A Response to Bryan Bissell

Click to go to our Home Page


Bryan,

I'll try to make this short in consideration of your busy schedule.

Concerning time and place, as regards Ellen White's statement labeling the fallen churches as Babylon and controlled by Satan as a body, do you think that those churches have changed the reasons she labeled them Babylon? Have they changed their doctrines that constitute them being Babylon? I cannot imagine for the life of me how you believe that her description applied to the fallen churches only in her day and that somehow they have redeemed themselves since! If this is you interpretation of her meaning of time and place, I respectively but wholeheartedly disagree. This is without a doubt one of the greatest rationalizations I have ever witnessed in all my days as an SDA, from another SDA. I would say you are too focused on this to the point that you cannot see the forest for the trees.

Bryan, SDA leaders have gotten a lot of mileage on the following quote you make:

I know that the Lord loves His church. It is not to be disorganized or broken up into independent atoms. There is not the least consistency in this; there is not the least evidence that such a thing will be. Those who shall heed this false message and try to leaven others will be deceived and prepared to receive advanced delusions, and they will come to nought. {Mar 203.2}

The statement is true. The SDA church militant will not be broken up into independent atoms. There is indeed not the least consistency in this. Do you know proof as to why there is not the least consistency in such a notion? Because it would not be around for the next Ezekiel 9 debacle, wherein men, maidens and little children are slaughtered without mercy, Testimonies, Vol. 5, 211, if it was broken up into atoms. God laves His church. He loves all the churches. Did He love apostate Israel? Read the first page of the Great Controversy, and know the answer to this question. But that love does not redeem them as a corporate structure from their ultimate fate, beginning at the house of God, the house of Jacob, those who have been privileged with great light, "beginning at His sanctuary," ibid. According to Ezekiel 5:9-27, SDA's will be humiliated and made an astonishment to the entire world before it is all over. Why? Because they disobey God and do it their way.

True, no such thing WILL BE, until the next conflagration of Ezekiel 9, and then, according to Scripture, and even Ellen White, the tenses change! Why? How? Because she says that Ezekiel 9 will have another literal fulfillment and so does Ezekiel 5:9 (compare with Matt. 24:21). Is it possible that Ellen White, in 1893, did not yet see what she later described as Ezekiel 9 being fulfilled again. Me thinks so! A similar prediction occurs in Scripture regarding the Jews:

Promise to Israel that was misunderstood by the Jews: "Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord." Jeremiah 31:35-37.

The inference is that Israel would never cease from being a nation. That was a conditional promise. The Jews misinterpreted that promise. Ellen White promise could have been CONDITIONAL! Could have been?!! Why I have been taught all my life in the SDA church that all the promises of God and His prophets are CONDITIONAL. Now, new movement SDA's want to interpret the Maranatha 203 statement to be UNCONDITIONAL. Consistency is a Jewel. Let's wake up my foolish-virgin friends. It is high time to awaken.

Bryan, you said: "Yes, lightbearer, there are conditional prophecies...but unless you've got a direct word from God saying that this no longer applies, I'm going to listen to Ellen White's warnings that people who do this are doing what Satan wants."

Pray tell Bryan! I have given many Ellen G. White "direct Word from God, saying that this no longer applies!!! Such as her saying that Ezekiel 9 will be literally fulfilled again BEGINNING AT HIS SANCTUARY, those privileged with great light, and her statement that the A.D. destruction of Jerusalem, a partial and secondary fulfillment of Ezekiel 9, was a PREFIGURE TYPE? That is a whale of a lot of DIRECT WORD FROM GOD VIA EZEKIEL AND ELLEN WHITE, that her former statement no longer applied and/or applied only to the SDA church in 1893, and/or she did not understand anything else at that time. But Ezekiel is the greater light and Ezekiel 5 and 9 are not going to be re-written. SDA's are following EXACTLY the course of ancient Israel, says Ellen White and empirical common sense.

I asked God if He would show me where in the Bible it supported Ellen White's statement that Ezekiel 9 will be LITERALLY fulfilled again. He led me almost immediately to Ezekiel 5:9. That verse UPDATES the Ezekiel 5 and 9 event to occur in the future, for it is then that God does the worst thing He has ever done or will ever again do. Matt. 24:21. And who is the subject of Ezekiel 5 and 9? Modern Jerusalem, God's SDA church militant.

Your above quote by Ellen White must be interpreted in light of Scripture and ALL she has to say about the church. For example, she instructs us to strive to be one of the 144,000, the undefiled bride of Christ. Now we do not know who will constitute that number, true, but we need to know something of the requirements for being among that number if we are to strive for such. Jeremiah 11:9-15 (KJV) is most instructive as to when a people have crossed God's line of no return. In verse 14 we are instructed not to even pray any longer for a church that has made the defined violations. In verse 15, God asks the question: "What hath my beloved (bride) to do in mine house (church Sanctuary) seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many, and the Holy Flesh [God] is passed from them? when thou does evil, then thou rejoicest [they celebrate--celebrationis style worship--instigated by Babylon in order to entertain and gain numbers by entertainment]. Celebration may have its time and place Bryan, but not on the proverbial banks of the Jordan, when we are supposed to be sighing and crying for all the abominations which get the church broken in pieces by Babylon's slaughtering men.

"You will take passages in the Testimonies that speak of the close of probation, of the shaking among God's people, and you will talk of a coming out from this people of a purer, holier people that will arise. Now all this pleases the enemy. . . . Should many accept the views you advance, and talk and act upon them, we would see one of the greatest fanatical excitements that has ever been witnessed among Seventh-day Adventists. This is what Satan wants.--1SM 179 (1890).

Ellen White said that A.D. 70 was a PREFIGURE, The Great Controversy, p. 25. That is SAFE to follow. Who left who then? Where did they go? They fled to the mountains of Pella, SDA Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, 76. 77. The good left the bad. And that was a PREFIGURE, A TYPE! Then she and Ezekiel say that the antitypical fulfillment of that PREFIGURE begins at Jerusalem, His sanctuary, Testimonies, Vol. 5, 211 and Ezekiel 5 and 9. The same Ezekiel says in chapter 22:17-31, that the dross (tares) are gathered into the midst's of Jerusalem for burning and melting. Does Ellen White's statement above contradict Ezekiel? Or, according to Ezekiel 5:1-3, does a remnant, "a few in number" escape to be bound "in thy skirts," marriage terminology, while the remaining three-thirds is destroyed. Truly, seriously, Bryan, if we interpret Ellen White's statement so that she does not grossly contradict herself in myriad other statements, we have to conclude that she was addressing the church of her day, in 1893, because she says in the same article from which the quote is extracted that the church at that time was heeding the Laodicean Message and keeping the commandments of God. This is why she said what she said to Stanton and Caldwell. Who could be holier than a people who were heeding the Laodicean message and keeping the commandments of God? So the quote applies to the church at that express time. And if it does not brother, we have a self-contradictory false prophet on our hands and I do not opt for that choice.

Concerning Early Writings, p. 273:

"I saw that since the second angel proclaimed the fall of the churches, they have been growing more and more corrupt. They bear the name of being Christ's followers; yet it is IMPOSSIBLE to distinguish them from the world...Satan has taken FULL POSSESSION of the churches as a body." E.G. White, Early Writings, 273.

If the following churches have changed the doctrines that caused them to be labeled fallen and Babylon, then we should return to them and there will be no loud cry calling people out of those churches. But that is not the case. Tense is not confusing here and neither are the current TENSE of the doctrines that are currently taught by those churches and indeed have continued to be taught since Ellen White's pronouncement. Let's not get into serious rationalizations that cause us to step off the Midnight Cry lighted path, because Ellen White says it is IMPOSSIBLE to get back on the path if we wonder off it.

Bryan you say: "The above quote has no connection to future realities. It only states the facts of the churches in Ellen White's day, NOT our day."

Then Mother Rome does not have harlot daughters and the churches will reform and discard their Babylonian doctrines which Ellen White so labels. We will see, but it has not happened yet! The SDA Bible Commentary says that the men with the slaughtering weapons in Ezekiel 9, are of Babylon--the fallen churches.

God bless,

Ron Beaulieu