Good News for Seventh-Day Adventists
A Review of "The Awakening Message"
Part 1
| Introduction The time has come to review a body of teaching known for the last decade as the Awakening message. I do this because we need to frankly acknowledge certain errors in our thinking and teaching. Most, if not all, of my readers will acknowledge that I can speak with authority and accuracy about what the Awakening has taught. Although a wide spectrum of doctrinal and interpretational matters have been dealt with, it is a simple matter to state what has been the central thrust of the message. Briefly — Christ is in the most holy place of the sanctuary in heaven. His special purpose for being there is to judge His people and to make a final atonement for them. The door to the place of judgment is open, and God's people are invited, even commanded, to enter by faith. Or to use the language of ancient typology, we are called to gather at the sanctuary because only those who are one with Christ in His final work will be benefited by the last great acts of His mediation. Although God calls us to sanctification as part of our necessary preparation for judgment, no man can enter in certainty on the basis of his sanctification. Even he who has climbed the alpine heights of holy living (having followed all the reforms and come up on every point) will "afflict his soul" because the holiness of his own life falls far short of the infinite righteousness which the law demands. There is but one Man who has a righteousness that can meet the broadest demands of the law. It is the Man Christ Jesus. He is our substitute. He stands in the presence of God for us. He is our righteousness. In Christ, every believer has righteousness enough to stand in the judgment. Well may we and must we come to the sanctuary with a broken and contrite spirit, yet at the same time with freedom and boldness in the blood, sinless life and mediation of our faithful and merciful High Priest (Heb. 10:19-23). God's people may not only face the judgment with confidence through faith in the substitute, but with eager anticipation as well. For it is not so much a judgment of God's people. The Judge will stand up on behalf of His poor, afflicted saints. He who died for them will mightily plead their cause in a time of overwhelming crisis. He will do something for them and for His own sake. He will make "final atonement," or blotting out of sins. He will seal them with the mark of eternal deliverance. God's people do not come to the judgment as sinless men; repentant, forgiven, sanctified overcomers of course, but not sinless. Yet through His work of judgment and final atonement, He will complete His work of grace and bring His people to that condition of perfect sinlessness as will enable them to live without His mediation in the sanctuary during the seven last plagues. (More difficulty has been encountered trying to describe this final work of grace in the saints. At first we called it removing "the scars of sin" from the spiritual heart, or character. Later it became identified as "original sin," the sinful nature—that is, of course, the sinful spiritual nature and not the corruptible physical nature—or even the buried evil of the subconscious mind. Whatever it was, all were aware that living without Christ's intercession after the close of probation called for a special work of grace; and this would be bestowed on God's people through Christ's work of judgment and final atonement.) Thus, the message of judgment is good news—good news because Christ Himself is our righteousness at the judgment bar of God, and good news because it is a judgment for the saints. Therefore we should earnestly desire the judgment and should pray that it might soon come. Of course, other points arose as corollaries of the preceding message, and some of these will be discussed in this paper. But the preceding summary constitutes an accurate digest of what has been the Awakening message. It is now a matter of history that this "sanctuary message" has made no small impact on the minds of thousands of God's people in many parts of the world. For many, it became the most joyful news they had heard since becoming Seventh-day Adventists. For even more, it became something which threatened the church and merited vigorous opposition. I think the following observation can fairly be made, without contradiction, by both parties: This sanctuary agitation arose at a time when the judgment and ministry of Christ in the most holy place was making very little impact on the Adventist consciousness. With the pioneers, these special and distinctive truths were central. By 1950-1960 these things had become a real minor chord in the Advent symphony. The Awakening message once again made these distinctive truths the major chord. The coming judgment of the living seized the attention of many sleepy people. Few of those who have been on the "inside" of the Awakening would try to explain its dynamic impact as mere human excitement. Admittedly, some have been involved in the agitation for want of better reasons; but many could not deny that it brought them into vital contact with the Saviour, relieved them of unnecessary fears and burdens, and revived hope in the glorious completion of God's work in their hearts and in all the world. We all know that the development has been surrounded by arguments and counter-arguments. In the atmosphere of religious controversy, it takes more than an ordinary miracle of divine grace for sinful humanity to be objective. But unless the writer and the reader are willing to be as objective as humanly possible (?), we might just as well stop right here. Many of the arguments surrounding the Awakening finally settled around the matter of the perfecting of the saints. Our critics felt that this was our most vulnerable point. The more vigorously this area was attacked, the more vigorously we defended it. Consequently, not only those who opposed the Awakening, but even those who espoused it, inevitably gravitated to regard this matter of the how, what and when of perfection as the summon bonum of the Awakening. Be that as it may, this writer is persuaded that our understanding of the perfecting of the saints through the final atonement has not been altogether sound.
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