I am responding to those who asked questions and made pertinent comments about my previous post on ACV’s Facebook page. I do not have a Facebook account and was not able to respond on that platform. ..If faith is genuine and saving then when it is presented with the truth of Christ being the Great I Am, who, as the Word, became flesh, in order to save sinners, such faith will welcome this glorious truth and not oppose it.
Read MoreI am writing this as an appeal to my fellow Advent Christians who personally hold to the full deity and humanity of Christ in his one person but who do not want to challenge those in our ranks who have no conviction regarding this teaching or who actually oppose it. Before I make the particular appeal let me state some assumptions and offer two points for you to consider.
Jefferson Vann explains his translation of 1 Peter 2:13-15.
Read MoreJefferson Vann shows how biblical terms for death help to counter the notion that it involves conscious survival.
Read MoreJefferson Vann examines how the book of Job uses the Hebrew word ‘erets.
Read MoreDifficult passages such as Psalm 82 are commonly ignored or dismissed with a badly exegeted interpretation leaving laymen confused when they look at the surrounding context and similar uses of the word elsewhere in scripture; but that’s enough of my ranting. Let’s take a closer look at this issue.
Read MoreAs you read the New Testament there are times when it seems that the Law is viewed negatively and there are times when it seems to be viewed positively. We can use Paul’s letter to the Romans to make this point. He sees the law as something under which the unbeliever is in bondage. Those who come to faith in Christ are not under law but under grace (Romans 4:14, 7:6). So in some sense the law is something from which we need to be delivered or set free.
Read MoreI have been following the posts and video debate of my fellow Advent Christians Catherine Rybicki, Luke Copeland and Robert Mayer concerning egalitarianism and complementarianism. By now I am sure all those who are regulars at Advent Christian Voices have no need for these terms to be defined or explained. Of these two positions I do believe that the complementarian one is the harder of the two to hold.
Read MoreWhat is the Judeo/Christian hope? Jeff Vann, David Davis, and Penny Vann explain why “Resurrection” is the answer.
Read MoreA Case for Biblical Egalitarianism: Part Two
Read MoreEgalitarianism. Otherwise known as - being in support of women in ministry and women holding positions of spiritual authority.
Read More[A]fter 25 years or so of pastoring in Advent Christian circles (I only have pastored two Advent Christian Churches in my 39 years of ministry) I began to question if what I had come to believe regarding conditional immortality was indeed Biblical. I left the shire and went on this “kind of scary” adventure and after some time found myself rejecting conditional immortality and embracing the traditional view of eternal conscious torment of the wicked….
Read MoreA couple of years ago, a Christian man desired to make a compelling TV series based on the Gospels. His desire, as I understand it, was to write and produce a show that Christians would want to watch: clean, wholesome, and with good story telling. Fast forward to 2020 and that show is a reality.
Read MoreLast year a prominent nationally known pastor advocated that Christians needed to unhitch themselves from the Old Testament. This set off a firestorm of debate online. His motivation for calling for such action was due to his passion to reach the lost for Jesus Christ and he sees the Old Testament as a hindrance to this objective. He argued that what people need to know, without getting into all the messy details of the Old Testament, is simply that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
Read MoreAs the plane pierced through the clouds, we got our first look at the Mediterranean. The sun glistened off the sea and islands dotted the endless blue tapestry below us. About twenty minutes after that astonishing experience, we saw the Holy Land. I had a feeling deep down in my stomach, one that I hadn’t felt for a long time. I felt at home.
Read MoreAdvent Christians make the right conclusions concerning the state of the dead in the intermediate state, so we humbly believe, though they are at times less concerned about the path they take to get there. One text in particular that has been ignored, swept away, minimized or mistreated time and again is Luke 23:43, Jesus’ iconic words to the thief on the cross, “And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise”(ESV). If there is in fact a rise of the spirit of historic adventism, then its adherents will no doubt be eager fill in the potholes of past mishandlings of the Word of God and set the record straight.
Read MorePastor Corey McLaughlin recently wrote an article which suggested that angels and demons are exceptions to Paul’s statement in 1 Timothy 6:16 that God alone is immortal.1 Much of his argument was particularly focussed on Revelation 20:10. McLaughlin argued that if Satan, the Beast and the False Prophet will be tormented “forever and ever” then at least they must have immortality.
In A Devil of A Dilemma: Part 1, we examined Revelation 20:10 honestly and cogently, but many were not impressed or satisfied with what we termed a sort of “modified conditional immortality view.” In truth, that is not a particularly good name since there is nothing actually modified about it per se, it merely states the main assertion of conditional immortality in plain language and follows it to its logical conclusion.
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