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The "Why" Of Success

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Dec. 28 - The "Why" Of Success(7)

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Worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all the springs of water. Rev. 14:7, NLT.

While the Sabbatarian Adventists saw William Miller and Charles Fitch, respectively, as the initiators of the first and second angels' messages, they regarded their own movement with its emphasis on the commandments of God as beginning the third. Their view of the end-time struggle over the commandments of God pictured in Revelation 12:17 and the fuller exposition of that verse in Revelation 13 and 14 reinforced their conviction that not only were they heirs of Millerism, but that God had predicted that their movement would preach the three angels' messages to all the world immediately before Revelation 14's end-time harvest.

As a result, that prophetic understanding eventually drove them to mission. By the early twenty-first century the conviction that their movement was a fulfillment of prophecy had resulted in one of the most widespread outreach programs in the history of Christianity.

They had established work in 204 of the 230 nations then recognized by the United Nations. That kind of dedication did not come by accident--it was the direct result of a prophetic conviction of their responsibility. Central to it was the imperative of the first angel of Revelation 14:6 to preach "to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" and the command of Revelation 10:11 that the disappointed ones "must prophecy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings."

Clyde Hewitt, in seeking to explain the success of the Seventh-day Adventists as opposed to the attrition faced by his Advent Christians, touched upon an essential element when he noted that "Seventh-day Adventists are convinced that they have been divinely ordained to carry on the prophetic work started by William Miller. They are dedicated to the task."

In contrast, Hewitt's father wrote in 1944 that the Advent Christians had given up Miller's understanding of Daniel 8:14 and the 2300 days and had no unanimity on the meaning of the text. And in 1984 I interviewed another leading Advent Christian scholar who noted that his denomination no longer even had an agreed-upon interpretation of the millennium--the very heart of Miller's contribution.


 

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Lord, help Your modern church to realize that Bible prophecy is not dead history, but the only understanding that will make it alive to its fullest as earth's trajectory moves toward its climax.

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