I'm sure fiddle chick is long gone. I am surprised that so many tried to convince her of the Sabbath with our favorite bible study. She has heard it all. She only wanted to know what we think. Here's my opinion.
About the Sabbath, it's a lot more than simply another time frame. It's hard for a Sunday-keeping Christian to imagine all that is involved in being a Sabbath-keeping Christian. For one thing, in general, though there are exceptions, there is the matter of degree. Most Sunday-keeping Christians don't "keep" Sunday. For most of them, all it involves is going to church on Sunday. After church, they may go home and study for Monday's exam at school. They may mow the lawn or do some chores around the house. They may play or watch televised sports or rent a secular video or read the newspaper or a novel. Many go out to restaurants (some what we consider "liberal" Adventists do this, but that is not very common, and strictly speaking, they are not keeping the Sabbath as most Adventists understand it). Sabbath-keeping Adventists don't do those things.
So if an Adventist works full time, the only time to do any secular personal chores is either week nights or on Sunday. And we steadfastly must refuse occupational work or School duties which are secular, on Saturday. That can be a real sacrifice for a Seventh-day Sabbath keeper. It keeps you from a lot of occupational choices, and it can get you fired from your job, or force you to go on doing it but feeling very guilty, and always pathetically asking your church friends to "remember you in prayer," when really, they just wonder why you don't have enough faith to quit and trust God that He will provide something more suitable for you.
When I was in professional school for example, I was not able to make any close friends among my classmates, because all the social activities were on Friday nights and Saturday, and nobody wants to be with a stick-in-the-mud. Praise God I had a great group at my local church who very supportive of a serious spiritual life and walk with Jesus, and a lot of fun to be with. If it had not been for that, life there would have been miserable. My heart goes out to Adventists in secular universities who are not as lucky as I was to have a great church group their age!
Then the same thing applied when I entered the job world. If you are a Sunday Christian, believe you me, you have no idea how much it costs socially to be a serious Seventh-day Sabbath keeper. I can imagine that to some degree a serious Sunday keeper, who doesn't work or do secular activities on Sunday may also feel a bit isolated, but since Sunday is the day of the majority, the degree of isolation is no match to that faced by a Sabbath-keeper. Yes, there are jobs where you will be fired for not working on Sunday, but they are way-way fewer than the ones that will fire you for not working on Saturday. Saturday is the biggest business day in our economy and the most important recreation and social day in our culture. You have no idea how important this is until you try to go against the flow.
This leads to the reason why a serious Seventh-day Adventist should never marry a non-Seventh-day Adventist, I don't care if they are Christian or not. Push WILL come to shove, and there WILL come a time when the Sabbath-keeper is faced with a sacrifice that their non-Sabbath-keeping partner will say, "Well, now this is going a bit too far. I had no idea it would come to this." And they will not be supportive.
To most deeply understand the Seventh-day Adventist mindset, that is the really dedicated, Sabbath-keeping Adventist mindset, you have to understand that the true believers believe that one day there will be a National Sunday Law, in which Sabbath-keepers will be compelled by legal prosecution, to break the Sabbath to go along with the rest of the world. We believe this is the Mark of the Beast, and that if we knuckle under and conform, and break the Sabbath, which in our view is breaking God's commandment to obey Man's commandment...we will lose our salvation.
So you see, every little compromise that we do to avoid trouble or try to "fit in with regular folks" that causes us to break the Sabbath, to us is like a slippery slope to losing our salvation. If we can't be faithful in little things, we will lose it when the "Big Test" comes.
So... How do we view Sunday keeping Christians? How do you think? We know they love Jesus. We know they believe the Bible. Many of us, myself included, belonged to Sunday keeping churches before, and we know and love those people. My parents are Sunday-keeping Christians. But you know, we believe that they are well-meaning, but misinformed. We also suspect a little bit that they are afraid to seriously examine the Biblical evidence for Sabbath-keeping because they are afraid that if they become convicted of it, then, they will have to make a lot of uncomfortable changes in their lives that they don't want to, and they'll be rejected by some people whose opinions they value and affections they really want. I know a Sunday keeper who has admitted to me that she had those exact feelings. I did not make this up, nor is it my "narrow minded judgmentalism," or something. We are still friends with this woman and hope that if things come out as we think they will and a Sunday law comes, she'll have the strength to make the right decision before it is too late.
Unfortunately, as much as we love and care about our Sunday-keeping brothers and sisters, you know, there's not much we can do for them. The subject becomes a taboo every time it comes up, and we get to the point where we just shut up about it because we're tired of other Christians thinking that the Sabbath is all we're about. That's what we think about other denominations. We love them, but we feel as if there is an invisible wall between us, because the Sabbath, the state of the dead, and the eternal hellfire thing- the things we care a lot about, we are sort of prohibited to talk about. We love them, but we know that most of them will think that the National Sunday Law will be a good thing, or they'll gladly go along with it, simply because they will "know not what they are doing."
About the state of the dead, it is a belief so deeply ingrained in a person's psyche that once they are convinced of one opinion or the other on that subject, it is one of the most difficult mental changes a human being can make, to change their mind about it. I did it. One of the biggest reasons Adventists think the state of the dead is so important is because if our dearly departed sleep in death, then where do those voices come from that speak to spirit mediums? Don't tell me you don't believe in that, because I have been to a spirit medium, and I can tell you that there are spirits out there who can do a perfect job of mimicking your dearest departed loved one, and, if you don't know any better, they can DEFINITELY convince you they are that person! They're fallen angels. They've been around since the beginning. They have had time to observe every member of your family and know things about your family history that you have not a clue of. I was almost deceived by one of those characters who posed as my dear grandmother, and told me family secrets I never knew, and verified later from my mother. My mother was convinced. I was not. Had I been convinced and followed the spirit's advice, I would have lost my salvation. That's what they're up to, and that's one reason why the state of the dead is so important to get right.
What's the fear of "sleeping" in the grave? Maybe you're afraid you'll wake up and claw on the headliner of your coffin? That's just silly. They embalm you, for pete's sakes! Let me tell you a story of what it is like to be dead. I am of the age where I occasionally have to do medical tests that are fairly unpleasant and embarrassing. I had to have a colonoscopy. That's where the doctor shoves a camera up your behind and watches the inside of your bowel on closed-circuit TV to see if you have any cancer in there. If you ever have to get a colonoscopy, make sure the doctor PUTS YOU OUT. Some of them make you stay awake for it, and, well, let's just put it this way, I don't know what that is like, and I don't want to find out!
My doctor put me out. I remember the nurse giving me an injection as part of the prep, and I said to myself, "Wow, this stuff is strong!"
A moment later, I was lying in the hallway on a gurney, and my wife came up and said, "How was the test?"
I said, "We haven't done it yet. They just prepped me."
She smirked and said, "I have news for you. The test is over. It took about 20 minutes." That twenty minutes was completely gone from my consciousness. It was as if one instant I was there with the nurse, the next instant it was twenty minutes later, and the test was all over. I wasn't even there!
Now, let me get this straight. You think you will somehow get what, bored? Tired of waiting all those years in the grave? Hungry? You think that you will experience the passing of time while your body is in the grave rotting like something you left in the fridge too long? And yet me, breathing, heart beating, smellin' fine- I'm so gone that I experience twenty minutes like it was a quarterflash? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it?
But if you have been raised to believe all those graveyard stories, and believe in ghosts, and all that folklore is so deeply etched in your mind you can't shake it anymore than one can turn a battleship around in a bathtub, well, then nothing I've said will make any sense to you, will it? I don't blame you. I did not find it easy to change either. I only knew one thing. A demon impersonated my dead grandmother to make me lose my salvation. God led me through a series of unmistakable events to join a church that taught that the dead are unconscious and experience no passing of time from their last breath, until the resurrection. I had a personal experience with general anesthesia to back it up. I found all the biblical evidence. I was convinced. But judge for yourself and I'll respect you, whatever you come up with.
