We all will come before God, and those who teach others to go against His word will be judged for doing so---so you can think it's us that are in trouble--doesn't bother me.--You take everything and twist things around and are teaching everyone to diregard God's commandments--we'll have to wait and see what God says at the end. For me, I'll go on with what I read in His word, and you will go on with what you feel is right in His word. But please don't whine about attacks--the attacks here pretty hostile and aimed at us. The rules here state that we are not to call other Christian groups, non-Christian--we are recognized as Christian and these packs of half-truths, and downright lies isn't going to change that. You go your way--I'll go mine--God bless.
And therein lies the rub.
For Christianity, Jesus Christ is "the word" of God. For Adventists, the Bible is. For Christianity, the Bible is only a worthwhile learning aid insofar as it leads to Jesus Christ,
the only reason the Bible even exists and the centerpiece and end-point of everything in it. For Adventists, the centerpiece of, and the reason the Bible exists is to reveal the Sabbath. For Christianity, the Resurrection is the be all and end all of
EVERYTHING.
Nothing else qualifies as a distant and remote second place. NOTHING!! For Adventists, the Sabbath is the reason the Bible exists and nothing else qualifies as second place.
If you can't stand the Bible and the only way that you will ever find out about Jesus's Resurrection is to accidentally glance at a billboard.......well then, every real Christian in the world would advise you to chuck your Bible into the dumpster and keep paying attention to billboards.
Christianity teaches that one can be saved if the only "Bible" someone has is John 3:16 on a 10 cent plastic pocket card, and they believe and follow that verse. Adventists teach that you can never be confident in your Salvation. You have to read and memorize thousands of pages out of Ellen White's 90 percent plagiarized books, and believe in the thousands of stitched and sculpted together half-verses and verses blatantly taken out of context that comprise the foundation of Adventism. They teach that you have to perfectly and without a hitch observe whatever the parts of the Old Testament Law that tickled Ellen White's fancy. Yet even if you can do
THAT (which clearly nobody can and nobody ever has), you still have to constantly look over your shoulder and dread the oncoming train known as the Investigative Judgment. Adventists teach Daniel 8:14 is the most important verse in the Bible. Christianity teaches that John 3:16 is. Christianity teaches you can inadvertently glance at a billboard and read John 3:16 word for word and be saved before the light turns green. Adventism teaches: "You better get on the stick and memorize 800 pages out of "The Great Controversy" today.
I spent my first 22 years of life as a miserable, carping, carking hopeless Adventist; fearful, depressed, paranoid. So I know of what I speak. I spent 22 years, watching my family hatefully ridiculing and criticizing devout Christians for celebrating the Resurrection every Sunday and on Easter I listened as Adventists preachers hatefully and viciously railed and fulminated against deeply-devout Christians celebrating the Resurrection of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, smearing them as the "harlot of Babylon" and the "Harlot Daughters of the harlot of Babylon." Then they had the unbelievable gall to fantasize that these devout followers of Jesus Christ would one day wholesale murder Adventists for not attending Church on Sunday. We'll get to the Christians who really
HAVE been murdered for their beliefs, here in a minute. I, and every other Adventist I know spent our lives ignoring the very existence of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which stands as a 2,000 year old, 300 million member towering, throbbing, and massive rebuke
against everything Adventists teach and believe. Why oh why did Ellen White and Adventist "Sabbath Scholar" Samuele Bacchiochi completely ignore the Eastern Orthodox church,
which has never wavered in its assertion that both Easter and Sunday were immediately celebrated in the first year after the Resurrection on the instructions of the Apostles?
Eastern Orthodoxy began intensely feuding with the Roman pope 1000 years before the Protestant Reformation, and unequivocally severed all ties with Rome more than 400 years before Martin Luther was a gleam in his father's eye. 800 years before Ellen White was born!!
Ellen White and Samuele Bacchiochi,
strangely claim, that Eastern Orthodox Christians - who have been tortured, persecuted and slaughtered by the millions upon millions under three different fallen Empires - began worshiping on Sunday and celebrating Easter
because the Pope ordered them to!!!!!
REALLY?
Come again? Eastern Orthodoxy willfully refused to obey the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union Empire, at the dreadful cost of millions upon millions of their followers and Priests being savagely murdered, brutally tortured and imprisoned. Their greatest churches have been turned into rubble and burned to the ground; forcibly converted to Mosques; locked up and the key thrown away under Soviet atheism for 70 years. The Patriarch of Moscow, on the orders of Lenin, was tied to the paddle wheel of a river boat and simultaneously beat and drowned to death for refusing to give the Church over to the communists.
1,000 Orthodox Priests were murdered in one single day after that. Let the following marinate in your mind just for a few seconds about the fate of the Eastern Orthodox in the early 1800s in Ottoman Turkey:
"Patriarch Gregory was taken out of the Patriarchal Cathedral on Easter Sunday, 1821, directly after celebrating the solemn Easter Liturgy, and hanged (in full Patriarchal vestments) for three days from the main gate of the Patriarchate compound by order of the Sultan; his body was then taken down and delivered to a squad of Jews who dragged it through the streets and finally threw it into the Bosphorus. Over 5000 Priests were then drug to the edge of the river, and systematically beheaded and their corpses mutilated for their refusal to renounce Christianity, in sight of the beloved and mutilated corpse of their Patriarch."
.....
"On the day of the hanging of Gregory V, three bishops and a dozens of other Greek Priests were quickly executed in various parts of the Ottoman capital. Among them were the metropolitan bishops, Dionysios of Ephesus, Athanasios of Nicomedia, Gregory of Derkoi, and Eugenios of Anchialos....They looted Greek churches and property, initiating a large scale pogrom. Around 14 Christian Churches suffered heavy damage, while some of them were completely destroyed. The Patriarchal complex also became one of the targets......On June 15, five archbishops and three bishops were executed. Additionally, in early July, seventy shared the same fate.....on May 3, the former Patriarch, Cyril VI, nine priests and twenty Christian merchants were hanged in front of the local Cathedral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Gregory_V_of_Constantinople
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consta...tions_of_the_Patriarch_and_the_Grand_Dragoman
"In 1922, in unprotected Smyrna, [Metropolitan Bishop] Chrysostomos said to those begging him to flee: "It is the tradition of the Greek Church and the duty of the priest to stay with his congregation."
......
On 9 September crowds were rushing into the cathedral for shelter when Chrysostomos, pale from fasting and lack of sleep, led his last prayer. The Divine Liturgy ended as Turkish police came to the church and led Chrysostomos away. The Turkish General Nouredin Pasha, known as the "butcher of Ionia", first spat on the Metropolitan and informed him that a tribunal in Angora (now Ankara) had already condemned him to death. A mob fell upon Chrysostomos and tore out his eyes. Bleeding profusely, he was dragged through the streets by his beard. He was beaten and kicked and parts of his body were cut off. All the while Chrysostomos, his face covered with blood, prayed: "Holy Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Every now and then, when he had the strength, he would raise his hand and bless his persecutors; a Turk, realizing what the Metropolitan was doing, cut off his hand with a sword. Metropolitan Chrysostomos was then hacked to pieced by the angry mob."
http://www.serfes.org/orthodox/memoryof.htm
"The Army converged upon the Augusteum, the vast square that fronted the great church of Hagia Sophia Church whose bronze gates were barred by a huge throng of civilians inside the building, hoping for divine protection. After the doors were breached, the troops separated the congregation according to what price they might bring in the slave markets. Mehmed II allowed his troops to plunder the city for three days as it was customary. Soldiers fought over the possession of some of the spoils of war. According to the Venetian surgeon Nicolò Barbaro "all through the day the Turks made a great slaughter of Christians through the city". According to Philip Mansel thousands of civilians were killed and 30,000 Christians were enslaved or deported."(Orthodox Christians have been barred from the Hagia Sophia for about a 1000 years. For 600 years, it was desecrated as a mosque)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople#Final_assault
If anything, the Eastern Orthodox would do
the exact opposite of anything the Pope told them to do. If the Pope told the Eastern Orthodox to worship on Sunday, the EO would worship on Wednesday, or Thursday
out of pure, mule-headed spite!! And they would willingly die rather than change that practice. They have proven that time and time again.
Eastern Orthodoxy insists Sunday worship commenced the first week after the Resurrection. They began celebrating Easter at the one year anniversary of the Resurrection. Both Sunday Worship and Easter celebration came straight from the Apostle's mouths. These facts stand completely unrebutted and unmentioned in SDA history and literature.
"Bishop Behrigian (1869-1915) was born in Zara and became the primate for the Diocese of Caesarea/Kayseri in 1915. He was arrested by Turkish police upon his return from Etchmiadzin where he had just been consecrated bishop. Informed of his fate, the bishop asked for a bullet to the head. Deliberately ignoring his request, the police tied him to a "yataghan" where sheep were butchered an then proceeded to hack his body apart while he was still alive.
Father Chghladian was born in Tatvan. In May 1915, as part of the campaign of mass arrests, deportations and murders, the priest was tortured and displayed in a procession, led by sheiks and dervishes while accompanied by drums, through the streets of Dikranagerd. Once the procession returned to the mosque, in the presence of government officials, the sheiks poured oil over the priest and burned him alive.Bishop Efthimios of Amasia was captured by the Turkish police and tortured daily for 41 days. In the last days of his life he chanted his own funeral memorial until finally dying in his cell on 29 May 1921. Three days later a written order for his execution arrived........Metropolitan Gregorios of Kydonion remained with his church until the end, helping 20,000 of his 35,000 parishioners escape to Mytilene and other free parts of Greece. On 3 October 1922, the remaining 15,000 Orthodox Christians were executed; the Metropolitan was saved in order to be buried alive."
Who you going to believe about the origin of Christian Sunday worship? The Eastern Orthodox, or Seventh Day Adventists?
I won't keep you in suspense. Here's one hint:
In Memory Of The 50 Million Victims Of The Orthodox Christian Holocaust
http://www.serfes.org/orthodox/memoryof.htm
Wow.
No effort whatsoever has been expended in any Adventist Sabbatarian literature to refute the unwavering claim of Eastern Orthodoxy that it began celebrating Christ's Resurrection on Sundays, just one week after the fact, at the instruction of the Apostles. And they celebrated the first Easter on the 1 year anniversary of the Resurrection, also obeying the explicit commands of the Apostles.
Wow.
Just Wow.
Adventists have been predicting for over 150 years that their long dark night of persecution is just around the corner, but for some reason it always seems to set on the Eastern Orthodox Christians instead. Just since Adventism was founded in 1863, more than 3.5 million Eastern Orthodox were murdered in the Armenian genocide, and at least 12 million more were murdered under Communism. Those are just two of the smaller massacres in the 20th century. For the Orthodox, relatively speaking, those were sunny days on the beach. 50 million members of the Orthodox church were murdered in just in the 1900s. I doubt the total membership of the Adventist Church since its founding comes anwhere near that number.
Here's an article discussing Christian persecution, written by one of Adventism's own theologians. I counted less than 10 Adventist Martyrs since the Church's beginning. Needless to say, Eastern Orthodoxy is not mentioned:
http://dialogue.adventist.org/articles/10_1_moon_e.htm
Adventists to this day wishfully pretend that 100's of their top theologians and thousands of their best pastors have not savagely renounced the absurd and anti-Biblical 1844 time-setting that Ellen White said is the basis for the Church's existence. Adventists wishfully pretend that the SDA Church has not fired 100s and 1000s of its best Christian theologians and pastors, who have denounced the Church's absurd and unbiblical interpretation of Daniel 8:14; and the ridiculous and unbiblical Investigative Judgment as nothing more than a fairy tale.
The IJ is nakedly unbiblical, 180 degrees opposite of the Gospel, and nothing more than a face-saving lie to cover up the disastrous events of 1844. The Church's obsessive fixation on the Sabbath drastically denigrates the effect of the Resurrection and is completely
OPPOSITE of the message of St. Paul. The SDA Church's laughable "interpretation" of Colossians 2:14-17 is absurdly the
OPPOSITE of what it actually says!
You come onto a Christian forums website with "another Gospel" and expect everyone else to
ALSO pretend that none of the above is true?
What were you thinking?
