The Impending Conflict
SECOND QUARTER 2024
SABBATH SCHOOL INSIGHT #11
JUNE 15, 2024
“THE IMPENDING CONFLICT”
Our lesson begins with an excellent statement regarding the purpose of this week’s lesson, and some of the key issues in the end-time “Impending Conflict:”
“The aim of this week’s lesson is to reveal the coming conflict over worship. Satan will challenge God’s authority by attempting to undermine God’s law. Specifically, the Sabbath will become the center of a global conflict over worship. Satan hates the Sabbath because he hates the Creator. He will use coercion, pressure, and force to break our commitment to Christ. There will be a collision of beliefs over the true and false day of worship. God’s final appeal is an appeal to faithfulness to Christ despite persecution, an economic boycott, imprisonment, and a death decree. This week’s study emphasizes Jesus’ strength to take us through earth’s final conflict.”
Repeatedly in the book of Revelation, particularly in the chapters we’re focusing on in Revelation 12, 13, and 14, the Bible tells us the critical role worship will play in the impending conflict. What is worship? What is God hoping for when He calls for worship? Is worship fundamentally defined by where and when we attend religious services?
Astonishingly, the Bible not infrequently tells of people who think they are engaged in the worship of God but are actually worshiping God’s enemy!
Jesus, when speaking to the Pharisees, who were deeply and devoutly religious, and who believed they were worshiping Yahweh, the God of Scripture and Jewish history, and who worshiped on the right day, paid tithe, believed in the advent, and followed health reform, but were told that they were in fact followers or worshipers of the devil!
“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do” (John 8:44, NKJV, emphasis supplied).
Jesus also describes a group of His followers, or worshipers, who were extremely active in His service – but He didn’t know them – He had no relationship with them!
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” (Matt. 7:21-23).
How is it possible to believe you are worshipping Yahweh, the God of the Bible, and even performing miraculous works in His name, and in reality be following Satan? The receivers of the “Mark of the Beast” in Revelation chapters 13 and 14 are religious. They are worshiping, in their conscious mind, the God of the Bible. They believe Jesus is their Savior and died on the cross for them – similar to the Christian church of the dark ages.
We get a vital clue in a verse to which our lesson calls our attention in Monday’s lesson – John 16:2-4: “They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service. And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me. But these things I have told you, that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them.”
Notice several vital points. Jesus finishes by telling us to remember what He is saying here, because when it happens, we will see it for what it is. But His fundamental point is that religious persecution (Rev.13:15-17), comes from people who BELIEVE they are serving and worshiping God, but in reality, they don’t actually know Jesus or His Father!
Think about this! We can look back in history and see this phenomenon, and thus know that it can happen in the prophetic future. It is actually possible to be working and studying and giving and sacrificing in a religious movement that believes itself to be working for the God of heaven but is actually working for the Devil!
How is that possible, you ask? Jesus tells us how, “Because they have not known the Father nor Me.” At a most fundamental level, all the religious forms, activities, efforts, rituals, donations and energy expended will actually be promoting Satan’s kingdom and opposing God’s kingdom, if we don’t actually know God in character. Do we know God? Do we LIKE Him? Do we LOVE Him? Are our thoughts and emotions and conversations and homes wrapped up in friendship and honor towards Him? Do we feel awkward talking about Him, or do we love to speak of Him? Are tithes and offerings an obligation and requirement rather than a blessing in our inner hearts?
“The man who attempts to keep the commandments of God from a sense of obligation merely--because he is required to do so--will never enter into the joy of obedience. He does not obey. When the requirements of God are accounted a burden because they cut across human inclination, we may know that the life is not a Christian life. True obedience is the outworking of a principle within. It springs from the love of righteousness, the love of the law of God. The essence of all righteousness is loyalty to our Redeemer. This will lead us to do right because it is right--because right doing is pleasing to God.” — Ellen G. White, Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 97, emphasis supplied here and onward.
The Sabbath-Sunday controversy, which will be at the center of the “impending conflict” as time comes to an end, will ultimately be a difference of two understandings of the character of God, and our relationship to Him based on our view of His character. Those who identify openly or through fear with the Sunday movement, will do so from a picture of God whose primary attribute is power used to control. Those who identify with the seventh-day Sabbath movement, will do so based on a picture of a God whose primary attributes are love, humility, respect, and freedom. And these two movements will reflect the picture of the God that they worship. By beholding, we all are being changed.
In Revelation 14, God’s people follow the self-sacrificing Lamb wherever He goes (Rev.14:4). God is not calling our attention to baby sheep in this passage. Our attention is being called to the cross. God’s people will follow the cross – Jesus the Lamb, the embodiment of the principle of self-sacrifice for others, wherever they are led. Rather than attempting to force others to follow their religious dictates via coercion, they will appeal to the hearts and minds of others through a revelation of self-giving love, the cross principle, in their own lives.
Notice how these two different methods of operation are brought out in one of the passages in The Great Controversy that we are to read for this week’s lesson:
“God never forces the will or the conscience; but Satan's constant resort--to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce--is compulsion by cruelty. Through fear or force he endeavors to rule the conscience and to secure homage to himself. To accomplish this, he works through both religious and secular authorities, moving them to the enforcement of human laws in defiance of the law of God.” — Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 591.
God never forces the will or the conscience, and neither will those who follow Jesus, the cross, the Lamb, wherever He goes (Rev.14:4). By beholding, they have been changed!
May the Sabbath move in our hearts from being an “obligation merely” to “an outworking of a principle within.” May the Sabbath be appreciated because we have a “love of righteousness, the love of the law of God.” We can violate the Sabbath in two ways – the wrong day, or the wrong understanding and experience of the Sabbath. And the second violation is much worse than the first! As we approach “the impending conflict,” the right day and the right understanding/experience will come together. And all who have used this probationary time to understand the character of the Lamb, and learned to love to follow Him, will rejoice in the Sabbath as the sign of the beauty God’s heat and mind, and His worthiness to be worshipped.
“It is the darkness of misapprehension of God that is enshrouding the world. Men are losing their knowledge of His character. It has been misunderstood and misinterpreted. At this time a message from God is to be proclaimed, a message illuminating in its influence and saving in its power. His character is to be made known. Into the darkness of the world is to be shed the light of His glory, the light of His goodness, mercy, and truth. . . The last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world, is a revelation of His character of love. The children of God are to manifest His glory. In their own life and character they are to reveal what the grace of God has done for them.” — Ellen G. White, Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 415.
~Bob Hunsaker
An additional resource: Christ and the Sabbath by W. W. Prescott
PDF:
https://ellenwhiteaudio.org/
Epub:
https://ellenwhiteaudio.org/