The Journal of Hairy-Chested Adventism

There's a Reason German Adventists' Resistance During World War II Isn't Well-Known

2025-11-21T22:04:00.000-08:00

During World War Two, while most of Europe looked away, a secret network of Seventh-day Adventist Christians built one of the most sophisticated escape routes in occupied Europe—and almost no one knows about it. The Dutch-Paris line saved over 1,000 Jewish lives by hiding refugees in church basements, forging documents in Adventist print shops, and guiding families through frozen Alpine passes into Switzerland. This is the untold story of ordinary believers who chose faith over fear, risking torture and execution to stand between the Gestapo and its victims.

Adventist Churches in Germany appeared to some to be less than openly resistant to Nazi outrages. I had even heard it said that some pastors said they compromised because they thought it was important that the Adventist churches remained open or they couldn't do their good works. What we did not know until fairly recently and for some reason was not talked about in SDA circles was that Adventists were actively working to smuggle Jews out of Germany to escape the holocaust. God bless them.

This documentary is not created by Adventist, but by historians.

The Seventh-day Adventists Who Hid Jews: The Untold Story of the "Dutch-Paris" Rescue Line

Can You Feel It. Have We Reached a Turning Point?

2025-09-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

One of the last pictures of Charlie Kirk

Something Wicked This Way Comes

A conservative Christian friend castigated a liberal friend on a recent post by another dear friend who regurgitated the progressive talking points of the left against recently assassinated Christian activist, Charlie Kirk. The fellow she decried as not a Christian is also on my friend friend list. He and I have some real go-rounds and his friends, some of them are downright communists and crawl all over me should I dare speak like a conservative Christian..

That said, my friend almost invariably states his case pretty politely and then lets me state mine. We go back and forth, but if I am to understand and communicate effectively with my opponents, I must first come to understand where they are coming from. It makes me a much better communicator that way. I can tell I'm communicating effectively too when I state my case politely without name-calling and my harshest opponents collapse into the sort of "You, oh yeah, so's your mama!" level of playground debate. Charlie Kirk was very good at that sort of debate and he too brought that nastiness out in young liberals when he dialogued with them. He was unfailingly kind, but he did not budge on principle.

Personally, I think the fact that his book explaining why the Christian church should not neglect the seventh day Biblical Sabbath is coming out in December and that the book was a big part of the reason Satan inspired his assassination. But God has worked things together for good. Charlie's book "God Said Stop!" is already a bestseller two and a half months before it comes out December 9th. He was dialoguing with Adventist organizations with regard to the Sabbath truth. There was a major conference last March on the Sabbath by Wisdom's Pearls that included conservative sabbatarian churches and speakers like Ben Carson, Paul Kelly, Danny Shelton and Charlie Kirk. It was, I think, a blooming of the fig trees announcing the coming of summer that Jesus told us to watch out for.

But when Amazing Facts and 3ABN wrote articles sympathetic to Charlie Kirk and decrying his assassination, it was so upsetting to the president of the Central States Conference, that he issued a statement on behalf of the church, calling for the denomination to sever ties with 3ABN and Amazing Facts, two of the most powerful ministries in spreading the Gospel we have. Earlier, Elder Josiah called for Ben Carson to be "traded" and that whoever we take in his place should receive full membership and privileges. The official statement he released on behalf of the church through the Central States Conference was right off the DNC talking points list.

To demonize a man who was a partner with us in spreading the 3 Angels Message, is wildly inappropriate for an Adventist church leader. And the vile talk about Charlie, the lies about what he believed and said, are coming from an ideology that denies God, advocates unity by subsuming everyone into one big collective run by all the self-identified smart people on the left. The ideology he seems to be espousing advocates giving power to government leaders to decide what we may say, where we may work, how we may worship and what we are allowed to believe. These people are ready to do away with the first and second amendments in favor of Marxist style global socialism, ironically called "progressive" by the adherents.

How can we associate ourselves with THAT! Are there extremists on the right? You bet. When the Democrat State Senator and husband and dog were assassinated months ago by a radical lunatic, both 3ABN and Amazing Facts decried that political violence, though it was perpetrated against politicians who had little or no sympathy with the beliefs of fundamental Bible-believing Christians like us. The man who killed her was as insane as the kid who shot Charlie Kirk. Neither assassin got any sympathy from 3ABN or Amazing Facts, but the CSC president only dumped his load of bile on Charlie Kirk. Obviously, his politics entered into his behavior in a big way. Cryston Josiah, who lists himself in the CSC "statement" as President of the Central States Conference of Seventh-day Adventist, seems to be new to the job as their website still lists him as the secretary. I have trouble believing that the majority of the 9,000+ members of the states covered by the conference - Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and San Juan County in New Mexico are on board with Mr. Josiah's obvious leftist bias.After all most of those states voted for Trump in the last election.

I believe we have reached a turning point in the rapid final events EGW predicted for the last days. We're seeing voices proclaiming the 3 angels' message rising up around us and joining us in spreading the Gospel. God has told us that should we neglect to warn the world, the rocks would cry out. Who would have predicted that the Sabbath Truth would be so powerfully put before so many millions? Yet, God works all things together for those who love Him and are called according to his purpose. In a recent study, Seventh-day Adventists came out as the fastest growing Christian denomination at a time when even the Baptists are in decline.

Remember always, Satan is a liar from the beginning. He's so good at it that he has convinced millions of Christian ministers that "you shall be like gods" was the first lie he told Eve. It wasn't. The first lie he told her was, "Thou shalt not surely die.' And he's still selling that whopper throughout Christendom with the immortality of the soul doctrine and the corresponding idea of an ever-burning hell; an idea that has blackened God's reputation as a loving God for centuries on centuries. And this despite the fact that Jesus clearly said God could destroy, not only the body, but also the soul in hell. Tell a lie big enough and often enough, and people will come to believe it without questioning. Paul said the wages of sin is death, but Lucifer redefined death to preserve his first lie. Solomon described death as "knowing not anything." And everybody's favorite Bible verse, John 3:16 very clearly states that eternal life is the gift of God. Without His gift we don't have eternal life. But because the eternal punishment in hell story is so frightening, it doesn't occur to most of us that our souls are not immortal. That would require us to accept that we are not immortal godlings after all.

And for Adventist who are persuaded that we should be insular and reject any dialogue with other Christians, please remember what Jesus said about that:

“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me,
for whoever is not against us is for us.
Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.
Mark 9: 39-41

Adventist Woman Led the Way a Decade before Rosa Parks

2024-10-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

Bet You Didn't Know This:

By Source, Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31871975

In 1944, A twenty-seven year old Seventh-Day Adventist black woman, Irene Morgan, made the gutsy decision to refuse to leave the "white" section of an Interstate bus and was arrested in Virginia under state segregation laws eleven years before Rosa Parks' famous refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama local bus. She was a little more spirited than Rosa however. She kicked the Sheriff in the groin when he tried to arrest her!

She landed two highly skilled lawyers on her defense team, one of whom was no less than future Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. Irene won her case before the Supreme Court. In 1946 in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that the Virginia law was unconstitutional, as the Commerce clause protected interstate traffic.

Irene's stubborn singular defense of her rights strengthened the WWII era U.S. anti-discrimination law prohibiting segregation on all interstate transportation and influenced public opinion against Southern racist segregation laws. Unlike Rosa, whose protest was part of a planned challenge of the segregation laws, Irene simply stood up for herself all on her own. With Irene, the NAACP was running along behind her shouting, "Wait for me I'm your leader!"

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Morgan
"Morgan v. Virginia (1946)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
Lamb, Yvonne S. "Irene M. Kirkaldy; Case Spurred Freedom Rides," The Washington Post, 13 Aug. 2007: n. pag. Print.
"Morgan v. Commonwealth (June 6, 1945)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved 2015-11-04.

The Lesson of the Bears and the Boys

2024-04-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

My pastor's weekly newsletter this week was about the story of Elisha and the boys who taunted him and were subsequently killed by a couple of angry she-bears. The original Hebrew, as Pastor Stephan points out, more than likely isn't talking about what we would consider children these days. The bears didn't brutalize a T-ball team. The word translated as boys in this story refers in other places in the Old Testament to young men. The Israelites considered anyone under 30 to be not an "adult" but a young male, not yet an adult. Essentially, a boy! And we all have been treated lately to the sort of orchestrated violence young people can get up to when incited by media and ideological party leaders.

The way this story is written, the confrontation of Elijah by the youthful servants of Baal (it's likely that's who they were) suggests there were more than 42 of them, probably sent by the priests of Baal to spread disinformation about Elijah's translation to discredit the story. Their manner suggests an imminent attack on Elisha was planned. Certainly the story was going around that Elijah was actually dead and that his going up to Heaven was a lie perpetrated by Elisha. Facebook isn't the first spreader of disinformation. It was in the interest of the pro-Baal party to spread this sort of gossip. Later their descendants, the pro-Sanhedrin party of Israel in Jesus' time, repeatedly spread lies about Christ, attempted to stone, throw off a cliff and arrest Him for disagreeing with their dogma. It's no surprise that their cultural ancestors (the "boys" in this story) would have been gathered to do harm to Elisha and to shut up the man who opposed the Baal narrative of the day. The bears were simply God's security team protecting Elisha, whose work was not yet completed in Israel.

Jesus said we would recognize the signs of his imminent return in the same way that leaves in Spring speak of the coming Summer. One can hardly look around, watch the news, hear the taunts of today's version of those young men in the story, and not see evidence of the soon-coming Savior. The young men have been gathered. Google Seventh-day Adventist and you'll see page after page of anti-Adventist web pages. Entire websites are dedicated to opposing Adventism. I saw one "pastor" ranting about how horrible SDAs are. He proposed that Adventist Christians should be knocked in the head until they come to their senses. He flat out recommends that SDA's be physically prevented from buying or selling until we cease spreading our lies, by law if necessary. It was pretty stunning hearing a self-proclaimed Christian pastor saying it straight out like that.

The devil is among us like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. It is hardly surprising that the church is being attacked from without and within. Only by knowing God and Jesus whom He has sent, is there any safety in this momentous age. But God is working among all those children of His. There is a growing division in the Catholic church over the direction their socialist pope is leading them. Among Protestants as well Bible believing church members are beginning to oppose their church's progressive leadership. Those who prefer to get their theology straight from the Word are going back to the Bible to investigate whether their shepherds are leading them astray or not.

In this day and age, many Christian leaders wonder after the Beast, seeking to gather their power and lead their followers to join the popular herd without challenging the non Biblical traditions Christianity has accumulated over the centuries. Satan has worked so very hard for millennia to embed false teachings in churches, the culture, the media and governments.

At the same time, we see Christians waking up and questioning things they've long been told and which are generally believed without question. It seems the Holy Spirit is moving God's scattered flock to go back to the Bible to check out some things they've been told about God that don't jibe with the God of Love they have come to know. I recently came upon an Assemblies of God pastor who has published the Bible with the books in their original order. To my surprise, Pastor Coulter talks about the ever-burning hell idea being false doctrine. Other whole churches worldwide are accepting the Sabbath truth. Amazing Facts director, Doug Batchelor, recently was invited to preach in the largest Christian church in India (if not the world). We hear many reports of whole churches on studying the issue, returning to worship on the 7th day Sabbath, led by faithful Christian pastors.

We're in the sheep and goats time of history that Jesus told us about. The polarization of political parties usually leads to sharp disagreements and violence, especially if their followers suddenly begin thinking for themselves, asking awkward questions, and (to the horror of the leader class), choosing another path. At the same time, apostate church leaders, who hold to a kind of "divine right of kings" with regard to their own authority, will gather loyal followers and encourage them to taunt anyone who deviates from the accepted convoluted pack of lies Satan and his minions have for so long perpetrated on the Christian world.

And one need not study for very long before you find that what you read in Scripture is on many points at variance from what you hear from the mainstream pulpits of the land. When Bible students take a hard look at doctrines like the immortality of the soul, ever-burning hell, transfer of sanctity of the 7th day Sabbath to Sunday, and priestly authority to forgive sins, and they find truths that have long believed without question are not truth at all. It makes a lot of people who have taken the name of Christ and claim to speak for him, exceedingly angry when their authority to, as Revelation puts it, 'to change times and laws.' When you realize that the idea of an immortal soul actually negates John 3:16, it shocks you to the core. The most quoted verse in Scripture, says God grants eternal life to 'whosoever believeth in him' receives eternal life', and does not to those who do not believe.

If humans cannot surely die (remember that quote from a certain snake in a garden), it means God no longer gives eternal life to those who believe in Jesus nor even has the power to do so. That ought to raise questions about a lot of things you have believed that are standard doctrines in the church. Mainstream Christian religion claims the soul is immortal. Therefore, if everyone good or bad, believer or unbeliever is by nature already immortal as mainstream religion claims, then God,since He cannot kill an immortal soul as this doctrine claims, can only burn people in the lake of fire forever. If souls are immortal by nature, the God cannot kill an immortal soul, even a sinful one who rejects God's grace. If this doctrine is true, then, logically, this means God cannot end any soul's suffering, even if He wanted to. He can only punish.

So that means God is NOT omnipotent at the very least or, at worst, He really enjoys watching folks suffer for a lifetime of what are in most cases a lot of relatively petty sins against the punishment being meted out. God, then is pretty harsh, not the God of love at all. Then there is Hollywood theology that portrays a kind of Christian reincarnation where you die, become an angel and then get sent back to Earth to have another go at it. If you want your congregations to believe all that, then you best keep your folks away from the Bible.

A retired pastor once told me, "I believe in science and the Bible equally." A pretty convenient belief system. That way it leaves room for him to believe the same stuff all the regular folk do and it becomes an easy road from there down to "Well the Bible is so full of flaws, there's no need to take any of it literally other than as occasionally good advice."

Those who love power have a tendency to become cruel and desperate as that power slips through their fingers. See Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of the world's despotic rulers for examples. The death toll in the 20th century alone is in the hundreds of millions at the hands of atheist and pseudo-religious governments. We are seeing that now as the venom against God's children gets more and more poisonous. Remember, we are up against the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet.

It's good to remember that God will send along she-bears to protect His servants when He needs to. She bears are pretty fearsome when it comes defending their cubs.

Yours in Christ,
Tom King
© 2024

Elemental Spiritual Forces Threaten

2024-04-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns against "hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world." When we rely on these beliefs, cooked up out of our own fears, desires and prejudices instead of upon Christ as revealed through the scriptures, we set ourselves up to eventually create our own versions of a religion, one without any reliance on objective truth, but instead upon something they like to call "my truth."

I think this was the thing also that Ellen White warned us about when she cautioned against the rising influence of spiritualism. Here Paul warned us particularly against "elemental spiritual forces". The spiritualism we've been warned against is more than just some ghosts knocking on walls while little girls hold seances. Spiritualism, while it does range from Ouija boards to communicating with the dead, spiritualism as a whole believes that we have immortal souls that know more than we are aware of. and deceptive philosophy. Satan seeks to confuse us. Encyclopedia Britannica defines spiritualism as philosophy that embraces ideas including "the immortality of the soul, or the immateriality of the intellect and will. Less obviously, it includes belief in such ideas as finite cosmic forces or a universal mind, provided that they transcend the limits of gross Materialistic interpretation. Spiritualism as such says nothing about matter, the nature of a supreme being or a universal force, or the precise nature of spiritual reality itself." This leaves all kind of room for the "spiritual" man to find his own truth within himself. As a result, the spiritualist does not have to submit himself to any external law, truth or instruction that does not emanate from within himself. This allows one to toss aside any uncomfortable restriction on one's behavior that doesn't feel compatible with your own truth which you have discovered within yourself. It also allow you to jettison any commandments or Biblical advice you don't particularly feel comfortable with.

This current so-called spiritual movement tends to rejects "religion" in favor of being "spiritual" not religious. It has many of the trappings of Lucifer's plan for ruling as the Prince of this world. If it doesn't reject religion outright, it seeks to water it down to allow room for "spiritual" Christians (if they still retain the Christian identity at all), to believe whatever suits them. It's frequently called "my truth" by people who say they are "spiritual not religious." Spiritualism doesn't necessarily achieve this level of self-enlightenment all at once, but it certainly trends that way if taken to its logical ends.

Satan keeps coming back to the same plan with the same beliefs about obedience to self and to heavy handed government and it always results in a whole lot of death. God tends to get left out or gets used as an impersonal rubber stamp for whatever the ruling class is up to. Marxism is just the latest Satanic deceptive philosophy to be embraced by the powerful special (rich) folk of the world. Before we had "I'm spiritual" we had the divine right of kings, emperors, caliphs, etc..We peons knew our place and deferred to the special ruling class and were proud to do so. We were mightily deceived to accept our low station with a kind of pride. A few special powerful leaders always make the decisions and discipline the collective, the masses, the proletariat, peons, the workers, the plebs, the rabble, the great unwashed, riffraff, Labor, the proles or, my favorite, the hoi poloi and usually they discipline harshly.

Recent attempts to blend Marx's philosophy with spiritualism as its being worked out in contemporary philosophy, dwell on the problems of labor, the unconscious, artificial intelligence, and depression. By summoning up the idea of an immortal soul, Marxist/spiritualist apologists conceive of a kind of secret human being that dwells inside the body of any species (a Buddhist/Hindu idea) and thus is detached from “man” in its traditional sense. This allows us to disengage the human body from "spirit". No longer is the soul to be attached to individual humans, the body isn't absolutely necessary since the soul exists as this impersonal essence defined by an ambiguous concept of labor (regular raggedy folks). This convoluted philosophy supposes that this soul or essence is both alienated from things like religion and emancipated from reliance on anything outside the self like instruction from some arbitrary "God". Marxism it is posited, provides a way to achieve an Earthly Utopia without having to bother God for instruction about how to do that. Friedrich Nietzsche a cheerful Marxist and inspiration for the German Nazis, went so far as to proclaim "God is dead." What he meant was that we no longer need God because we are spiritual beings and everything we need is in our own immortal essence. It also allowed the Nazis to decide that murdering 15 million people didn't make much difference as their essences would simply go elsewhere so they wouldn't interfere with the establishment of the Third Reich's plans for an Aryan Utopia.

This kind of philosophy supports Satan's contention at the beginning of the Great Controversy that he had a better idea for how to govern humans so that he keeps all that free choice controlled. If we are paying attention it's not hard to spot cloven hoofprints all over this sort of spiritual Marxism. And always it winds up that a whole bunch of uncooperative human weeds need to be pulled up and incinerated.

Not religion but politics and progressive spiritualism is the hallmark of Satan's plans for ruling the Earth. Even religion, when co-opted for Satan's purpose, is at its heart political and involves a tyrannical powerful ruler or ruling class lording over the people who are assumed to be incapable (too stupid) to manage their own affairs. Sadly, many who claim to have once been among God's chosen people find themselves drifting away from the church. By adopting a more convenient sort of religion, their advanced spiritual philosophy allows them to set themselves up in these last days as arbiters of their own more comfortable truth. But don't call this belief system a religion even though it is. That would hurt their feelings.

And since these spiritualists no longer need organized religion, spiritualism provides them an alternative to "assembling themselves together" in congregations of believers. The spiritual often prefer instead, things like going out into nature and being spiritual; getting in touch with the elemental spiritual forces that come from their own understanding rather than the Word of God. Or they can gather in chat rooms with other enlightened spiritual folk and discuss how this ever-shifting philosophy so admirably adapts itself to whatever new notion springs up among them.

The deception is pernicious, pervasive and deadly. It allows the spiritual person to join a herd of fellow humans who are okay with infanticide, sexual perversion, and rejection of inconvenient Biblical commandments. "We don't do commandments anymore. What's the point?

Accordingly, we no longer need to be saved by God's grace, but are emancipated from all that by our own righteousness and superior philosophy." It soon follows, as one retired pastor told me that the spiritual man holds science and scripture as equals. The trouble is, that increasingly for my spiritual friends, science begins to weigh more heavily on their personal truth scales, especially the "science" that justifies the whole reliance on "my truth" rather than upon God's truth.

It explains why in the last days many of the brightest lights among us will go out; the victims of their own brilliance unsupported by a reliance upon God's Word. Beware for the devil our adversary prowls among us seeking whom he may devour.

No Wonder Adventists Back Then Were Spooked

2024-04-06T02:00:00.000-07:00


Rev.Samuel Walter Gamble known for research in the ancient literature, enabling him to reproduce the long lost Hebrew calendar, upon which he bases arguments to prove that Sunday and not Saturday was the "ancient and true Sabbath." - Who's Who circa 1920

I found a book published in 1900 and now residing in the Library of Congress by Samuel Walter Gamble, field secretary of the American Sabbath Union (later the Lord's Day Alliance) that purports to prove that the Sabbath is really actually on Sunday. It comes up near the top of the list when you do a search in Google images for the word "sabbath".This poor man, a valiant defender of laws making working on Sunday a crime in the United States, spent 18 years trying to prove his case by studying ancient calendars. He based his research on the assumption that God's people couldn't count to 7, and that God basically gave the Hebrews the wrong date for Sabbath when he gave them the 10 commandments.

He further assumes that despite the Biblical genealogies that go all the way back to creation, that the true Sabbath was "lost" after the flood and no one kept it. Also, because the seventh-day Sabbath couldn't occur on the same date every month, Gamble believes that the Jews and the string of God's followers chronicled in scripture all the way back to Adam, couldn't possibly have counted up to 7 days in order to keep the same Sabbath every week. They could only have done that if the Sabbath was on a fixed date, he says. Thus the Sabbath wandered around all over the calendar and can't be assumed to have occurred every seventh day.

Odd that Gamble seemed unaware that Sunday comes on different dates every month nowadays, but he'd rather we not look too closely at that. Flaws in the argument notwithstanding, Gamble and the American Sabbath Union prevailed in inspiring some pretty strict Sunday laws for some time, toughening up, if not national, then state Sunday laws. They were

Wilbur F Crafts
ASU Founder

especially successful in the South. It should be noted that more than one Adventist farmer did jail time for working his fields on Sunday around that time, despite having rested the previous day and having attended church services that Saturday. Mr. Gamble heartily approved of this level of enforcement. Aggressive Adventist activists opposed ASU founder Wilbur F. Craft's efforts to promote the Blair Amendment (a national Sunday law) and the Breckinridge Bill (limited to Washington DC). Prominent SDA preacher A.T. Jones and Wilbur Craft got into a series of running conflicts that led in part to both men leaving their respective organizations.

Gamble says that Jesus fixed the problem of everyone worshiping on the wrong day by rising on the first day which was "really" the seventh day and that (reading the mind of Jesus who never said any such thing) Christ intended for the Sabbath to be on the first day of the week all along. He closes his eyes to the fact that Christ, Himself, kept the so-called Jewish Sabbath during his ministry and his apostles did the same afterward during theirs. Also, it's significant that after his crucifixion, Jesus rested in the grave from his labors from Friday to Sunday, only rising from the dead after the hours of the Sabbath had passed. The Sabbath, He had said, was made for man, but apparently Jesus kept it holy Himself.

A.T. Jones - Minister
and SDA Activist
Gamble has no problem with Roman Emperor Constantine, himself a major sun-worshiper, changing the Sabbath to "the venerable day of the sun" (Constantine's own words) in order to make the Pagans more comfortable joining the Catholic and coincidentally Roman State Church. The Vatican quickly held a counsel that accepted the change in order to ingratiate itself with the emperor and to pack the cathedral pews a little tighter with new pagan converts and their money. Apparently, that was not problematic for Gamble.

The author, an ASU officer at the time, was busily trying to shore up the nation's restrictive national Sunday laws. As part of his argument for tougher Sunday laws, Gamble claimed that if Seventh-Day Adventists were to succeed in getting the national Sunday laws of the day repealed, that all workers would suddenly be required to work 7 day weeks. Without the force of a national law requiring all workers to rest on Sunday, Gamble warned Congress that America's churches would be soon abandoned.He also claimed, again without evidence, that it had been "proved" that workers only live 12 years when working 7 days a week and that therefore Adventists would be responsible for the mass slaughter of millions of working fathers far earlier than what God intended.

Talk about logical gymnastics trying to prove that a largely Catholic Christian tradition, established on the Roman Church's own hook without scriptural authority was correct. He would have us believe that the ten commandments are flawed or at least the 4th one is. Given that, apparently, God didn't even know when Sabbath was supposed to be, then Gamble believes that the unbroken keeping of the 7th day Sabbath by Jews is, according to Gamble, impossible and irrelevant anyway. How could anyone have been expected to keep the 7th day Sabbath if it changed dates every month instead of being only on fixed calendar dates.

He went on to claim that the worst of it was that if the Sunday Laws were repealed millions would no longer come to his revival meetings and be saved.

And this silly book is enshrined in the Library of Congress, digitized and published online. Interestingly, Gamble acknowledges a debt to the Reverend D.M. Canright. Canright picked up the title "Reverend" when he left the SDA church to become a Baptist preacher. He left because, as he put it to a colleague, "I could be a great and popular preacher if this (SDA) message were not so unpopular." Coincidentally, Canright left shortly after Ellen White told him he was too long-winded and should pare his Sabbath sermons down from 2-3 hours to 20 or 30 minutes.

Gamble could have benefited from the same counsel. It seems this convoluted and often incomprehensible book was designed deliberately in order to encourage people to try to read it and then to give up in confusion. Nobody wants to admit they can't understand what the man is trying to say. So, many readers, looking for some comforting argument that means they don't have to make any big and uncomfortable life changes, decide that this guy must know what he's talking about.

Little hint: he doesn't.

(C) 2024 by Tom King

Angels Dressed as Soldiers

2023-03-25T14:34:00.006-07:00

These guys look like they're ready to suit up and drop onto the battlefield.

Angels are described in the book Early Writings thus. "The company of guardian angels around them had been doubled, and they were clothed with an armor from their head to their feet." Not exactly the effeminate angels of Renaissance Christian art. Angels as described in the Old Testament could appear as nonthreatening, but usually they had to reassure those to whom they appeared, saying, "Fear not!"

And angels pop up all over the place in scripture and in stories throughout Christian history. I have seen the working of angels, but they remained out of my sight. A friend at camp almost ran over me and a canoe load of kids with a motorboat he was unfamiliar with. I watched in shock as the boat did an impossible 180 degree turn as the boat, bow high was coming down on us. It turned so fast the spring loaded ladder on the back of the boat knifed through the air where my head had been a second before. I felt it brush my hair as I was looking over the side watching the boat's propeller pass underneath the canoe. The way Jack (the boat driver) and I figured it, his angel got on one end of the boat and mine got on the other and spun it around. Whatever they did, that boat was moving fast and it suddenly disobeyed the laws of physics. And I'd just missed by a fraction of an inch, being knocked off the canoe on top of a spinning propeller. Jack and I spent the next hour in a lengthy prayer of thanksgiving.

A missionary friend of mine told a story about a South American Adventist school where angels did make themselves visible to the enemy. Local communist guerrillas decided the school was counter-revolutionary and must be eliminated. The principle did not know anything about it. He went to the store in town one morning for supplies. When he went up to the counter the store proprietor seemed shocked to see him.

"Where did you get the soldiers?" the man asked as he rang up the supplies.

"What soldiers?" asked the principal.

"The ones that were standing guard around the school last night!" The store owner proceeded to tell him why he'd asked. The guerrillas it seems had chosen the previous night to attack the school. Of course, word got around the close-knit community and everyone expected to hear bad news about the school in the morning. The attack never happened. Word came back that when the guerrillas reached the school, they found it surrounded by tough-looking heavily armed soldiers. The guerrillas quickly decided that in the interest of their personal survival, attacking the school was a very bad idea.

The principal was shocked himself; he'd never seen any soldiers at the school that night. Certainly no one from the government or the military had offered to help or had even warned him of the attack. He returned to the school with a glad heart and brought together the children and the teachers to pray and give thanks for the angel "soldiers" who had camped round about them that they might fear no evil.

We shall see greater miracles than these in the coming days. We are told that we often entertain angels unaware. Angels have often stood guard over us to save us from dangers of which we were not even aware. I've had more than my share of what had to be angelic intervention over my life. I once got smacked in the chest by a 3 foot wide boulder from above while rock climbing along the Trinity River. Had to have had help hanging on to the tree root I found myself dangling from when my head cleared. God only knows what other stupid things my guardian angel has saved me from.

In these last days we may go about God's work without fear. Whatever happens, we may be assured of God's deliverance no matter what. Some of us may sleep, but we all shall be changed in the moment in the twinkling of an eye. Knowing God sees the end from the beginning and makes sure that whatever happens we will surely be going home with Him, we may face whatever the armies of evil throw at us with confidence.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

What About the 60 Million?

2022-10-22T20:06:00.003-07:00

I keep getting crosswise of some of my brethren with some of the things I believe about God. My walk with him leads me to believe even more strongly in His mercy. For instance, I believe God will give to saved parents, the babies that were lost to abortion here on Earth. God says he formed us in the womb and knew us before we were even born. Our God is a jealous God, not willing that any should be lost. Therefore, I believe that all aborted babies will be taken home to be with us in Heaven. Me I want the angels to round up at least six or so that we can raise in a loving home, enough that we can have our own flag football team or extra crew for the schooner my kids and I are going to build in the New Earth.

Stephen responded to my assertion that aborted babies would not be lost with this: "This is unconditional immortality which is not a teaching of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and leads to spiritism."

So let me ask, "How do you explain our teaching that babies like the ones spoken of in the passage below from Ellen White will be restored to their mothers' arms at the Second Coming and even the motherless babies will be taken by Jesus to the tree of life?". After all, this baby clearly has not reached the age of accountability. Is there some kind of free pass for these babies if their parents belong to the right church. How is that fair to those who never had any chance to decide whether or not to follow Christ?

I have real trouble, Stephen, believing that God is that hard-hearted. We also believe (along with notable Protestant theologians like John Wesley) that many will be saved who never heard the name of Christ but were seeking Him without knowing His name:.

Among the heathen are those who worship God ignorantly, those to whom the light is never brought by human instrumentality, yet they will not perish. Though ignorant of the written law of God, they have heard His voice speaking to them in nature, and have done the things that the law required. Their works are evidence that the Holy Spirit has touched their hearts, and they are recognized as the children of God.” - Ellen G. White

Strict conditional salvation is almost as heartless as the doctrine of an ever-burning hell. God is love and He knows His children. He knows our frame, He knows we are dust, according to Psalm 103:14. God does not wish that any should perish, but that ALL should have eternal life (Matthew 18:14, ). That the God of infinite love, who carefully formed each of those fearfully and wonderfully made, but aborted babies in their mothers' womb and knew what they would one day be, will not finish His work, especially when there would be millions of us willing to raise those perfect babies in a perfect world. For that matter, I believe God will give me my dog back if I ask Him. Would a Father deny his child something that would only do him or her good. Would he not do ultimate good for the lost children who were victims of the holocaust of the unborn? Sixty million dead masterpieces created by God in sixty million wombs will not be wasted I believe.

I do not hold to the brand of religion that treats salvation as some kind of magical incantation. Many Christians (or Hindus, pagans or Buddhists for that matter) believe that you have to say the right words and perform the right rituals to get into Paradise. I met a Church of Christ pastor once who told me that because the preacher didn't say "In Jesus' name," but said "In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," my baptism was no good. I disagreed. I asked him, "Do you think God doesn't know who his son is?"

My acquaintance with God tells me He does what He does, not through magic and incantation. He does what He does because his nature is supernatural or above our 3 dimensional plane of existence. He exists outside of time and is the Alpha and Omega, or as scripture says He lives in the present, the past and the future all at once. God knows who will be safe to take to heaven and the new Earth because He sees tomorrow the way we see today. It's not magic and definitely doesn't require incantations, waving magic wands or giving special powers to people the church hierarchy deigns to "ordain". He picks folks He knows, like Deborah, Gideon, Joseph, David and Simon Peter who can do the job He has for them to do.

People keep trying to stuff God into a conceptual box so they can (a) understand Him with their limited intelligence and in a way that they approve of His actions and (b) figure out how to game the system so God is somehow forced take them to heaven. These folk lack faith. They don't quite trust God to make good decisions, or at least decisions they approve of, unless they have some leverage. Ah, but if we say the right words and perform the correct rituals, He will be forced to let us into Paradise, won't He?

Well, no! Remember Christ's description of the judgment - all those folks complaining that they did miracles, preached to the masses, built Crystal Cathedrals and God told them flat out, rituals and incantations and successful fund-raising and all, "I never knew you." God just doesn't fit in those kinds of boxes nor have those kinds of limitations. A lot of that kind of thinking is left over from the long discredited Last Generation Theology - an Adventist theologian's answer to an ever-burning hell for scaring people into the pews and into line with the "authorities". At the core of Adventism, is a kinder gentler, more forgiving picture of the character of God than many strong-willed Christians are quite comfortable with.

Timothy objected: "This is the unconditional love and nature of God. If there is a first life, then there is a soul, and the second life depends on our submission and accountability. A baby in the womb is life and has no accountability.

I think God is quite able to raise up murdered children freed from the stain of sin. Adam and Eve,had they not been tempted could have lived eternally. Why not an unstained infant? If a child is knit together by God in the womb and another person ends the life that God has carefully created the child is unstained; murdered before the child has even been able to commit his first sin. Why would anyone think God would not object to having His babies killed without having had a chance to experience His love and choose life.

Stephen objected. "You did not limit it to babes as in the picture. You included the unborn. There is no such teaching in Adventism."

Again I think such an idea is woven into the very Scriptures. An unborn child is a baby and a human. At least that's what God says about it. The idea that a fetus is a "clump of cells" is a progressive fiction and for that matter downright satanic. God sees the end from the beginning and knows the choices the little human being would have made. I firmly believe that God does not just toss out 60 million human beings that Satan killed before they had a chance to know Him. I'm sure there are "progressives" out there who would cheerfully stand beside the lake of fire with a pitchfork, shoveling babies into the flames. They are collectivists and think everybody ought to share in the same fate. I cannot imagine the God of infinite love being that cruel. You may face eternal death (Ecclesiastes 9:5) for your own sins, but innocent babies should not be lumped in that "collective".

Our founding fathers didn't have millions of abortions in their day; scarcely a handful. Ellen G White also said we'd discover new truth in the years to come. I think what is unique about our church is we really do believe God is loving and merciful. Unborn children are no less His children than the Hottentots who have never heard Jesus' name. I think we are learning more about Him as the years go by. When somebody puts forth beliefs about God's character that paint Him as harsh and unkind, it doesn't sit right because the God you know isn't merciless. Now if you choose to reject Him okay. You get removed from the universe permanently as you expected. But the innocent who were made by God, knit together in the womb by God Himself, have been murdered before they can make any such choice. You wanna tell me God abandons His handiwork because the devil decided to kill it before it was finished?

I don't think so! What kept me out of the church till I was 17 was the harsh picture of God that the Last Generation theology proponents were peddling. Then I met the actual Jesus and rejected the "only if you are a rigid, strong-willed Christian capable of Earthly perfection." bunk they were peddling. You can't tell me God will abandon 60 million plus innocent children as well. And they ARE innocent. And they are children. That settles it for me!

The idea that an unborn child is not a "soul" until he draws his first breath outside the mother's womb is messed up. God breathed into Adam and he became a living soul. He was a fully formed adult at the time. The idea that a "fetus" hasn't drawn breath and hasn't a soul, reveals a profound lack of knowledge of biology. When a baby is formed in the womb (knit together by God no less), he or she is ALREADY BREATHING. Its mother breathes and imparts oxygen and food to the child through the umbilical cord, an incredible design by God to see that the "clump of cells" gets oxygen and food. So, in essence, the child is breathing from the moment God begins to form it in the womb.

God is merciful and he knows us from the moment of conception. Salvation is not a crap shoot where you win if the roll of the dice is in your favor. God is, as I said, not willing that any should die, but that all should be saved. Why do you think he waited until now, when there are more people alive than have lived and died throughout the whole history of the world, to finish the Gospel commission and come in the clouds? He waited for telecommunications, transportation, the Internet, rockets and satellites to allow the Gospel to reach every kindred tongue and people, that He might take home the absolute most numbers of people He can without their seeing death. God hates death. He longs for that moment, that twinkling of an eye when he changes us, gives us immortality and takes us home. There are, we are told, going to be more people on the Sea of Glass to celebrate God's triumph than we can number. God is not exclusive. He is inclusive. He wants every person in His kingdom who is safe to turn loose in the universe with both eternal life and free will (intact so that we may reflect His image).

I find nothing in this that conflicts with the picture of a loving merciful God who would give His son to make sure we have the greatest chance of sharing eternity with Him. He's our Father and what Father is going to abandon more than 60 million babies aborted or miscarried? Are you prepared to tell a mom who miscarries that God doesn't care about her lost baby and won't give it back to her in heaven? Not this father! One of the founders of our church described little babies in heaven being restored to parents. I'm a parent and I will gladly take a whole flock of those babies.Sometimes I think that pernicious doctrine that infants lost cannot be saved comes from cranky old Christians that don't like the idea of being bothered by a lot of rambunctious infants and toddlers running around and walking on their grass.

This I know. Jesus loves us, child, adult or old person, rich or poor, red, and yellow, black or white and carried every one of us in his heart when he went to the cross. I will not cheapen his sacrifice by telling people that Jesus won't accept anyone who doesn't say that canned phrase about "accepting Jesus" or isn't baptized with the correct words by the properly credentialed church official. God is love. PERIOD!!!! You cannot convince me otherwise. I know him too well!

So people with mental disabilities get the lake of fire too? Downs Syndrome? Autism? So, give me a list of people who will be excluded from heaven by God who gave his only begotten son, because they are mentally impaired or didn't manage to get born. I have no doubt that women who have lost babies prior to that age of "accountability" will get her babies back. My infant brother will be restored to my mother's arms. And I will get my football team of unwanted "clumps of cells".

The only thing I've found that shows the Old Testament God as particularly harsh penalty-wise, was his response to the pagan practice of sacrificing babies to Molech. The Israelites got up to that sort of thing on the ancient hilltop shrines and grove temples. God REALLY REALLY hated infanticide and I don't think he blamed the babies for it. I sure wouldn't want to be the people who did that stuff when I stand in the judgment.

That misconception of God as an angry god, comes from his harsh "fatherly" punishment of the Israelites and pagans for their evil practices. The Aztecs used to slaughter and butcher more than 26,000 captives annually. The Canaanites, Israelites among them, ran up similar annual numbers and you don't want to know what horrors were perpetrated in those pagan temples and groves. The Mexican pyramids have special channels to capture the blood runoff. Canaanite, Greek, Roman, Druidic and Egyptian temples were worse than today's serial killer lairs. They believed that the more the victims screamed, the better the harvest would be. The pagans murdered hundreds of thousands to make the crops grow - the victims' crime being that they were still virgins.

Hey, if you slaughter tens of thousands of my children, I'm going to be pretty angry with you too and for good reason. I'd probably go medieval on you with an "automatic" weapon if you were murdering my babies. Nowadays, we only need protest the slaughter and we get treated like criminals for speaking out about it.

I suspect God is pretty angry with us for the 60 million we've allowed to be slaughtered because Margaret Sanger and her ilk thought people of color were human weeds that needed to be plucked up from among us (her words spoken to a KKK women's group back in the 20s). I don't much blame God for allowing that batch of willful sinners back in ancient Israel to be punished. The interesting thing is that God didn't rain down fire indiscriminately on folks to stop it. He simply backed off and let evil people destroy other evil people as evil people are wont to do. Seems He is doing the same with us. We've already ginned ourselves up a nice plague to thin the numbers. What are we going to do next? A nice nuclear war with Russia? A newer more deadly strain of CoVid? We could have that soon. A university lab in Boston has already combined original Covid and the Omega variant and created a Covid strain with an 80% kill rate in rats. We're still sending money to research labs in China and they certainly don't like us. Even our progressives don't get a pass from them.

God will shorten the time to Christ's coming else no flesh would be saved. The wages of sin is death. God doesn't have to hand you a paycheck. The devil auto-deposits it in your account. Forgive the length of this post, though. It's a subject that riles me up! Too many people have joined with Satan to harm the innocent and the faithful. Knowing God for more than 50 years, I believe God will make all things new and right and just - not the social justice being peddled by today's unchurched, but justice actual and true given us by our Father in Heaven.

© 2022 by Tom King

Forbearance and Unity

2022-10-22T15:12:00.005-07:00

Ted Wilson Wrestles With the Unity Backlash from the Women's Ordination Vote

In the wake of the kerfuffle over the 2015 San Antonio General Conference and subsequent measures to "promote unity" by the General Conference administration, GC vice president Tom Lemon, chair of the Unity Oversight Committee, made remarks about the issue. Lemon spoke about the different entities he'd met with since the last Annual Council—in North America and elsewhere. In all these meetings, he said, he didn’t find "one person who gave any hint… [of] rebellion." The attitude was "we are children of God, and we are in this thing together…." "I heard an understanding of mission and commitment to mission that would warm your hearts." Lemon saw no evidence of the rebellion, which evidently GC president Ted Wilson fears. As a result, it appears that Lemon resigned as director of the church's Unity Committee apparently under duress, although any information as to why he resigned was not forthcoming. This sort of thing does not increase confidence in President Wilson out here in the hinterlands. His reelection to a third term in 2022 was unusual as GC presidents for generations have limited their terms to two, further creating concerns that the Wilson was setting up a dynasty in Silver Springs, especially those who remember how difficult it was to dislodge his father Neal Wilson. Messenger to Adventism, Ellen G White weighed in on the matter of controversial decisions being made at the GC in response to discontent in the field over the 1888 General Conference.

“In no conference should propositions be rushed through without time being taken by the brethren to weigh carefully all sides of the question. Because the president of a conference suggested certain plans, it has sometimes been considered unnecessary to consult the Lord about them. Thus propositions have been accepted that were not for the spiritual benefit of the believers and that involved far more than was apparent at the first casual consideration…. Many, very many matters have been taken up and carried by vote, that have involved far more than was anticipated and far more than those who voted would have been willing to assent to had they taken time to consider the question from all sides” ( EGW 9T, p. 278, italics supplied).

Unfortunately, what appears to be the defining issue of the present administration thus far has been the General Conference president’s failure to report the findings of the Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) to the 2015 General Conference Session after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of tithe funds on the project that was to solve the issue once and for all. But the findings of the carefully selected committee were out of harmony with his ideas on the topic. A large majority of the Glacier View gathering of the best SDA theologians in the world had said that Scripture did not forbid the ordination of women. Wilson and those who supported him did not agree and Wilson did not allow the study report to be presented at the San Antonio session before the divisive vote was taken. He failed to mention that a super majority (62 for and 32 opposed) of the TOSC and nearly all of the concurrent world division reports favored permitting divisions the option of ordaining women. One result has been ongoing turbulence in the denomination and the three-year search for the proper way to punish noncompliance.

Ellen White noted that “the very beginning of the great apostasy was in seeking to supplement the authority of God with that of the church” (GC pp. 289-290). We need to pray for our church, its General Conference president, and the members of the General Conference Executive Committee that they might think twice (or a dozen times) before voting into policy “laws” that will take all of us down a well-beaten historical road; a road that has always led Christianity to some very unchristian practices done in the name of Christ. Many incarnations of Christ's church have confused spiritual unity with ecclesiastical compliance. May God help His church!

Sister Ellen became troublesome to the GC following the 1888 General Conference and was invited to go to Australia for much of a decade. Mrs. White made the most of the "opportunity" and left the church administration to work out its issues with God's guidance. When she returned to America, she championed the creation of union conferences to decentralize church authority. She counseled that shifting decision-making authority further afield would make the work out in the field more effective and responsive to issues that sometimes occurred half a world away from Battle Creek, the GC headquarters at the time. The creation of union conferences helped loosen the authoritarian grip of the leadership. And once God burned down the press building in Battle Creek, the GC admin decided God was displeased. As a result the General Conference moved from what had become an Adventist quagmire to Silver Spring.

Recently, a new issue as flammable as the Righteousness by Faith controversy post 1888, has risen. Much heated rhetoric over women's ordination has been delivered from pulpits, discussed in the aisles of our churches after services, in church-sponsored conferences, over church potluck tables, and in magazines and publications approved, disapproved or tolerated by the General Conference. Prominent Adventist theologians have weighed in on both sides of the issue. Seemingly harsh actions that have been taken at the General Conference have troubled the saints in North America. Enforcement committees have been proposed by the GC Executive Committee that seem to have the power to disband whole unions or local conferences that do not hew to the theological positions of the General Conference executives. The GC position is that the matter was settled in San Antonio. Other SDA leaders have questioned the San Antonio actions as the product of a flawed and even manipulative process. Some folk charged with examining the issue, like Tom Lemon, have found themselves removed for not vigorously supporting decisions originating in Silver Springs.

We stand on the precipice of momentous events in Earth's history. Of course the devil is going to seek to divide us. We see it happening in the secular world as the political prophecies of Revelation are working themselves out on the nightly news. Is squabbling over issues of whether authority should reside in Silver Springs or in the congregations of the saints something inspired by God or by some force outside the church seeking to divide us when we should be working tirelessly side by side to reach the world. Should we be putting bureaucratic burdens upon the army of the Lord. Ought we instead to use every tool in our arsenal, every resource available to us to complete the Gospel commission? Certainly, establishing a veritable Adventist FBI to root out heresy as defined by church managers won't unite the church. A Unity Conference didn't do much to put the GCs fears to rest either.

Ellen White, during a similar upheaval in our history said, "The church may pass resolution upon resolution to put down all disagreement of opinions, but we cannot force the mind and the will, and thus root out disagreement. These resolutions may conceal the discord, but they cannot quench it and establish perfect agreement. Nothing can perfect unity in the church but the spirit of Christ-like forbearance” (EGW, Ms 24, 1892, italics supplied).

At a time, when we are currently the fastest growing denomination in the United States if not the world, it probably delights Satan to stir up division in our midst. Lucifer is a master at using authority to overturn our actual agreements among the brethren. Then he tries to convince us that we who run roughshod over our brethren are thereby more sanctified than those they suppress. My prayer is that we may resist the devil when it becomes evident that he is among us, that he may flee from us. In this way we may truly have Christian unity, not just submission to human authority. In God's church, it is He who is our Lord, who is our direct guide and savior.

Last Generation Theology Debunked

2022-06-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

My pastor, Bob Stephan, posted this article by Walla Walla Biblical Studies emeritus professor Alden Thompson. It answers the premise of M.L. Andreasson's Last Generation Theology and the often misused Ellen White quote about the church achieving perfection before Christ comes. He draws quotes by Mrs. White which clearly explain that it is only by grace and not our own feeble efforts that we are made fit for heaven. Christ work was finished at the cross. We do not have to finish the work in our own strength. God knows we are so damaged by millenia of sin that only His sacrifice and His power and forgiveness can save us. For more in depth information on this subject, check out George R. Knight's powerful book."End Time Events & The Last Generation."

Ellen White’s Vision of a Flawed Final Generation

By Alden Thompson, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Walla Walla University.

Recently I came across some astonishing “last generation” comments from Ellen White in the chapter “Joshua and the Angel” in Prophets and Kings (582-592). As I pondered the chapter, I was startled but encouraged at how clearly Ellen White presents the case for a sinful people standing before God in the last days, but safe under the atoning blood of Jesus.

I outline some of the key points below. (The italicization in the quotations are added by me.)

Final perfect generation?

First, I suspect the idea of a “final [perfect] generation” (aka Last Generation Theology) never would have caught on if some conscientious soul had not isolated a quote from Christ’s Object Lessons from the rest of Ellen White’s writings:

When the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.” Christ is waiting with longing desire for the manifestation of Himself in His church. When the character of Christ shall be perfectly reproduced in His people, then He will come to claim them as His own. – Christ’s Object Lessons, 69.

I have concluded that Ellen White must have viewed this quotation in a corporate rather than an individualistic sense. In other words, Christ is wanting his church, the corporate “body of Christ,” to perfectly reflect his character, doing what Christ did to minister to the “least” of God’s children (cf. Matt. 25:40). Interpreting it in an individualistic sense with salvation overtones not only places an impossible burden on sensitive souls, but also overlooks key elements in Ellen White’s interpretation, both in Christ’s Object Lessons and Prophets and Kings.

The rest of the story

But now let me introduce you to a remarkable statement that I came across years ago. (This was when I was preparing the material for the Sinai-Golgotha series which was published in the Adventist Review (1981-82).) The chapter from Prophets and Kings entitled “Joshua and the Angel” is based on Zechariah 3:1-5, which depicts the attacks of Satan against Joshua the high priest. Let me first share the entire passage from Zechariah:

Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this man a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was dressed with filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.” And to him he said, “See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you with festal apparel.” And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with the apparel; and the angel of the Lord was standing by (NRSV).

In the narrative interpreting this passage, Ellen White makes this striking comment:

But while the followers of Christ have sinned, they have not given themselves up to be controlled by the satanic agencies. They have repented of their sins and have sought the Lord in humility and contrition, and the divine Advocate pleads in their behalf. He who has been most abused by their ingratitude, who knows their sin and also their penitence, declares: “The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan. I gave My life for these souls. They are graven upon the palms of My hands. They may have imperfections of character; they may have failed in their endeavors; but they have repented, and I have forgiven and accepted them.” – Prophets and Kings 589.

But this is the astonishing sentence in her interpretation of Zechariah 3:

Zechariah’s vision of Joshua and the Angel applies with peculiar force to the experience of God’s people in the closing scenes of the great day of atonement (Prophets and Kings 587).

In other words, this is a vision of a flawed people is a vision of the “last generation”!

The final (flawed) generation

And we must ask the question: What kind of people are these who find themselves standing before God (and Satan!) in the great day of atonement?

Here are several excerpts from Prophets and Kings that indicate quite clearly that these are not people who stand in sinless perfection before God. No! Joshua was “clothed with filthy clothes” (Zech. 3:1). So were his people:

“He does not claim that Israel is free from fault. In filthy garments, symbolizing the sins of the people, which he bears as their representative, he stands before the Angel, confessing their guilt, yet pointing to their repentance and humiliation, and relying upon the mercy of a sin-pardoning Redeemer” (Prophets and Kings 583-584).
“Because of their sins, they had been well-nigh consumed by Satan and his agents for their destruction” (p.584).
“Satan’s accusations against those who seek the Lord are not prompted by displeasure at their sins. He exults in their defective characters. . . .” (p.585).
“In his own strength, man cannot meet the charges of the enemy. In sin-stained garments, confessing his guilt, he stands before God” (p.586).
“As Joshua pleaded before the Angel, so the remnant church, with brokenness of heart and unfaltering faith, will plead for pardon and deliverance through Jesus, their Advocate. They are fully conscious of the sinfulness of their lives, they see their weakness and unworthiness; and they are ready to despair” (p.588).
“The tempter stands by to accuse them, as he stood by to resist Joshua. He points to their filthy garments, their defective characters. He presents their weakness and folly, their sins of ingratitude, their unlikeness to Christ, which has dishonored their Redeemer. He endeavors to affright them with the thought that their case is hopeless, that the stain of their defilement will never be washed away. He hopes so to destroy their faith that they will yield to his temptations, and turn from their allegiance to God” (p.588).
“But while the followers of Christ have sinned, they have not given themselves up to be controlled by the satanic agencies. They have repented of their sins and have sought the Lord in humility and contrition, and the divine Advocate pleads in their behalf. He who has been most abused by their ingratitude, who knows their sin and also their penitence, declares: ‘The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan. I gave My life for these souls. They are graven upon the palms of My hands. They may have imperfections of character; they may have failed in their endeavors; but they have repented, and I have forgiven and accepted them’” (p.589).

Imperfection

That last quotation stands out like a beacon light, for Christ himself declares to the court that his people “may have imperfections of character.” God’s people can stand confidently in court, not because of their sinless perfection, but because their lives are hid in Christ.

When we compare the material from Christ’s Object Lessons with the material from Prophets and Kings, logically we must give the Christ’s Object Lessons passage a corporate interpretation, for Joshua and his cohorts as individuals have “imperfections of character.”

These imperfect saints take refuge in their “clean” clothes, which are symbolic of their total trust in the grace of Christ.

Therefore, we can conclude that if there is a “final generation,” it is a generation that trusts solely in the grace of Christ.

And all the discouraged Adventists shouted “Amen!”

Fallen Warriors: Cosmos Garza

2022-04-02T01:29:00.002-07:00

Cosmos Garza

Just 12 days ago, I lost my friend, Carlos "Cosmos" Garza to CoVid-19. We went to school together at Valley Grande Academy my senior year (1972). Cosmos was a unique individual. He tried to grow a mustache like mine, but the poor boy had to settle for that sparse growth that actually became popular more than 30 years later. He was always up for some harmless goof or other.

When I came up with the idea for a Men's Liberation March during our annual spring picnic in the orange grove, Cosmos helped me make the signs. My other buddy, Dave Dameron whom we lost to CoVid last August helped me burn a pair of Fruit of the Looms on a pole. We had some very bossy girls that ran the place and the guys in the dorm were just about fed up with it. Cosmos, to his credit, instantly saw the value in the protest march as a way to harmlessly valve off some steam and was an enthusiastic participant.

In college, Cosmos took up a new cause of the same sort. Several heretical Adventist groups, most notably the Branch Davidians (formerly known as the Shepherd's Rods). They would show up for camp meetings, evangelistic meetings or anytime a bunch of Adventists gathered at the school. Cosmos made it his mission to collect every piece of literature he could lay hands on when the came up to proselytize for whatever goofy new doctrine they were peddling. He had a box in his dorm room that he called his "heretical literature library". It grew to quite a collection.

My last communication with Cosmos was about his escapades as an anti-offshoot guerrilla. I can still remember him and some friends including me hitting the Davidians at the doors and engaging them in deep theological discussions and distracting them from passing what they laughably called "literature". Cosmos could hold the best of them in thrall long enough for the congregation to get to their cars and drive away unmolested. It was brilliant strategy and the Davidians were suckers for it.

Here is the last post I ever got from Cosmos:

You know I just reread your last message (from Aug 9) about the Branch Davidians .. Well the main guy that was always there, was Perry Jones with his 5 or six (or 7) very young blond-haired kids. I'd spend time talking to them to find out what they actually taught (& read their literature later on).

Well one of Perry's daughters (Rachel, as a very young teen) ended up marrying Vernon Howell (David Koresh). Perry was the frontman and public relations man for the Branch Davidians. Well, Janet Reno had the ATF & FBI attack the New Mount Carmel Center. When they got a cease fire, Perry Jones came to the front door and was shot by federal agents. He refused to be taken in & taken to hospital. He died a few days later .. the 1st Branch Davidian member to be killed.

Years, years later (maybe 2002), returning from some Conference meeting, my son & I drove to the center, stopped & walked all over the place. NO BODY was there at the time we went. My son picked up a VHS tape from their chapel that had written "PRIVATE - FOR ELDERS ONLY" on it. (It was a Fritz Springmeier tape on the 13 Bloodlines of the Illuminati and also one about the TRANCE-Formation of America with Cathy O'Brien [a rescued whistleblower survivor of the CIA's secret mind control program "MK-Ultra"]. (The tape) "traces her path from child pornography and recruitment into the program to serving as a top-level intelligence agent and White House sex slave." https://trance-formation.com].

PS. When in Waco, we stopped at a convenience store & my son Jon started talking to these 2 Sheriff's Deputies. He asked them if they had known David Koresh. They said "Oh sure! We all knew him. He was in town every week and we'd talk with him when we'd see him." Jon asked "Did you ever have to go to the compound?" They said, "Oh sure!" Jon: "Were there problems?" "Not really. Sometimes we'd get calls about the gun shooting, but since they're in the country, they have a right to shoot." Jon: "So if he was in town often, didn't the ATF or FBI try to get him then?" They smirked and looked at each other and said, "Look, they had Koresh under surveillance. Koresh was in town the day before it all broke out. They could have apprehended him then." Jon: "So do you think they really wanted it to be the big show that happened?" They looked at us with a face of "Well yeah!' but answered, "We can't really say what they wanted."

People somehow would talk to Cosmos and tell him all kinds of secrets. Even with all that, Pastor Garza was a well-grounded guy and someone you could count on. Some of our stuffier SDA "leaders" had some difficulty understanding Carlos, but there is no doubt in my mind that he was a thoroughly decent and likeable guy. Of the guys in the VGA dorm, Cosmos was the closest to a kindred spirit I knew and I had some really good friends.

So far my Academy senior class has lost 6 members dead and one is confined to a nursing home. Several are missing and we can't find them. We're planning a Zoom meeting to celebrate 50 years since graduation this coming May. Jesus is clearly loading up the bus to come and get us very soon. Some of our best and brightest, He's given them a skip day and they will next wake to see Christ in the heavens. For the rest of us, the next years could be rough, but I keep ever in my mind the idea that folks like Cosmos, Dave, my friend Hansi, my grandpa, my brother, and my own son whom we lost in 2006 will be waiting up ahead for us to catch up.

Sometimes, I think Jesus is giving the best of us a pass; taking it easy on them because they don't need the tribulation to finish polishing them up. They're already pretty shiny and they've gone on ahead of us. I look forward to catching up with them.

Just sayin'.

Tom King
© 2022

The Art of Christian Storytelling

2022-03-27T15:43:00.004-07:00

The Master Storyteller

It is no accident that Jesus so often taught by telling stories. Parables are a powerful tool in witnessing to others. I'm pretty much a shut-in right now, so I watch a lot of live-streamed church services on Sabbath mornings. A majority of these stories are told by women. Many of them by older retired teachers and others comfortable with being up front. My church in Tyler, Texas has been bringing young men as well as women up front to do children's stories. Men are stepping up even more often. One of my favorite of our gang of storytellers was my son, Micah. Six foot four, close to 300 pounds, he knew how to tell a story and the kids loved him.

Too often our churches do not train and nurture storytellers. Often it's whoever they can make guilty enough not to turn down an invitation to tell stories up front. Many churches even have a rocker up on stage in deference to our older storytellers so they couldn't plead physical disability to get out of telling the children's story. You have to hand it to those volunteers who give of themselves to our youngest members, but children's story is potentially one of the most powerful parts of the church service, and if you don't attend to it by building up the skills of your storytellers, you miss that blessing.

I'd like to offer them some help to better engage that wriggling mass of children who's attention they try to hold. So, I'm planning to write a free e-book for people who tell the children's story in church. Greater storytellers than I have preceded me. There's a wonderful out-of-print book by Charles Spalding and Eric B. Hare called Christian Storytelling. It has a Kindle e-book version available on Amazon .In my book I want to deal specifically with how to do the children's story at church before the sermon. This sort of story has become a standard in many many churches, and it's a wonderful witnessing tool.

Thanks to Youtube and Facebook live streaming, many many churches put services online for members who are away on are homebound, disabled or simply drifted away from the church. My wife and I attend our old church back in Texas, because even though we are 3000 miles away, we get a glimpse of our grandson when he gets up front for the children's story. Our hearts are bound to that church in large part because of that brief story and the children sitting in a circle there at the front of the church.

The principles taught by Spalding and Hare are essential, but there are some things you can do specific to upfront storytelling in church as opposed to campfires and sabbath/Sunday schools. One of the most valuable was Eric B. Hare's advice to tell your story to the youngest members of the group of children. A story for 4 year olds will hold the attention of the 10 year-olds, while a story for the teens will quickly lose the preschool kids. So often we see storytellers talking over the heads of the little ones as they squirm and poke each other. If you've ever heard the old records Eric B. Hare made of his stories, you see a master at work. I've memorized his stories and made them my own and held the rapt attention of a gang of 2 to 12 year olds to the end of the story. The art of storytelling CAN be taught.

If you are reading this and you have some sage advice to impart to younger storytellers; if you have any stories or things that worked for you as a storyteller, I would love for you to message me and tell me all about it. I thoroughly believe that children are the future of the church and the weekly worship service children's story is the first step toward engaging our young people as participants in worship and outreach. I have witnessed a church transformed by determined effort by parents and grandparents to bring their children forward and up front.

One of the best pastors I ever had was Ron Halvorsen. Ron filled the church week after week and even had 1200 people coming to prayer meetings on Wednesday. He got his hands on a fleet of yellow school buses and went out into the community and rural areas picking up children and old people to come to church. I went along on the buses and played guitar and we rolled out over the county singing at the top of our lungs, five year-olds to 95 year-olds.Storytelling was his secret though. Not only was Ron a gifted storyteller, he knew how to impart that skill to others.

We taught the teens in the church how to tell stories using great storytelling principles and filled up youth meetings and children's services and taught a generation how to witness through storytelling. Turns out the kids were gifted, creative and innovative and the church annex overflowed with kids every Wednesday night.

So if you have a contribution to make to the art and science of Christian storytelling, please drop me a note on Facebook Messenger or email me at twayneking@gmail.com. Meanwhile, if you are telling stories already, click on the link to the Spalding & Hare book "Christian Storytelling." It will transform your storytelling style.

Confusion is His Game

2022-02-25T19:29:00.001-08:00

Recently, we've all been bombarded by lies. If it isn't the news media, it's our breathless brothers and sisters with the latest conspiracy theory. If it's not the Illuminati, it's the Bilderberg conspiracy, the Rothchild's, the Rockerfellers, the Merovingians or the Jewish bankers. People you thought were wise counselors seem to be led off down paths that all have one thing in common. They are paths that stray from the light and delve into dark places. Jesus is not the subject of these elaborate stories, though He may be mentioned as justification for such flights of fancy, but Christ is not the center of the story.

We need to be so careful here at the end, for Satan has had millennia to work out his schemes and he deludes himself that they are almost come to fruition. Over and over he's tried to make things work on this Earth the way he argued way back in the beginning that things ought to go. You don't have to go very far in Earth's history to see a pattern in which layers or hierarchies of authority between the people (aka, the masses, the proletariat, the collective) and some central Earthly authority. This is rather different from the single layer from human to God governance that Christianity teaches. Sadly, power attracts the corruptible and again and again, humans layer the church government with ever more and more elaborate hierarchies inserted between the Lord and his children.

All around us we see the signs that Christ's coming is imminent. But we are warned that "The devil our adversary walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour."* If we wish to survive the time of trouble ahead of us, we must be wary of the deceptions laid before us like so many land mines.

Lucifer has been a liar from the moment he arrived on Earth. His first lie was, "You shall not surely die." That wasn't what God said, of course. But Satan deceives by flattery. He told Eve she could be like a god. He tells you that you are smarter and better than all the stupid schlubs around you. He tells you that you understand things no one else does, especially all those ordinary folk that are so much less "aware" than you are. Lucifer is a brilliant deceiver.

Jesus says the truth shall set you free. It's a very good idea to go to the source of Truth and keep yourself regularly infused. When you are wandering about the world, beware. Before you latch onto some conspiracy theory, especially if it feeds your ego, remember, as the old spiritual puts it, "Satan is an evil charmer. Shut the door, keep out the devil."

Paul is even more direct with regard to spending time looking into dark places. "...it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. For this reason it says, 'Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'”**

Seek the truth. If some conspiracy theory attracts your attention be very careful. Do not rush to attribute the events on the nightly news to some brilliant human plot to control the world. We have been told who is plotting against us. Much of what seems to be some diabolical plot, is simply the shared interests and the similar lusts for power of wicked people. It is also the stupidity of those steeped in vanity, sin and selfishness that creates what seems like a dangerous plot to harm us.

Angels stand behind us to lead us safely through the valleys of the shadow of death. We need fear no evil. For He is with us. His angels surround us. We need what is available to us in His Word and no other secret "truths". For in conspiracy theories, there be dragons.

* 1 Peter 5:8
** Ephesians 5: 12-14

We Have Almost Reached the Deciding Moment

2021-06-05T12:29:00.001-07:00

We've just about reached every corner of the Earth what with radio, TV, air, train, bus and auto travel, the Internet, the printed word and other media. My church has established missions on the ground in 212 out of the 235 nations of the world and by radio and Internet we've covered them all. It's getting close to the point that we can say with our fellow Christians that we've actually preached the gospel to the whole world.

Meanwhile, Satan has used those same tools to deceive multitudes, to create weapons capable of turning Earth into a molten lake of fire, something Revelation talks about. At one moment in history we stand almost ready to go home and almost ready to destroy the Earth utterly. This is the moment. Go tell it on the mountain folks. Not much time left.

Yours in Christ,

Tom King

AF Doesn't Archive These - How We Got the Interstate Highway System

2021-05-29T23:03:00.002-07:00

© Amazing Fact Devotional - May 29, 2021

AN AMAZING FACT: After World War I, leaders in Washington became concerned about the state of the nation’s roads. The automobile was still a relatively new invention, so most transcontinental travel depended on a few train tracks spanning the country. The U.S. War Department wanted to know if the nation’s roads could handle coast-to-coast movements of Army units by road. As a test, the Transcontinental Motor Convoy—some 80 military vehicles and 280 soldiers—took an epic road trip from Washington, D.C. to California. The starting date was July 7, 1919.

Like the cavalry of old, Army scouts would ride in advance of the convoy to check out the conditions that lay just ahead, except they were mounted on Harley-Davidsons instead of horses. The convoy traveled over dirt roads, rutted paths, winding mountain trails, and shifting desert sands roughly along the route of present-day Interstate 80.

Many areas were nearly impassable, and the men often had to push or pull the heavy trucks along through the summer heat. The vehicles frequently broke down, got stuck in quicksand and mud, and sank when roads and bridges collapsed under them. In spite of the hardships, 62 days after it left Washington, D.C., the convoy reached San Francisco. It had covered 3,251 miles, averaging 58 miles a day at an average speed of 6 mph. The official report of the War Department concluded that the existing roads in the United States were “absolutely incapable of meeting the present-day traffic requirements.”

One of the Army officers on the convoy was 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later said the roads they encountered “varied from average to non-existent.” Eisenhower never forgot this grueling experience, and one of the most important things he did after becoming president was to create the interstate highway system. Construction began in 1956, and the entire interstate system now has a total length of 46,837 miles. It’s the largest highway system in the world and the largest public works project in history.

Did you know the Bible speaks of an army of highway workers that will go before the Lord? “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’” (Isaiah 40:3). Not only did John the Baptist fulfill this prophecy, but we too may help make straight roads that guide others to heaven.

KEY BIBLE TEXTS

Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people. Isaiah 62:10

Note from Tom: The Interstate Highway System is often cited as an example of socialism in action. It actually wasn't. It was Americans and their government fixing a problem together that everyone agreed needed fixing. Each state participates in maintaining the Interstates. We all contribute to it. We do this because it enables commerce in the national marketplace and contributes to making us all a bit wealthier in the process. The Interstates were primarily designed to help move troops in case of an invasion (we learned about the dangers of that in WWII. It had the added benefit of allowing commercial and private citizens to move easily about the the country. It was the sort of thing the Constitution said we were creating a government for - in this case to provide for the common defense.

Tom King

Answer to a Critic of Ellen White

2021-05-01T20:31:00.001-07:00

I recommended a book by SDA historian George R. Knight called "Ellen White's Afterlife" in which he thoroughly discusses the issues the anti-Adventist crowd has presented here on social media. Let me address some of the points one by one.

1. Ellen White never claimed to be equal to scripture much less greater. She told pastors not to quote her from the pulpit as an authority. She described herself as a messenger, not a prophet. Others later on made that claim about her. She did not.

2. Her writings always point to the Bible as the source of all truth. She always sent people back to the Bible when she offered advice or a message she received in vision.

3. To outright reject her claim to having visions is to dismiss scripture's prophecy (Acts 2: 17) that, "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams." Bible says it will happen.

4. Her use of sources credited and uncredited is described clearly in the forward to Great Controversy. She followed what was common publishing practice in her day. When concern was expressed about how her lack of written sources might be perceived, she altered the book in later editions to include references. She was quite frank that in many cases she found a passage in her reading that said what she'd seen or wanted to say better than she could herself. She had secretaries who edited her work and, as I said, she changed some things in later editions, especially if she found better more accurate sources.

5. She never claimed to be infallible. Many things she wrote were for individuals and not for public consumption. There was a doctor and his wife (also a doctor) in Australia that Dr. Knight described as "dying of health reform." Sister Ellen wrote them and told them to drink grape juice and 2 raw eggs for breakfast each morning to recover their health. They were doing health reform over-zealously and missing parts of the message. She did not recommend this for all, but in this case it seemed to have saved the couple's lives.

6. Of course her health messages were similar to others ideas. If something is good for you, it should be advised by more than one person. She advised people to stop tobacco use a hundred years before doctors finally weighed in on the subject. She preached temperance before AA. She had a knack for getting it right even when it went against the ideas of other health reformers at the time. At one SDA college where she had lunch in the cafeteria, Mrs. White asked for a salt shaker. The waitress said the school no longer provided salt because it was unhealthy. They didn't even use it in cooking. Mrs. White told the waitress, "Please bring me some salt. My Bible says it is good and I trust it's counsel over man's."

7. The final words of her final sermon shortly before her death were, "Brothers and Sisters," she said lifting her Bible over her head, "Unto you I commend this book." She advised pastors to teach from the Word and not to quote Sister White. She once complained that it made her skin crawl when she heard someone preface their remarks with "Sister White says...." She got to where she had to almost quit giving people verbal advice, specifically for that person alone, because she often heard it repeated from the pulpit the next Sabbath. This she objected to strenuously.

8 After her death, GC president AG Daniels, who knew her and her views, called a conference of educators together to discuss how to use Sister White's writing with students. Daniels was adamant that she never wanted to be used as a club to enforce any idea for which there was not thorough grounding in Scripture. When one conference president wrote her demanding that she give the brethren advice on a hotly debated passage in Galatians as to the meaning of "The Daily", she flatly refused. She told them to go back and pray some more and that God would lead them aright.

9. There was a time in the 40s and 50s when a theologian named Andraeson promoted something called Last Days Theology, which was the idea that Christ's sacrifice was not a completed work, but that humans in the last days would live perfect lives for a time without an intercessor and that it was necessary for humans to prove that one could live perfectly on his own hook. This is contradicted in scripture and comes primarily from one misunderstood passage in a single book which was a compilation which Sister Ellen did not like the idea of were she not involved in the selection of the writings. Andraeson became disruptive with his insistence on Last Day perfection being necessary to justify God somehow, that the church had to withdraw his ministerial credentials. On his deathbed he apologized for the disruption he caused. Unfortunately, his influence was very widespread and it took some controversy within the church in order to resolve the issue. The church now is united on the idea that atonement for His children was completed at the cross. The Sanctuary doctrine and the investigative judgment we believe is a final closing of the books that takes place as Christ comes. The Sanctuary doctrine has far more support in Scripture than the secret rapture doctrine and the immortality of the soul.

10. The Adventist Church can support it's theological doctrines from Scripture. We don't have to explain to our members as to why we are allowed to disobey the only commandment that says "Remember" as the first word. We don't have to explain the absence of an immortal soul, an ever-burning hell and a commandment to change the Sabbath to Sunday anywhere in the New Testament.

11. We Adventists do a healthy diet as far as possible. Not all of us eat a good diet but in repeated studies, among all Adventists we live 9 or 10 years longer than everyone else. We've taken much from the Old Testament about diet going back to the Garden of Eden where the original diet was fruits and vegetables with grains added after they got kicked out. We reason that if our body is the Temple of the Lord, we should probably treat it well.

You can go to church anywhere you like. You may even find your way to heaven without ever darkening the door of an SDA church. Adventists believe Jesus will take home people from all corners of Christendom and beyond. We even believe that some will be saved that never heard the name of Christ, but who searched for Him with all their hearts. But there is no excuse for some Christians who seek to tear down fellow Christians, calling them a cult, calling Ellen White a false prophet and accusing us of a whole horde of things without evidence. That's all I've got to say. If you don't like us, you are not required to fellowship with us. Your salvation is between you and your God. You preach what you believe about God's character and we'll do the same. I frankly believe that when Jesus said the dead sleep, that he meant that. I believe when Paul said "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed" that that's exactly how it works.

The God I met while studying Scripture would not torture any one for all eternity. Satan was the one who said "Thou shalt not surely die". and we don't lop a week off the 70 weeks prophecy and move it 2000 years later to hide the identity of the Beast power.

We must have something right or our fellow Christians would not be so anxious to discredit us, I think. We hope you find your way to Him as we too have that blessed hope. We'll see you there.

© 2021 by Tom King

Towards a Lost Sheep Ministry

2021-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

The reward of seeking lost sheep.

When I was working in Tyler, Texas during my nonprofit days, I saw a survey we did for a HUD grant of the local "demographic." In it, they included an item that identified people by religious affiliation. I was shocked to see that of the people who said they were Adventist, there were half again the number of professed Adventists as there were Adventists who were actually attending the 3 Tyler SDA churches.

Some likely listed themselves as SDAs because that was the last church they'd had anything to do with. I suspect many were maintaining their connection to the church through the 3ABN TV UHF ground station the local church maintained in the community. Others were occasional attendees but had never put their names on the books. It's a sad statistic that of the ninety and nine of our flock there were 50 more missing and wandering around kind of lost.

Sadly, ministry to the lost of our own flock is too often neglected these days in favor of evangelistic meetings that bring in new members. I wonder if some of the reluctance to seek after our lost members has anything to do with the fact that some of them were troublesome sorts of members in the first place and our church officials are not anxious to reignite old fires. Still, our displaced and isolated members are a fertile field for harvest.

Still that one lost sheep is by definition, a troublesome sheep, wandering off from the flock. With many of these lost sheep having caused the shepherds all sorts of trouble., the thought may be, "Better to let sleeping sheep lie."

Just as new technology has improved search and rescue techniques, so new tech has given us new tools for spiritual search and rescue. If Jesus' parable about the lost sheep is any indication of the relative importance of spiritual search and rescue, then it seems like it ought to be a ministry that is a fixture or our church programs. It seems there should be more of a focus on this neglected ministry.

Now with the Internet and the ability to inexpensively livestream our services we have a priceless opportunity to reach out to disconnected members, shut-ins and hereditary Adventists in the community who have slipped away.With texting, mobile phones in everyone's pocket and the means to use social media to keep in communication with one another, there are abundant avenues to woo back our lost lambs.

Being a shut-in myself has opened my eyes to the possibility of ministries to recover lost members and engage our shut-ins. Ron Halvorsen Sr did a thing at the Keene, Texas church when he was there, where he bought and had donated a small fleet of school buses. We fanned out through the countryside picking up kids for Wednesday night youth meetings and picking up elderly and disabled folk for prayer meeting and church. Through word of mouth and by direct mail we let people know that we would come for them to bring them to church. We put young people with guitars on the buses and sang our way through the hills and dales of Johnson County picking up kids and adults on Sabbath on on Wednesday night. The church was packed to overflowing. We went from an average 42 attendance at prayer meeting to over 1000. We went from one service to two.We trained the Academy and College kids to organize, plan and run the youth meetings. We taught classes in story-telling to young volunteers. Musicians just showed up anxious to help and to be a part of some wonderful music.

The church grew dramatically, much to the chagrin of some of the board members. There are always some that hate the idea of all those new and energetic members. I say new members, because in seeking our lost members, we wound up finding dozens and dozens of new ones who were swept up in our nets. Adventist kids often brought along friends and neighbors on the buses. The Wednesday Youth meetings were like an all year Vacation Bible School.

I think every SDA church needs a lost sheep ministry. The Graham church here in Washington did a thing where the deacons and board members and volunteers went round to take communion to our shut-ins. It was a lovely idea and a blessing to those of us who are isolated from our church family due to health, disability or transportation issues.

Sometimes we think witnessing is going around passing out "literature" and throwing evangelistic meetings. But it's not. In all of scripture I have found only three things we have been told to do in order to find our way to heaven. Study, pray and then share what you've learned from the first two. In sharing what you've learned, you'll find that what you've learned is heavy on treating others the way you want to be treated, caring for the sick, the disabled, the widows, orphans and elderly. Witness means getting out your hammer and building your elderly friend a ramp so he can get his wheelchair out of the house, installing handrails in her shower, mowing someone's grass or repairing a sink.

The really beautiful thing is that doing all this outreach to our lost sheep and to our neighbors as well, we help save souls, including, surprisingly, our own. There's nothing so good for depression and unhappiness as turning your hand to helping another, especially if you do it with no thought of reward or payment.

In these days when we see prophecy being fulfilled right and left, it will not be having the right politics that will bring us through these times of trouble. It will be how we build communities of faith, how we lift each other up, and how we pull together as sons and daughters of God.

Think about it. What can you do to find a lost sheep. It may be simply listening to someone's troublesd. It could be running an errand for someone. It might be as simple as inviting someone to go with you on an adventure. If each day you ask God to bring you to the witness stand that you may tell of your own experience with Him, God will guide you to His lost sheep that you might show them that He loves them through your own life.

Yours in Christ,

Tom King

Is it Wrong for a Christian to Be Involved in Politics

2020-09-19T18:44:00.009-07:00

A preacher friend and relative, counseled all of us to not involve ourselves in politics in his Sabbath morning homily today. It was at that point that I realized he'd done stopped preaching and done started meddling!

Seriously though, as a professional journalist/blogger/author whose specialty is politics, humor (two branches of the same field), religion (make that 3 branches), vegetarian cookery and how-to articles, I find it difficult to give up my political writing. This is especially so since I firmly believe that modern progressive politics are working very hard to create the world we were warned about in Revelation. I personally have come to believe from my study of current events, political discourse and the Bible that there is one political group that will get our nation down the road to hell far faster than the other. Revelation talks about a three-fold union between the Dragon (Satan/Pagan Rome), the Beast (the inheritor of the power of pagan Rome - see Emperor Constantine) and the False Prophet. Sounds suspiciously like some sort of global new world order to me.

As a result of my studies, my political blogs tend to be as much about religious matters like the Second Coming and the 7 last plagues as they are about who should win the next election, since at this point in history, politics and religion have become so intertwined. And anti-religion is every bit as much a religion as any denomination. They have shared rituals like burning down electronics stores after looting them, setting forest fires, shooting people with MAGA hats, and screaming Marxist claptrap in the faces of people smaller than they are (not to mention knocking down little old people). They have shared beliefs like collectivism, and shared values like perversion and anarchy. Also as a citizen of a nation whose constitution clearly states this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that makes each of us leaders of the government. The state, our founding fathers decided, belongs to us, not we to it as the collectivists would have us believe.

The advice this morning's speaker quoted came from one of our church founders, whose advice to avoid politics was, I believe, aimed at Gospel Workers (that being the name of the book the quotation was drawn from). The counselor in question also once publicly called out the president of the United States for not making the Civil War about slavery - she said God wouldn't bless the North if he didn't. She was an abolitionist at the time which was a very prominent and trouble-making 19th century political movement. It can be argued that the abolition movement was a direct cause of the Civil WAr. It seems that even back then politics and religion had some shared values. Turns out she was prophetic about making it about slavery once it got started. The North struggled in the early years of the war, until Lincoln stopped talking about a settlement that left slavery intact and went right for the Emancipation Proclamation solution. Immediately after that, the tide of the war turned in favor of the Union.

I feel like there is still a role for watchmen on the wall whose responsibility is to tell the truth to kings. A lot of God's servants have gotten in trouble for doing just that. The kings didn't appreciate their meddling in politics and some prophets paid with their lives in singularly unpleasant manners. So like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Elijah, John the Baptist, Elisha, Joel, Samuel and other minor and not so minor prophets, all of whom got in trouble for challenging the centrist governments of their day (they called the politburo presidents kings back then), I feel called to challenge the centrist oppressive government of today and support those who fight against those who would take our freedoms, shut down our churches and persecute those who disagree with them. Even more so as the end of time approaches.

"Watchmen on the wall" Isaiah called them (Isaiah 62: 6). He said we shouldn't rest from watching for the approach of the enemy, nor should we be silent about it..

Just one man's opinion.....

Water - One Reason I Gave Up on Atheism

2020-05-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Water in all 3 of its miraculous forms - liquid, solid and gas

As a young man, as young men will do, I toyed with the idea of atheism. With my limited youthful logic I thought the idea of evolution and survival of the fittest a pretty smart idea as we often do in the midst of our youth and arrogance, when like Eve, we buy into the lie that we are, by nature, immortal and that, with a bit of knowledge, we can be our own gods.

Once I learned how to reason, however, some problems soon arose with the whole idea that there is nothing out there beyond our own, horrifically flawed selves. If, in fact, we are the result of a very long series of cosmic accidents, I came to realize, that then how could we trust that our minds are even capable of real rational thought. We could be thinking we have reasoned things out by cold logic, but the fact is, our accidentally constructed "minds" could well be incapable of anything other than a crippled kind of thinking influenced more by our lack of some missing kind of perceptive ability than by reason as we think of it, if we can think rationally at all.

So, the truth is that the "logic" by which the atheist rejects the notion of God may only be the product of a limited ability to think. We could be limited in our ability to think truly rational thoughts about anything beyond what our five senses seem to perceive. In fact, there may be an entire reality beyond the limits of our perception. Perhaps God is a pan-dimensional being we can neither see nor hear nor touch nor taste nor feel because we lack the sense organs to perceive such a being. God told Moses it was impossible for him with his limited sensor equipment to see more than his "back parts".

If could be that we are only able to perceive the results of a creature outside the strictures of 3 dimensional space when He interacts with the universe and with us lower creatures. Consider, for instance, water. Without water, life could not exist. Water is a compound made of two of the simplest of elements - hydrogen and oxygen.Water has the following unique properties.

It is liquid in its normal state allowing us to drink it, sail on it, water crops with it, bathe with it and cook with it.
Water turns to gas in response not only to boiling, but to lowered humidity levels in the air at relatively low temperatures through evaporation.
Were it not for evaporation, clouds would not form, nor would precipitation redistribute fresh filtered water over the land areas of the Earth where animals and plants take it in as a necessity of survival.
Also, water changes to a solid (freezes) at a temperature at which animals and plants can survive. Just before it freezes and turns into a solid, unlike every other substance on the planet.
Just before freezing water expands rather than contracts causing its solid form to float on it's liquid form.
Were water like all other substances, it would continue to contract as it cools and sink to the bottom of the body of water exposed to freezing temperatures.
If ice sank rather than floated, instead of protecting life below the surface of the water from freezing temperatures above, it would fill up lakes, rivers and oceans from the bottom up.
Ice that sinks would eventually force the fish our onto the surface of what had become a solid block of ice instead of a body of water. Sea life would die gasping. Virtually all animal life in the water would be killed after a single hard winter.
Water, by all appearances, seems unlikely to be a happy accident of physics, but rather the product of some intelligent design scheme. And, where you have a design scheme, you pretty much have to have a designer.
Were you to change those two very odd properties of water, life would be unable to exist.

It turns out that it takes an incredible amount of faith in accidents or a remarkable lack of curiosity to attribute all that to chance. Over the past century or so, as science digs deeper and deeper into the nature of the universe around us it keeps discovering that life exists by a singularly complex web of factors which increasingly like they could only have occurred on their own by a string of not just improbable, but statistically impossible complex circumstances.

CS Lewis compared it to smashing a jug of milk on the floor and hoping it gives you a map of London. As unlikely as that would be to happen, no matter how many jugs you smashed to the floor, your family cat, attracted by the crashing, could hardly guess with the brain it has, whether the delightfully tasty patterns spread across the kitchen floor accidentally appeared there as a result of the crash or if this odd superior creature sitting on the drain board taking notes might have created the mess for some unfathomable reason known only to itself. The cat, with cat--like logic might assume the milk spread itself over the floor of its own accord for the cat's enjoyment.

Not having seen you smash several jugs of milk on the floor, the cat would likely accept the miracle of the milk and commence to licking it up without further thought. Me? Because I have a human's ability to reason, could look at the milk, even if someone else at broken the jugs, not me, and detect the action of some actor who was behind it. I could probably even guess which one of my kids was responsible for the milky map of London on the kitchen floor.

So given that I would require an extremely deep sort of faith to accept that this glorious world is the accidental product of volcanoes and asteroids, I have look deeper, with an open mind and found unmistakable imprint of Him, the great designer, in even simple things like water.

Is God Giving the Churches a Nudge?

2020-04-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the CoVid-19 pandemic, SDA churches all over the world have stopped having services on Sabbath. A lot of our churches have given their members weblinks and reading materials and the address to which to mail their tithes and offerings and said "See you later." However, many of our churches have, at this time and for this crisis, chosen to invested the rather modest funds needed to purchase cameras, computer and sound gear needed to livestream church services rather than simply shoving their flock over to Amazing Facts, 3ABN and the Hope Channel. While these are worthy sources for religious instruction and comfort in this difficult time, they lack the personal impact of remaining connected to your brothers and sisters.

When this emergency is over, the churches will still have the equipment to livestream services and should be able to do so economically. I wonder if perhaps God will use this crisis to nudge His churches into using this technology to reach out and provide a link to others beside those who show up each Sabbath. I'm thinking of the elderly and disabled shut-in members and those who have for one reason or another drifted away from our fellowship. Perhaps this is an opportunity for our churches to provide a more subtle way for lost and isolated Christians to rejoin the life of their churches.

In my town in Texas, they did a survey of church membership in the city by denomination. We discovered to our shock that though we have 3 churches in the city, the number of people who listed themselves as belonging to our denomination was over twice the number of people on the books and who were coming to church.

We have sadly neglected our shut-ins and strayed lambs. I've been made acutely aware of this in the past few years as my wife and I have found ourselves becoming shut-ins due to her disability. Amazing Facts has been a blessing, but it is no substitute for being able to connect with our church family. There is a huge field out there to be harvested. So many people have drifted from the church over the years simply because they missed a few weeks and nobody noticed.

With social media, live-streaming, email and telephones, a whole field of mission has opened up that we are really not reaching. Maybe you aren't confident enough to do Bible Studies or you don't have the stamina or courage to "pass out literature" to perfect strangers. But how hard is it to work with your church's website or social media page to answer messages from people who saw services on the Internet? What a great way to follow up with isolated, lonely, elderly, disabled and ill church members. How hard could it be to follow up a comment on a post on the church Facebook page with a phone call and a simple "How are you doing?"

Jesus told the story of the ninety and nine in which the shepherd turned and headed back out into the night to find a single sheep who had strayed. My God, why have we forsaken the vast flock out there who have gotten lost from our fellowship? Perhaps God is giving us a high-tech flashlight and a shepherd's crook in all this scary pandemic in order to encourage us to gently seek out our lost sheep and bring them home - or at least to offer them a little comfort and a sense of belonging to their home church again. What a nice mission that would be and so easy to set up.

© 2020 by Tom King

Upsetting the Sanhedrin

2020-01-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've written anything on this weblog. There's a reason for that. I haven't trusted myself to comment on the sorts of controversies rattling around in the upper rooms of church governance and in the lower chambers of the active and often outspoken laity. I got my copy of Adventist World today, opened it and there it was - Executive Committee Members Debate Proposed Compliance Action. I thought, "Well here we go again." As I read, I quite frankly found myself in sympathy with the unions and pastors who were being threatened.

I use the word "threatened" because you can't read the article and sense anything less than a clear threat for unions and union conference presidents. I found it odd that nothing was said about conference presidents and individual conferences that are out of compliance with the sketchy vote-down of women's ordination at the San Antonio General Conference.There have been two reactions to that decision by those unconvinced by that vote. Both reactions were discussed in the article.

One response was to ignore the edict which didn't exactly forbid women's ordination, but took power from the Union Conferences to make that decision for themselves. The vote moved the authority for deciding about ordination back to the General Conference where it was prior to the 1903 General Conference. In that conference, the unions were created. Ellen White was at that conference and said angels walked the aisle and influenced the decision to divest the GC of some of its power. Individual union conference presidents in the West Coast Unions seem destined to be publicly reprimanded as their unions have continued to ordain women as though they still had the authority to do so.

The second response has been that of the Scandinavian and German unions in Europe. There, the men turned in their ordination credentials and both men and women are commissioned. To me that seems like a reasonable compromise on the part of the unions. It complies with the prohibition against ordaining women while achieving the conference's goal of treating women equally in terms of pay and responsibility as pastors.

Apparently not. Elder Wilson intimated in his comments that, although he hasn't used the compliance committees, he still has them holstered and ready if needs be. It was clearly a not so veiled threat and it's backed by many of the more patriarchal unions that find the ordination of women to be a threat as well.

My wife and I were watching one of the Jesus movies and something kind of jumped out at me. All was not harmonious in the time of Christ. There were factions ranging from the zealots on the right to the looser Jews like Zacchaeus, Matthew and their crowd. And in the midst was the political class of the Sanhedrin - Pharisees and Sadducees, the Democrats and Republicans of Jesus' first advent.

Many of our brethren express concern over the state of the Adventist Church at this time. The divisions within are at once spiritual, political and cultural. Could we expect anything less in the day of Jesus' second advent? The fragmented Jewish faith at the time of his first advent was unable to find unity within its diversity save through the emerging Christian faith. Jesus drew followers from tax-collectors, revolutionaries, fishermen, the rich and poor, small and great, young and old, Scribe, Pharisee and Sadducee. Rather than stuffing his children all into one ideological box, he met them where they were and set them on the road to heaven.

Perhaps after 2000 years my church should remember that we are called to save the lost. We are not called to accumulate people who perfectly reflect our own beliefs and ideas and stuff them all into a big organized box o' holy folk. We are called to love one another, not obey human authority in a hierarchy growing as complex and authoritarian as that of the Roman Catholic Church. This troubles me too.

I'm a rock-ribbed conservative, in both spiritual and political matters, yet I find myself siding on ordination with fellow Adventists who are down-right socialists. Perhaps my small government, individualistic, and respectfulness of foundation law and principles colors my thinking. In watching recent events, I find myself worried about the direction in which our leadership is taking us. We've always done Bible Conferences over issues of Bible doctrine. In this case also, we spent a good deal of church money doing a conference at Glacier View in Colorado over women's ordination. The Theology of Ordination Committee (TOC) found by a solid majority that ordination was a human construct rather than a Biblical command and that there is no evidence that women could not be ordained as pastors and ministers if the church chooses to do so. And with TOC report firmly in hand, the GC proceeded to effectively ignore the advice of the TOC, burying its findings in procedural maneuvering at the San Antonio GC in order to push toward the desired vote. The vote effectively divested the union conferences of authority to decide policy regarding ordination for the individual unions. While the union conferences that have been accused of noncompliance have yet to be summoned before the committees, the GC and Wilson in particular seemed determined to bully the unions into compliance without having to invoke the compliance committees and disband unions, especially unions that provide a significant chunk of the world budget. Compliance committees have been called the Adventist FBI and large numbers of Adventist members find this ominous.

The church is made up of individuals making their way to heaven. It's not a bus or a cruise ship. It's not a form of transport where everyone must have a ticket and sit where the conductors tell us to. The church is a gathering place where we all flock to be blessed with God's presence. Why are we worried that remembering the way the Lord has led us in the past will lead to trickle-down non-compliance? And since when is it the church's duty to enforce "compliance". Since when do we place human authority between Christians and their God that men be granted the power to make us all comply with human decisions? Yet in the end, I can say with the president of the Pacific Union Conference, "I am a Seventh-day Adventist today and I will be a Seventh-day Adventist tomorrow regardless of what this vote does."

Based on my experience with the children of God, I expect they will continue their journey toward home, whatever the Sanhedrin does. I love my church and pray for its leadership that they look beyond their fears and trust in Christ. Based on what I see on the evening news and what I read in Scripture, Jesus will soon come and once again He will take his children with Him beyond mere compliance to righteousness and eternal life.

© 2020 by Tom King

The Third World Next Door

2019-06-24T21:20:00.001-07:00

There's a wonderful new program that trains students for missions by visiting refugee/immigrant communities in Houston, Texas where half the population speaks a language other than English. It's a great program, don't get me wrong, It's a lovely idea. I just think they can go farther with this idea.

During my heyday, I worked with folks in what the Texas government calls "colonias". Now the term colonias has a very narrow, politician-defined meaning. It must, for instance consist of a settlement with poorly constructed houses, often with little or no insulation, no electricity except what could be stolen from nearby businesses or directly from light poles. There are lots of people killed trying to wire their shacks, especially during freezing weather. Running water is rare. Sewer service and trash pickup are often non-existent. Transportation is dependent on employers offering semi-slave jobs. AND they have to be within something like 150 miles of the border to be a colonia and receive federal and state dollars. It's not accidental that communities within 150 miles of the border tend to be the stronghold of one particular party that has encouraged the establishment and filling of these tar-paper communities for decades.

The trouble is there are a couple of dozen colonia type settlements in deep rural East Texas, a lot farther from the border. So these settlements legally defined as colonias and don't get political attention much. The Texas legislature is trying to do something about it, but they aren't getting a whole lot of cooperation from the "loyal" opposition party - especially not the ones that aren't Demoocrat strongholds. These illegal immigrant camps are a whole lot like the worker camps the railroads and mining towns used to build back in the 1800s that Tennessee Ernie Ford sang about in the song "Sixteen Tons".

Like our War on Poverty welfare programs, colonias are designed to punish anyone who tries to escape this particularly oppressive form of indentured servitude. Except with indentured servitude you had a time limit. Life in colonias is a sentence without a visible end. Try to escape and the boss man calls a friend in ICE and gets your fuzzy hindquarters sent back to Mexico. With legal refugees and immigrants, there may be a period of hard work and sacrifice, but the future in America holds promise and opportunity for them and a path to citizenship. For illlegal immigrants, especially those from Mexico, there is only a slightly better form of poverty and endless, often brutal work.

That's why we must close the border and create a legal path for guest and migrant workers to enter the USA. It will take both actions to solve the problem. Guest workers could then come in to the US under the protection of the state and federal Departments of Labor and OSHA. Of course, then the big campaign donors and corporations that exploit illegals would lose there wildly underpaid servants.

There is a mission field out there calling out to our church, often hidden nearby in poverty-stricken towns you didn't even know were there. I worked with one nonprofit program where we quietly developed transportation to town for the mothers in those colonias to buy groceries and supplies. We used church buses. When we started, coyotes with pickups would drive the ladies to town piled in the bed of the truck. The women would buy saleable commodities with food stamps and trade them for a ride home. The going rate was $85 worth of food stamp purchases for the ride home. That way they got around the law against transferring food stamp dollars to the guy who was driving them. Typically they would shove 5-10 women in the bed of the truck, and get up to $800 or so in goods in exchange. This was being encouraged and coordinated by big flower nursery owners, chicken ranchers and processors, dairy farmers and big commercial farms.

Looking for a mission field? The colonias needs more than religious tracts in their own language. And these guys aren't just facing language barriers or cultural barriers or racial prejudice. These guys are being oppressed right here in the United States. It's an enlightening visit to a third world right next door that you probably don't know about.

Want to help oppressed third world peoples? Take your church van to a colonia (or for that matter your own van) and offer the ladies a lift to town. Raise some money to provide heaters in winter. Perhaps pay for a light pole and breaker box to be dropped in the neighborhood. Find a spot and dig a well or deliver cases of bottled water. Set up food bank days for those living in colonias. You'll get in trouble for your kindness with the people hiding these places as their own personal slave camps, but in the process you can shine a light on the enslavement of people simply looking for a safe place to raise their kids. There are still honest people in the media and in elected office. Appeal to the good guys. They love it when you do and you'll quickly discover who the good guys aren't.

Of course, you'll probably anger the oppressors in the process and you may want to travel in pairs, go armed and check under the van for funny wires before you drive out there to the colonias.

Anybody supporting "illegal" immigration and who do not want to enforce the border must share the responsibility for the continuation of this deep level of oppression of a desperate people. Immigration must be regulated, not to keep out undesirables as the leftist media try to characterize it. Controlling the border is about making sure that what happened to my Irish ancestors or your Italian, Greek, Chinese and Japanese ancestors back in the days of the "company store" and unsafe coal mines, dangerous railroad building work and migrant abuse doesn't happen in the 21st century when we're supposed to have grown to be better as a society than that. We're supposed to be compassionate, yet we tolerate a system that pours willing slaves into the gristmills of cheap labor dependent industries. Sorry for getting on my high horse again, but my trips to the colonias were deeply disturbing and seeing the good citizens who abused these people parade their wealth in local social circles and donate millions to put their names on buildings on the backs of illegals was sickening.

We need to cut off the flood at the border and funnel it through legal channels. Want to see exploiters of illegals wither up and die on the vine? that's how you do it. If you just look away you're abetting this evil system. If we create a legal path to work for guest workers, then they can appeal for help to government regulators the same as citizen workers can, if employers underpay them or force them to work in dangerous conditions.

A controlled border is about cutting off the flow of desperate human beings into the maw of thecruel third world of undocumented slave labor camps. Want to do mission work? Visit the colonias. Get your hands dirty. Don't just throw a bag of burgers out for the homeless alongside the road and rest on your unearned moral superiority. Get up on your horse and visit your representatives in government. Talk to the media. There are still honest reporters. Shine a light on the exploitation. Say something out loud about it. Organize your church. Build a food bank in an empty room and keep it stocked. Drive out to the colonias with a load of food and distribute it to the mamacitas and the children. Do something to directly help them, but don't stop there.

Vote for people who will stop this self-imposed slavery. There's a better way to get these folks jobs with dignity in jobs "Americans don't want." It's an American tradition to provide immigrants with jobs for unskilled workers. What is not a product of our uniquely American idealism, is the evil (yes evil) setting of caps on people to prevent them from rising in the world to escape their poverty. Wouldn't it be nice if rose growers, farmers, dairymen, chicken processors and such had to provide clean places to live for migrant workers and access to food and training in how to speak English and manage money. We did all that in migrant communities in East Texas when I was there. Good church people taught ESL classes. Banks sponsored classes in money management.

There's so much more we could do for the Third World next door if we'd open our eyes to it. But as Joy Behar once said, it's unpleasant to see and "deal with" and it's so much easier to shove (my word) the responsibility off on the government and tell yourself "I care about those poor people."

It's time more people like the couple who helped start the Houston program get up and go out among, not just legal immigrants and people who are okay but just foreign and unconverted. It's time we make a hard push in and among the truly oppressed. We Adventists have a history of doing that and building communities, digging wells, and teaching children. Ellen White's son shocked some of his brethren by going among Southern black communities after the civil war and preaching, teaching and helping emancipated former slaves become truly free.

It's time our church got back into that business in a big way, especially in Texas where I come from. If we were to put a stop to the exploitation of illegals and get control of the problem, Texas is the perfect place to work that change. We are a blended society. Hispanic Texans fought alongside American immigrants at the Alamo and San Jacinto. There's hardly a third generation Texan that doesn't have a Garcia or Rodriguez up their family tree. We even have a special language - Tex Mex that blends English and Spanish. Our favorite foods in Texas are blended cultural dishes.

So why aren't we out there in those dark colonias, modern-day slave labor camps, doing some good. Well, for one thing, it's hard work, but there's no reason the local churches and border conferences shouldn't be sending warriors into the slave camps to bring relief and the word of God to a people who truly need it. For another thing, your community leaders aren't going to give you permission. They'll likely discourage you, but since when do Adventists do the easy thing or ask for permission to do God's work.

Okay, getting down off my podium now. Think about it though. I challenge you all to look beyond the "Wall" and the "Open Borders" easy ideology and think about how we can solve the actual problem. We can get our crops picked without abusing the pickers. And yes, some day the pickers will want to get an education, learn some skills and rise from the fields to become more than they ever thought they could be, with homes, cars, children in college and plenty of food on the table.

Don't worry my liberal Adventist friends. There will always be a steady supply of entry level workers waiting at the border to come to del Norte where opportunity awaits even the poorest of the poor so long as they are legal. And by the way, these people have a work ethic that puts the Puritans in the shade. That's the value they bring to America if we can just keep the bosses from crushing that spirit. And helping lift people up is a huge witness for Christ by the way.

Okay, now I'm done preaching.

© 2019 by Tom King

Do Not Underestimate an Adventist Woman

2019-05-31T00:12:00.001-07:00

Bet You Didn't Know This:

By Source, Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31871975

Never underestimate an Adventist woman on a mission. That's why we love them so much. They are a precious resource it is our duty to protect. In 1944, A twenty-seven year old Seventh-Day Adventist black woman, Irene Morgan, made the gutsy decision to refuse to leave the "white" section of an Interstate bus and was arrested in Virginia under state segregation laws eleven years before Rosa Parks' famous refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama local bus. She was a little more spirited than Rosa however. She kicked the Sheriff in the groin when he tried to arrest her!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Morgan
"Morgan v. Virginia (1946)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved 2015-11-04.
Lamb, Yvonne S. "Irene M. Kirkaldy; Case Spurred Freedom Rides," The Washington Post, 13 Aug. 2007: n. pag. Print.
"Morgan v. Commonwealth (June 6, 1945)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved 2015-11-04.

You're Wrong - Marxist Socialism Is Not a Viable Model for Church Governance.

2018-12-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

A recent piece in Adventist Today by Stephen Ferguson | 16 December 2018 posits that
Marxism's governance model has a lot to offer the church. Ferguson admits that "...the world is fundamentally corrupt and human nature is a long way from ideal, which is why Marxism has consistently failed from Russia, to North Korea to Venezuela." Yet throughout, he flirts with the idea that maybe the church should embrace a little Marxism, as though the church is immune from the problems of a fundamentally corrupt human nature somehow. It is not.

A link to this article was posted on Facebook and Adventist Today seems invested in defending its premise. No matter what anyone says, in the comments section, if they disagree with the author of this piece on Facebook, they are going to get Adventist Today saying "Please read the article before commenting."

I did read it and once again they pull some nonsense out about how Karl Marx's philosophy is like Jesus'. This guy's final point is that Jesus owned no property in this life. Balderdash! He owned the entire planet and he knew it and he went down fighting for a planet full of real estate and billions of people who were destined to become His. No one owning property was one of Marx's brilliant ideas and all it's every led to is starving millions.

As to Marxism being some kind of preferred style of governance for the church, I don't see it. Marx and Engels wanted to do away with religion altogether and create a human driven Utopia. There is no such thing. Man is corrupt. There is one system that will work eternally and one only. Good people harvested from the hellish challenges we face here on Earth (or spiritual bootcamp as I like to think of it), serving their God who is Himself, incorruptible. No hierarchy of authority. Just God and his people - one layer of authority. That's it..

The church on Earth will inevitably go the way of the genocidal socialist nations of the 20th century if it adopts a communist collectivist model of governance. We can see it happening in the recent shift of power to the GC administration. At Marxism's core is that somehow if we create a centrally planned and controlled collective, men through their own efforts can create some kind of Earthly utopia.

The truth is it won't. Human beings can't do that. We can be washed clean and transplanted to a place where the only ruler we need is God and where we are free indeed as God promised. There, we won't need to worry about the rich for we will all be rich. Nobody will have to send out jackbooted troops to force us to do right. We will do right because it is right.

Capitalism has a lot wrong with it, but it's one of the only systems on Earth where a good man can make himself successful and even wealthy by providing his fellow humans with something they need or want. He doesn't have to steal it from someone else as Karl Marx claims. He merely works hard and provides something other people want. There have been communal, collectivist Christian societies, but if you notice something about groups like The Shakers, and other communistic religious societies, they tend to die out. Those who work hard wind up carrying others who have no interest in hard work. In the early American colonies there were groups that experimented with commune living. They disappeared, scattered or died off. Even early Christians did something similar. But that wasn't a permanent thing. It was designed to meet a crisis. Once the Christians scattered away from their persecuters, they went free market capitalist at once.

Are there corrupt capitalists? You bet, but even those guys produce things like affordable goods, four dollar medications, convenient services and jobs to high school dropouts working on their GED's. There are far more corrupt Marxists too and they do far more damage these days. Marxist socialist models always put power in the hands of a few self-proclaimed smart people and therin lies the problem.

No, I don't believe absolute power corrupts absolutely. What power does is attract the corruptible who inevitably seize the reins of control over men and women so that instead of a free society of people doing good things because they want to, it all soon devolves into something like the Stanford Experiment where pretend guards became nearly as brutal as Nazi concentration camp guards. Collectivism in all its form will not work upon the Earth. We are not in any condition to make it work and as Ronald Reagan put it, "Socialism only works in heaven where they don't need it and in hell where they've already got it."

Free Market capitalism with all its flaws in both church and state is still the most effective governance strategy in nations packed to their borders with sinners. I would be very afraid to enlist Marxism as a model for church governance. If it ain't broke, should we really be fixing it. The SDA church is growing faster than anybody. Yes we are losing members, but that's always happening in any church. The point is, we're out there busily spreading the gospel to every kindred, tongue and people and some of us are trying to round up all the sheep and pen them up in some imaginary Christian worker's paradise. Then like the Roman Church, The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Cambodia too many others to list here, the leaders of "paradise on Earth" discover they are not gods and not capable of managing the vast proletariat from Washington DC (or Silver Springs for that matter). When it all goes South, then leaders inevitably start purging anyone with the temerity to point out that the system ain't workin'.

Marxisizing the church won't do anything but inhibit the church from doing the work we've been told to do. Marx has nothing good to say for the church. His theories depend on people who do not exist and a severely flawed theory that you can make people good through external force. You can't make people be good through governance systems. The best you can do in this nasty old world is protect the sheep from wolves, protect their rights and freedoms and let them take care of themselves as best they can. Plenty of them will do the decent thing if one of their number gets in trouble. It's what good sheep do and it makes them better sheep because they do it of their own free will and not because some system dictates it.

But Marxism is such a neat idea that our intellectual betters always drift back to it, fancying themselves as just the sort of "dear leaders" to lead the children of God to the promised land. They forget that not even Moses could manage that task. It was left to God to do it His own way.

Tom King - © 2018

Jesus and The New Golden Rule

2018-07-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Many, who would minimize the impact of Christianity upon the world, claim that the so-called "Golden Rule", which requires one to treat others as one would wish for them to treat oneself, had its origins long before the time of Christ. While it is true that variants of the Biblical Golden Rule show up in Confucianism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and other religions and philosophies, it is not exactly true that these prior "golden rules" were the same as the one Christ articulated. Christ articulated a new version of the golden rule.

Prior to Christ, a careful reading of ancient texts reveals a uniformly negative construct of the idea. In other words, these prior versions were more about not provoking others. These versions more closely read "Do not do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you." There is no instruction to do good things to others for unselfish reasons. Before Jesus it was about not poking the bear. After Jesus it became about doing acts of kindness, even towards the bear.

Jesus' teaching, however, goes beyond the negative instruction to avoid doing what one would not like done to oneself. Christ's version was a positive formula that directs His hearers to actively do good to another that, if the situations were reversed, one would desire that the other would do for them. This formulation, as indicated in the parable of the Good Samaritan, emphasizes the needs for unselfish positive action that brings benefit to another, not simply restraining oneself from negative activities that hurt another person.

The instruction by Jesus to initiate kind treatment of others rather than to simply avoid being unkind emphasized a doing version of love for one's fellow man rather than a mere feeling kind of love. We are to be proactive in loving our neighbors rather than reactive. This idea of actively doing good first to others is unique to Christ's message.

That message of proactive goodness is the thing that undergirds all Christianity. It's why Christianity outstrips virtually every other religion on the planet in doing good. It's why we have missions. It's why we build hospitals, send doctors, nurses and teachers to every corner of the planet teaching proactive kindness. Jesus told us to and in obedience, we do acts of kindness. Because we have a relationship with Christ we cannot help doing good to our neighbors.............as we would have them do unto us.

© 2018 by Tom King