TROUBLERS OF ISRAEL

I did not want to write about the ____ situation. I still don’t. Some things you do not want to touch, for even getting near them makes you feel unclean.

We live in a time when everything is right. Anything goes, especially standards. Do anything you want. The only thing wrong is to say that something is. There are no rules, no standards. Eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we’ll do it again, and there’s no one to stop us. At least, they better not try. Besides, nearly everyone’s doing it anyway. Don’t risk being different; and, above all, don’t say that something might not be right.

Kill the babies and protest if the government tries to eliminate the wanton murderers. Be sure to reelect the politicians and protect the big corporations. States should guard the rights of the homosexuals and accept payoffs from the pornographers and gambling industry. Congress had better remember on which side its bread is buttered. Money and friendships count; morality no longer does. That, in a nutshell, is life today in our secular world.

The churches—including our own—are not doing much better. Think not that the Catholic bishops are the only ones moving problem pastors instead of firing them. We have been doing it for years.

In the 1980s, the late John Adam (a finance attorney based in Memphis who was the first to uncover the Davenport scandal before the bankruptcy occurred in our Davenport Syndrome; see our Financial Tractbook) learned that, after a church officer in the Alabama-Mississippi Conference had led a young Adventist girl into sin, the conference was planning to transfer him out-of-state so he could carry on his practices elsewhere. When Adam threatened them with full exposure, the conference buckled and discharged the vile minister.

There was the Adventist minister in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California who led his associate pastor, a woman, into sin. In order to hold onto her job, for a time she felt she dared not refuse him. But eventually, under pressure from her own conscience and her husband who knew what was happening, she went to the conference office in the hope of getting the senior pastor fired.

The conference president listened to what she had to say—and then fired her!

She went to court over the matter. We have the complete papers here. Fully backing him, the Central California Conference paid all the adulterous senior pastor’s legal expenses, which included a costly, but persuasive attorney.

The judge ruled that, because both sides acknowledged that the adulterous relation had continued for a time, she could not collect damages for being fired because of what her supervising pastor did.

But that ruling meant that the conference fully acknowledged that he was a practicing adulterer, with a track record of over a year!

As soon as the trial ended, the man was transferred to the Southern California Conference, where he is today senior pastor of a major church, the one with the largest number of (active) homosexuals. They do well together, and the conference is happy because the cozy arrangement increases the number of offerings brought into church coffers.

“And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel (1 Kings 18:17)?”

Who was the troubler? The one who blew the whistle or the one actively involved in the sordid lowering of standards? Which one was destroying the nation of Israel’s moral fabric? Which one was trying to save it?

When I started typesetting tracts in the late summer of 1979, as explained in my autobiography (Story of My Life), I only intended to print missionary tracts. But after typesetting sixteen Great Controversy extracts as tracts, five summary ones (now in our Shelter in the Storm, Mark of the Beast, and Final Crisis Foretold) and several other tracts (Out of the Cities, You Can Overcome, etc.), I learned about the Desmond Ford crisis. Aside from discharging him, church leaders were careful to say little in refutation of his errors or in defense of our historic positions. They feared to rock the boat, lest the liberals among us become uncomfortable.

So, five years before Firm Foundation magazine was established, I prepared and sent out over thirty tracts in, what I called, my Firm Foundation Series; all of it was against Fordite errors (see our 320-page New Theology Tractbook).

As the years passed, there were other matters to be discussed, including:

Our college administrators were protecting new theology teachers. And, in October 1984, the General Conference got the Annual Council to pass an “academic freedom” ruling, permitting our teachers to do pretty much as they pleased (Theological Freedom, WM–110).

Our conferences were protecting the new theology pastors who were graduating from our colleges while the North American Division was busy, hailing faithful believers into court in order to destroy their small congregations (see our various Trademark books).

Our General Conference was busily sending “personal representatives” to the World Council of Churches headquarters, in Geneva (see our Seventh-day Advent­ist/Vatican Ecumenical Involvement: Book 1: History, 80-pages, and Book 2: Documents), and working out secret agreements.

The notorious secret agreement over keeping quiet about the Sabbath proclamation, which occurred in the late 1990s, was one of the worst (Secret Interchurch Planning Agreement [WM–906] and Update on the Secret Interchurch Planning Agreement [WM–914]). We are now living with it, and are only beginning to feel the full brunt of its effects. That agreement was one of the causes of the current revolt among our laity in South America (see our “explosion” tracts). Leadership had carried out so many compromises with Catholicism—that our laymen decided to begin the open evangelism and proclaiming our historic beliefs to the world, teachings which church leaders wanted hidden.

All levels of our denomination have changed because our mores have changed. The Word of God is no longer the authority in the church. We had entered an era of no rules, no morals, no standards. Anything can be done as long as nothing negative is said about leadership. (See pages 3 and 4 for recent examples.)

I did not ask for the job I now have, but I was willing to accept it. Am I now to be quiet? Does not the world need more whistle-blowers rather than less?

There is no one in our nation able to stop the gambling interests. The moral foundations are gone. As far as the legislators are concerned, it is just a matter of who offers the biggest bribe. Nothing can stop the homos. They have the money on their side.

Ellen White predicted that the civilized world would be brought to its knees because Protestantism had thrown out the Ten Commandments. And so it has happened. A terrible condition of things has set in.

There are no longer moral standards, and whistle-blowers are treated like dirt. A similar condition exists in our own denomination. Those of you who have dared to speak up about the growing liberalism in your local church well-know what I am talking about.

“If you are a church worker, do as you want; we’ll protect you. And woe be to those who protest. We have a word for them: They are troublemakers and will be dealt with.”

Every organization knows that whistle-blowers are a danger to their security and authority. And no organization will blow the whistle on another one. They want to live together in peace. “Don’t tell what I’m doing wrong, and I won’t tell what you’re doing wrong.”

Yet it is the whistle-blowers who alone are able to slow the crumbling state of affairs in our nation and in our denomination. And even if they do not succeed, at least they did what they should do. It is better to do right and suffer and die for it than to go down to the grave in self-preserving silence.

In our culture today, it takes a crazy man to cry “standards” when things are sliding downward. Yet that is exactly what is needed. In past ages, people were burned at the stake for doing it. Do not expect roses and back-patting today for telling the truth about what is going on.

 “And he answered, I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Baalim” (1 Kings 18:18).

 Who are the troublers in our church? Those who are keeping the commandments or those who are forsaking them? Those who obey the standards laid down in the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy or those who flaunt them and, by their example, lead still others into sin?   

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