The Sabbath is often a difference between SDA's and other Christians.
As you know SDA's keep the 7th day Sabbath.
We believe that the Bible says that when we die we do sleep until Jesus comes.
Imagine you were married and one day your husband and yourself were involved in a very bad accident.
Just for the sake of the illustration I am giving, you were killed and went staraight to heaven as many Christians believe today.
As time went by your husband did get over your death and found that he wanted to marry. He had found a very lovely woman and they did get married.
All the time you are watching in heaven while all this is going on.
How do you think you would feel about all that?
Perhaps it would not concern you at all. Then on the other hand you may take the other view on seeing your husband get married again.
Your next point about marriage by an SDA to a non-SDA.
It is not encouraged at all. We believe that a couple should be equally yoked together as the Bible says so.
I hope this helps you have a better understanding of what we believe.
Blessings
May SDA's become better acquainted with the gospel concept of the mortality of the soul. May it become more
"cross centered," something that will move the
heart, not just a cold doctrinal theory.
The Real Meaning of Death in Light of the Cross:
The pagan notion of immortality neatly destroys the real meaning of the cross of Christ, because it corrupts the idea of the LOVE demonstrated there. If this be true, immortality, then obviously Christ could not die on the cross, and God could not truly love the world so much that He GAVE Him for us--He only
lent Him. And Christ could not have died for us a true death, the equivalent of the "second death." See Revelation 2:11; 20:14. From this point of view, He merely suffered mental and physical agony as have many soldiers mortally wounded in war, many of whom have suffered for even longer periods of time than Jesus did when He died on the cross. The idea is that Christ only
lent Himself to us briefly.
Jesus "tasted" the second death "for every man," the death in which there is no cheering light of hope at all. No man since time began has ever felt that full weight of condemnation and despair except our Lord. It was the full weight of the "curse" of God that Paul quoting Moses said rested on "every one that hangeth on a tree" (see Gal. 3:13 and Deuteronomy 21:22, 23), although no other crucified person ever felt it to the full. This is what Isaiah means when he says that Christ "poured out his soul unto death," Isaiah 53:12.
Can we imagine the horror of a great darkness forever the aloneness, forsakenness, or eternal separation from the Father, the utter ruin, shame, and humiliation that being lost involves? When Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46) He meant every syllable of it. It was the horror of that eternal forsakenness that killed Him.
The point is that "in this was manifested the love (agape) of God toward us." 1 John 4:9, 10. This is untainted by the Greek notion of natural immortality, the apostles understood what had happened on the cross. There, the "breadth, and length, and depth, and height" of "the [agape, not eros] of Christ which passeth knowledge" was displayed for the world and the universe to see. See Ephesians 3:18, 19. It was not the Sabbath that was first perverted in church history, but the concept of true agape. Christ had to sorrowfully say to the church of Ephesus (the early church), "Thou hast left thy first love [agape]." Rev. 2:4.
It was Plotinus in the third century rejected the idea that God is
agape and boldy declared Him to be the Hellenistic idea of self-cntered love based on natural immortality. So entrenced had the apostasy from love become by the fifth century, that Augustine synthethized the conflicting New Testament and Hellenistic ideas of love into what he called
caritas, which became the basis of medieval Romanist doctrine.
There is much more to say on the topic in the light of the cross .... but, anyway, I beg SDA's to put this topic in the light of Calvary.
blessings to you,
John
I actually went to an Adventist college but a public high school. My home church didn't have any Adventist youth close to my age during that time, so I was really lonely in church. It wasn't until college that I had any close friends who understood my beliefs.
