You present a good example of just why it is so important that people think about what they believe and why rather then simply assuming that they know all the answers. You will not find statement of Paul's like "by grace we are saved not by works" in the Old Testament, hints at that are found in the latter writings but certainly not to the Children of Israel at Sinai.
They did not, read the Old testament and you will not find that idea in the first 5 books of the Bible, later they began to develop messianic expections but they were mainly based uon the expectation of a ruling king that would make the nation of Israel great once again. We just went through the book of Ecclesiastes which quite clearly had no expectation of life after death. In fact it ends by saying obedience to God is the best we can do. Obedience to God was the main teaching of most of the old testament. It was not the type of faith based obedience of the New Testament.
Hebrews 4 points out that faith is what God desires and that the rest they desired to enter was the rest we can enter through Christ Though their rest was far different from the rest we anticipate, for instance Abraham looked for a land based rest as in his own country. It does not present that they knew the gospel of salvation mediated by Jesus Christ 1000's of years before it occurred. The Gospel that Paul espouses is based very much on the historical life death and resurrection of Jesus.
Does Peter ever say that "that this same message of salvation through Jesus was preached by the spirit to the antideluvian world before the flood?" In fact it appears you are using one of the controversial verses of the Bible that many think means Jesus preached in hell or something. One thing for certain is that it is not a clear teaching that people before the flood had the gospel as revealed in the New Testament.
That is right I challenged their trite thinking just as I challenge yours. That is why the question was raised in the first place. What does the word of God mean? They. like you started out thinking that it was the Bible and that we must obey what the Bible says. Then when they encounter what the Bible says they have to come to a decision as to why they don't follow what they have called the word of the Lord says:
They claim the Bible is the word of God yet they don't practice much of what the Old Testament commands, even things that as above are thus saith the Lord. They have to learn to make interpretations about what is for us and what is time and place and context relevant for others in history but not for people today. If the lesson wants to tell you that the Bible is the word of God why is it they they don't define the term? The reason of course is because the fundamentalist concept of the Bible as the word of God does not work and they don't want to delve into that, they want to hold to trite and simplistic thinking.
This is not undermining faith it is application of our minds into what our faith is about. The Bible is not all about Jesus, it is not even all about God it is a series of stories and poetry which are meant to bring us to a relationship with God. Do you really think the rape of Tamar (Gen 38) is about Jesus or the Ezekiel's prophecies about Egypt (Eze. 31). Too many people don't think about what they are saying they will quote the following and pretend that it means everything in the Bible is about Jesus:
John 5:39
39 You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, (NIV)
The scriptures should lead you to God, just like the law with all its regulations are meant as a schoolmaster to lead people to Christ."
Gal 3:24 " So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. (NIV)"
The reason you don't see the importance of these issues is probably because you don't understand the Bible either and instead of trying to understand you claim that people must just grasp it by faith. Well that does not work today if it ever worked. And it certainly does not work with the people in the world who we should be trying to reach. Unfortunately Adventism has focused mainly upon reaching other Christians so we paid little attention to really understanding how we need to interpret the Bible. Then of course most Adventists accepted EGW as the inspired interpreter of the Bible and it left Adventist incredibly weak and in many cases Biblically illiterate. We even tried to say that we were called "people of the book" even though no one outside of Adventism called us that and that we were in fact stealing the term from Moslems who used the term to describe any religious people who had a sacred scriptures they followed like Islam followed the Koran.
RC,
I will pray for you. I have gone to your website and perused much of what you teach and, to be honest, I don't understand why you espouse to be a seventh-day adventist. What bothers me more though is that you try to use common sense as your guide to understanding the Bible instead of letting the Holy Spirit teach you what is contained in the word of God. Yes, people who break the sabbath should be put to death because it is a sin, However, Jesus taught a very important lesson about condemning people didn't He?
Yes, the whole Bible is about Jesus from top to bottom. From the very beginning the human race has been taught of the messiah. Don't you remember Gen 3:15 which was just in this past weeks lesson. It is a promise of Jesus. What about when God told Abraham all would be blessed through him? The WHOLE sanctuary was about Jesus. Do you think the israelites did this without knowing what it meant? When did they finally figure it out? No one has ever been saved by "obeying God" which we call works. All have been saved by faith from the very beginning when we first needed a savior.
Sometimes truths are so simple that our human wisdom can't grasp them. In any case, if you are not leading people to Jesus at every chance you can get, but instead arguing and undermining their belief they do have in Him than you are not following the direction of God. You would rather try to show people how smart and learned you are and boast of your knowledge than humble yourself and be a servant to people by showing them Jesus.