The morning Manna will be provided at 6am. Thanks.

Studying Three Cosmic Messages in the SSnet.org series Lesson 11, may the Holy Spirit be the speaker to your heart.

The Topic today is: "Notes around the confusion of Vicarius Filii dei for Morning Manna of the Sabbath School Lesson Three Cosmic Messages”.

The Opening Hymn will be 229 "Spirit of the Living God."

The Sabbath School Quarterly, downloadable from SSnet.org in the Teacher's Edition is on page 89.

The SSnet.org site allows anyone, anywhere to read the lesson in their own language. Choose your own language to see God speaking also to your heart.

Why do you not click on this now?

--- https://absg.adventist.org/pdf.php?file=2023:2Q:SE:PDFs:EAQ223_11.pdf

---S. Bacchiocchi (1938-2008) thought, relying on Froom, that vicarius filii dei did not really exist in the Catholic Church and that Andreas Helwig who identified the vicarius filii dei = 600+60+6 was only his invention.

---They thought the actual title vicarius filii dei never existed in the Catholic Church and was never used.

---Wrong. So was the finding in the Adventist research of E. de Kock (2011) et al and M. Schleifer online.

---It is now established science that vicarius filii dei did exist early, was used by the official Catholic church, was used to exalt the supremacy of the pope, can be used interchangeably for vicarius Christi. Wow.

---What actually caused the gematria skepticism among some scholars in Adventism, is not that something is wrong in applying the tool, but due to inroads of other systems of thinking diffusing the Historicistic model of Adventism, whether mutational systems like Idealism or accommodation orientated models.

---De Kock illustrated how two doctorates in 1977 (Desmond Ford) with Preterism inroads, and 1983 (Beatrice S. Neall) with Idealism inroads became the well from which the dissenters tapped their phraseology on the matter.

---Whereas the General Conference conclusion on vicarius filii dei was “As being the key we have every right to calculate the numerical values of its letters to the exact total of 666,” others wished to differ (see Findings of the VDF committee in 1943 Part IV Observations no. 1).

--- Revelation does not say the number as triple 6, in Greek

“ἕξ ἕξ ἕξ,” but it is “six hundred sixty and six” (ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ) in Greek to be calculated.

--- W. Prescott took the Catholic objections of Our Sunday Visitor too seriously and relied on Idealistic sources by using A. Deismann and J. A. Seiss as well as the Catholic John Dawson Gilmary Shea (1892-1987) to design his own alternative. Prescott (like non-Adventist G. Shea) said that not Latin but Greek gematria should be used.

--- Can one use Latin in Revelation when it was written in Greek? When Jesus died on the cross, one of the three languages was Latin because it was the period of the fourth beast of Daniel’s prophecies period, the Roman imperial period. The language of the beast is Latin for both Pagan Rome and the Holy Roman Empire.

---Neall’s position in 1983 was this: “It is more likely the meaning [of 666] is to be found in the symbolic value of the number six itself.” The result is that they began to indicate that six is an imperfect number but seven is perfect, therefore 666 is imperfection but 777 is perfection.

--- Bacchiocchi felt that all numbers in Revelation are spiritual and in this he shares the view of the Spiritualist interpreter in the 18^th century, Dr. Emanuel Swedenborg.

---A trend that one can see in the alternative Idealistic inroad systems of the dissenters to Historicism application, is that they switched eschatology with ontology.

--- An example from Stefanović in 2001 has it about 666 that ““The number six has understandably been regarded as a symbol of man, in that it falls short of seven, which is the divine number.

---A Rodriquez in the Sabbath School Quarterly of 2002 at Thursday June 6 said: “The Bible does not say that the number is the added numerical value of the letters of a name.

--- De Kock pointed out that the inroads of Idealism in Historicism is like small-pox or leprosy. Catching a little of it threatens severe sickness and even death for the entire body.

--- The Andrews Study Bible downplays 666 with a Trinity parody.

---Francis Noll, the founder of Our Sunday Visitor in 1930 said: “Who are the dragon, beast, and false-prophet of Apocalyptic chapters 12 and 17?” and Noll answered: “They make up together, as it were, an ‘infernal trinity’ in sharp contrast to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

---They wrongly triplicate the six in their arguments and identifications: 6-6-6 instead of the biblical six hundred – and sixty – and six. Kenneth Jørgensen pointed this out in a paper he read 9 August 2006 at a meeting in Michigan at Camp Au Sable, near Grayling.

--- Jørgensen showed that in Greek it is abbreviated in some manuscripts as chi xi sigma) or written out in full like in the New Testament. Both appeared in manuscripts. It is not the repetition of the same letter.

--- De Kock indicated that such an interpretation of 6 separated from 6 separated from 6 is a Hindu-Arabic method of numbers and does not belong to the ancient Levant systems.

--- Goldstein [not Adventist] in 1935 tried to argue that the I and V in vicarius is not additive 5 + 1 but substractive 5-1 thus IV.

--- However, Eric W. Weisstein (1996) demonstrated that the Romans used the additive system and the subtractive system is only after the year 1450.

--- Stefanović put it this way that the mark of the Beast is the same thing as its name. His analysis of Rev. 13:17 has it: “The mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

--- The Pioneers Bates, Holt [after 1844] and James White [The Present Truth March 1850] and also Uriah Smith (1865) had identified the Mark of the Beast as Sunday observance and Ellen White in Great Controversy (1888) also described it such. “But Prescott in 1933, Ranko Stefanović in 2001, Diestre Gil in 2004, Bacchiocchi in 2005, as well as others after them have brushed it aside by muddling together the mark, the name, and the number of the Beast.”

---So is your pastor playing games with our church and its views. Is he trying to be a pastor or a pleaser of people’s feelings and thoughts?

---Is he biblical like our Pioneers and proper Adventists are? If not, get out and find another congregation. Right? When. Now.