ARE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES REAL?
FOOD SWAPS FOR BETTER HEALTH
SIGNSTIMES.COM • JANUARY 2021
OF THE TIMES8
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EDITOR’S NOTE WITH MARVIN MOORE
IS RELIGION IRRELEVANT?
Perhaps you've heard the word nones recently. It refers to people who are nonretigious.
In fact, nones are the fastest-growing religious group in America today, which means that the number of those who claim to belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque is diminishing, and this is especially true of Christianity. Many of these nones probably abandoned religion because they felt hurt by the religious organization to which they belonged. And that's unfortunate. It tells those of us who are religious that we need to more be careful how we relate to the people in our congregations.
However, the good news is that many nones will tell you that they are very spiritual. Probably the majority
say that they pray or meditate often. And I'm glad to know that. I hope to see many of these people in God's kingdom someday. But the question still remains, is religion irrelevant? Does it have no legitimate place in today's world? Jim Berglund addresses this question in his article "Spiritual but Not Religious?" which begins on page 32.
I hope you find it helpful! ®
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2 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
IN THIS ISSUE JANUARY 2021
COVER
32 Spiritual but Not Religious?
Can we be one without being the other? And do we have to choose between them?
FEATURES
6 Where Did Life Come From?
Are we the product of chance or of choice-and does it matter?
12 10 Ways to Win Within
Ten ways that you can Live Life to the fullest
20 Selfish Mind Sickness
And its cure
24 Are Near-Death Experiences Real?
Scientific and biblical answers to an intriguing phenomenon 38 Jesus Went to Church
He didn't let the hypocrites stop Him.
44 Can We Believe the Gospels?
Some say yes; others no. Who's right?
52 What About Unanswered Prayers?
It's easy for us to think that God has abandoned us!
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
58 You Are Needed!
Your church needs your unique talents! Are you willing to make them available?
64 What Will People Think?
And does it even matter?
COLUMNS
4 Religion in the News 18 Living With Children
Picky Eaters 50 Health Matters
Food Swaps for Better Health 62 The Editor Answers Your Bible Questions
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FREEPIK
RELIGION IN THE NEWS
AS QUOTED	RELIGIOUS EQUALITY FOR COLLEGES
“I'm sitting there as a grown adult, almost in tears."
-Kentucky National Guard Specialist Dan Otterson, who felt deeply moved when a five-year-old boy asked to pray with him; when Otterson agreed, the child followed up with a passionate prayer for the protection and safety of “these police officers."
MUSLIMS ON WHETHER A CONFLICT EXISTS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION
4 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
In recent years, some secular colleges and universities in the United States have restricted the privileges of religious organizations on their campuses. For example, in order to receive federal funding, some colleges and universities have demanded that religious organizations allow anyone to serve as officers, which means that an atheist could presumably become president of a conservative religious club. The US Department of Education recently ruled that it can cut federal funding to colleges and universities that do not provide religious groups with the same rights and benefits as other campus groups, including the use of campus facilities to hold their meetings. -Voice of America
CHURCH HELPS ERASE MEDICAL DEBT
RIP Medical Debt helps low-income people resolve their medical bills by buying the patient's debt and paying it off for pennies on the dollar. Adam and Keira Small-combe, lead pastors of the VIVE Church in Palo Alto, California, challenged their church to raise money to donate to RIP. The response was overwhelming, and $100,000 was donated within a short time. RIP used the VIVE Church's $100,000 to eliminate almost $20 million of medical debt for needy people in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago. The church is thrilled with the result of their donation and is "looking for more opportunities to serve communities in need." -CBN News
Source: Pew Research Center
RCMP BOOTED FROM FIRST NATIONS SUN DANCE
Partway through 2020's coronavirus pandemic, a group of about 35 First Nations people in Canada were holding a sun dance "to support people during COVID-19 and to empower scientists" to find a treatment for the disease.
Suddenly, a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) showed up and tried to break up the ceremony. The reason? The people were congregating and dancing without practicing social distancing or wearing masks. Chief Bobby Cameron (pictured) ordered the RCMP to leave their territory. He said, "These are First Nations lands. This is Indian land. Stay off our lands unless you are invited.... Our ceremonies, our sun dances, our sweat lodges, our pipe ceremonies will continue ... no matter what any government or what the RCMP may try to say or do." He pointed out that traditional ceremonies cannot be performed online the way some church services are-National Post
ANCIENT SEAL FOUND IN JERUSALEM
Nine years ago, archaeologists began excavating a parking lot in Old Jerusalem. The dig has yielded many artifacts dating from the time of Solomon's temple to the time of Christ and beyond. Recently, a seal made from a semiprecious stone was found in the rubble of a building from the period of Solomon's temple, more than 2,500 years ago. A woman's name, Elihana bat Gael, was inscribed on the seal. Artifacts from the period of Solomon's temple are rare; seals from that time are even more rare; and rarest of all are seals bearing the name of a woman. The script on the seal is similar to Ammonite scripts of the time, which suggests that the owner of the seal came from the kingdom of Ammon, which had great influence
in Jerusalem during the period of the seal -Haaretz.com
ETHIOPIAN CHRISTIANS KILLED
During the past several months, at least 500 Christians have been killed in Ethiopia's Oromia Region.
The slaughter is being carried out by members of Qeerroo, which is made up of young Muslim men. Some of them had lists of Christians who were especially active in supporting the ministries of their churches.
In some cases, children were forced to watch as their parents were murdered with machetes. One Christian was beheaded because he refused to remove a thread from around his neck that was a sign of his baptism. And in some places, the police stood by and watched. -Christian Post
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021	5
THESTAR.COM
6 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
According to Hollywood, there’s no shortage of alien life in the universe. Unfortunately, the aliens are usually presented as hostile to humanity. In fact, flicks such as War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Independence Day depict cosmic creatures that threaten humanity’s very existence.
On the other hand, throughout history, some thinkers, philosophers, and even scientists have taken a completely different spin on the question of the relationship between life on Earth and life in outer space. Instead of imagining aliens as hostile,
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
Several theories have been suggested for where life on our planet originated. The two most common are the scientific and the biblical.
BY CLIFFORD GOLDSTEIN
DIMITRIS66—GETTY
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even seeking to wipe out humanity, they believe that alien life could have been what first seeded life on our planet eons ago. Thus, far from being hostile, alien life would be quite friendly to us.
What’s behind this theory, and is there anything to it?
seeds from space
The idea that life on Earth originated from outer space is called panspermia— from the Greek words pan, which means “all,” and spermia, which means “seed.” It’s basically the theory that not only does alien life exist, but it also can spread throughout the cosmos and seed other worlds. This seeding can happen through microbes in asteroids or other cosmic debris that lands on planets, and fortuitously gets life going there. Or, as some have argued, perhaps aliens came to our planet purposely and started life here—and who knows how many times they did the same thing on other worlds.
One of the twentieth century’s most famous scientists, Francis Crick (who with James Watson discovered the double helix of a DNA molecule), proposed just such an idea. He called it directed panspermia. Though a militant atheist, Crick argued that life on Earth was just too complex to have formed here by mere chance. “An honest man,” he said, “armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the
The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.
conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.”
Hence, he proposed a solution: life itself was first brought to Earth in spaceships billions of years ago by more highly evolved creatures. “As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms,” he wrote, “we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet.”
Thus, one of the last century’s greatest scientific minds argues that, perhaps, aliens in spaceships first brought life to Earth, which explains how you and I also got here.
a cosmic solution to a very earthly problem
Others think there could be something to the panspermia idea but reject the directed part. They believe that alien life could have been transported through space by comets, asteroids,
8 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
or meteorites by accident. Following some sort of interplanetary collision or explosion, microbes hitchhiked rides on the debris left over from the collision. This is called ballistic panspermia. Then, managing to survive the rigors of travel in outer space, these microbes were hurled across the cosmos until they landed on other planets, including ours.
Hence, they were the seeds that happened to take root by chance, survive, multiply, and evolve into what we see today. Therefore, according to this theory, everything from fungi to turnips to the Boston Symphony Orchestra had their origins in microbes from other planets.
Even proponents of panspermia will admit that their theory is highly speculative. But it would solve what many evolutionary biologists still consider
the most troublesome problem of their theory—the explanation of the origin of life on Earth. How could the first life to form on our planet have arisen from nonliving material, as the most common evolutionary theory teaches? This question remains unanswered. The panspermia idea (whether directed, ballistic, or any other version), if true, would, in one fell swoop, give a cosmic solution to what has been a very earthly problem.
Allan Hills 84001
Some scientists claim that we already have evidence for alien microbes reaching Earth. In 1996, headlines splashed around the world about a meteorite found in Antarctica a decade earlier, called Allan Hills 84001, that showed evidence of life from Mars. The theory stated that the rock was blown off the
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021	9
BAONA—GETTY
Martian surface by a meteorite impact 4.5 billion years ago, and it landed on our world billions of years later. The announcement of the possible discovery of what would have been extraterrestrial life caused quite an international stir, even prompting Bill Clinton, then US president, to make a televised announcement to mark the event.
But critics quickly pointed to many problems with that specific interpretation of the evidence found in the meteorite. Before long, papers had been written, arguing that the strange features on the rock were mere leftovers of unique geochemistry and that nothing on the meteorite showed microbiological features. To this day, scientists debate the question, even though the consensus is that Allan Hills 84001, however interesting, didn’t carry evidence of extraterrestrial life from Mars.
What might have been deemed a powerful example of how panspermia could have happened doesn’t seem to present any evidence for such a thing at all.
begging the question
The idea of panspermia is not a twentieth- or twenty-first-century notion. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 400 years before Christ, promulgated the theory that life could have started elsewhere in the cosmos before coming here. In the 1700s, the idea of panspermia appeared in the writings of a French natural historian named Benoit
The Creator Himself came to Earth thousands of years ago and created human beings in a special, intimate act.
de Maillet, who
claimed that life on Earth was seeded by germs from space that fell into the oceans. Others promoted the idea as well, including the famous Lord Kelvin, who wrote in 1871 that “we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If at the present instant no life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.”
Of course, besides being highly speculative, the panspermia theory simply begs the question about life’s origins. Even if humans had found evidence that life on Earth was started by life originating somewhere else in the cosmos, how did that cosmic life itself get started? Whether ET or some microbe riding in the belly of a comet,
10 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES -JANUARY 2021
life is very complex and thus needs an explanation for its existence. The panspermia theory only pushes the question of life’s origins further back. It doesn’t come close to answering it.
of maybe it's right?
On the other hand, maybe there’s something to panspermia after all. Francis Crick might have been closer to the truth than he realized. According to the Bible (and Crick), life did not originate here on Earth, in and of itself. Instead, it was purposely formed (as Crick argued) by a nonearthly power (again, a la Crick).
Instead of aliens in spaceships or microbes in comets, the Bible teaches that God Himself was the One who created life on Earth. The first chapter of Genesis depicts our “extraterrestrial” origins: “Then God said, ‘Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.’ . . . Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image’ ” (Genesis 1:20, 26, NKJV*).
This idea is repeated all through the Bible. “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (Job 12:7-9).
And here’s what the psalmist wrote: “Know that the Lord, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we
ourselves” (Psalm 100:3, NKJV).
In fact, the Creator Himself came to Earth thousands of years ago and created human beings in a special, intimate act. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7, NKJV). However this special act took place, and whatever grand mysteries were involved in it, this account clearly shows the “extraterrestrial” origin of human life on Earth.
Thus, in ways that they couldn’t imagine, and many would be loath to admit, proponents of the panspermia theory, including Francis Crick, are right after all. Life didn’t originate here on Earth. Instead, as the theory teaches, life on Earth began by an intelligent Life from somewhere else in the cosmos.
The good news, however, is that this original life was not mere microbes in asteroids or even aliens who seeded Earth and then took off into the depths of outer space. Instead, the biblical version of panspermia puts our origins in the work of a loving God who not only created us but, as the Cross shows, redeemed us as well. ®
Clifford Goldstein is the editor of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's daily Bible study guide and a frequent contributor to Signs of the Times®. He lives near Washington, DC, in Maryland.
* Bible verses marked NKJV are from the New King James Version®, copyright© 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021	11
You'll find these principles for personal spiritual growth challenging because they're right on target!
BY TAMMY DARLING
12 SIGNS OF THE TIMES -JANUARY 2021
We all want to live so that we can be and do all that we were created to be and do. But to accomplish this, we must understand that every outward word and action begins from within. Our thoughts and our beliefs—these are the things that determine the direction our lives will take. In short, the inner life determines the outer life. To be all that we were created to be, we must first win within.
IVe been on a quest for inner health and healing in my own life, and therefore, I’ve been seeking ways to win within so that I can ultimately win without. The following are 10 ways that we all can win within.
1PUT GOD FIRST
• The days I wake up and hit the ground running are nothing like the peaceful and joy-filled days that I start off with the Lord. That’s not to say that I don’t experience problems on those days that I put God first, because I do.
But by starting my day with God, I am better able to continue focusing on Him throughout the day. When something goes wrong, I turn to Him immediately for guidance instead of reacting out of frustration or even fear.
By putting God first, I can maintain my joy and peace throughout the day, no matter what comes my way.
ways |to win
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ACCEPT YOURSELF
• How many of us can honestly say that we accept ourselves, we re OK with who we are right now, and we re on the way to where we want to be? I believe those who genuinely do accept themselves are in the minority.
Learning to love and accept ourselves, flaws and all, is so very important. A lack of acceptance creates an atmosphere of negativity and insecurity, where we lack the courage to take risks and be our true selves with others. But when we give ourselves grace and mercy, we re able to easily pick ourselves back up when we fall—without beating ourselves up. We can then continue moving forward instead of allowing setbacks to hold us back.
REFUSE TO HATE
• The amount of hate I see in today s world is mind-boggling. And yet I know I am not immune. There was a time when I hated a particular person with such all-consuming passion that I thought of little else. I lost sleep. I had no peace or joy. By holding on to hate, I was destroying my own life.
To win within, I knew I had to let go of the hatred. I handed that person over to God and began to concentrate on thinking about good things that line up with Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable . . . think about such things.” What a huge difference this made! I realized that I had a choice in the matter, and
I realized that I had a choice in the matter.
14 SIGNS O^^WfMES • JANUARY 2021
I didn’t have to hate this person. By refusing to hate, he didn’t win—I did.
4 FORGIVE FREELY
• As I handed this person over to God, I also had to forgive him. But he wasn’t the only one I needed to forgive. As my quest for healing and wholeness continued, I realized there were quite a few people I needed to forgive. Forgiving others is one of the most freeing ways we can win within.
And just to be clear, forgiving others doesn’t mean they’re getting away with anything. It does mean that we’re now free from the hold they had over us. Now that I’ve experienced the freedom forgiveness brings, I regularly do a self-check to see whether there’s anyone else I need to forgive.
5 AIM FOR EXCELLENCE
• In a society that settles for mediocrity, I want to aim for excellence. I don’t believe for one moment that God wants us to do just enough to get by. He wants us to go the extra mile and stretch ourselves beyond what we think we can do into what He can do through us.
Aiming for excellence is not about being better than everyone else. It’s about recognizing that God gave us gifts and talents, and we need to have the desire to use them well for His glory and honor. I want to be the best me I can—for Him.
5 SET BOUNDARIES
• I recently set boundaries with a toxic person in my life. For years, this person spewed his own issues over me to the point of being abusive. I finally said, “No more.” Since setting boundaries, I’m no longer affected mentally or emotionally by this person.
Boundaries are not walls. Walls keep people out; boundaries allow people in but within the context of healthy conditions. Once this person realized that I would no longer allow him to treat me the way he was, he backed off. While things still aren’t perfect, I’m now treated with much greater respect.
7 GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO HAVE FUN • Having fun is not a sin, but I can assure you that I used to think it was. I actually felt guilty if I took time to do something I enjoyed, even if it was something beneficial, such as
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 15
reading. And to this day, I’m not sure where I got such an idea.
God created work, but He’s also the Author of pleasure and joy. For instance, because He is beauty, we may seek the beautiful in His creation. I’ve come to enjoy taking my camera with me on walks to see what beauty I can capture in nature. Life isn’t all about work. Give yourself permission to have fun and enjoy the abundant life you’ve been given.
LOVE, EVEN WHEN YOU AREN'T LOVED BACK
•	I used to get discouraged and even borderline depressed when I wasn’t feeling the love in my life from those who claimed to love me. I craved it. I depended on it. And when I didn’t get it in the form of more than mere words, I was a miserable mess and would withhold my own love as a result.
Now I’m learning to love, even when I’m not loved in return. Jesus never said that we should love others only if and when they love us back. No, we are called to love. Period. He even told us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-45)! As I increasingly depend on Christ for the love I need, I also love others by serving them and sometimes by just being there. Love is action, and so I will act in love toward others, even when it isn’t given to me in return.
SPEAK TRUTH TO YOURSELF DAILY
•	If negative self-talk were a profession, I’d have a master’s degree and my own internal talk show. As
it stands, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t speak negatively about myself. Old habits are hard to break, but I’m determined to crush this one. If I don’t, I can’t possibly win within; it’s that crucial.
To break a bad habit, you must replace it with a good one. Therefore, I’m training myself to speak truth daily. I tell myself who God says I am. I keep a list of positive affirmations and repeat them to myself daily. And when I mess up, I’m learning to encourage myself instead of beating myself up about it. Words bring life or death—victory or defeat. I choose life and victory.
MAKE TIME FOR WHAT'S TRULY • IMPORTANT
If I want to win within, I must prioritize. Part of prioritizing is knowing what’s truly important and what I can let go of. When all’s said and done, will I be pleased with how I spent my time and talents? More important, will Jesus?
I’m currently setting new goals and prioritizing my time and relationships. I’m putting God first, where He belongs. And I’m making sure the little foxes don’t spoil the vine (Song of Solomon 2:15). Because when everything is in proper alignment, I win within—and without. 0
Tammy Darling is the author of 1,400 published articles and two books: And She Danced and While We Wait: Devotions for the Adopting Parent. She writes from her home in rural Pennsylvania.
16 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
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People have a lot to say about it. Some even claim to have been there. Using Scripture as a guide, the book, Is Heaven for Real?answers questions such as: Is it an actual place? When do we get to go? What will heaven be like? What about hell? How long is forever?
FOR RUI?
HEAVEN
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Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said there is no idea so bizarre that a philosopher has not advanced it. These days, the philosophers in question are psychologists, and the bizarre ideas are their explanations of human behavior. Said explanations are bizarre because psychologists (trust me on this, I am one) wear, as a rule, ideological blinders that prevent them from accurately understanding what makes humans tick. Unable to see human behavior for what it truly represents, they justify their existence by inventing and marketing diagnoses, as if giving something a name is equivalent to understanding and knowing what to do about it.
The latest manifestation of this fraud
is avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, or ARFID, formerly known as picky eating. Lots of university health centers and independent practitioners offer therapy for people of all ages whose parents nevertaught them that it is rude not to eat what someone else, including one's mother, has taken the time to prepare and serve.
One psychologist points out that most of the ARFID sufferers she sees eat the same stuff: macaroni and cheese, pizza, chicken nuggets, french fries, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Lots of folks will recognize those foods as the very ones they wanted their parents to serve at every meal. I know I did. Staring at several tablespoons of steamed broccoli for three hours before I decided I
18 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021

WITH CHILDREN
wanted to get up from the table was one of the most therapeutic experiences of my childhood. My next therapy session involved brussels sprouts. That session lasted only minutes.
Now, instead of picky eating being narcissistic and just plain rude, it is a psychological disorder that some people have. ARFID has become big business, mind you. Search online for ARFID therapy, and you will discover just how big. Some of the therapy programs for picky eating are residential and cost more than what most people earn in a good year.
One psychologist, quoted in an online article, claims that picky eaters have control issues. That's right. They have control over whether they eat broccoli and brussels sprouts or not. They believe that their feelings represent universal truths to which everyone else should genuflect.
A true story: once upon a time, a child became infested with ARFID demons at an early age. He would begin gagging and sobbing at the very sight of a food that caused his tongue to feel even slightly less than fully happy. His parents-bless their hearts-catered to the ARFID demons by feeding him only macaroni and cheese, french fries, and fried chicken nuggets.
Sure enough, the ARFID demons grew increasingly clamorous.
By the time the parents sought my advice, the child was certifiably insufferable when
it came to food. He was well on his way to becoming an adult whom no one wanted to be around if the event involved eating. I told the parents (a) to feed him only what they were eating but in half-teaspoon portions, (b) set a timer for 15 minutes, (c) put him immediately to bed if he didn't clean his plate before the time expired, and (d) let him have seconds of anything on his plate if he ate everything within the time allotted. Within a week, the ARFID demons had fled-demons cannot tolerate common sense-and said child was eating everything on his plate and asking for seconds.
My parents invented that therapy, by the way. It costs nothing. ®
Family psychologist John Rosemond is the director of the Center for Affirmative Parenting in Gastonia, North Carolina. For information about his talks and workshops, contact Tracy Owens-Jahn at tracyjahn@ sbcglobal.net or (817) 295-1751.
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 19
selfish mind sickness
No matter who you are or how self-centered your mind has become, know this: you have been sozo-ed (read the article for the definition).
BRENT WHITTAKER
*tte, ,
Sitting atop your shoulders is the most complex object in the universe—your brain. It contains approximately 86 billion neurons, each connecting to 10,000 other brain cells that are constantly reshaping themselves in a process known as neuroplasticity. This milieu of ever-changing organic matter is organized into sophisticated functional areas linked by numerous neuronal pathways.
One of these areas is the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It plays
a pivotal role in controlling higher mental functions, such as voluntary movement, concentration, planning, emotional expression, judgment, and decision-making.
Scientists know that the frontal lobe executes these functions, but they don’t know how it executes them. The brain that we can touch and see somehow produces something we can’t touch or see. The organic creates something inorganic—in fact, something immaterial, the mind.
20 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
me first
A cursory assessment of the nature of the human mind accentuates a glaringly obvious problem: we all have an innate, intrinsic disposition to serve self
In his groundbreaking 1864 novel, Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea .” In other words, I don’t care what happens to anyone else so long as I get what I want. Sadly, this is too often true of each of our minds.
Thus, the reality of consciousness— our ability to feel, perceive, experience, and make choices—seems tarnished by the desire to serve self.
The Bible makes an audacious claim. It states that we are all in need of saving. Romans 3:23 says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (NKJV*). In other words, our condition as humans is flawed, fallen, and infected with sin, which means that we need saving. Saving from what? From our self-centered minds.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 21
ELNUR—ADOBE STOCK
44
the cure
The Bible illuminates how salvation is achieved. Ephesians 2:8, 9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” This is the defining feature of the gospel. The transliterated Greek word for “saved” is sozo, which literally means “to save a suffering one,” “to heal,” or “to make whole.” The Bible asserts that salvation from our self-centered minds is not achieved through anything we do ourselves. No amount of internal focus, mindful chastisement, or rigid disciplinary action can mend the selfish minds we possess. All of these strategies center on what morally broken humans can do to fix themselves.
Jesus transforms our selfish, sin-sick minds by turning our focus from ourselves to others. The Bible admonishes us in Philippians 2:5 to “let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
Christian writer Ellen G. White described Jesus’ humility and selfless death on behalf of humanity. Jesus, she said, “was treated as we deserve, that we might be treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our sins, in which He had no share, that we might be justified by His righteousness, in which we had no share. He suffered the death which was ours, that we might receive the life which was His. ‘With His stripes we are healed.’ ”
Infinite grace, unutterable descent—God Himself came down
I noticed a change beginning to take place within myself.
from heaven, became a human being, and lived a perfect life of selfless love. At the time of His death, He experienced eternal separation from God, then rose from this death and ascended to heaven, victorious on your behalf and mine.
the response
Jesus decided that He would save humanity at any cost to Himself, and when we understand this, it leads us to repent of our sins that caused Him such pain. Romans 12:2 says that we are “transformed by the renewing of . .. [our] mind.” Jesus takes our hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:25—27), and we begin to live for others. This is the experience of salvation—the act of healing that turns our minds around so that we attribute all of our transformation and self-improvement from ourselves to God.
I grew up in the religion of my God-fearing parents and, like the apostle Paul, could have boasted of my birthright and religiosity. I attended
22 SIGNS OFTHETIMES* JANUARY2021
church faithfully, sang songs sincerely, and tried to do the right thing in my own strength. Yet Jesus was not my reality. I was not experiencing salvation.
In late high school, I decided to put Him to the test and committed myself to reading the Bible for one hour a day. Initially, waking up at six in the morning was tedious and unfulfilling, but I persisted. As I discovered the truths of the Bible and started each day with prayer, I noticed a change beginning to take place within myself. Jesus became my best Friend and Confidant. Those close to me also noticed a change in my behavior and demeanor.
Through no effort of my own, I became a different person. Jesus sozo-ed me. He continues to heal my self-centered mind and make me whole.
marvel of marvels
In his allegorical tale The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis writes of Emeth, a devoted follower of the demon-god Tash. Toward the end of the book, Emeth speaks to the royal subjects of Narnia about his encounter with Aslan (Jesus) in Aslans country (heaven):
“I went over much grass and many flowers and among all kinds of wholesome and delectable trees till lo! in a narrow place between two rocks there came to meet me a great Lion. The speed of him was like the ostrich, and his size was an elephant’s; his hair was like pure gold and the brightness of his eyes, like gold that is liquid in the furnace. He was more terrible than the
Flaming Mountain of Lagour, and in beauty he surpassed all that is in the world, even as the rose in bloom surpasses the dust of the desert. Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be. . . [the scum] of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. . . .
“And since then, O Kings and Ladies, . . . my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me, Beloved, me who am but as a dog.”
Like Emeth, sin has plagued you and me all the days of our lives. Too often we have served the false god of self. Whatever you have done, whatever sins you have committed, and however self-centered the mind inside your intricate brain has become, Jesus died to sozo you—to heal you from the sickness of selfishness. And the marvel of marvels, dear sinner, is this: He calls you beloved. ®
BrentWhittakerisa medicalstudentstudying in Port Macquarie, Australia. His article first appeared in Adventist Record magazine and is used by permission.
* All Bible texts in this article are from the New King James Version.
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 23
24 SIGNS OF THE TIMES‘JANUARY 2021
Thousands of people who have come close to death have reported out-of-body experiences. Is this proof of an afterlife—or is it something else?
On our farm in South Dakota, there was a covered cattle watering tank. My brothers would often challenge each other to enter an opening at one end of the tank and then emerge from an opening at the other end. One afternoon, when I was five, I was shamed into trying it. Inside the tank, I lost my way. The next three minutes seemed like hours. I struggled frantically for the opening, banging my head and hands against the sides and the top of the covered, water-filled tank. My head and lungs seemed to be exploding, and I became frantic as I realized that I might be drowning. Then, just as suddenly, the whole perception of what was happening changed. A tremendous sense of pleasant calm swept through me. I remember clearly thinking, lam drowning, but I was not afraid.”
SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021 25
AETB—GETTY
BY REINDER BRUINSMA
44
Lawrence Den Besten, a professor of surgery, recalled this experience during a speech in Pasadena, California. He went on to describe what he experienced during the short time that he was near death.
He found himself lying in his coffin, and he saw those who passed by for the viewing.
“Suddenly,” he said, “I became aware that I was being held by my feet. My head was pounding terribly, and I was coughing. For forty-seven years, I have reflected on these memories. Now I realize . . . that I was going through a typical experience of dying.”
In 2015, a movie titled 90 Minutes in Heaven was released. It was presented as the true story of Don Piper, the victim of a horrific car crash who was pronounced dead at the scene but was revived later in the hospital. Piper told those around him that he’d had a near-death experience in which he’d seen God in an overwhelming bright light in the middle of the heavenly Jerusalem. Piper saw and heard the voices of many fellow Christians who also were on their way to their heavenly home. After recovering from his injuries, he began to talk about his experiences, and he assured others that heaven is real.
These are just two of thousands of similar tales. Between 1975 and 2005, more than 3,500 cases of such experiences were reviewed by researchers.
Between 10 and 20 percent of people who have come close to death have had near-death experiences.
According to nine contemporary studies from four different countries, between 10 and 20 percent of people who have come close to death have had near-death experiences (NDEs). Small wonder that a distinct discipline of NDE studies has developed. We are not dealing with an insignificant fringe phenomenon but with something of major global significance.
describing NDEs
What do we make of these experiences? Do thousands of men and women worldwide, at the brink of death, have the opportunity to temporarily take leave of their bodies and get a glimpse of “the other side”? And are these experiences an irrefutable argument for the existence of life after death? Or are there other explanations?
26 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
First, we would do well to describe NDEs in a little more detail. We will follow a list of their common traits as developed by Raymond Moody, the pioneer researcher who coined the term near-death experience in 1975:
1.	There is a strange sound: a buzzing or ringing noise while the people have the distinct sense of being dead.
2.	The dying process may be painful, but as soon as people leave their bodies, the pain is gone, and peace prevails.
3.	They have the sensation of rising up and floating above their bodies as the medical team stands around
them. They often hear themselves being pronounced dead. They have the sensation that they are some sort of spiritual body that’s weightless, invisible, and inaudible, and there seems to be a kind of living energy field around them.
4.	They feel themselves being pulled into a dark tunnel at great speed toward a bright light. This tunnel experience may be rather scary for some, but it doesn’t give the sense of going to hell. For most, it is actually quite pleasant.
5.	At this point, most people report seeing the earth as if they were in space.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 27
INNOVATEDCAPTURES—GETTY
6.	Arriving on the other side of the tunnel, they meet people who are glowing with inner light. Often friends and family members who died earlier are on hand to greet them.
7.	There’s usually a Being of light, whom they later identify as God, Jesus, or some religious figure. In most cases, the recipients of this experience are at a total loss for words to describe what they have seen.
8.	This Being of light presents them with a panoramic view of their life. Good deeds as well as selfish ones are flashed back. The review is nonjudg-mental. The emphasis is on taking advantage of opportunities to love others and acquire knowledge.
9.	There’s usually a limit or border that they aren’t permitted to cross. To do so would be to join those who are on the other side and are permanently in heaven. After this experience, they tend to be very reluctant to return to normal life.
cultural factors
Although reported NDEs show quite similar patterns, we must take into account the fact that they are not identical and don’t always follow the exact same sequence. Also, it would seem that these experiences are subject to cultural conditions. Neardeath experiences don’t occur only in the Christian West but also among adherents of other religions. What Hindus and Buddhists see when they are near death corresponds largely with the ideas about the afterlife in
their faith traditions.
Over time, there have been major changes in the way people have experienced the nearness of death and their encounters with those who have already reached their eternal destination. Paul Giurlanda, an American professor of theology and religious studies, remarks, “Medieval travellers
44
“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven,... and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive ... will be caught up together with them in the clouds.”
to ‘the other side’ invariably saw it as they understood it from the religious teachings of their time—as a terrifying hell, which they thought was a possibility for everyone, no matter how holy they might have been. Some also experienced purgatory and heaven.. ..
28 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
While the medieval God threatened fire and brimstone, the God of the moderns looks askance at such outmoded tactics. The experience God nowadays offers seems to be more congenial to Western minds.”
what the Bible says
The single most important problem with NDEs is that the Bible forces us to reject the thesis that
these experiences are, in fact, what so many people believe they are. Near-death experiences are not quick excursions to heaven. Whatever people see and experience, NDEs are not the soul’s absence from the body or the presence of God or Jesus, and they do not offer a true encounter with loved ones who have preceded them in death.
Bible-believing Christians accept
SIGNS OF THE TlMES •)AN29
that dreams can have divine origins (though most dreams do not) and that God can give visions and reveal things to the men and women He chooses. The earliest examples of these phenomena are recorded in the Bible. These things should not blind us. But its an incontrovertible fact that the dead “sleep” in their graves, unconscious of anything that happens on Earth, and they wait for the day of the resurrection to enter heaven.
First Thessalonians 4 makes this utterly clear. The apostle Paul said, “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death. . . . According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, . . . and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever” (verses 13, 15-17).
When we take the Bible seriously, there’s only one conclusion: NDEs are not what they are often made out to be. But what alternative explanation could there possibly be?
the near-death brain
Oxford scholar Michael N. Marsh, who, shortly before his retirement,
wrote a doctoral dissertation about neurophysiological and theological approaches to NDEs and other out-of-body experiences, urges us to pay close attention to the term near death and asks a very pertinent question: Can a person who is near death simultaneously inhabit another realm that is supposedly beyond death?
Several experts have pointed out that a brain that is starved of oxygen, drugged by hallucinatory painkillers, or excited by fever is hardly likely to function properly. Who knows what visions could be accounted for by these disturbed conditions?
Dr. Jack W. Provonsha, a theologian and medical doctor, studied the near-death phenomenon in depth. He told the story of a patient in Loma Linda, California, who claimed that he had left his body at least 15 times over a 10-year period. The man was eventually diagnosed as having a slow-growing pituitary tumor. After this tumor was surgically removed, his “out-of-body” experiences ceased.
Provonsha pointed out that a study of psychedelic literature is extremely relevant in this regard. He maintained that almost every aspect of the descriptions given by those who have had an NDE “is matched line for line by the users of hallucinogens such as LSD.”
And Professor Den Besten, whose NDE was related at the beginning of this article, stated, “All the material I have presented comes from patients
30 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
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who have survived the dying experience and are alive to talk about it. . . . These data have nothing to do with what happens after death.”
the journey begins
I am prepared to take a leap of faith and believe that, like life, death has to do with a dimension that exceeds our human comprehension. Life originates with the divine Source, and death is caused by a separation (at least, temporarily) from this Source of life. As humans on this side of eternity, we must realize that our knowledge will remain partial for now (1 Corinthians
13:12). Nonetheless, I fervently hope that you will continue to explore this topic and that what you find will strengthen your commitment to the God of life and reinforce your faith in the new, miraculous kind of life that He wants to give us after our present existence has ended. ®
Reinder Bruinsma worked for the Seventh-day Adventist Church for more than 40 years in Europe, West Africa, the UK, and the United States. Now retired in his home country of the Netherlands, he continues to be active as a speaker and writer. This article is adapted, with permission, from his latest book, / Have a Future: Christ's Resurrection and Mine.
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32 SIGNS 6f THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
SPIRITUAL
but not	
RELIGIOUS?
What is the difference between religion and spirituality? Are they mutually exclusive, or does each one contribute to the effectiveness of the other?

A number of years ago a college-age church member introduced me as his pastor to a group of his friends. Immediately, one of the Millennials responded, “Nice to meet you, Reverend, but with all due respect, I don’t go for all that organized church stuff Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am spiritual, just not religious.”
He later defined spiritual as his internal, direct, personalized connection with God. He believed that being spiritual meant rejecting religion, which included cold institutionalism, meaningless ceremonies, prescribed traditions, formal worship, demanding rules, reliance on biblical authority, and all-too-human leadership. He felt that spirituality was internal and personal, while religion seemed external and corporate. Spirituality allowed for a personal, subjective journey; religion called him to conformity to objective standards.
*
at one level, I agreed
Initially, I resonated with much of his argument, wondering whether I should also declare myself to be spiritual and not religious. After all, I’m opposed to a works-based religion, and I seek an intimately personal, relational faith with God. I recognize that, in the name of religion, religious people have persecuted, tortured, and killed those found guilty of rejecting their established church.
Even today, charlatans con people out of their money by promising financial gains, healing, or elevated spiritual states—all in the name of religion. The media has exposed sexual scandals among priests, pastors, and famous public evangelists. And when religious people prove not to be spiritual, religion gets a black eye.
So, yes, I agreed, yet many things about this man’s point of view troubled me. Do I have to be spiritual only? Might something be gained by also being religious?
I’ve found that peoples’ definitions of spirituality and religion differ significantly. Many take everything they dislike about organized faith and label it religion, while they label all the best aspects of an intimate experience with God as spiritual.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES- JANUARY 2021 33
DJEUCS—GETTY
BY JIM BERGLUND
when did religion become a bad word?
In some countries, only two categories exist: religious and irreligious. Americans have developed a third category, which my church member’s friend labeled as spiritual. This philosophical concept emerged during the 1960s antiauthority, antigovernment, antilaw, antiestablishment hippie movement. Their countercultural protest rejected all established authorities, including the church, as evil. Nonconforming dress, free sex, and drug use became their symbols of personal freedom, including the freedom to define right and wrong individually.
The Beatles helped this movement along. Paul McCartney, a band member, became known for his statement “I’m not religious, . . . I’m semi-religious.” For him, spirituality didn’t conflict with his use of drugs, his experience with sex and rock and roll, or his rejection of society’s norms of morality.
Today’s young Christians might see “spiritual but not religious' as meaning that they determine for themselves the parameters of their relationship with Jesus. Maybe they haven’t considered where a nonreligious spirituality might lead them.
The Beatles’ press agent, Derek Taylor, stated in an August 1964 Saturday Evening Post article, “Here are these four boys from Liverpool. They’re rude, they’re profane, they’re vulgar, and they’ve taken over the world. It’s
as if they’d founded a new religion. They’re completely anti-Christ. I mean, I’m anti-Christ as well, but they’re so anti-Christ they shock me, which isn’t an easy thing.” McCartney further explained that not only were the band members non-Christians, they were also atheistic agnostics. He declared, “We probably seem antireligious because of the fact that none of us believe in God.”
McCartney understands spirituality to be a self-defined relationship with a higher power. This perspective on spirituality elevates one’s individual experience over biblical authority. This then gives a person license to mold and define his nonreligion any way he wants and call it spirituality. With this definition, a rapist, drug dealer, or murderer can claim to be spiritual.
God gave religion
The Bible does not agree with the dismissal of religion as creeds, forms, and traditional ceremonies. In God’s eyes, true religion goes beyond superficial forms. It evokes a personal, heartfelt response. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27). God calls on religious people to move to a higher plane of action: “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless” (verse 26).
34 SIGNS OF THE TIMES -JANUARY 2021
Thus, instead of contrasting religion and spirituality, we should consider the difference between true and false religion. God rejects legalistic religion as corrupting true religion. He hates it as much as we do.
People who are genuinely religious will cultivate a personal spiritual experience with God. Real religion transforms Christians from living as slaves to sin and makes them obedient from the heart (Romans 6:17). Jesus didn’t tell the legalistic Pharisees to stop being religious and stop following the law.
Instead, He told them to look deeper and find what true religion means. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” He said. “You give a tenth of your spices— mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). We should both follow the law and have a personal spiritual experience.
religion
Religion helps me to be more spiritual. I go to church meetings to organize how I can cooperate with my fellow church members in caring for the elderly, the sick, the uneducated, and young parents and their children. The exercise of my religion takes me to church multiple times a week to pray corporately, to worship with others, to encourage each other in our spiritual journeys, and to receive spiritual instruction in God’s Word.
My religion holds me to an objective truth that directs my life.
As part of religion, God instituted ceremonies, such as baptism, that join me not only to God but also to a religious community as I become a part of His family. Like a wedding, this celebration happens in the presence of the community as a whole.
Religion and spirituality aren’t an either-or choice. I need both. I know that I need an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus, which for me is a profoundly spiritual experience.
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021 35
JOSHUA ECKSTEIN—UNSPLASH
In God’s eyes, true religion goes beyond superficial forms.
Religion is more than an external cooperate with God in accomplish-attendance at church and observing ing His mission to the world. God certain rituals. I choose to be religious designed religion and commanded me because religion helps me to be more to participate in it, so I am religious spiritual. Being religious roots out in obedience. I will be spiritual, and the selfishness of sin. It prevents me I will be religious too. ® from deceiving myself. It leads me to
godly living. Being religious allows Jim Berglund is the pastor of the Killeen Seventh-day
me to minister and receive ministry Adventist Church in Killeen, Texas. He contributes from fellow Christians. It helps me to occasional articles to Signs the s®
BIBLICAL GUIDELINES FOR RELIGION
The current push for spirituality instead of religion rejects God's mandates.
1. Biblical authority. I myself do not have the authority to subjectively determine what is right and wrong or what spirituality and following God mean. Instead, I study the Bible "to present [myself] ... to God as one approved"
(2 Timothy 2:15). Should I claim that I don't need religion because spirituality releases me from the rules? On the contrary, Paul said, "I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet'" (Romans 7:7). Doing what is right in my
own eyes will result in death.
2. Interconnection. Corporate religion keeps me from being self-deceived. "Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment" (Proverbs 18:1, ESV*). Developing my spiritual walk includes recognizing my selfishness and my sinful nature. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death" (Proverbs 14:12, ESV). "There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth" (Proverbs 30:12, ESV).
36 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
3. Accountability. God expects a formal religious body to hold its members accountable. "If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 18:17, 18, ESV). God designed accountability into His religion (1 Corinthians 5:4-13).
A. Support, encouragement. God intended for my religious experience to include other brothers and sisters on the same spiritual path toward heaven. "Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another-and all the more as you see the Day approaching" (Hebrews 10:24, 25).
5. Spiritual gifts. Corporate religion enables me to use my God-given gifts and talents to benefit the church body. People share their gifts of teaching, prophecy, preaching, and wisdom, which help to enlighten each believer on the meaning and application of God's Word. Those having the gift of faith can encourage me, and those with hospitality minister to my needs. God also gave apostles, leaders, and administrators and has called me to consider their counsel and appreciate their guidance (1 Thessalonians 5:12).
Having a religious body with organization and structure allows me to function efficiently. Religion improves my spiritual function of service and helps me to mature spiritually.
6.	Service. God calls me to corporate religion so that I can help others. The spirituality-only movement encourages an it's-all-about-me kind of spirituality. But God called me to be my brother's keeper and helper. I grow spiritually as I give. I become a tool
in God's hand by putting others first, extending forgiveness, demonstrating compassion, and living a transformed life.
7.	Mission. Jesus has a mission that He wants accomplished in the world, and He has chosen to achieve it by using
a religious body-the church. Who am I to reject God's ordained means of taking the gospel to the world to prepare a people for His soon coming (Matthew 28:16-20)?
8.	Jesus was religious. Jesus attended corporate worship services; recognized religious authority; observed religious ceremonies, rituals, and feasts; studied the Bible; and organized His own church. The church He left on Earth had leaders, organization, hierarchy, levels of authority, and rules (Acts 2:41,42; 11:22; 18:27).
* Bible quotations marked ESVare from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021 37
38 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • J $NUA#Y202n>
Jesus faced constant criticism from the people He went to church with, but that didn't stop Him from going—on a very regular basis!
BY MAYLAN SCHURCH
Jesus
went to church
Hes thinner now,” whispered one of the synagogues worshipers to the man beside him.
“Much thinner,” the other said. “He needs His mothers cooking again!” A man behind them chuckled. “Hard work, that’s what He needs. His dad taught Him how, and He needs to get back to it. Woodworking gives you an appetite.”
“He builds a solid table,” someone nearby said. “I bought one. Where’s He been, anyway? Haven’t seen Him for a couple of months.”
“Well, they’ve invited Him to speak today,” said the first man. “Let’s hear what the Kid has to say.”
The young Man standing before the people reverently unrolled part of a huge scroll and began to read. However, He didn’t look at the words but at the worshipers. “The Spirit of the
Lord is on me,” He quoted, “because he has anointed me . . (Luke 4:18).
The Woodworker, of course, was Jesus. And the synagogue was in His hometown of Nazareth. After Solomon’s temple was destroyed in 587 bc and the Israelites were deported to Babylon, the Jewish people created synagogues as places of worship and instruction, and they gathered in them on Sabbath mornings. Every village had at least one synagogue, and some had several. (Jewish sources indicate that a synagogue could be established where there were at least 10 Jewish men.) If you were a faithful Jew, you attended regularly. In other words, synagogues were much like the churches of today—places where believers went to study, pray, and worship.
“But is attending church really all that important?” some people ask.
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES‘JANUARY 2021 39
REVIEW & HERALD PUBLISHING—GOODSALT
“Cant I just remain at home and meditate? Can’t I worship God by taking a hike in the mountains? Is gathering with other Christians essential to my salvation?”
Here’s how important churchgoing was to Jesus.
Jesus went to church as a regular habit
“He went to Nazareth,” Luke 4:16 says, “where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom ’ (emphasis added). The Greek word for “custom” is eiotha, which is a form of ethos, and basically, it means a regular habit. In other words, Jesus didn’t go to church only when He felt like it. He made it a habit—like lacing His sandals or combing His hair.
So if Christians respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow Him, they’ll be walking through the doors of a church once a week. After all, Jesus said, “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20). He didn’t say anything about mountain hikes or even personal devotions as substitutes for worship places. Occasional getaway vacations are appropriate, but for the Christian, those should be the exception, not the rule.
Jesus went to church in spite of the hypocrites
“The reason / don’t go to church,” someone might say, “is because it would make me sick to have to sit with
a bunch of hypocrites.” But if this hypocrite reason were valid, Jesus would have had the best excuse of anyone to skip church! In every synagogue He entered—and He entered a lot of them—He found scowling clusters of Pharisees and teachers of the law who were listening for anything He said that they could twist into heresy. They were also watching eagle eyed for any “illegal” Sabbath miracles of healing He might perform.
But Jesus had no qualms about literally calling them out. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” He would tell them. “You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” (Matthew 23:13). These men claimed to be defenders of God, but they would eventually murder His Son. That’s the ultimate in hypocrisy, yet Jesus never stopped going to church with them! And He didn’t go merely to synagogues but to the temple itself, as John 7, 9, and 10 and many other passages tell us.
You see, Jesus didn't reject organized religion—He participated in it! He spent much of the last week of His life teaching in the temple, and less than 24 hours before His death, He celebrated the Jewish ritual of Pass-over with His disciples.
God always works in groups
Jesus’ Father loves groups. He created Adam and then Eve and gave them the ability to create and gather about them a family of children. Abraham wasn’t called to Canaan
40 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
as an individual but with his entire household. When God liberated the Israelites from slavery, He didn’t slip them over the Egyptian border one by one but marched them out triumphantly in tribes.
And when Jesus sent His disciples out to spread the gospel, the new Christians gathered in churches, and Paul and other apostles wrote letters to some of those groups. John sent his powerful “revelation from Jesus Christ” not to individuals but to “the seven churches in the province of Asia” (Revelation 1:1, 4). God calls individuals, but He always calls them to meet together in groups.
some spiritual benefits of going to church
Why go to church? Well, why do we gather at sports events, concerts, birthday parties, weddings, and even funerals? Each of these “gathering” opportunities satisfies
something within us—and being part of a church even more so. Here are some real benefits of attending church regularly:
You'll know you're not alone. You don’t need me to tell you that being a Christ-honoring person in today’s society is often a lonely journey. At the end of a soul-bruising week, how wonderful it is to gather for mutual encouragement with others who believe the way you do.
You're part of a support system. I’m a pastor, and if I had one bit of advice to give people who are facing chronic challenges—single moms, for example—I’d tell them to get connected with a church. Go every week.
Get there a bit early (that’s when you’ll meet the “core saints”), and linger afterward. Enroll your kids in Bible classes. Get to know people, and let them get to know you. Gradually, you’ll become part of a group of people who will have your back.
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 41
PEARL— UGHTSTOCK
How wonderful it is to gather for mutual encouragement with others who believe the way you do.
You'll thrive under the mentoring of others. Everybody’s human, right? Nobody’s perfect. But in a church, you’ll find some people who handle discouragement, conflict, and crisis better than you might. I’ve actually made it a practice to keep an eye out for people who are delightfully diplomatic, so I can copy their behavior and make it my own. Others know how to listen well, and that’s a valuable art to learn. Still others are experts at cheerful, kind confrontation, and I try to remember the ways they defuse tensions without starting fights or getting steamrolled.
You'll learn stories of others' spiritual journeys. For an absolute heart lift, you can’t beat hearing someone share the true, humble story of his or her conversion. When I conduct baptisms in my church, I always ask those who will be baptized to be prepared to tell the story of how the Lord brought them to this day. It’s always the highlight of the morning.
You'll gain a better picture of God. Let’s face it, good or bad, we get our first view of what God is like from our parents. If Dad is a tyrant, God will seem like a tyrant. If Dad is absent, God will seem absent. But when you get to know other people at church whose life stories give us better views of God, you’ll gradually learn to relax into His love.
You'll get a chance to use your talents to serve. Are you good with kids? As a Bible class teacher, you’ll change the lives of many youngsters as they learn
about Jesus from someone who likes them. Are you good with numbers? Eventually, after several years of showing people you’re trustworthy, you might end up as a church treasurer. Are you good at yard work? The church campus will blossom (literally) under your ministrations. Do you sing or play the piano? Guess what: You’re needed!
Do you like to help people? Any congregation could begin a free-clothing ministry, starting small at first. Like to cook? You might end up organizing potluck teams if you’re also a leader. Do you love to pray? Join the prayer team, and eventually, take a turn at leading. Let me share with you a staggeringly powerful secret: using your talents to serve people will make going to church a joy.
Your Savior, the Nazareth Woodworker, was a server and servant. Let’s listen as He reads more of the passage from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18, 19).
Jesus went to church—both to serve others and to let them serve Him. And He invites you to join Him and the others He has gathered there! ®
Maylan Schurch is pastor of the Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist Church in Bellevue, Washington. He is a frequent contributor to Signs of the Times®.
42 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
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44 SIGNS OFTHETIMES • JANUARY 2021
can we believe the Gospels?
Did Matthew, Mark, and John know Jesus personally, or did they make up their stories several decades later?
BY ED DICKERSON
Why was the tomb supposedly empty? I say supposedly because, frankly, I don t know that it was. Our very first reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard that it was empty. How would he knowi—Bart D. Ehrman, New Testament scholar and professor of religion.
The so-called Gospel of John is something special and reflects... the highly evolved theology of a Christian writer who lived three generations after Jesus.—Geza Vermes, scholar and historian.
The testimony of these two scholars is representative of a growing chorus of intellectuals, including even some biblical scholars, who deny the central claims of the New Testament. It seems like the Bible is on trial, and the prosecution is winning!
Today, many religious leaders openly question the reliability of the New Testament and, specifically, the accounts of Jesus’ life. And it’s not just intellectuals and celebrities who call themselves atheists. Today, more and more people express considerable doubt as to the accuracy of the Gospels. Increasingly, it’s fashionable to declare oneself to be skeptical of the claims of any religious text. Noted atheist and author Richard Dawkins says that “the Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality.” We expect such criticisms from people like Richard Dawkins, but when we hear it from an evangelical biblical scholar, it can be a little unnerving.
That’s why Bart D. Ehrman’s numerous books, with such titles as Forged and How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From
SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021 45
KEVINCARDEN—LIGHTSTOCK
Galilee, have caused quite a stir. Ehr-man, who says he was raised a fundamentalist Christian, now calls himself an agnostic. He has especially focused on the development of early Christianity. His particular field of study is textual criticism, which examines various early manuscripts, seeking errors and inconsistencies, in order to, if possible, eliminate all errors and produce a text most closely representing the original text.
His work has led him to conclude, among other things, that Jesus was not considered divine until nearly 200 years after His death (remember that time period!) and that the Gospels couldn’t have been written by the men whose names they bear. Ehrman doesn’t consider the New Testament, specifically the Gospels, to be an accurate depiction of Jesus’ life or of the beliefs of those who actually knew Him. He says, “Our best sources about Jesus, the early Gospels, are riddled with problems.”
This statement, coming from someone who was initially a believer and who has made a serious study of the issues, can be pretty unsettling. To those who disagree with him, who still believe the New Testament to be reliable, he warns, “People almost always find what they expect to find if they allow their expectations to guide the search.” (I suggest he consider his own observation!)
The reliability of the New Testament is being tried in the court of public opinion. We’re all members of the jury, and at first glance, it appears the prosecution is winning.
The reliability of the New Testament is being tried in the court of public opinion. We’re all members of the
P
jury, and at first glance, it appears the prosecution is winning.
cold case
How do we uncover the truth of the matter? The events described in the New Testament took place around 2,000 years ago. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John themselves are long gone. We can’t cross-examine them, but can we defend their testimony? Can we believe them or not?
If this were a TV mystery or a detective show, we’d look for an investigator
46 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
who specialized in cold cases—crimes that were committed years ago and have never been solved. And as cases go, this one is really cold because it’s 2,000 years old! In a plot twist that’s worthy of such dramas, it turns out that there is someone just like that who’s already on the Gospels’ case. He’s a real-life homicide detective. His name is J. Warner Wallace, and he has 20 years of experience solving
cold cases. In his book Cold Case Christianity, he tackles the case of the Gospels and their authors head-on. Unlike Ehrman, Wallace began as an atheist, and instead of taking a scholarly approach, he brought the tools of his trade as a criminal investigator to bear.
Reading the works of Ehrman and Wallace is a fascinating study in contrasting approaches. Ehrman began his study believing the Bible to be inerrant—that is, without errors of any kind. As a textual critic, it was his job to find errors in manuscripts, and find them he did. In fact, he found so many that he essentially gave up believing in the truth of the documents.
Wallace, on the other hand, began as a total nonbeliever, but he approached the Gospel record as he would any cold case, as he would the testimony of witnesses recorded long ago that had been passed down through many generations. Scholars and critics, focusing on the errors and inconsistencies in the Gospels, found the documents wanting. Wallace, with his police background, didn’t care whether the witnesses were without error in every detail. Instead, he wanted to know whether their testimony was reliable. Did what they say present a convincing case for the critical claims of Christianity?
During his years as a cold-case detective, the first question Wallace asked of any witness testimony was whether he or she was present at the
SIGNS OF THE TIMES -JANUARY 2021 47
KEVINCARDEN—LIGHTSTOCK
scene of a crime. He declared, “Before I could ever take the Gospels seriously as eyewitness accounts, I needed to decide where they fell on this timeline. . . . The closer they appeared to the life and ministry of Jesus, the more seriously I could consider their claims.” Unless the Gospel accounts originated with witnesses who were actually present during the events they described, there would be no point in going further.
Although many scholars claim that the Gospels were written as late as two centuries after the events they described, when Wallace examined their testimonies, he found convincing evidence that they were in fact based on firsthand accounts of the people who witnessed the events they wrote about. For one thing, none of the Gospels mention the siege of Jerusalem or the destruction of the temple, which took place in ad 68—70, yet several Gospel accounts show Jesus predicting these very events. Had they already happened, it would have been to the advantage of the Gospel writers to refer to them, but they did not. In Detective
48 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
Wallace’s mind, this indicates that the Gospels were written prior to ad 68. Wallace also noted that not a single New Testament book mentions the deaths of either Peter or Paul, which took place around ad 65 or 67.
Altogether, Wallace collected 11 pieces of evidence in support of “an early dating for the Gospels. The gospel writers appear in history right where we would expect them to appear if they were, in fact, eyewitnesses.” In short, they were there.
Next, Wallace examined what investigators call the “chain of custody.” In working with a cold case, Wallace had to make sure that the evidence that was passed on to him was confirmed at the time and that it had been passed down reliably. For example, the apostle John taught men named Ignatius and Polycarp, who, in their own writings, affirmed the major claims of the Gospels, including the divinity of
He approached the Gospel record as he would any cold case.
Jesus. Polycarp taught Irenaeus, who taught Hippolytus, and Hippolytus brings us to about 200 years after the Crucifixion—just about the time when Ehrman suggests that the idea of Jesus as God originated. Wallace shows a similar chain of custody for the apostles Paul and Peter. So he has three separate chains, any one of which refutes the claim that these teachings originated at a much later date.
Wallace examined claims that the apostles were lying—they made up their testimony about Jesus’ resurrection, His miracles, and so on. He found that they had no motivation to lie. To the contrary, their insistence on the truth of their claims caused them persecution, suffering, and want. He concluded, “The apostles were free from ulterior motive.”
When examining the testimony of the Gospel writers, Ehrman and other scholars find the inconsistencies
disqualifying. Wallace found just the opposite: “Every case I handle is like this,” he said, “witnesses seldom agree on every detail. In fact, when two people agree completely on every detail of their account, I am inclined to believe that they have either contaminated each other’s observations or are working together to pull the wool over my eyes. I expect truthful, reliable eyewitnesses to disagree along the way.”
There’s much more to the book, as Wallace, the cold-case detective, meticulously marshals the evidence, weighs the testimony, and examines alternatives, building his case for Christianity. When he finished, he said, “We’ve examined the four important areas that jurors must consider when determining the reliability of eyewitnesses. The most reasonable inference is that the gospel writers were present, corroborated [each other, and were] accuratey and unbiased. If this is the case, we can conclude with confidence that their testimony is reliable. We’ve done the heavy lifting needed to determine the reliability of these accounts; we’ve been diligent and faithful as jurors and have considered the evidence. It’s time to make a decision.”
Fellow members of the jury, what say you? ®
Ed Dickerson is a freelance writer who lives in Garrison, Iowa. He is the lay pastor of the HomePage Seventh-day Adventist company in Marion, Iowa, and he is a frequent contributor to Signs of the Times®.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 49
A1139—A3N30V HIHOS
Tips to maintain healthy eating habits
50 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
For those of us who are consider!
making some healthy changes in 2021, it's especially important to establish some new eating habits. Here are some simple and clever food swaps you can adopt to help you stay healthy and improve your nutrition.
GUT HEALTH
Research continues to uncover the benefits of a well-balanced gut micro-biome, linking happy gut bugs to everything from good mood to weight loss. Looking after your gut doesn't require expensive probiotics or prebiotics. A quick and easy, budget-friendly food fix is simply to swap from refined grains to whole grains.
The fiber in whole grains provides both probiotics and prebiotics that
a diverse gut microbiome, which you need for good gut health. Legumes are also important for our healthy gut bugs.
JOINT HEALTH
Your diet can make a big difference to your joints and can help keep bothersome aches and pains at bay. Your best bet to help reduce inflammation in your body is to eat more plants, especially those that contain omega-3, which has been shown to reduce signs of chronic inflammation. Plant-based sources include walnuts and flax, chia, and hemp seeds.
BRAIN HEALTH
Need to nourish your noggin? Avoid junk food, which research indicates actually shrinks your brain. Eating
MATTERS'
more plant foods will help you to grow new brain cells, which will enhance learning and memory. Brain foods to add to the shopping cart include plenty of colorful fruits (especially berries), dark-green vegetables, nuts (especially walnuts), and seeds (chia, flax, and hemp).
CHOLESTEROL
When it comes to lowering cholesterol levels, the most effective dietary strategies are to replace saturated and trans fats (bad fats) with unsaturated fats (healthy fats) and increase your intake of plant sterols. Plant sterols can stop cholesterol from being absorbed by your body. They can be found in unsalted, raw nuts; fruit; hummus; tahini; peanut butter; and reduced-fat Greek yogurt. ®
FOOD SWAP TIPS
GUT HEALTH
Instead of white pasta and rice, go for whole grains and a variety of legumes. Try swapping out meat for legumes several times a week or more. Choose high-fiber alternatives in some foods. For example, try making your own whole-grain pizza crust orsubstitute whole-grain pita bread.
JOINT HEALTH
Swap creamy salad dressings for dressings with extra virgin olive oiland lemon juice orapple cider vinegar. Add a tablespoon or two of high-fiber chia seeds, hemp seeds, or ground flaxseeds instead of bran. Pack unsalted nuts, seeds, and dried fruits fora healthy snack on the
go-
BRAIN HEALTH Go fora side of salad instead of fries for your next meal. Top your breakfast cereal with sweet blueberries or raspberries instead of syrup or sugar. If you are on the run, lookforhealthiertakeout options, such as brown rice sushi or whole wheat tortilla wraps.
Article courtesy of Sanitarium Health Food Company. Visit sanitarium.com.au and subscribe to Wholicious Living for more great health and nutrition info each month.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 51
FCAFOTODIGITAL— GETTY
52 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
SIGNS OF THE TIMES"* JANUARY 2021 53
BYSKIPMACCARTY
I sat across the dining-room table from Neal, a brilliant teacher of the Christian faith. He’d jeopardized his job over a matter of conscience and been fired. He asked God to help him find another job in his specialized field, confident of His aid. Although he’d sent his resume all over the United States, nothing came of it. Month after month, he’d prayed and waited with no response.
Now he was telling me that he was about to take a job that might compromise his faith. I’ll never forget his words: “If God is my Father, as I’ve always believed, then why didn’t He
answer me? I would never treat my children like that. I’m no longer sure there is a God.”
King David testified that unanswered prayers were as traumatic for him as the death of a close friend or relative. He said, “When my prayers returned to me unanswered, I went about mourning as though for my friend or brother. I bowed my head in grief as though weeping for my mother” (Psalm 35:13, 14).
Unanswered prayers are devastating because of the high expectations that Bible promises suggest. Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer,
Have you ever said a desperate prayer that God didn't seem to answer? How do you deal with the disappointment you feel when that happens?
unanswered
prayers?
believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). While other Bible passages put qualifiers around apparent blank checks like this one, generally, we re encouraged to expect answers to our prayers.
the secret is out
Unanswered prayers may be a closet secret for the church, but they’re no secret in the Bible. Most of the book of Job is the story of unanswered prayers for God’s intervention (Job 30:20-23). Paul prayed three times for relief from a serious affliction, but God never removed it (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). In Psalm 88, Heman the Ezrahite poured out his bewilderment to God over his unanswered prayers. He apparently had an ailment from his childhood that made him a social outcast. Taught to believe in prayer, he petitioned God for healing, but deliverance never came. Heman asked, “O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” (verse 14, NRSV1).
And Psalm 91 promises, “If you say, ‘The Lord is my refuge,’ and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent” (verses 9, 10). On the other hand, Hebrews 11 speaks of people who made God their refuge, and yet some were “put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. ... These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised” (verses 37, 39).
how do we cope?
What are we to make of these unanswered prayers? And even more important, what are we to make of our own? Here are a few practical steps that may help:
1.	Talk To God openly about your disappointment and disillusionment. God Himself brought this issue into the open, as we have just seen, because the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible verses that accuse God of not answering prayers and not keeping His promises. What might God possibly have had in mind by allowing such prayers to be included in the Bible? I believe it was His way of saying, “I understand how much it hurts when you feel I’ve let you down. When that happens, I want you to talk to Me about it.”
Grief therapists tell us that an important step in recovering from a devastating loss is to acknowledge the hurt we’re feeling and talk to someone about it. Denying the hurt and refusing to discuss it delays and can prevent a healthy recovery. When God’s silence has hurt us, it’s healthy to tell Him what we’re feeling. Our repressed feelings of hurt and disillusionment can develop into bitterness and a callousness that refuses to pray lest we get hurt again. I know of no other way to reconcile with God from the hurt and estrangement caused by unanswered prayers than by talking it through with Him.
That’s what Job did. He felt that God had treated him unfairly and
54 SIGNS OF THE TIMES‘JANUARY 2021
told Him so (Job 6:8, 9). God told Job’s three “friends,” “You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). God applauded Job for understanding that He was the kind of Being who wanted to hear the truth about how Job felt rather than receive insincere, sugar-sweet language that masked his grief.
2.	Seize the opportunity to grow. Job sensed no evidence of God’s presence, yet he was able to say, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15, NKJV2). God had protected him in his hour of trial. As far as we know, it wasn’t that way for Heman the Ezrahite, yet he still sought God daily. And while God didn’t give Paul relief, He enabled him to grow
in his faith and honor God through it (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). In fact, 1 Corinthians 10:13 indicates that whenever God allows a trial to come to us, He also supplies the faith we need to endure it.
Richard J. Foster, in his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, wrote, “We may not see the end from the beginning, but we keep on doing what we know to do. We pray, we listen, we worship, we carry out the duty of the present moment. What we learned to do in the light of God’s love, we also do in the dark of God’s [seeming] absence. We ask and continue to ask even though there is no answer. We seek and continue to seek even though we do not find. We knock and continue to knock even though the door remains shut.”
SIGNS OFTHE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 55
REVIEW & HERALD PUBLISHING—GOODSALT
KEVINCARDEN—LIGHTSTOCK
3. Recognize that an unanswered prayer might be a blessing in disguise. Some things we ask God for could harm us if God were to grant them. God is too wise and loves us too much to make such mistakes. As Ellen G. White, a wise writer on spiritual matters who lived more than a century ago, put it, “We are so erring and short-sighted that we sometimes ask for things that would not be a blessing to us, and
44
56 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES- JANUARY 2021
our heavenly Father in love answers our prayers by giving us that which will be for our highest good—that which we ourselves would desire if with vision divinely enlightened we could see all things as they really are.” And the apostle Paul wrote, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). God will allow nothing to touch the lives of His children but that which will contribute toward some higher good— not even an unanswered prayer. He never leads us other than we would choose to be led if we could see the end from the beginning.
4. Realize that your unanswered prayer might benefit someone else. Undoubtedly, during World War II, many sincere German Christians prayed for a
Sometimes God asks us to hold on until the Great Day when everything will make sense.
speedy end to the war—in favor of the Nazis! Their unanswered prayers benefited the world. When would-be picnickers pray for a dry, sunny day and farmers pray for relief from a drought that same day, someone will be disappointed!
5. Consider past evidence. When Jesus hung on the cross, He felt completely abandoned. He was aware of the promise that He would be resurrected, but it still seemed that His heavenly Father had forsaken Him (Matthew 27:46). Likewise, someone experiencing the devastation of unanswered prayer finds little comfort in the suggestion that there’s no such thing as unanswered prayer.
If we review our lives, we can all find experiences and blessings that are unmistakable indications of God’s love and care. And when it seems as though God isn’t responding, we, like Asaph, can draw strength from recalling them.
God's response
If we understood all of God’s promises as He intended them, we could better affirm that His promises will be fulfilled. They’ve never failed; they can never fail. This doesn’t mean that we’ll never experience legitimate feelings of disappointment and anger.
Ironically, when we accuse God of breaking His promises, He responds with even more promises. On the superficial level, that doesn’t make
sense. But it works for some of us.
Isaiah foretold a time when God’s people would say, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14, RSV3). That’s how it sometimes feels when we conclude that an important prayer has gone unanswered. But Isaiah said that when God heard His people talking like that, He responded: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (verse 15, RSV).
Sometimes God asks us to hold on until the Great Day when everything will make sense. Ellen White penned these reassuring words: “The things hard to be understood will then find explanation. . . . Where our finite minds discovered only confusion and broken promises, we shall see the most perfect and beautiful harmony.” In the world to come, “we shall see that our seemingly unanswered prayers and disappointed hopes have been among our greatest blessings.” ®
1.	Bible verses marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2.	Bible verses marked NKJV are from the New King James Version.
3.	Bible verses marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952,1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the NationalCouncilof the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 57
YOU ARE NEEDED!
What do you do well? What unique talents do you have that you especially enjoy using? Most important, how can you use these gifts to make your church even better?
BY NANCY CANWELL
58 SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUAR^H|
My sister broke her wrist a while back. She had a cast on her right arm that started at her fingers and ended above her elbow. She had no idea how important her right arm was until she couldn’t use it!
She told me, for example, that on one occasion she couldn’t grasp the cap on her water bottle to twist it open. “And since I can’t bend my elbow,” she said, “something as simple as getting dressed is a challenge—not to mention curling my hair, driving, cooking, typing, and all the other daily tasks I’ve always taken for granted. I had no idea how much I need my right arm!”
If you’ve ever had a part of your body immobilized, then you understand what my sister was going through.
you are part of a body
The apostle Paul likens the church to the human body. In 1 Corinthians 12:12, he said, “A body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body,” and in verse 27, he ? said, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” So when you become a Christian, you also become a part of the body of Christ, His church. You belong, and you are needed\
“Me, needed?” you may ask. “I’m not needed! There are plenty of talented people who can do much more han I can.” But according to the
Bible, every person is a vital part of Christ’s body, and the Holy Spirit has given each of us gifts to use for the benefit of the church as a whole.
So what is the body of Christ? According to Paul, it’s the church. In Colossians 1:18, he said that Jesus is “the head of the body, the church.” So the group of people you worship with every week is Christ’s body, as is the larger, worldwide church.
The question we’re dealing with here is, What part do you play in the life of your church? The answer is simple: your part is to serve both inside and outside of your church. And you do that by using the unique gifts that God has given to you.
Paul explained it clearly when he wrote, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully” (Romans 12:4-8).
You may think that you can’t serve because you aren’t perfect, but none of us are perfect. Jesus’ disciples certainly weren’t perfect!
You may think you can’t serve because you don’t have any gifts to
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ANDREYPOPOV—GETTY
offer the church. But you do! Stop and think about what your passion is. What do you especially enjoy doing? Why not use those abilities within your church and the community outside the church?
You may think that your gift isn’t important. But all the gifts God gives to His people are needed in order for the body of Christ to function well.
You may think that someone else can do a better job than you can. But if we all thought that way, nothing would get done!
a unique orchestra
There’s a private school in Oregon, where I live, that has a unique orchestra. What makes this orchestra special is its purpose. “We use our orchestra to demonstrate the body of Christ— the church,” the school’s principal told me. “The students have learned that everyone has to do his or her own part or the entire orchestra suffers. All must do their own job, yet they must also look out for each other. We teach our kids that when they see someone struggling, they can serve by encouraging that person to keep trying.”
The principal went on to explain that the orchestra focuses on 1 Corinthians 12:21—23: “The eye cannot say to the hand, CI don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, CI don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.”
The principal said, “Garrett is a perfect example of how we help each student find their unique gift and use it to make up one body.”
Garrett’s mom had heard that this small school specialized in finding each student’s unique contribution and making them a part of the larger school body. That was exactly what her son needed!
Garrett was born with a severe cleft palate. By the time he was in the fifth grade, he had undergone 15 major surgeries. He had been the victim of bullying at his previous school, so his mom called this principal, begging her to accept Garrett as a student.
“When I met Garrett, he wouldn’t even look at me,” the principal said. “He constantly had his face to the floor. He walked through the halls that way, ate his lunch that way, and sat in class that way. He felt that he was absolutely ugly, because that’s what he’d been told.”
The school decided to see how Garrett would do playing the cello. It would be a big instrument for a boy with such little self-worth. Amazingly, after he was made a part of the school body, he gained a sense of pride. And the rest of the body—the other students—encouraged him and built him up.
“Almost instantly, Garrett began to look up,” the principal told me excitedly. “And within just a few months, he was not only touring with the orchestra but also giving his testimony during
60 SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021
concerts! He was a shriveled-up onion when he came to us, but Garrett realized that he had a gift to contribute, and he found a place where he belonged .”
Imagine what our world would be like if each member felt that they were a part of the larger body and if they were using the gifts that God had given them!
no gift too small
The Bible says that we all “have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us” (Romans 12:6). And that’s true of you too. You have a gift. If you aren’t sure what your gift is, ask God to make it clear to you. And don’t be afraid to ask other people what gifts they see in you.
Never think that your gift is unimportant or insignificant. Everyone is needed. In God’s eyes, there are no insignificant gifts.
I know a pastor who offered a workshop for church members who wanted to learn how to share their faith with others. Several sessions into the workshop, one of the exercises was to go to a willing church member’s home and practice telling that person about Jesus.
One woman, a shy but dedicated member, attended the classes and eventually felt that she was ready to give witnessing a try. The pastor accompanied her to the home of one of the members. In this particular home, only the wife was a Christian. She’d tried for years to get her husband to come to church, but he never would.
When the pastor and the shy woman
Using our God-given gifts is never about us,
entered the house, the husband moved to the farthest corner of the living room. The woman’s effort to witness to this man’s wife didn’t go well. In fact, it was almost embarrassing. The pastor silently hoped that she wasn’t offending the woman’s husband!
Then it came time for the shy woman to ask the church member, “Do you want to accept Jesus as your Savior?”
The pastor was shocked when, from across the room, the husband exclaimed, “I do!” He’d been listening the whole time, and although this woman didn’t appear gifted in witnessing, the Holy Spirit used her to touch this man’s heart!
This story goes to show that using our God-given gifts is never about us. It’s about being a part of the body. It’s about doing what we can to change the world around us. And it’s about giving back to Jesus, who gave His all for us. ®
Nancy Canwell is an associate pastor of the Milton and Blue Mountain Valley Seventh-day Adventist Churches in Oregon. She isan occasionalcontributor to Signs of the Times®.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES • JANUARY 2021 61
PACIFIC PRESS—GOODSALT
THE EDITOR ANSWERS
YOUR BIBLE QUESTIONS
"There are all kinds of suffering____
Satan is the instigator of this suffering, not God."
Q:lf humans have all sinned, why did God tell Noah to build an ark to save the human race? Why didn't He destroy everyone and start over?-Joshua Voight, Tecumseh,
Nevada
ArWhen parents bring a child into the world, they covenant to love that child regardless of how the child turns out. Similarly, before God had even created the human race, He made a covenant that He would love us regardless of how we turned out. The Bible calls this the "everlasting covenant" (Jeremiah 32:40). God loved us so much that He was willing to take our sins upon Himself and pay the death penalty we owed, just so He could enjoy the fellowship of those who accepted His offer of salvation (John 3:16).
Q: Some people say that Job is the oldest book in the Bible. Is this true?.
-Mark Risper, Houston, Texas A: The authorship of Job has been
variously attributed to Moses, Elihu (one of Job's "comforters," Job 32:2), Solomon, Ezra, and others. Most early Jewish traditions assigned the authorship to Moses. Several factors can be cited in support of the Mosaic authorship. Job has a strong Arabic flavor, which Moses would have become acquainted with during his 40 years in Midian. Certain allusions to Egyptian society are consistent with the fact that Moses grew up and was educated in Egypt. And Job's description of God as Creator fits well with Moses' account of Creation in Genesis 1 and 2.
Q: Is the story recorded in the book of Job true? If it isf why did God give Satan permission to destroy all of Job's property, kill all his children, and afflict his whole body with boils from the top of his head to the soles of his feet?
-Marlene Sullens, Nampa, Idaho
62 SIGNS OFTHE TIMES-JANUARY 2021
A There are all kinds of suffering in the world. The story of Job helps us to understand that Satan is the instigator of this suffering, not God. If God is powerful enough to have prevented Satan from causing the suffering in the world, then the fact that it's happening makes it obvious that He has allowed Satan to inflict it. The story of Job simply helps us to understand that God has given Satan the freedom to carry out his atrocious deeds.
Q: A footnote in Mark 16:9 says, "The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20." Why are these verses included in the more recent translations if the most reliable early manuscripts and witnesses did not have them?-/Vame withheld by request A: Back in the early 1600s, the King James Bible translators did not have access to many of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that we have today. As these more ancient manuscripts were discovered, translators incorporated what they learned from them into later translations of the Bible. However, rather than leave out of these more recent translations what the earlier translations of the Bible had included, the modern translators have added footnotes that advise readers of the more ancient manuscript evidence.
To have your Bible questions answered, write to Your Bible Questions at Signs of the Times®
PO Box 5398, Nampa, ID 83653-5398 USA or email: signs@pacificpress.com.
Q: In Mark 9:43-46,48, Jesus spoke five times of hell as a "fire that never shall be quenched" (KJV). However, other texts suggest that the fires of hell will consume everything. Which way is it?—Shirley Nestler, email
A: Afire that cannot be quenched is a fire that cannot be put out. It will keep burning until it has consumed all of its fuel. However, once that fuel is gone, the fire willgo out. Other Bible texts do indeed suggest that the fire of hell will consume everything that is placed in it. Malachi4:1 says, "Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble.
... Not a root ora branch will be left to them." Thus, there's no contradiction between a fire that cannot be quenched and a fire that consumes everything.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES-JANUARY 2021 63
LESZEKCZERWONKA—GETTY
WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK? AUTHOR UNKNOWN
WE HUMANS ARE OFTEN CONCERNED ABOUT THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS. HOWEVER, A HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD STORY FROM SIGNS OF THE TIMES® HELPS US TO PUT THIS TENDENCY IN PERSPECTIVE.
The story is told of a	the walk successfully, his father asked him, "What
prince who was taken kind of faces did the people make?" prisoner for a crime he His son replied, "I didn't see anyone! I saw*only had committed. His father. mv life in mv hands!"
the king, came to his cell and The lesson is a good one. We should not go through promised to release him on life worried about what people will think of us. ® condition that at noon he be
led through the streets in his Adapted from Signs of the Times ®, March 5,1896.
~	.--unk
young man, "I cannot bear to see the mocking of the people!"
The king replied, "You still don't know how you will be led."
At noon the next day, the king gave his son a glass brimming with milk and instructed him to carry it through the streets with the warning that if he spilled a drop, he would die. The young man tookthe cup and began to walk. When he had finished