The Great Awakening
The Adventist Movement arose as a reforming movement in an era of profound ferment and demand for change. This era is known as the Great Awakening. This awakening was a protestant religious revival that occurred from about 1790 to 1850 in the United States.
The Great Awakening notably altered the religious climate in the American colonies, leading to the founding of several seminaries and missionary societies throughout the US. Ordinary people were encouraged to make a personal connection with God, instead of relying on a minister. It was also in this period that campmeetings became a popular way to share truth and encourage people to turn to Christ.
Out of this awakening, God raised up a special Movement identified with the primitive Christian Church--resurgent as the Remnant. It was the Advent Movement.
Our movement was informal; highly person oriented, and convinced that the prevailing religion around us was missing many special elements of truth. It was this Advent Movement who dared to challenge the world with the prospect of Jesus’ soon Return in 1844. And when it didn’t happen–when we thought it would–the rest of the professed Christian world was enormously relieved. God used this disappointment to strip away all notions of pride and make us profoundly teachable. We had to become like children so we could ‘see’ the kingdom of God. Through the Bible and the conforming voice of the SOP, God gave our small group the panoramic perspective of redemptive history, and the task of proclaiming and restoring forgotten truths of the Bible (we call it the Great Controversy). There is a spiritual war going on.
It is unsurprising that the antagonist in the Great Controversy (the commander of Babylon/confusion) raised up counterfeits to confuse our message. In the 1800’s he raised up Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witness-ism, and more recently, the heavy artillery of Social Justice.
COUNTERFEITS
Counterfeits try to get you confused between that which is real and that which is fake. To erase the distinction between two dissimilar things. But distinctions matter, especially for Christians—our God did two very important things at the Creation week.
1) He established His divine order for human flourishing. And He repeatedly summed up aspects of this divine order with three special words: "It is good."
2) He established necessary distinctions that would be helpful for humans to know and respect. He made distinctions between male and female, between God and humanity, between the Creator and creation, and He revealed the permanent distinction between good and evil. He also made a distinction between life and death--validated by obedience or disobedience.
For every distinction that our Father created, Satan makes a counterfeit of them. For the gift of marriage Satan provides the counterfeit of divorce. For the complementary union of male & female marriage he provides the unholy counterfeit of homosexuality. In place of the secure stronghold of goodness he offers his mutiny of evil.
In place of the Sabbath day of rest that God provides, Satan offers the counterfeit of restlessness, ultimately encapsulated in a different day. In place of faith in the coming Messiah, symbolized by the Lamb in Genesis 4, he offers the broken cisterns of salvation by works epitomized in the offering of Cain.
As we move into the rushing waters of the time of the end, we find Satan’s counterfeits again. And God raised up a remnant to help restore the whole.
As this Remnant people of God go about their duty in the last days, tasked with sharing the Three Angels Messages to the world, Satan once more raises up counterfeits to distract them.
Social Justice
With social justice comes the idea that our task is to right every wrong in the world. I take the position that this is a false notion. Why? Because our task as the Remnant Movement of God is not to make everything right in the world, but rather to call the world’s attention to the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ who will restore all things (Revelation 21:5; 22:12; 2 Timothy 1:12).
Friends, we have things to do in this world, but it is not our job to make everything right. That is His job. Many of the trials that people experience in this life are consequences with a line of connection to choices they have made. We cannot make things right for them, what we can do is point them to the Hope of all humanity and encourage them (along with ourselves) in the knee bending exercise of repentance.
You and I cannot solve the problem of another person’s decisions. What we can do is encourage them to resolve any spiritual issues that are causing consequences in their life--through prayer repentance and freedom.. And we must do the same things ourselves. The Advent Message points people to the solution for our problems. Social Justice seeks to create a utopia on earth, not unlike the millennialism of the early 1800’s. And that brings us to the BLM movement.
BLM
In recent weeks it has become obvious that many people in the West are not content to let criminal justice take its course, instead demanding a form of social vengeance upon certain groups within society and even the destruction of the cultural history of the Anglosphere. Legitimate demonstrations have been strategically captured by a political ideology, exploiting Mr. Floyd’s death, and used as justification for rioting, violence and a full-scale assault on the remnants of Western Christian culture as expressed in the biblical family structure and the rule of law. No one is safe, great figures from the past like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, Christopher Columbus or even Winston Churchill. No one is safe. The memory of these great men must defaced, beheaded, or pulled down to make way for the new order of social justice.
It doesn’t matter what these men stood for or accomplished, or the liberties they helped to secure for the ungrateful beneficiaries of future generations. All that matters is that they belong to an alleged guilty culture and privileged ethnicity. Their portraits must be removed, their statues torn down, their legacy mocked and the memory of them erased.
To these social justice revolutionaries any person, institution, and cultural artifact representing the old order must be removed, destroyed, censured or shamed, to make way for a new revolutionary order. Unlike the Bible instruction, this new order legitimizes covetousness, jealousy and resentment. Their rage is an existential posture with no specific target—it is generalized against society and its institutions as a whole, as if changing that will change the self that they have come to hate.
The emergence of this frenzied movement is underwritten by the ideology of social justice. If you accept social justice as a guiding principle, you are 85-90% likely to accept the ideology of Black Lives Matter. And what is the ideology of BLM? Many of you are aware of these already:
Marxism (openly acknowledged by the guiding founders of the movement)
Destruction of the nuclear family
Defund police forces (leading to a collapse of law and order)
Redistribute wealth (by overthrowing white privilege in all of its supposed forms)
The advancement and promotion of homosexuality and transgender-ism (particularly black LGBTQ).
These sentiments are constructed on organized bitterness and resentment. The challenge of facing and overcoming resentment regarding one’s situation in life or in regards to the ‘sins’ of others, real or imagined, is a normal part of the human condition in our fallen world. Each of us have experienced wrongs, friends. The question we face regarding them, is will we forgive, or will we drink them down like the acid they are? When we choose to forgive from our heart, we experience a joy and freedom that we may have never known before. However, for any number of reasons, it does not take much for unresolved resentment to become the governing emotion in people’s lives, and quickly transformed into a social cause. Adventists who join such a movement ultimately sever all connection with the Three Angels’ Messages. That’s a shame because the Advent Message holds the solution to covetousness, jealousy and resentment. I’ll explain why at the end.
What about Adventists?
Numerous Adventist leaders and young people alike have been swept up into the BLM flood. Andrews University, Pacific Union, the Ohio Conference leadership, the NAD, the Oregon Conference President and the Review and Visitor magazines, to cite only a few. There was even a pro–social justice article published on the GYC website in June of last year by Esther Louw. That article has since been removed from the website., but not before being read by hundreds & thousands of Adventist youth.
The Pacific Union Recorder just printed a torturous article by Charles Mills, in which he claimed that a higher incidence of black birth defects is evidence of—wait for it—racism. This is a ludicrous claim.
There is no way to prove his assumption, and he knows it. All he has to do is make the accusation and a virtue-signalling Union publishes it as fact. It is much more logical to conclude that poor diet and lifestyle choices among parents can have a negative effect on the health of children. That’s where our health insights can be very helpful.
To just blame the problem on a lack of political social justice, is to hitch our wagon to a train that is heading towards a cliff. This is where the NAD and the PUC appear to be heading, beginning with Dan Jackson’s outburst at 2018 NADYEM that “Social justice is the gospel!”
And apparently, no one is asking the question “What does this have to do with warning the world about the oncoming hour of God’s judgment”?
We watch with amazement as virtue signaling church leaders and publications prostrate themselves both literally and figuratively, pleading for ideological absolution so that they too can be on the side of these revolutionary ‘angels.’ Many leaders have published ‘confessions’ and issued calls for social justice such as last year’s Review article by Gerald Klingbeil.
But, every revolutionary movement setting out to right wrongs whilst not grounded in biblical truth and the reconciling work and Lordship of Jesus Christ constitutes a counterfeit jubilee and a political gospel of false guilt, phony confessions, fictitious atonement, larcenous restitution and artificial forgiveness.
One aspect of social justice in our church is seen through interpretation, or rather re-interpretation. All that was held valuable in the past is now required to be pressed through a screening process which re-interprets it in light of current cultural values. But, cultural values are rarely if ever, in harmony with the Almighty Lord God. Why? Because cultural values reflect the changeable will of man.
This sinister attempt to put people at war with each other and divide society has come into the Church recently by the co-opting of black identity and culture by a movement (BLM) of politically minded radicals in the name of social justice. The agenda rings increasingly hollow as the rioting and lawlessness continue even as brave black voices in our country have spoken out against what is taking place (including several black authors on F7). The attempt to divide us is a one-sided revisionist interpretation of cultural history that seeks to paint one ethnic and cultural group as the oppressive cause of all society’s ills, with everyone else as victims. This sentiment is not coming into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In fact, it is already here. Listen to the increasing voices accusing the Church of systemic racism—whatever that is.
The beautiful prophetic voice that we have heard and benefited from in the past, is now being re-interpreted to say something different than what it was intended. Ellen White and our pioneers are now being caricatured by some as social justice warriors. The progenitors of this newfound zeal want you to believe that God is on their side as they deconstruct the pillars of the church.
Shame & Guilt
Shame and Guilt are not uniquely Christian ideas, they are programmed into the heart of each person as a check-heart light flashing on the dashboard of our lives. When we violate God’s Law, we are supposed to feel shame. And shame is always accompanied by guilt and fear.
However, it is ONLY Christianity that offers a way to resolve guilt and shame—by nailing it to the cross of Jesus Christ. This remedy is also found in the Three Angel’s messages—the Everlasting Gospel (or good news).
If people reject the idea that they have sinned against a holy God, that rejection does not get rid of sin or the guilt and shame that came with it. It just forces them to place it on something other than the cross, and nothing but the cross can bear that weight. After failing to pay for our own sin burden, our second try is to make others pay for them.
The politics of guilt with its gospel of social justice offers a form of atonement that enslaves the heart of the unforgiving. The BLM agitators’ motive in our time appears increasingly sadistic in their desire to lay on societal groups (police, government officials, whites etc) the burden of sin and guilt. But the result for everyone of this utopian project is only more societal sickness and enslavement because there is no remission of sin and true reconciliation outside of Jesus Christ. There ain’t any. Whatever one’s ethnicity, only a person that is grounded in the atonement of Jesus can know what it means to be free from guilt and shame. This is the culture of Heaven. In Christ we can—and must—forgive from the heart. The Three Angels’ Messages contains the solution to guilt, shame and bitterness. And it leads us to patience. “Here is the patience of the saints!”
Patience
The Bible says in your patience possess ye your souls (Luke 21:19). One of the main requirements for the proper direction of our souls (our self) is patience. Social justice has no stomach for patience, demanding change now. The more that social justice captures our attention, the more impatient we become. Fortunately, the Advent Message has the answer for impatience. I’ll explain that in a moment.
Summary
I am amazed how God can change a life. I am amazed how sin (including shame guilt and bitterness) binds and destroys a person. I am amazed how accurate the Bible is to provide answers for everything that we struggle with.
The Advent Message is the answer to these problems.
Counterfeits (worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water.” Our God is the ultimate reality and beside Him there is no other.)
Different races and ethnicities (having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. 15:4 “All nations shall come and worship before You).
Social Justice: (The hour of God’s judgment is come. There’s justice, my friend.)
Fear (Fear God and give glory to HIM)
Resentments (the faith of Jesus. Christ can love others through us; as we forgive, so are we forgiven, this brings glory to God)
Shame and Guilt (Everlasting Gospel. Christ died for our sins 1 Cor. 15:1. It is the power of God unto salvation [Romans 1:16])
Patience (“Here is the patience of the saints”)
Conclusion
Certainly the Adventist 'church' is no ordinary body. It is a Movement, called of God to prepare a dying world for the soon return of the Lord Jesus. An understanding of the prophecies of Daniel & The Revelation in the Word of God, led to the formation of this last "message bearer" to Earth. The Adventist church has an understanding of prophecy that is far beyond anything I've ever seen. The Adventist people also possess a knowledge of Jesus and His Life & Ministry that is thrilling. Yet along with that insight comes a responsibility. Lest you think I am bragging (I'm not), may I say that the church is full of people who struggle and fail, just as I do. The good news is: Jesus accepts sinners, and invites us to grow in Him as a perfect Body. In the words of Paul: "this is a mystery," but it is also a reality. God is calling together a people who want to know Him, and will walk where He walks.
I close with a question: Are you aligned with the Great Awakening or the great awokening?
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