After a very long hiatus I felt compelled to post an email to someone I have in one of my Seminary classes at Maranatha Baptist Seminary.
In our pastoral epistles class you asked a question that I am not sure of it was directed at me in regards to my statement about investigative Judgment.
Having been raised in Seventh Day Adventism this is an issue that is very close to my heart. I even had to witness my own mom die in her sins because of their false doctrine. I would contend that if Christians new more about their false doctrines beyond the fact that they gather on Saturday they would not be so quick to call them Christians.
No doctrine is worse than the one that is the basis of their name. In case you didn’t know here is a little historical background:
- 1. William Miller twice predicted the second coming of Christ despite the clear teaching of Scripture that we are not to set dates for His return.
- 2. This was later called “The Great Disappointment” in which a group of believers was supposed to have been crushed by the failure of the prophecies. This included Ellen G. White and her husband who would later start Adventism.
- 3. Ellen G. White claimed that instead of being a disappointment God had given her a vision of the start (advent) of the seventh prophetic day. So she falsely claimed that Miller had been right about the date not what the date meant. She claimed that Christ started a new day in heaven in which His ministry had changed. Now He was no longer seated next to the Father. Instead He was supposed to have risen and started a new ministry within the heavenly temple called investigative judgment.
- 4. Investigative judgment is not referring to the judgment seat of Christ. It is this idea that only those who follow the Old Testament law and do not worship on Sunday will have been judged by their works to be worthy of entrance into heaven.
Adventism cannot be divorced from their roots by which they obtained the name. This idea of a seventh day and the works religion it established goes against the gospel that men are saved by grace through faith. If man can still be saved by His works then what does that say of the death of Christ that made it possible for us to be saved.
I do think they all are preaching another gospel and the warning that Paul gave in Gal. 1:8-9 does apply to them as a false gospel.
What has confused many Christians who are more sympathetic to Adventism is the fact that starting in the 1930’s Adventism began to rephrase their language so as to try to appear to be evangelical. Yet at their core not a one of them despite their change in language will abandon the name and the investigative judgment that is the basis of the name. This was a further aided by New Evangelicals Walter Martin and Donald Barnhouse who advocated that they were evangelicals. Many Christians (including some fundamentalists) as a result stopped looking at the specifics of their doctrines including investigative judgment.
I no longer use terms like cult to describe them, I just use the terminology that they are among those who are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ and they preach another gospel.
Just wanted to express in more detail, since this is not possible in the way we have for the virtual classes.
