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HOME / PROCLAMATION! MAGAZINE / 2009 / MAY/JUNE / LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

MAY/JUNE 2009
VOLUME 10, ISSUE 3

D E P A R T M E N T S

LETTERS to the Editor

 

Beautiful truth of Scripture

Hello, everyone! Just wanted to let everyone at Life Assurance Ministries know how I appreciate your Proclamation! magazine! How wonderful to know the true gospel of Jesus, that we have eternal life in Jesus by faith alone—oh, the time and money I have wasted on Ellen G. White books!

No soul sleep—but we enter into the presence of Jesus at death! Colleen, your article about your mother facing her surgery and her hope and trust in Jesus touched my heart. How beautiful the truth of the Scripture! Gone are the sad, devastating doctrines of the Adventist church!

The love of the Father and Jesus is overwhelming. May God bless you in your work for Him.

Hot Springs, AR

 

Devil having his way

Your messages in Proclamation! are certainly not Bible based. I cannot understand how you can be so deceived. The devil is working hard, going about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. He sure is having his way with all of you.

Please take our name off your mailing list. We do not want this magazine in our home.

Richmond, ME

 

Teaching sound doctrine

I came across a copy of your magazine Proclamation! (Vol. 10, issue 1, January/February 2009) and was interested in the issues regarding legalism and also the all-too-often misleading or inaccurate doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists. Many years ago as a new Christian, no one really taught me how to live the Christian life. So, to make a long story short, I learned by trial and error and went through a lot of sad episodes before I finally discovered how to do so, and your January/February 2009 issue really hit home.

I am also always concerned about sound doctrine, and I've always taken exception to Seventh-day Adventist teachers (they're good people, but I cannot accept many of their teachings). Your issue appears to teach sound doctrine.

I would like to subscribe to your magazine, starting with your January/February 2009 issue. I saw the copy at my job, so obviously I couldn't take it home, but I browsed through it. You don't indicate your subscription rates, so I decided to enclose a check…so that, at the very least, I can help offset printing costs. Thank you!

P.S. I have known the Lord for 32 years this April 6, and my relationship with Him has gotten better and deeper over the years.

McKinleyville, CA

 

You are proselytizers

I knew Dr. Jim Boice and listened to his preaching almost every Sunday for over 20 years. He followed Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse as senior pastor of the very prestigious 10th Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, PA. He made a very significant and thoughtful statement: never argue about religion.

It appears that most of the contributors of the Proclamation! magazine are pursuing the style of engagement practiced by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It is understandable. My church and your former church had as its main approach, with other Christians of various denominations, plain and simple proselytism. Ignore what we have in common. Proof text them into a corner so they will not be able to move. Then they are more likely to accept Adventism. And not a few accept what they have learned without becoming Christians in the true sense of the word.

Now let's be candid and honorable. Isn't this your motive with your magazine? You are proselytizers. You appear to not budge an inch. You are greater exegetes than the spiritual giants that met more than 50 years ago at 10th Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia—men of integrity, who declared that even though they could not accept certain Adventist doctrines, Adventists were still of the household of faith. I personally witnessed this.

The main body of Adventism continued to be proselytizers, not accepting the fact that when one holds to the basics of the gospel, they are Christians. Why must you dear folk continue with this aberrancy you learned in Adventism? Get off your hobbyhorse. Make #1 in your outreach—as it was with St. Paul—1 Corinthians 15:3,4: the death and resurrection of our Lord and its significance to lost sinners.

Stand by what you believe wherein Adventism fails the litmus test that you hold as important. And would you pass the Calvinist teaching about divine election, the Pentecostal teaching about tongues, the Wesleyan disbelief in the doctrine of eternal security, or the avoidance of jewelry among some?

I have reservations with Pentecostals, certain Methodists, some Presbyterians, and much with Roman Catholicism. But I'll say without any reservations, God has His own in all these. And God also has His elect in the Adventist Church. The physician sending this letter is indeed of the elect. If you have questions about the doctrine of election, do read chapter one of Ephesians and Romans 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Wallingford, PA

 

Editor's response: In order to answer the points you make, I refer to the "Introduction To the Annotated Edition" by George Knight in the republished Questions on Doctrine printed by Andrews University Press in 2003.

In his introduction, Knight acknowledges that in order to convince Walter Martin and Donald Barnhouse that Adventists were evangelical Christians, LeRoy Froom, W.E. Read, and R.A. Anderson actually misrepresented Adventist doctrine. The two points that were the hardest to explain were the atonement and the nature of Christ.

Knight says, "An atonement completed on the cross was problematic because Adventists tended to refer to the atonement in terms of the anti-typical Day of Atonement, which they believed had begun in 1844. Froom and his colleagues resolved the confusion between the evangelicals' use of the word ‘atonement' and the Adventist terminology by speaking of the atonement ‘accomplished' on the cross and the atonement that was then currently being ‘applied' in the heavenly sanctuary…The Adventist conferees believed themselves to be safe in making that verbal adjustment because Ellen White had used the word atonement in a similar fashion" (p. xv).

The question of Christ's nature was more difficult because both Ellen White and other Adventist authors wrote that Christ had taken sinful nature. Moreover, Froom discovered that almost all Adventists believed Jesus took a sinful human nature.

"Not seeing any way around the problem, it appears that Froom and his colleagues were less than transparent on the denomination's position on the topic since the mid 1890s," Knight reports. (p xv).

Knight states that Froom explained to the General Conference president that because "they were dealing with some fairly prejudiced and aggressive fundamentalist leaders," they used "a vocabulary that would be understood by the evangelicals" (p. xvi). Thus, in Knight's words, the Adventists "adjusted their language on the atonement" in order to "maintain their long-held theological beliefs while at the same time expressing their ideas in a way that matched the vocabulary and understandings of the evangelicals" (pp. xvi–xvii).

George Knight acknowledges that the Adventists manipulated "the data they presented on the human nature of Christ." Knight says, "…the issue of the change of position on the human nature of Christ was one of substance. Whether Froom and his colleagues were willing to admit it or not, the view of Christ's human nature that they set forth was a genuine revision of the position held by the majority of the denomination before the publication of Questions on Doctrine" (p. xvii).

Knight continues in his introduction to explain that the positions Froom et al presented to Martin and Barnhouse and later published in the now-out-of-print Questions on Doctrine created unhappiness and disagreement within Adventist circles because they did not represent true Adventist belief.

Therefore, the fundamental premise of your letter, that Adventists are true Christians as evidenced by Barnhouse's acclaim, is a flawed premise. Barnhouse accepted Adventists as evangelicals on the basis of deception on the part of the Adventist leaders with whom he conversed.

Our magazine is not proselytizing Adventists into any other church or group. We exist to present the true, biblical gospel and to help Adventists discover the ways in which their beliefs conflict with Scripture. We exist to help Adventists meet the true, eternal, sinless Jesus of the Bible and to call them to integrity. We deeply desire that Adventists will see that Jesus alone is all they need; God will not judge them on the basis of a day or of a diet. He will judge them on the basis of Jesus and His cross.

If you are born again and hidden in Christ, you have already passed the judgment, because you have been baptized into His death and are in the likeness of His resurrection (Romans 6:5). If you have been born again and know the Lord Jesus, you will be increasingly uncomfortable with denominational additions to the gospel. Jesus will compel you to release to Him the unbiblical requirements you may have believed were necessary for salvation.

If you have not trusted the Lord Jesus and been born of the Spirit (John 3:5-6), neither your sincerity nor your discipline will qualify you for eternal life. If you haven't yet done so, lay your life before Jesus right now and ask Him to forgive your deep sin and to be your Savior.

 

False teaching

If anyone who truly cares about truth reads the March/April 2009 Proclamation!, they will have solid proof of Ratzlaff's false teaching provided by his building upon the clearly unscriptural insistence that "Christ took the pre-fall nature of Adam." He then goes on to, once again, climb aboard his favorite childish hobbyhorse and lambaste law and obedience. The Bible is absolutely clear on the matter; Hebrews 2:17 declares that Jesus was "made like unto His brethren." Adam had no "brethren". Verse 16 says that Jesus took the nature of "the seed of Abraham" which was long after Adam's fall! The Ratzlaff cult clearly flunks the test of 1 John 4:1-3. And when it comes to "the state of the dead", they directly contradict the clear teaching of Scripture, and even Jesus Himself—exactly like a multitude of other false teachers.

Deer ParK, WA

 

Editor's response: "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5:21). "But you disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, but put to death the Prince of life, the one whom God raised from the dead" (Acts 3:14-15a). "For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens" (Heb. 7:26). "You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin" (1 Jn. 3:5).

 

Marvelous thing

The Tour of Encouragement should be a marvelous thing! Praise God! Our prayers are with you. God bless in every way!

Belle Fourche, SD

 

Not Christian

As I usually do, when I first received it I casually flipped through your recent magazine and was struck by the obvious—you're not a Christian. I read your magazine and had long ago noticed the addition of body piercings, dangling gold, and body paint—all marks of various pagan cultures. In the past I had simply ignored the obvious because "everybody's doing it," but this time it struck me, no less forcibly than a physical blow. In spite of your loud "we're Christians" profession, as you have left the church of God and directed your interests toward more pagan concepts, your adoption of pagan practices simply became the next logical step. In our current pagan culture body modification, scarification, various piercings, inking, and painting is quite a popular art form, though condemned for the people of God in both the Old and New Testaments.

I know you want to be "free" and really don't want to be Christians (true, it's not very popular), but you should at least be honest with your audience.

Lancaster, TN

 

Thank you for support

It's been almost two years now since I left the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I have gone through a terrible emotional and spiritual experience during this period. However I would like to thank you and your staff for supporting me with each edition of Proclamation! that I have received. I cannot describe in words the support that came to me through this magazine during the difficult times. I also have read the books I've ordered from you about one thousand times! The Bible has a completely different meaning for me. I am still praying for my friends in the church, but they refuse to study any of the given material.

Modimolle, South Africa

 

Inspiration

I have been receiving your magazine, and it is an inspiration. I left the Adventist church in 1980 and found the truth of the gospel. How wonderful to read your magazine, which helps to liberate me more from this cultic church.

Hot Springs, AR

 

"Tour" responses

Following are a few responses from the first meetings of the Tour of Encouragement held in Auburn, California. They are answers to the question, "What prompted you to come to these meetings?"

 

Life Assurance Ministries

Copyright 2009 Life Assurance Ministries, Inc., Glendale, Arizona, USA. All rights reserved. Revised June 22, 2009. Contact email: proclamation@gmail.com

Send letters to the editor to:

Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
P.O. Box 7776
Redlands, CA 92375

Or email editor: proclamation@gmail.com

Life Assurance Ministries

Mission

To proclaim the good news of the new covenant gospel of grace in Christ and to combat the errors of legalism and false religion.

 

Motto

Truth needs no other foundation than honest investigation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and a willingness to follow truth when it is revealed.

 

Message

"For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God; not of works, that no one should boast." Ephesians 2:8,9

Now let's be candid and honorable. Isn't this your motive with your magazine? You are proselytizers. You appear to not budge an inch. You are greater exegetes than the spiritual giants that met more than 50 years ago…

Our magazine is not proselytizing Adventists into any other church or group. We exist to present the true, biblical gospel and to help Adventists discover the ways in which their beliefs conflict with Scripture. We exist to help Adventists meet the true, eternal, sinless Jesus of the Bible and to call them to integrity.