I want to study with you this morning an old subject. It is something that we have been studying and preaching about now for quite a few years. However, it is a very instructive subject to study, and we find a great deal of material about it in the writings of Ellen White.

It is a disturbing study to many Seventh-day Adventists because of what it reveals. But sometimes we need to study things that are disturbing. Do you believe that? Sometimes we need to take a good hard look at facts that may not make us comfortable. And the subject that I want to study with you this morning is Why the Jews rejected Jesus?

Now this is a very big subject. Some of you might be aware of the fact that Brother Terry Ross wrote a whole book on this subject, but that book is not exhaustive either. So obviously we are not going to cover the whole subject today. It is a very large subject and you can look at it from several different points of view to try to understand how and why this happened.

So we are not going to look at all the reasons, but we are going to look at a few of the reasons right out of the Bible. And before we get started on this subject, I want to be sure that everybody who is studying this subject with me this morning understands its application to the last days.

If you do not understand that, you have missed the whole point. We are going to study history, but we are not just studying history. We are studying history that prophecy has told us is going to be repeated. I have learned-- and I am not saying this to criticize anybody because I am the same as you in this regard--that God's people are very poor at understanding prophecy when they see it being fulfilled.

If you study that subject, you will find that we are not too bad at understanding prophecy that has been fulfilled in the past; because we can look in a history book and we can compare history with the prophecy. We can go back and forth, back and forth and we can say, There it is! The history book just confirms what the prophet said 2,500 years ago.

So you can go back and forth and compare the two. When I was a child, I could do that very thing with the history of the Messiah. I could look at the history and I could say, Why did they do that? They had been expecting the Messiah to come for over 1,000 years. They were preaching about it every week in the synagogue. They were all expecting it to happen. They were talking about it, they had been studying about it, and every Jewish boy, ever since he could remember, had been told about the wonderful things that were going to happen when the Messiah came. Yet, when He came, they rejected Him. I repeat, God's people have a very poor record of recognizing when prophecy is being fulfilled right in front of them.

We can recognize it when it is in the past and we can recognize it when it is talking about the future, (incidentally, one of the most common things that happens when prophecy is fulfilled right in front of our eyes, it that we reject what we are seeing. We say, No, it is going to be fulfilled in the future, it is not being fulfilled right now.)

So when Jesus came, the Jewish people did not recognize that they were rejecting the Messiah. They said, Well, the Messiah has not yet come. We are expecting the Messiah to come and we want the Messiah to come, but it is in the future, it is not right now because this is not it. One of the great dangers of God's people today is that when prophecy is fulfilled right in front of our eyes, we will not recognize it. We will say, No, that is not it. It is coming in the future. I get telephone calls and letters from people all of the time that say, Yes, the Lord is going to purify the church, and they are talking about the future. But, friends, that is a terrible mistake. God is purifying His church right now. Are you aware of that? It is happening right now, right in front of us.

We think it is going to be sometime in the future, Some people are so mixed up about this that they think it is all going to happen right at the end. While they are looking for something to start, it is going to all be over, and they will not even know it. It has already started! Ellen White indicated that it had started in her day and that was over one hundred years ago.

It is well under way, but it is not over yet. Nobody is saying that it is over yet, but we need to pray. I am not pointing a finger at anybody. I need to pray, too. We need to pray and ask the Lord to open our eyes so that we will be able to understand what is happening in the spiritual world right in front of us.

Here is the statement so that we can understand the significance and importance of what we are going to study, a very familiar statement to many of you. Ellen White writes, "We want to understand the time in which we live. We do not half understand it. We do not half take it in. My heart trembles in me when I think of what a foe we have to meet, and how poorly we are prepared to meet him. The trials of the children of Israel, and their attitude just before the first coming if Christ, have been presented before me again and again to illustrate the position of the people of God in their experience before the Second Coming of Christ--how that enemies sought every occasion to take control of the minds of the Jews, and today he is seeking to blind the minds of God's servants, that they may not be able to discern the precious truth." Selected Messages, Book 1, 406.

She says the Lord presented this to her over and over again. If the Lord presented it to her over and over again, do you think that there is something really important about it? She said that the devil had been trying to take control of the minds of the Jews. Now let me ask you a question. Was he very successful? He was very successful back then.

Then let me ask you another question; Those Jews, of whom the devil was able to take control of their minds, did they know that the devil was in control? Did they know that? No, they did not. They most certainly did not. And she said, to illustrate the position of the people of God in their experience before the Second Coming, the Lord showed her again and again that the devil would try to do the same thing again.

Well, why did the Jews reject Jesus? Let us open our Bibles and read a few texts. Open, first of all, to John 2:13--22. This is right at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It is at the Passover time, 28 A, D. Jesus began His ministry as the Messiah by cleansing the temple. We are going to read just verse 18. You know the story. It says, "So the Jews answered and said to Him, 'What sign do you show to us, since you do these things?"

Why were the Jews asking for a sign? Well, let us look at Matthew and see some of the reasons they were asking for a sign. Let us see if this sounds familiar to anybody. This is at the end of Jesus ministry and they are still asking for signs.

"Now when He came into the temple," [this is the time after He had just cleansed the temple the second time, at the close of His ministry, the chief priest and the elders of the people confronted Him as He was teaching, and said, 'By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority?" Matthew 21:23. Notice the question that they were asking.

To understand the significance of the question they are asking, you have to understand the system with which they are working. These people believed that they were God's people; God's church, His children and they had a worldwide representative body that they called the Sanhedrin. It is equivalent to what we call the General Conference today. This was a group of seventy individuals. And they said, This group has been duly appointed by God.

Have you ever heard of people who are duly appointed? D-U-L-Y. Duly appointed. They said, This group has been duly appointed by God. Now how could they prove that? They could prove it to you by the Scriptures:

"So the Lord said to Moses: 'Gather to Me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; and bring them to the tabernacle of meeting, that they may stand there with you. Then I will come down and will talk with you there. I will take off the spirit that is upon you and will put the same upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you that you, may not bear it yourself alone.' [verse 26], But two men had remained in the camp: the name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other was Medad. And the spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, and said, 'Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.' So Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, 'Moses, my lord, forbid them.' Then Moses said to him, 'Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put His spirit upon them!" Numbers 11:16, 17.

You can look at the same thing in Exodus 24. The Lord directed Moses to choose seventy of the elders of the people. And He said He would put His spirit on these people. Now, obviously the time came when those people died, right? And after they died they had to select other elders. And then after they died, they had to select other elders and they kept doing that. In Christ's day they still had this group of seventy. And they said:

1. This group of seventy, the Sanhedrin, this is the group that is duly appointed. God directed us through Moses to have this group of people as the elders of His people.

2. These are the duly appointed leaders of God's people.

3. These men are representatives from all parts of the field.

4. These men have been ordained since the days of Moses that they should represent the Lord to His people and that they should have divine authority. It is the responsibility of these men to plan for the prosperity and the advancement of God's work.

5. This is the highest authority God has on earth and this authority must be respected.

And so in the days of Christ, before you could be a teacher or a preacher and talk to God's people and be known as an instructor, you needed to have something. We have a modern name for it today; we call it credentials.

You needed to have credentials approved by this group of people so that you were authorized to be a preacher or a teacher. Jesus and John the Baptist did not have these credentials. You see, in order to get these credentials, you had to go through their school system and Jesus did not go through their school system and neither did John the Baptist. So they did not have any credentials.

That is why you read in Matthew 21:23 or in John 2, Well, who gave you authority to do this? The Sanhedrin did not give you authority, and they thought that if the Sanhedrin did not give you authority, you were like what we would call an offshoot. So they accused both Jesus and John the Baptist of taking something upon their own individual responsibility.

Have you ever heard of that? You are not supposed to work on your own individual responsibility. You are to be appointed and directed by the church. You are to have respect unto the brethren--and that is what they said. And that is why they rejected both John the Baptist and Jesus; because they had not gone through their school system. They had not received the proper theological training and therefore they did not have any credentials. They were taking upon their individual responsibility when they should have not done anything except as they were directed through the Sanhedrin. You see, they had a total misconception in those days, did they not, about who the church was?

That is what led to that kind of thinking. And John the Baptist talked to them about it very, very plainly and straightly. Look In Matthew 3:7. This is Matthew's account of the ministry of John the Baptist. It says, "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, 'Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come."

Now we have studied about the judgment, and we know that the Judgment is based on works, it is based on character. The Judgment is not based on who your father is or to what organization or group you belong. Oh, no. Did you know that in the Judgment the question is not going to be, Did you belong to this church organization or that organization? That question is not even going to be asked in the Day of Judgment.

Ellen White says that God is only going to ask one question on the Day of Judgment, just one; and that question is, Did this person keep My law or not? That is it, because that reveals your character. The Judgment is based on the character; and that is what they did not understand.

And they said, We are God's people. Well, how did they know that they were God's people? Because, they said, we are Abraham's children. They had all been circumcised. They were all Abraham's children. Now notice what John the Baptist had to say about this. He does not call them Abraham's children. He calls them a brood of poisonous snakes.

And in verse 8 he says, "Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance." In other words, your life, your character has to be in harmony with what you say you are doing. You say you are repenting of your sins, well, your life has to be in harmony with that repentance. Look at verse 9. "And do not think to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father." That is what they were all saying. We are God's people because Abraham is our Father and we are the children of Israel and we are God's chosen people.

We are God's chosen people. That was their profession. You can read about it in The Desire of Ages, 107. Mrs. White says that John the Baptist told them that profession was worthless. He told them that unless their lives were in harmony with the Law of God, they were not God's people.

Now that was pretty strong, because they had been taught ever since they were little children that they were God's children because they were Abraham's children. You know, you tend to believe something if you have been taught it ever since you were a little child. If you learned it from your mother's knee, you tend to believe it.

The Papacy knows that. They have said, Give me a child until he is seven years old and he will always be a Catholic, and most of the time that is true. They know that, and we need to know it too.

These people had been taught, ever since they were little children. You can see why John the Baptist was not very popular with the leaders. It was not just because he called them a bunch of poisonous snakes, it was because He was attacking something that they had cherished as a belief ever since they could remember. He was attacking one of their most fundamental beliefs. And that belief was, Since we are Abraham's children, we are God's people.

John the Baptist said, No, that is not true. Profession is worthless unless your character backs up your profession. Unless your character is in harmony with God's Law, you are not His people. It was a shock!

They knew they were not obeying the Law of God. They knew that there was a prophecy, but they said, We are God's people because we are Abraham's children. And they believed, by the way, that when the Messiah came He would purify the Church. He would straighten the Sanhedrin out.

So they said, Even though things are bad, we are just praying and we are just hoping and we are waiting. The Messiah is coming, and when the Messiah conies, He is going to purify the Church. Now let me ask you something. When the Messiah came, did He purify the Church?

I notice some people saying yes, and some people saying no. How come we are so confused about this?

You see, I asked a good question. I am going to make you think. Now whether you believe He purified the Church or not depends upon who the church is in your thinking.

You see, if you believe that the Church is those people who are Abraham's children, the Sanhedrin and Caiaphas and company and all of those in that whole group, if that is who you believe the church is, well, then, it did not get purified, did it? No, that did not get purified.

But the question is, Is that really the church? Did the true church actually get purified? Yes, it did. Yes, it did! The true church actually did get purified.

Well, who is the church? That is not difficult. The Bible says, point blank, in Colossians 1 who and what the church is. It says that the church is the body of Christ. Sometimes we like to make it a little bit more complicated. We say that the church is the mystical body of Christ. I have no objection if somebody says it that way. The Bible just says the church is the body of Christ.

Let us think this through a moment. How many heads does the body have? One! The Bible is very clear about that in Ephesians 1. The church has one head. Now there are beasts in the Bible that have seven heads, four heads, and all sorts of things, but the church does not have seven heads or four heads, it has just one head.

Now let me ask you this question. When Jesus was here in the flesh, who was the head of the church? Who was the head of the church then? Jesus! A lot of Seventh-day Adventists do not know that. Did you know that there are many Adventists who believe that Caiaphas was the head of the church when Jesus was here? You ought to talk to them. I get letters from them and phone calls from them all the time.

Who you believe to be the head of the church has all kinds of implications, by the way. Because of their belief about who and what the church is, they believed that Jesus and John the Baptist were tearing down the church. That is what they believed.

This is the way Ellen White talks about it in The Desire of Ages, Ill. This is after Christ's baptism. It says, "Though He was the Prince of Peace, His coming must be as the unsheathing of a sword. The kingdom He had come to establish was the opposite of what the Jews desired. He who was the foundation of the Jewish ritual and economy would be looked upon as its enemy and destroyer. He who had proclaimed the Law on Mount Sinai would be condemned as a transgressor. He who had come to break the power of Satan would be denounced as Beelzebub."

Now, with all of the miracles that Jesus performed and all of His preaching, teaching and the character that he brought, why was it that He could not turn the Jewish nation around? When you read the gospels, the things that happened were things that had never happened before.

Remember the man who was born blind? He said to the Jewish people, >From the foundation of the world, it has never been heard of that anybody opened the eyes of a man who was born blind. There is no record of anything happening like this in any of the history books. But that did not turn them around.

Well, this is something important to understand, too. And this comes as a shock to some people when they first hear it. The reason that all of those things did not turn the Jewish people around was because of their understanding of the Scriptures. Do you realize that they used the Scriptures to prove that Jesus was not the Messiah?

As I have studied this, many times I have asked myself the serious question, If I had been alive at that time, would I have made it or would I have been duped? I do not know. Now there were hundreds of Scriptures that they used, but I just want to read to you one or two so you can get a feel for the way that they developed Bible studies to prove to the Jewish people that Jesus was not the Messiah. And these Bible studies were very effective, by the way.

I want you to understand, friends, that there is a right way and a wrong way to use inspired writings. I want to repeat that. There is a right way and a wrong way to use the Spirit of Prophecy. Do you realize that you can prove error from the Bible and from the Spirit of Prophecy? It has happened many times and it is not over yet.

That is one of the reasons, by the way, that Ellen White counsels us that before we ever study the Bible, we should pray. We should say, Lord, help me to understand truth so that the devil does not work on my mind and wrest the Scripture so that the very Word of truth is taken to teach error. It has been done over and over again.

Let us just look at a couple of texts that they used. Look at Psalm72:8. This was one of their favorites. This was a proof text. If there are headings in your Bible, under Psalm 72, it will say that this is a Psalm about the glory and the universality of the Messiah's reign And they loved to dwell on this.

Now they read the whole chapter, but we will read just verse 8. "He [that is the Messiah] shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth." And they used to read that Scripture and then they would ask this question. Is this Jesus of Nazareth? Does He reign from sea to sea? Does His dominion go to the ends of the earth? Does it?

Well, everybody could see the answer was No. The Romans were ruling the world then. Jesus was not ruling to the ends of the earth. So, they reasoned, that proves that He is not the Messiah.

I hope that you will get the message from this that when we read the Bible or the writings of the Ellen White, we need to pray and ask the Lord to give us spiritual vision so we will not twist it and use it, like Peter says, to our own destruction. I find that today people are doing just that.

Let us look at another text that they used. It says, "Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night, Who disturbs the sea, and its waves roar (The Lord of hosts is His name): 'If those ordinances depart from before Me, says the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation before Me forever.' Thus says the Lord: 'If heaven above can be measured, and the foundation of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, says the Lord." Jeremiah 3l:35.

So they would read this Scripture and they would say, Now this Jesus and John the Baptist, they are preaching against the Sanhedrin and against the church organization and if they get their way, they are going to destroy our nation. That is what Caiaphas said. You can read it in John 11. But, they would ask, what does the Bible say? What does the Bible say about the nation of Israel? And then they would read this text.

And they would say, Is the sun still up there? Well, it is. Well, then Israel is still going to remain. Is the moon still up there? Are the stars still up there? Well, yes. Well then, Israel is still God's people. We are God's people. We are God's church.

Now I want you to see how much different their idea was than Jesus' ideas. They were reading Jeremiah 31 and proving to themselves that they were God's people no matter what because the sun was still there, the moon was still there, the stars were still there. But Jesus, just like John the Baptist, showed them that it was character that counted. Character is always what has counted in God's sight.

In John 8:37 Jesus is speaking, "I know that you are Abraham's descendants, but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. I speak what I have seen with My Father, and you do what you have seen with your father." Notice, Jesus tells them, My Father and your father are not the same.

Well, they said, Abraham is our father. Jesus immediately denied that in verse 39. He said, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham." In other words, If Abraham were your father, you would manifest the character of Abraham. So Jesus denied their allegation. He acknowledged in verse 37 that Abraham was their father according to the flesh, but He denied in verse 39 that Abraham was their father spiritually.

He said, Abraham is not really your father. If he were, you would do the works of Abraham. You would have a character like Abraham. Well, that was too much. He proved to them that they were doing something completely contrary, something that Abraham would never do. Inverse 41 He said, "You do the deeds of your father" Your character shows who your spiritual father is.

That was too much. They got sarcastic. This is something that Jesus had to meet all of His life.

You are all aware of the fact that all of His life Jesus was accused of being a product of fornication and being an illegitimate son. The Jews never accepted the fact of the virgin birth, because if they had, they would have had to acknowledge that He was the Messiah.

And so they got sarcastic and they said, Well, we have not been born of fornication. They did have some rules. You could not be born of fornication and be part of the Sanhedrin. They had some standards. And they said, We have not been born of fornication. We have one father, God. Jesus immediately replied, "If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me." Your father is the devil.

He hit them right between the eyes. My Father is God, but your father is the devil. You say that God is your Father, but it is not true. The devil is your father. How did Jesus know that the devil was their father? He shows how you tell who your father is. Look at verse 44. "You are of your father the devil, and the desire of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."

How do you tell who your father is? Your character tells who your father is. The devil was a liar and a murderer, He says, from the beginning. And you are lying and murdering. You are plotting murder. You are plotting to kill Me. So that proves that the devil is your father. Or as the same writer says it in 1 John 3:8, "He who sins is of the devil."

Oh, no, we say, we are Christians. No, that is not what the Bible says. No matter what we profess, if we are living in sin, the Bible says our father, our spiritual father, is the devil. In fact, John is so strong about this in 1 John 3:4-- 10, he says, If you really have been converted, if you have really have been born again, you will not sin. And if you are sinning, you are of the devil.

Look how he puts it in 1 John 5:18. "We know that whoever is born of God does not sin; but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him." How do you know if you are converted? It says He who is born of God, he who has been converted, he who has experienced the new birth, he who has experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit, that person does not sin. That is the way you know.

And if you are not having that experience, you are not yet converted. You may be going to church; you may love Jesus and you may want to do His will, but you are not converted yet if sin is not a thing of the past in your life and if you are not having an experience of victory over temptation and sin.

Notice, both John the Baptist and Jesus pointed out that it was your character that determined whether or not you were God's children or the devil's children. It is your character that proves whether or not you are part of God's church or the devil's church.

By the way, the devil does have a church. Ellen White says it is a very large church. She tells us of whom it is composed. It is the people who are living in sin. They are in the devil's church.

I would like to go over, if possible, a few questions. I believe that people should think and when we read inspired writings, questions develop in our minds.

Paul and the other apostles had to answer questions that the Jews had gotten from these Bible studies that had been developed about the Messiah and about the Jews being God's people. We read a little about it in our Scripture today in Romans 10. The apostle Paul states that he spends a lot of time in explaining the identity of the real Israel.

The Jews were mixed up on this point. There is no problem with Isaiah 31--if you understand who Israel really is; but if you do not understand who Israel really is, well, then, you will be like a lot of other people. Still today there are Christians, even Seventh-thy Adventists, who have ambitions to go back to the Holy Land.

I remember when I was young there was a whole group of professed Adventist people who went back to Jerusalem. But what they thought was going to happen, did not happen, so most of them scattered out.

So, the apostles had to answer questions and objections. We have to understand and be able to answer the same questions and objections.

Here is one question that people have. Maybe you have heard this. They say, Well the Spirit of Prophecy says that the church is not going to be broken up into independent atoms. Have you ever heard that? The church is not going to be broken up into independent atoms. Well, I believe that. The church is not going to be broken up into independent atoms.

But I will tell you what is going to happen. It is going to be split up into two parties. Inspiration makes that very clear. It is not going to be all broken up into independent atoms; we are going to have churches until the end, but the church is going to be split into two parties.

In Selected Messages, Book 2, 114 Ellen White is talking about the shaking, and she says divisions will come in the church. Have you ever seen that? One preacher described it like this. He said, It is like walking down the sidewalk and having a crack appear. You try to straddle it and you keep going on, but the crack gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Sometime, before the crack gets as big as the Grand Canyon, you cannot straddle it anymore, you have to choose one side or the other on which to stand.

Divisions, she said, would come in the church and two parties would develop. And that has happened. Now that was prophecy in her day, but it has happened right in front of your eyes. Do not say that is going to happen in the last days when this world ends. No, it happens before probation closes. It is happening right in front of our eyes, today.

The church is not being broken up into independent atoms. There is still a Second Advent Movement all over the world and there are faithful churches all over the world that have been, and are being, established in all different countries. Churches that want to get the Three Angels' Messages out to the world.

But she says that "Two parties will be developed." Ibid. Well, now, since this has happened and it is still happening, I am not saying that it is over, but it has happened, let me ask and see if you recognize what you are seeing.

Who are the two parties? lam going to tell you who they are, be-cause I see them all over the world.

They both call themselves Seventh-day Adventists and they both say that the other group is not Seventh-day Adventists. That is interesting, is it not? Who are the two parties? Here is Who they are.

We do not draw the line down any kind of organizational line, that is not valid, but there is one party who is doing that. There is one party who says, We need to get together with the other churches and keep the peace. It is not time to distribute The Great Controversy and get so pointed about the Three Angels' Messages now. That is for a later time.

The trouble is, when you read the Spirit of Prophecy, she says the time to preach the Three Angels' Messages is right now and we need to keep doing it until the close of probation.

But there are some people who say, No, we cannot do that. We have to wait. The time is not right. Let me tell you something. If the time is not right now, it is going to be even less right tomorrow. There is going to be even more pressure not to do it tomorrow. That is one group. And there are millions of Seventh-day Adventists today in that camp.

And then there is a second party that is being developed. The second party is a group who say, We know from the Spirit of Prophecy and the Bible that the Three Angels' Messages have to be taken to every single person in the world. Is that true? Yes.

So we are divided into two parties.

Now I just gave you an illustration that just happened in the last few weeks in Brazil. But let me tell you, friends, Brazil is not the only place where this has happened. It is happening in the United States. We have somebody working at Steps to Life right now, a Spanish brother, who just a matter of several weeks ago was disfellowshipped in Los Angeles for the very same reason. We have a radio program that is getting the Three Angels' Messages out to the Spanish-speaking people of Los Angeles, and for that reason, he was disfellowshipped.

The same thing is happening in Africa The same thing is happening in the South Pacific. The same thing is happening in Eastern Europe. Ellen White said that as time went on the church would be divided. She said that divisions would come in and two parties would be developed. And that is happening right in front of your eyes.

Let us look at a second question. Remember they took Jeremiah 31 and Psalm 72, and although these Scriptures were true, the way they applied them was not. They applied them to teach error and cause people to reject Jesus, and the same thing is happening today.

People come to me with all sorts of references from the Spirit of Prophecy and they say, Do you not see, Brother John, it says we are to press together. We are to have harmony. We are to have unity, and you are stopping and blocking the unity that we should be having. Well, what about this? Because our preaching arouses opposition, are we at fault for not being for unity and not pressing together?

Are we in violation of these counsels? Remember what Ellen White said. She said we are to unify, but--and that is a big BUT--we are not to unify on the platform of error. And that straightens a lot of things out. You cannot be in unity and harmony today with everybody who calls himself a Seventh-day Adventist, because some of them will take you right back to Rome.

We believe in unity. In fact, one of the exciting things that is happening around the world is that there are Adventists who are seeking unity; and more unity is developing than we have ever had before. But it is developing among this one group. The other group is never going to have unity They may have unity with the ecumenical movement but the Bible says that is going to be split in three parts. So they are not going to have unity.

But there is unity developing. The only people who are going to have the unity, though, are the people who are trying to get the Three Angels' Messages out to the world and trying to come into harmony with it themselves. Those are the only people who are going to have unity. The rest are not going to have it.

We believe in unity. We believe in pressing together. But we do not believe in unifying on the platform of error.

The third question just keeps being brought up by people who are confused. People who think that Caiaphas was the head of the church in Jesus' day. In I Timothy 3:12 and I Timothy 3:15, it says, "If I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."

We need to understand what this Scripture means. It means that if you leave the truth, and present truth today is the Three Angels' Messages, you have left the church--period! It does not matter if you have the church checkbook, if you have the buildings, the machinery, the organization, and the name.

The Jews had the name, too. Caiaphas had the name. They called Jesus Beelzebub. They had the name. They had the organization. They had the buildings. They said, We have inspiration to back us up. But if you walk away from the truth, you have walked away from the church. Do not ever forget it.

And Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life; and when they walked away from Him, they walked away from the church. They thought that they had disfellowshipped Jesus from the Church, but how do you disfellowship the head of the church from the church? They thought they cut off the head of the church, but actually what they really did was they simply disfellowshipped themselves.

Now that has some powerful implications if you think it through.

In any church, when people who are disfellowshipped are part of the body of Christ, the Lord does not cut them off. The Lord does not cut off somebody who is part of the body of Christ just because the church decides to disfellowship that person.

But when a church does that, they demonstrate to the whole universe that they are on the opposite side of the great controversy than the person they have disfellowshipped. So what does that do? That means that they just disfellowshipped themselves. It is happening just like it did in Jesus' day.

"Romanists had persisted in bringing against Protestants the charge of heresy and willful separation from the true church. But these accusations apply rather to themselves. They are the ones who laid down the banner of Christ and departed from the faith which was once delivered to the saints." The Great Controversy, 51.

I want to tell you, friends, when they departed from the faith it was probably over 90% of them who departed. If you belong to a church, and 99 out of 100 people depart from the faith, they have still left the church. And if you stay with the faith, you are still in the church--even if you lose the building and they disfellowship you, because the church is the pillar and ground of the truth. When you leave the truth, you have left the church. If you stay with the truth, you have stayed in the church. The church is clearly defined, not only in I Timothy 3:15, but also in Revelation 12:17 and Revelation 14:12. The church of God in the last days of earth's history is clearly, clearly defined.

After quoting Revelation 12:17, Ellen White wrote in The Signs of the Times, April 22, 1889, "We can see from this Scripture that it is not the true church of God that makes war with those who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

Did you get it? She said, It is NOT the true church that makes war on those that keep the commandments and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. It is not the true church that does that.

That is why I could go to a group of independent ministries; special ministry leaders, in 1990 in Indianapolis where they were having the General Conference and tell them, "The General Conference President right now is not even a member of the church."

Why? Because I had in my possession photostatic copies of the lawsuit against John Marik, signed by the General Conference President. And Ellen White said that if you take your brother to court, you are written in heaven as an unbeliever.

Do you think you can be written in heaven as an unbeliever and be a member of the church?

She said that the Holy Spirit will be taken from you.

Can you be a member of the church and not have the Holy Spirit?

She says that God will not hear your prayers.

Can you be a member of the church and God will not hear your prayers? Will He not hear the prayers of somebody who belongs to His own body?

That was not the last time. Since then, Raphael Perez has been taken to court. Some of us were down there. Let me tell you, when you take someone to court and threaten to put them in prison, you are making legal battle (war) against them.

I already mentioned Brazil. In New Guinea, people have been threatened to be killed; people have been stoned, beat up and murder has been attempted. That has already happened in the last five years--by Conference Adventists. It has happened in Germany. It has happened in Africa. It has happened in New Zealand.

Are the people who are doing these acts part of the church? Absolutely not! Ellen White says that we know from this Scripture (Revelation 12:17) that it is not the true church that makes war on those who keep the commandments. Jesus said, You claim that you are the children of God but really you are the children of the devil. Your character proves it.

Now we do not believe in independence. We believe in yielding all independent judgment to the authority of the true church, to the authority of the Second Advent Movement worldwide, who is trying to get the Three Angels' Messages to all the world. We believe in church discipline. We believe in submitting to the authority of the church as long as the authority of the church is underneath that of the Bible.

We do not believe in drawing apart from God's commandment--keeping people who are preaching the Three Angels' Messages to the world. And we believe that the true church is organized in all parts of the world. In some parts of the world it needs to get organized more. We believe in thorough organization.

Let me tell you a story. In Texas there was a church that was not yet organized. We believe in thorough church organization. We believe in church discipline. We believe in yielding individual judgment to the judgment of the elders and brethren and sisters in the church.

But this church was not yet organized and they called a church business meeting. Some conference people found out about it and people came in. They should not have allowed them in, but they were not organized yet. They did not even have a membership list. The conference people came into the meeting, outvoted the local people and closed the church down.

If you are not thoroughly organized, someday some way the devil will figure out away to close you down, too. We believe in thorough church organization. We believe in Church discipline. We do not believe in independence or private judgment. And we believe that when representatives from the world church get together, that private independence should be surrendered.

But we do not believe is surrendering private independence to apostasy. So why did the church in Jesus' day reject Jesus? Why did they reject the Messiah? Oh, it was because of all these theological theories that they had built up directly from the Old Testament. Even in the face of miracles and everything else, they said, Well, the miracles have to be from the devil because He could not be the right one, we can prove it from the Bible.

The same thing is happening today. People say to me, Oh, these people that are doing all this, that could not be the right thing. We just have to wait. God is going to purify the church someday and then they are going to finish the work. Let me tell you something, God will have the work all finished while some people are waiting for the purifying to happen.

The evidence right now is that God is getting ready to finish His work all over the world. There is very powerful evidence that this is happening. And the most wonderful experience that you and I can have is if we could just be a little part of it.

You see, there is a revival and reformation going on all over the world amongst the Second Advent Movement.

This is a story that happened in just the last few days. There are a lot of similar stories like this happening in South America, and this is just one.

The brethren down there are being threatened with death. And if someone threatens to kill you if you distribute literature containing the Three Angels' Messages, you are not going to do it unless you have some convictions. Would you not agree? And would you not agree that if somebody threatens you with death for doing this, it would make you do a little thinking? Let me see now, should I keep on distributing this material or not?

So there were some brothers down there who were very troubled and some of them did some fasting and praying. It is very interesting what has been going on down there. The Lord has been sending people visions and dreams, and one brother had a dream. And he understood what the dream meant.

The Lord showed him the entire Second Advent Movement in the form of a giant tree; part of the tree was good and part of the tree was rotten. And a sword came down and just cut that tree right in two and cut the rotten portion out. I want to tell you, it is happening right in front of our eyes.

Are you converted? Are you going to be part of the wheat harvest and not part of the chaff, the tares?

Well, the decision, friend, is up to you and me. The decisions we are making day by day; will determine to which part of the tree we belong. If we are surrendered to the Lord, if we are asking to be led by the Holy Spirit and are being baptized by the Spirit, if we are asking the Lord for victory over every darling sin, if we are asking the Lord for power and grace to know the best way to get the message out to the world, we can be part of that which remains and not part of that which is cut away.

I want to give you an opportunity to make a covenant with the Lord and say, Lord, I want to be ready. I do not want to miss it. Some of the most wonderful things that have ever happened to God's people are about to happen, and some people are going to miss it. Ellen White said that the light that enlightens the earth with its glory would be called a false light. You can see it coming.

But would you like to be part of the grand finale when God finishes His work? Would you like to be part of it? If you would like to tell the Lord that, I want to invite you to kneel and let us pray together and let us ask the Lord to fulfill that desire of our hearts.