I went to a Seventh-Day Adventist meeting during the past week. Temporary insanity I suppose. Maybe I wanted to see if I could really resist the temptation to try to make friends of people who have self-selected for a permanent lifelong inability to be real friends. Could I keep from being sucked into extrovert-style behavior? See their "You will do 'friendly' our way or not at all!" and raise them a "No, you will do 'friendly' my way or not at all"? Maybe I did that. Maybe I'm glad.
I thought I'd probably hear something worth blogging about at the meeting, and I did.
Nothing about the Adventists' attachment to their interpretation of biblical prophecies could possibly be new to me.
Adventists are the first to admit that the Bible tells us that God's prophecies are conditional. Most of what the prophets said, most of the time, simply reminded people of the natural consequences of different things people do. If you throw bricks at windows, glass will break. If you build a reputation for honesty, your business will prosper. That sort of thing. When the prophets delivered special messages that went beyond reminding people that obedience to God's law would have good consequences and disobedience would have bad ones, sometimes people warned of the consequences of sin repented, or people promised blessings fell into disobedience and lost some of the blessings.
So, the further ahead in time the prophets' vision ranged, the more difficult it is to be sure exactly what they were foretelling. Many people have believed that a Bible prophecy foretold some specific event in human history. The Adventist church began when one of those interpretations proved inaccurate, and has seen other interpretations proved inaccurate every year. Their own preferred interpretation has yet to be proved inaccurate, but it also has yet to be proved accurate. What we are clearly told is that we won't know exactly what to expect.
I can live with that, but some people can't. Some people like the emotional feeling of certainty even about things it's not possible to know.
When I think back to my years among the Adventists, I can even imagine them being told, "You understood all the prophecies, and all mysteries, and all knowledge, but you had not Love: you are nothing."
If you've never been a vegan and a virgin and a total abstainer from all drugs, and picked up a nasty infection from an unnecessary vaccine thrust upon you by church members, and then heard those church members decide among themselves that your symptoms undoubtedly came from drug abuse and none of them would consider hiring you for any job...oh, you've never lived!
Over the years I've explained this to a few of the people who still talked to me who have not become ex-Adventists. They all react the same way. They twist and wriggle and try every trick they can think of to put me in the wrong, and when that fails, they say "But you can't let people affect your relationship with God." Of course not. That is why I stopped going to church, until the day, which has never come, when I found myself working with people, during the week, who all agreed to go to one church. If I have fellowship with people on the other six days, then I might have fellowship with them on the seventh day. Meanwhile...introverts don't need to spend hours being in a group of people above whom we think we have to rise. If people are not real friends and fellow laborers, we have no need to spend time just breathing the same air they do. They can go their own way.
I don't hate Adventists. I sell books by, and pray for, and hope God will continue to bless and enlighten, all Christians, impartially. I actually think the neurological facts about introversion being the healthy and desirable physical condition of humankind, and extroversion being a phyisical deficiency, have been available long enough that several church groups should be ready to learn how to behave in order to deserve the privilege of fellowship with introverts, and I'd be willing to help them learn.
Still, if there were Adventists I could love, they would be saying, "How can we make it right, at this very late date? How can we make ourselves worth your time?"" That might be possible. That is also what they never say. They want credit for putting things right but the last thing they want to do is actually put things right.
That some Adventists are unpleasant people, and that my generation in that church self-selected for having defective consciences, are separate things from the question of whether anyone has ever really interpreted the book of Daniel accurately.
The Adventist minister told us a bit of news that would have dismayed the late Tim LaHaye, and may possibly inspire Jerry Jenkins to write another bestseller. (For what it's worth, Tim LaHaye may have lived and died in error about the word apostateuo, but he also won his fame by being the first to defend the character of introverts in those churches that preached Christ-plus-extroversion.)
The Adventist minister said that although the madly popular Left Behind series was speculative fiction, some people have apparently read it as if it were fact. They know the global dictator may not literally be called Nicolae and so on, but they think the details of the story, such as the time of tribulation lasting exactly three and a half years, are actually what the Bible teaches.
Regular readers of this web site may remember that Tim LaHaye wrote a serious nonfiction book explaining what he really believed would happen before the Second Advent. His "Pre-Tribulationist" vision had Jesus returning to Earth three times. First the secret return when so many Christians would opostateuo, which means stand apart, step aside. LaHaye curiously interpreted that word to mean "be raptured off into Heaven." In most contexts most scholars would interpret it to mean "become estranged, leave the church, backslide into their old ways," like Julian the Apostate. Then the three and a half years, this figure also reached by debatable interpretations, when all the previously converted Christians would have been raptured off and sinners would be free to make this world a place of torment. During this time it would be much more difficult and dangerous to be a Christian but last-minute converts who endured the danger and difficulty could still be saved. Then Jesus would come back, cast down the evil powers ruling the Earth, and reunite the last-minute converts with other Christians.
We are not told how to conduct the Final Judgment. We are told that "we shall judge angels" but, whether this means that we are to judge messages here and now, or that individual spirit beings called angels may be judged by comparison with us, we are not told that we can really know where our fellow humans are going.
However, according to the "Post-Tribulationist" schools of biblical interpretation, the "day that shall come as a thief in the night" is what has been called a "rapture of the wicked," when the unsaved are removed from the Earth, possibly by Plague, Famine, War, and Death. The righteous have to live through the seven years of tribulation in this world, and then Jesus returns to take the righteous to Heaven, as by this time Earth needs a thousand years to recover from the devastation wrought upon it.
It shouldn't make much difference which of these interpretations you find more plausible, or whether you have a preference. Do you love Jesus? Do you practice righteous love? If so you should find out soon enough where the saved are going.
For what it's worth, I think the evidence is stronger on the Post-Trib side, but I think the important question is whether we love and serve Powerful Goodness.
But the minister claimed that, at least in Indiana (from whence he was visiting), people who were not and had never been Christians were telling him, "I plan to 'get saved' after the Rapture. When I see all the Christians disappear, I'll be sure that I believe, and then I'll become a Christian and lead a Christian life."
Sinner. Ohhhhhhhh, Sinner. If you are thinking that way, need it be mentioned that having to listen to me burst into quotations from God's Trombones, dire though that may be, is the least of your concerns?
I think these people were merely making fun of both the Adventist minister and Tim LaHaye, but if the Post-Tribbers are right, the joke is on them. And even if that were not the case, it's not a very funny joke.
Among the last conversations I had with an old school friend from that church college was the one where the ministerial student told me, very slowly and awkwardly, how the Adventist ministerial colleges had apparently just discovered the idea that the saved love what is good for its own sake. In other words, they have consciences. Understandably, this is a very advanced and difficult concept in denominations that push away the people who have consciences. In Christianity, generally, it's basic.
People who love what is good for its own sake do not want to postpone committing themselves to serve Powerful Goodness. They might struggle with confusion and doubt about doctrine, or not want to reject one church by joining another church, or want to wait until the ceremony of baptism can be done in some special way . Those things or other things might cause people who love God to postpone the public display of their commitment. But when they think about the whole idea of Powerful Goodness, they know they are thinking about what they want to serve and follow from that moment forward. .
Reasonable people think long and hard before they commit their loyalty to a denomination within the church, which is only a group of people--but sincere Christians don't have to think twice about wanting to align themselves with God.
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