T H E O L O G Y
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BY WALTER SCRAGG
It's my father's evangelistic heyday. I sit enthralled in the preaching tent, watching the blackboard that serves as his chief teaching aid. The smell of freshly raked sawdust rises in the warm evening. The tent ripples and waves. The audience quiets. My father strides to the board. The platform squeaks its protest. Hand stretching dramatically, a line slashes down, a date appears above it. His measured steps draw a line to the other end of the board. He talks. He explains. Then another vertical slash, another date. Dramatic silence, the chalk again, and a great sweeping curve surges from one end of the board to the other. The arching strokes draw closer and closer--538, 1798, 1844. My father eyes his last slash, looks off to the right of the board, hesitates, then draws a question mark at its edge. No year, no date, is written. A question mark and a promise from the Bible: "I shall come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also" (John 14:3, REB). Tension mounts. The audience sighs its response. I live in the heart of the genius of God's last-day message. How many millions, how many thousands, of gatherings have watched the curving lines of prophecy and felt the Spirit speaking to them from the Holy Word--this truly is the end of the age! Jesus is coming soon. This is pure Adventism: prophecy finding its fulfillment in history. Y2K and Prophecy In one startling interpretation, the Colorado cult leader Monte Kim Miller called the deluded to focus on Jerusalem and the Holy Land. He proposed that Messianic Christians provoke armed conflict, start a final world war, and force Jesus to return. He was pushing the envelope of futurism. In the months leading up to the year 2000, Israeli security forces believed they had discovered such a conspiracy. Their agents reported on Christian cultists who had aimed to attack the Temple Mount at the end of the millennium, destabilize relationships between Jews and Arabs, and join in the battle of Armageddon. Yes, we had our books about the Y2K crisis. We had our fringe-dwellers who thought they could count better than the other Miller--William, of 1844 fame. Yet Seventh-day Adventists remained aloof, observers rather than participants. Why? It's worth asking why. If millennial frenzy gripped so many Bible students, why did Adventists remain calm? Our very name positions us at the hub of prophetic interpretation. But we remained unmoved in a hubbub of conjecture and fantasy. We saw the time-setting, millennial fanaticism as yet another sign of the times. It wasn't that the spiritual descendants of William Miller didn't know how to reckon the time periods of prophecy. We do it with consummate skill. But we escape the time traps. Our distant eschatological cousins, Jehovah's Witnesses, have a track record on repeated time predictions that failed. Not us. Never again. Ask why we were not caught up in this mix of ideas and conjectures? Here are the reasons. 1. Adventists Let History Interpret Prophecy. A specific system of prophetic interpretation protects Seventh-day Adventists from the disappointment and disillusion of time-setting. We have always believed and continue to believe that history interprets prophecy. We see our God keeping His eye on the main prize--history providing a pathway to the new earth of His promise. History is God's child, not His enemy. Luther, Calvin, Isaac Newton, and many others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would find Adventist methodology quite orthodox. Today only a small minority of commentators and theologians support what was the motivator and intellectual resource of the Reformation. Seventh-day Adventists are the largest single group advocating that system of prophetic interpretation. "In history and prophecy the word of God portrays the long continued conflict between error and truth. That conflict is yet in progress. . . . God's people, who in their belief and fulfillment of prophecy have acted a part in the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels' messages, know where they stand. . . . They are to stand firm as a rock" (Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, book 2, p. 109). Thank God for Ellen White, Uriah Smith, H.M.S. Richards, and thousands of other Adventist teachers and preachers. There never has been a doubt that Bible prophecy and history are inextricably linked. When the Web is sticky with seductive but unfounded scenarios, when bookstores blare the out-of-tune concertos of the New Age, of the rapture, of Jerusalem--the capital of Christendom, say to yourself: "There, but for God's leading, go we!" The principle we follow is apostolic and Christian. Events of the New Testament interpret Old Testament prophecy. The Wise Men from the East, Herod, and the Jewish authorities all used this principle to identify Jesus' birthplace: "You, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, . . . out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel" (Matt. 2:6, NIV). Paul followed the same principle as he declared, "When the time had fully come, God sent his Son" (Gal. 4:4, NIV). 2. Adventists Hold Open the Final Prophetic Trajectory. In the tents and halls of Adventist missions and campaigns there is always the unfinished arc. The sweeping curves can carry you from 457 B.C. to A.D. 34 and on to 1844, with waymarks at A.D. 538 and A.D. 1798, but the final curve has an uncharted trajectory. We know the arc exists, we know its end point. But we cannot turn the question mark into a date. "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Matt. 24:36, NIV). And so Adventists did read of Y2K and the prophesied confusion, but they never linked the year 2000 and the millennium to any time prophecy. We saw the time-setting, millennial fanaticism from a different perspective--as yet another sign of the times, part of a witches' brew concocted by false prophets and phony messiahs (Luke 17:20-25). It's worth remembering that futurism has its origins in a deliberate move to deflect and destroy the locomotive of the Reformation. The Reformers found an amazing match of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation with the role of the Catholic Church during the Dark and Middle Ages. No wonder the Counter-Reformation, initiated by the pope, first fabricated and then pushed futurism as an alternate methodology. 3. Adventists Long for a Heavenly Millennium. As the new millennium raced toward us, dire warnings spoke of the collapse of the computer-controlled world system as an A.D. 2000 New Year's gift. We might have had reason to remember 01-01-00, but not for any link to the chronology of prophecy. For more than 150 years mainstream Adventism has kept a clear course, and has never been tempted to set a date or project a precise time line to the return of Jesus. The millennium features in our teaching, but with an approach that is almost unique in modern Christianity. We expect to go from this planet to the presence of God at the Second Coming and spend the millennium with Him in heaven. Revelation gives us the beginning and ending of the biblical millennium, linking it with the return of Jesus. It begins at Christ's return. We have no date for that event. We will spend the millennium in heaven. It will end when God creates His new earth. 4. Adventists Know the Presence of Jesus Here and Now. When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, . . . because the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20, 21, NIV). During the intensity of the Adventist debate over the nature of righteousness by faith back in the 1980s, I found myself discussing issues with a group of church leaders from other denominations. "In my church," I offered, "the biggest issue right now is to define righteousness by faith." There was a moment's silence, and then the head of one of the Lutheran churches shook his head. "How fortunate for you," he said. "I wish our members would make righteousness by faith their great concern. Most of them know nothing about it." More than ever, as this new millennium begins, Adventists are building their spiritual hopes around a saving relationship with Jesus. We are learning to find satisfaction with what Jesus is doing for us now. We expect His coming, and that right soon. But if He does not come when we expect, His presence now is enough. In Him the kingdom of God, the expectation of His glorious return, the future home with God and the Lamb, come from the future and meet us today. In Jesus we have already come home to God. 5. Adventists Want No More Dates--Not Now, Not Ever! As we wait for Jesus we have this word: "About dates and times, my friends, there is no need to write to you, for you yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night" (1 Thess. 5:1, REB). The informed Thessalonians had this to stabilize their belief: "We, who belong to the daylight, must keep sober, armed with the breastplate of faith and love, and the hope of salvation for a helmet" (verse 8, REB). They knew about dates and times, but more important, they had the ultimate protection--faith, hope, and love. Prophecy confirms our faith in Jesus, restores our hope in Jesus, and directs our love for Jesus. We do not need another date. The spiritual descendants of William Miller know better, thank God. Yes, we have the prophecy protection. But above all, we have Jesus. Waiting is such sweet wonder while you tarry with Jesus in your heart. Walter Scragg, longtime church administrator, is currently serving as senior pastor of the Sligo Adventist Church in Takoma Park, Maryland. |
