Adventist News Network
	
	
	S E R M O N
	
	by G Ralph Thompson Secretary, General Conference of SDA
	
	Sabbath, July 1, 1995
	
	
	NO CUNNINGLY DEVISED FABLES
	
	Text:  II Peter 1:12-21
	
	Just a few months ago in 1994, we Seventh-day Adventists celebrated
the 150th year after the Millerite Movement reached its climax on
October 22, 1844--an epochal day when they expected the Lord to come.
	
	The calculations had been done.  The arithmetic was correct.  The
only thing left now was to write Q E D.  And the problem was solved.
	
	The anticipation of the soon return of Christ was sweet in their
mouths.  With glorious anticipation they expected to leave this world
and be forever with the Lord.  As the clouds split wide open they would
have the opportunity to see the magnificent display of heavenly
fireworks, as the Son of God, wrapped in the glory of ten hundred
thousand mid-day suns, come riding down the flaming skies to call His
people to their heavenly home.  The air was electric with anticipation.
 Every sin had been confessed.  Wrongs had been made right.  The
earthly chores were forgotten.  Their Dear Blessed Lord would soon be
here.  In a few hours, in a few minutes it would be reality.
	
	But midnight passed.  October 23, 1844 is the real Day of
Disappointment.  The thought of it was sweet in their mouth, the fact
of it was bitter in their belly, as the book of Revelation states. 
Their hopes were crushed, their wonderful anticipation of being with
their Lord was smashed.  Their hearts were broken.  Tears flowed freely
as strong men weeped like babes, along with mothers and children. 
Jesus had not come!
	
	All that has been written about this event can hardly describe
adequately the depth of their disappointment.  The cold, dismal,
disappointing feeling that gripped their hearts!  The derision they
would face at the hands of their enemies and despisers would be almost
too great to bear.
	
	We are familiar with the story, or we ought to be; but somehow, out
of the ashes of their terrible disappointment arose a new Biblical
hermeneutic.  The earth was not the sanctuary to be cleansed.  Daniel
8:14 had another meaning.  The sanctuary is in heaven.  The work of the
pre-Advent, Investigative Judgement must begin.
	
	Christ entered into the Most Holy Place, where the books were opened,
and the judgement in heaven had begun.  The work of preaching the
gospel was not over.  The Three Angels' messages had to be carried to
every nation, kindred, tongue and people.  Yes, they must prophesy
again.
	
	And so it was out of the ashes of the Millerite hopes, smoldering
in the dust of October 23, 1844, that the Advent movement, the
Seventh-day Adventist Church arose.
	
	And it should be pointed out clearly and forcefully that the
Seventh-day Adventist Church itself has never, ever set a date for the
Second Coming of Christ.  And anyone who does is doomed to
disappointment and failure, for he or she is outside the Word of God. 
"For of that day and hour knoweth no man," says the Bible.  No, not the
angels in heaven.  But we Seventh-day Adventists have got to ask
ourselves the question:  Is our hope in the coming of the Lord doomed
also to failure like the Millerites?
	
	Who is to say that this belief in the coming of the Lord that has now
become the warp and woof of the Advent Movement and a part of our name,
 Adventists, will not blow up in our face?
	
	Who is to say that it is not just a figment of the imagination or
just a fugitive optimism? And that we, too, are destined to die in
despair, never realizing our hope?
	
	Who is to say that this Christian belief in the Second Advent of
Christ should not itself be relegated to the realm of prophetic
fantasy?  Or the scrap heap of religious history?
	
	After all, going back to the time of the apostles, for almost 2000
years now, the church has talked about it, preached about it, prayed
about it, sung about it, waited for it.  Generation after endless
generation of believers have died without seeing its fulfillment. Will
it ever come?  Or is it simply the figment of ancient superstitious
religious speculations? We need every so often to ponder the enormous
implications of such a question.  Shall we join the skeptics and the
agnostics and say, "Nothing has changed and nothing will change. 
Everything will continue as it has done for centuries and millennia"? 
For the Christian, is there any reason for hope in a future?
	
	Was Shakespeare right when he says in Macbeth that "Life is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?
	
	Well, as you turn to our text for the day found in II Peter, Chapter
1,  Peter seemed to have sensed the disturbing questions that would
arise, both in the immediate and in the distant future.  He, too, had
experienced the apprehensions of sophisticated Greek audiences,
questioning whether the Christians' story of the incarnation and the
Second Advent was not some figment of the imagination.  Some cunningly
devised fable.  Or some cleverly devised myth.
	
	As we read in II Peter, Chapter 1, verses 12-21, let's go to the
context of our text, putting it in its setting.  For Peter is saying,
"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths, or cunningly devised
fables when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty."  What does he
mean?
	
	
	Well, Peter's mind goes back to that extraordinary event of many
years before.  It had been a long and exhausting day.  And Jesus had
taken him, along with James and John, across the fields and up a lonely
mountainside.  Somehow Jesus seemed to enjoy the company of these three
whenever He wanted to pray and meditate, or when some great event or
teaching in His ministry would be about to occur.
	
	The sun was setting in the western sky, its golden beams still
caressing the mountaintop. Higher and still higher they followed Him,
wondering but not daring to break the silence.  What could this all
mean?
	
	And then at last they come to the place, perhaps familiar to Jesus
Himself, where He had spent other nights in prayer alone.
	
	Going a little beyond them, Jesus Himself, the Man of Sorrows and
acquainted with grief, pours out His soul to God, with heartbreaking
intensity.  For hour after slow-moving, agonizing hour, He prays for
strength to endure the test before Him on behalf of humanity.  He prays
for power to take fresh hold on omnipotence so that His own faith would
not fail in the dreadful crisis hour ahead.
	
	He prays for His disciples, especially the three sleeping ones on the
mountainside that evening who would be selected to witness His crushing
anguish in Gethsemane.  He prays that they might be fortified for the
excruciating test just ahead.
	
	Jesus prays that these three might be given a manifestation of His
great celestial power and majesty, that they might be strengthened to
behold with human eyes a revelation of His glorious kingdom, a
revelation so vivid, so spectacular, so realistic as to sustain them
through the dreadful events of Gethsemane and the cross just ahead.
	
	The Father in Heaven hears His Son's prayer.  And as Ellen G White
puts it in Desire of Ages, page 421:
	
	"While He is bowed in lowliness upon the stony ground, suddenly the
heavens open, the golden gates of the city of God are thrown wide open,
and holy radiance descends upon the mount, enshrouding the Saviour's
form.  Divinity from within flashes through humanity and meets the
glory coming from above.  Arising from his prostrate position, Christ
stands in Godlike majesty."
	
	The agony of His soul disappears completely and the quaking mountain
is ablaze in the light all around Him.  This was indeed a miniature
dress rehearsal of that great and stupendous hour when powerful voices
in heaven will announce, "It is done.  The kingdoms of this world have
become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.  And He shall reign
forever and ever." Revelation 11:15.
	
	Suddenly, Peter, James, and John awake and there before their
astonished eyes stood their Master in blazing splendor, enshrouded in
the glory of his pre-Earth state.  The disciples are completely
enraptured by this sublime revelation and the thrilling grandeur of
that moment.
	
	And that moment makes an indelible impression upon the mind of Peter,
never to be erased.  And it was the hard-nosed factuality of that
stupendous event that led him to make this categorical declaration:
	
	"We did not follow cunningly devised fables; we have not followed
sophisticated old wives' tales.  We have not declared to you cleverly
devised myths or bedtime stories when we made known unto you the power
and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but were  eyewitnesses of His
majesty."  II Peter 1:16.
	
	We have actually felt the thrilling rapture of that grand and
stupendous hour when Christ with clouds shall come.
	
	This was the message of the transfiguration.  This is what Peter is
talking about.  No cunningly devised fables here.
	
	And how do we know that this is true?  We believe it BY FAITH.  The
theologians call this epistemology--dealing with the question of how we
come to know.  And it boils itself down to a matter of faith and
belief.
	
	And that is why what we believe becomes extremely important.  We may
not be able always to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but we
believe it because God's Word says so.
	
	Involved in this is the weighing and assessing of available evidence.
 There is an innate ability of the human mind, a sort of native
shrewdness, an innate capacity to discern sense from nonsense, truth
from fiction, fact from fancy, history from fantasy, reality from myth.
 We can't fully explain it, but the logic of the situation says it is
so.
	
	This probably is the reason why many non-Christian lands maintain
their policy against Christian witness and the Christian gospel, for
fear that their own people will be confronted by a new system of ideas
and that the native ability of the human mind for recognizing truth,
discerning sense from nonsense, and truth from fiction, and history
from fantasy will suddenly come into play, and the whole fabric of
their ironclad non-Christian belief system will come crashing down.
	
	On the other hand, teachings and claims of the Christian faith have
been open and under scrutiny for nearly 2000 years.  And the Jewish
faith from which it sprang, an additional 4000 years.  Historians,
archaeologists, sociologists and scientists of every description, not
to mention Biblical scholars themselves, have gone over the
Judeo-Christian Scriptures inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, yet
its credibility still stands undamaged and unshaken.
	
	And that is why we can today affirm that we are not following
cunningly devised prophetic fantasies when we make known to the nations
the power and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
	
	True, you and I have not been eyewitnesses ourselves of His majesty,
but the native intuition of the human mind that God has given us has
led us to believe the testimony of those who experienced it.  Their
unequivocal affirmation has come down to us in this document whose
reliability has remained unshaken by the massive onslaught of hostile
critics over the years and whose credibility has withstood the
concentrated battering rams of the centuries.  So that we can sing the
words of our General Conference Theme Song, "We have this hope--hope in
the coming of the Lord."
	
	True, we say today we have not followed cunningly devised fables. 
We Seventh-day Adventists still believe the basic fundamental truths
that make us a peculiar people, the remnant people of God.  We still
believe in creation by Divine fiat, that in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth and rested on the seventh, which we celebrate today.  
We still believe the Seventh-day Sabbath is a sacred memorial of God
Himself, which He set aside and asked us to remember. This reminds us
that Jesus is our Creator, Saviour and Coming King.  And God's Law is
still sacred and provides His standard for humankind and happiness
today.
	
	We still believe in the two-phase ministry of Jesus Christ in the
heavenly sanctuary.  We still believe in the pre-Advent Investigative
Judgement, which is going on now.  No cunningly devised fables here.
	
	We still believe that forgiveness for sin and salvation are available
through Jesus Christ alone.  And salvation is provided as an unmerited
favor to all who will accept and follow in His way.  No cunningly
devised fable here.
	
	Yes, we still believe that the prophetic basis for Adventism is
anchored in God's Word. The books of Daniel and the Revelation
sustained our belief that the Seventh-day Adventist movement was
established by God Himself, whereby truth is to be taken to every
nation, kindred, tongue and people.  And when the Great Commission is
completed, Jesus Christ will come.
	
	We still believe that the Christian life is an outgrowth of making
Jesus Christ the central reference point of life.  When this is done we
no longer measure life, its failures or successes, by the instruments
of society around us.  Our citizenship is in heaven.
	
	We still believe that the Christian call is an invitation from God
for us to take our place, to declare our allegiance in a universal
drama that is being played out in every life and community. The
headlines of the newspapers are but the footnotes of Scripture.  Our
mission is to draw attention to God, and not to ourselves.  We become a
link in the chain of divine history.  The list of faith heroes in
Hebrews 11 is continued even in our day by individuals who demonstrate
their faith in God by the choices they make in everyday life.  When we
place our trust in God, He uses every experience of our lives, even our
problems and defeats, for the proclamation of His kingdom.
	
	Yes, we believe,  still believe in the entire 27 fundamental points
of belief in our church. And we believe that the Christian destiny
begins on this earth but does not end here.  God has prepared for us
something much more enduring, and He prepares us for it.  And we are
but strangers and pilgrims here.
	
	So this message is one of expectation and encouragement and hope.
It is desperately needed today, especially in sophisticated circles
where thinking people understand something of the frightful
alternatives facing mankind in these, the closing years of the 20th
Century.
	
	There was a time when conservative Christians, especially Seventh-day
Adventists, used to be branded as calamity howlers, but today it is the
politicians, the thinkers, the secular intellectuals who are the
calamity howlers.  A mood of pessimism is setting in.  We hear it in
the words of the late British philosopher Bertram Russel who, some of
you may recall, used to lead demonstrations in the 1960s against the
Vietnam war.  Expressing his philosophy in terms of the barren theory
of evolution, he also contends that man is the product of causes which
have no pre-vision of the end they are achieving--that is, that man's
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are
simply the outcome of accidental collocations or combinations of atoms;
that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration,
all the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction
in the vast depth of the solar system, and that the whole temple of
man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a
universe in ruins. He says all these things, if not quite beyond
dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects
them can hope to stand.  (Quoted in The Christian Approach to
Philosophy, page 165.)
	
	Interestingly enough, the apostle Peter does in part share in this
pessimism, for he speaks in Chapter 3 of this Second Epistle, of The
coming of the day of the Lord in which the heavens will pass away with
a tremendous roar.  The elements would be destroyed with intense heat,
and the whole earth, and the works of human civilization will be burned
up.
	
	Ah, but this is the difference, the great Christian difference. 
Peter is an ultimate optimist.  Nevertheless, (What a Word!) 
Nevertheless, according to His promise, we look to a new heavens and a
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
	
	What a privilege is ours today to join Peter in this glorious hope!
 What a joy it will be to join in the rapture of that thrilling moment
when the heavens split wide open and Jesus rides down the azure skies
in blazing splendor to wake the sleeping saints and translate the
living righteous, and claim His faithful people from all nations.
	
	In summary, we are Seventh-day Adventists--it is part of our name,
and we can confidently affirm today that we have not followed cunningly
devised fables, that this glorious message that we believe and share
will not peter out on the rocks of oblivion and end in some obscure
corner with just a little whimper.
	
	But, no, under the outpouring of the power of the Latter Rain it is
destined to end in a fantastic display of apocalyptic glory.
	
	We must never lose this hope, for if we do we lose everything.  We
must hold on to it; we must cherish it; we must believe it against all
odds.  The thrilling rapture of that hour must capture our every waking
imagination, pursue us even in our dreams.
	
	That is why, brothers and sisters, we must remain United in Christ.
We are God's "rainbow" family, made up of every nation, kindred, tongue
and people.  We are not the Seventh-day Adventist Church of Africa, of
India, of the Caribbean, of South America, or of the United States; of
the Philippines, of the Americas, of China or of Asia.
	
	No, we are the Seventh-day Adventist Church in all of these
countries--one people United in Christ, under God, looking forward to
His blessed return in power and great glory.  For "We have this hope,
hope in the coming of the Lord."
	
	And so as I close this message today, I ask you, friend of mine:  Are
you ready for Jesus to come?  Have you given Him your heart and your
life?  Are you living for Him day by day?  Are your sins forgiven?  Do
you know the joy of God's forgiveness and the sweetness of His
companionship with you through the Holy Spirit day by day?
	
	Do you love His people--His Church?  Are you just all in all in love
with Jesus Christ?  Is He YOUR Saviour?
	
	Would you like to tell Him once more today, "My Jesus, I love You,
I know You are mine"?
	
	Would you do that, and join me in standing to your feet, and let the
world see once again that we are a united people waiting for the coming
of the Lord, for ``We have this hope that burns within our hearts, hope
in the coming of the Lord."  For we have not followed cunningly devised
fables when we made known unto you the power and the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
	
	God bless you!           #