HOME / PROCLAMATION! MAGAZINE / 2013 / WINTER / LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

W I N T E R • 2 0 1 3
VOLUME 14, ISSUE 4

 

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D E P A R T M E N T S

LETTERS to the Editor
 

 

Excellent

Greetings! Your journal Proclamation! is remarkably excellent. Keep up this high quality! Enclosed is a check to help. I have read your journal for many years from cover to cover. I believe I started with the very first one.

Highland, CA

 

Take your medication

“Manipulative enmeshment”? [See the article “Contextualization”, Fall, 2013] Whoa, we broke out the old thesaurus for that baby, didn’t we? You might want to look up what “enmeshment” means before you use it again. Here, I'll help:

“Enmeshment is a state of cross-generational bonding within a family, whereby a child (normally of the opposite sex) becomes a surrogate spouse for their mother or father.”

“Manipulative enmeshment” is a term Colleen Tinker has thought up to impress her readers, who, judging from the Letters to the Editor, read (and write) at around a third grade level.

But don't worry Colleen, they are all impressed.

Your article sticks out like a sore thumb. It is rare that one sees such bile and anger in a Christian periodical. You’re starting to sound like some of the letters you print.

You really need a vacation, [expletive]. No offense, but comparing honest hearted people, no matter how mistaken in their beliefs, to child molesters is really beyond the pale. You should seek counseling when you get back from the beach…

You should stick to correcting the other authors’ spelling and grammar, rather than writing articles. Dale gets many of the same points across, without all the vituperation. Quite frankly, you are embarrassing yourself. You’ve probably got people so afraid of your temper that they are afraid to confront you, but you can’t get at me, so you’re welcome.

What former Adventists don't need is some shrill [expletive] going off for page after page about what she doesn’t like. You’re going to close down your own magazine if you're not careful. No one is going to send you money so you can feed your frustration.

Breathe in, breathe out. Take your medication. Get plenty of rest. And stop writing such mean spirited [expletive].

Via email

 

Spiritually abused and afraid

I am on a healing journey, and I really, really appreciate your article “Spiritual Abuse among Religions” by Joanie Yorba-Gray, MSW, with Colleen Tinker (Winter, 2012). It explains so many feelings I have had and still have and the conflict I feel still. The hope in my heart is that I will finally be able to speak my truth and heal, but the fear of offending God and what I always thought was my true religion of Seventh-day Adventism has kept me quiet.

Your article explains how they used Ellen White’s writings to demean and shut me up. I see it now. I also just realized that I was badly spiritually abused as well. They convinced me that since I was adopted and was carrying the sins of my biological parents, I asked for and deserved abuse so I could become perfect for God’s return any day.

I was also so afraid of all non-Adventists; they were Satan or with Satan.…

Thank you; your article has helped me a lot already.

British Columbia, Canada

 

Abhor your magazine

Please do not send your quarterly magazine to me again!!!!!

I don't “bash” you for leaving Adventism, I have no respect for people who call themselves “Christians” yet bash other religions. I abhor your magazine and trash it upon receipt! So save yourself the postage and remove me from your mailing list!

Kennewick, WA

 

Thank you, Dale, for your courage

I was raised in a devout fourth generation Adventist home …(and) attended grades one through 12 in an Adventist school. I did my best to follow the rules and regulations, but in my teens, I began to realize I couldn’t. I turned to a life of drinking …and felt God couldn’t love a hopeless case such as myself…I dropped out of college, got married, and had a daughter. After a few years of unhappy marriage and another child, my drinking took an even more important role in my life, and my wife and I divorced.

It seemed drinking could help me forget not only my inability to live a “good life” but also the scary end time scenario that Ellen White prophesied which had terrified me since I was eight years old.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with a beautiful woman, and after a couple of years, I checked into a treatment center to start my sober walk. We got married about a year later. It was my plan to convert my wife to Adventism and be a perfect Adventist myself. She was open to Adventism, so she started studying the Adventist doctrine in earnest. She uncovered several questions that I could only partially answer (even with my 12 years of Adventist education under my belt), and a serious rift grew between us and almost tore us apart. I could not seem to get through to her and remove the veil.

Then the Lord began to reveal the truth to me. We read a lot of literature online, including one testimony by a former Adventist minister who spoke of his separation from the church and how he believed that the Adventist doctrine was false. It finally started to sink in. We found several of Dale Ratzlaff’s videos and watched them several times each. His loving and caring approach to explaining the true gospel unveiled my eyes and unchained me from 41 years of bondage! God has become a living and breathing Reality in my life. And I’m saved!!

Thank you so much, Dale, for having the courage and conviction to take a stand against the false doctrines that are taught by the Adventist church. I am evidence that God is using you to spread the Good News about Jesus and His love for us! Praise the Lord!!

Olive Branch, MS

 

Trampled, calloused consciences

Whose cause is now being served by perpetuating perjury in the attack on the Law of God and the Bible and the relentless persecution of the Church, its members, and on Ellen White and the inspired writings?

Are you people now beyond the reach of God’s Spirit? Wasn’t your current road to perdition hampered whilst “kicking against the pricks?” Are your consciences so trampled and calloused that they have now ceased to serve your own best interest?

Consider that better brains have tried for centuries to discredit God, His Law, and the Bible and have failed miserably. Seriously, Satan with his supernatural brain could not accomplish it, but now he dupes you into thinking you are engaged in a good cause when, in fact, all he is doing is roping you into his failure and his fate!

Since our Good God is not willing any should perish, why would you insist traveling down this bendy road to the eternal cliff?

If you can still hear, then harden not your hearts. If you have not already been hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, then hear and turn and allow God to heal you while you can.

“Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Is. 55:6-7).

Via email

 

Effective ministry

I’m a born again Christian, but some of my family on my Dad’s side are Adventists. I think this magazine would be really effective in helping me witness to them as well as to my Dad. Thank you for being obedient to God’s Word and God’s Truth. Your ministry is awesome!

Los Angeles, CA

 

Be reconciled

We have been receiving your magazine for awhile. I looked over one once. I am sorry to see your dissatisfied opinions about God’s Church. I pray every day that your group will be reconciled with Jesus.

Troy, NH

 

Not surprised

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the negative comments in Letters to the Editor. Satan is very busy. I haven’t yet seen my Adventist sister able to see the error in her practice. I appreciate your good work.

Green Valley, AZ

 

Praise God

After my husband found the gospel of Grace, he was so ashamed that he had ever believed all that EGW “stuff”, but he was a biblical illiterate when he joined the Adventist church and took off to college at CUC. It didn’t help matters when he fell in love with me; I was full of EGW from childhood and was doing my pharisaical best to live by the 2000 or so Adventist rules! Praise God for showing us the freedom we have in Christ who said, “It is finished.”

I will never forget our visit on that bench, Colleen [at an FAF weekend], regarding our spirits going to be with the Lord. I was so afraid to believe it, but you and the Holy Spirit made it clear to me, after so many years of believing that my spirit was just the breath of life God gave me.

Maranatha—and Merry Christmas!

Idylwild, CA

 

Shout to the Lord

When I read Dale’s testimony against the Adventist church, I shouted, “Praise God!” Someone else finally found out the truth!

For 38 years my spouse has tried to put the yoke of the Adventist faith around my neck with absolutely no success. For 38 years I’ve watched the Adventist organization do what they do, and I have always believed that it was not for me. I will always hang onto Galatians 5:4 and Colossians 2:17. The Sabbath was a mere shadow of something better to come! Now that I’m saved, I rest in Christ my Sabbath on a daily basis.

Memphis, TN

 

Wonderful articles

Thank you for the wonderful articles. God bless you.

Porter Corners, NY

 

Thank you

Thank you again for the wonderful work you do to bring the true gospel to the Seventh-day Adventists. May God continue to bless you!

Pasco, WA

 

Why we left Adventism

From the editor: We usually don’t print really long letters, but we think that you will agree that this letter needed to be presented (with only light editing).

On April 19, 2013, we mailed a letter to the Senior Pastor of Vallejo Drive Seventh-day Adventist Church in Glendale, California, to officially withdraw our membership from the Seventh-day Adventist Church after a combined 108-year history with Adventism between the two of us. We became Adventists in the Philippines, and we both had many leadership positions in our congregations.

We have been studying the Scriptures in depth for the last three years, without the filter of any church or religion, but with open hearts and minds, to try to reconcile it with some of our Adventist teachings. What we discovered were real eye openers, and liberating.

We have come to the conviction that Seventh-day Adventism’s central doctrines cannot pass the biblical test; therefore, we cannot remain Adventists and maintain our integrity.

To make our transition as painless as possible (our feelings of having been betrayed by the frauds and cover ups of the Adventist leadership are now behind us), we will address here only the key Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists which the denomination claims make it uniquely God’s only true church for the last days.

A. 1844: This date, called the great disappointment, is the culmination of William Miller’s erroneous exegesis of Daniel 8:14. Miller first calculated the second coming of Christ would occur in 1843. When that date failed, the Millerites recalculated and set the date in 1844. Ellen G. White believed that it was God who purposely misled “His people” to believe first in 1843: “I saw that God was in the proclamation of the time in 1843. It was His design to arouse the people and bring them to a testing point, where they should decide for or against the truth” (Early Writings, p. 232). Instead of humbly admitting a failed prophecy, EGW blamed God for the error.

God does not play games with His children nor deceive them!

B. Investigative Judgment: This “unique” doctrine is contra-biblical: “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life” (Jn. 5:24). “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Rom. 8:1-4).

If Paul were waiting for the end of an investigative judgment that allegedly started on October 22, 1844, he would not have declared with certainty, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award me on that day—and not only to me, but to all those who longed for his appearing” (2 Tim. 4: 7-8).

When Jesus declared at the cross, “It is finished”, the real and final sacrifice for sins had been offered! Then, when Jesus ascended to heaven, He immediately “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven, and…serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man” (Heb. 8:1, 2). The central Adventist doctrine of the investigative judgment has no place in the completed work of Jesus!

C. Sabbath: While God rested (ceased from) His work of creation on the seventh day of the creation week, there is no record of man observing the seventh-day Sabbath as a regular day of rest, let alone worship, until God called the Jewish nation from slavery in Egypt about 2,500 years later. The seventh-day Sabbath was given specifically to the Jewish nation as a sign between the Lord and the children of Israel (Ex. 31:12-18), and as a memorial of their deliverance from slavery (Ezek. 9:13-14). Furthermore, the Sabbath commandment, like the rest of the commandments in the Pentateuch, were given to foreshadow the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ, who will ultimately deliver all his children—Jews, Greeks, and Gentiles alike—who receive Him by faith.

The Sabbath was the outward sign/seal of the Old (Mosaic) Covenant. The New Covenant presents Christ as our real and perfect Sabbath rest (Col. 2:16-17; Heb. 4:1-10).

Christians worshiped God on the first day of the week, which they then called the Lord’s Day, in honor of the resurrection of Christ (Acts 20:7).

There is a clear account of how the early Christian leaders in Jerusalem addressed the conflict between the Gentile Christians and the Jewish Christians who insisted that the Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses (including the Sabbath commandment) in order to be genuine Christians. (Acts 15:5-12, 22- 31). Notice how Peter responded to the Judaizers’ requirement of keeping the law in Acts 15: 7-11, “Why are you questioning God’s way by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke [the law of Moses with more than 600 requirements] that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? We believe that we are all saved the same way, by the special favor of the Lord Jesus”.

When people insist that Sabbath-keeping is a requirement for salvation, then they are preaching an un-Biblical Gospel (Gal. 3:1-14). In fact, twice the Apostle Paul warned about these false teachers: Rom. 14:5-11, and Col. 2:13-17.

Lastly, the writer of Hebrews re-affirms the fact that with the Christ-event comes the New Covenant which nullifies the provisions of the Old (Sinaitic) Covenant (Heb. 8:6-13). He further states that “the old system of the law of Moses was only a shadow of the things to come, not the reality of the good things Christ has done for us” (Heb. 10:1-12).

When people ask us what we are now, we are quick to answer, “We are new covenant Christians!”

We thank God that after decades of our hanging onto the veil of Moses, by His grace alone God removed that veil so now we can see to what the Old Testament and the Old Covenant were pointing: the Messiah, the Son of God.

We believe that the one and only continuing, authoritative, and reliable source of truth and guidance for God’s church in these last days is His Son (Heb. 1:2). We believe that the true seal of every believer is the Spirit of God (Eph. 1:13). We also believe that the true test of discipleship is what Christ himself said, “all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (Jn. 13: 35).

Fred and Rochelle Hosillos
Prineville, or

 

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