Season of Advent

This is the final weekend of liturgical season called Advent.  Our name “Adventist” is derived from this root.  What does it mean to us?

Yesterday, December 21, 2012, many expected “the end of the world.”  Some say that as many as 12% of USA population expected that something would happen.  We may laugh at the silliness of believing in such superstitious predictions.  But, just remember the great Disappointment of 1844, when faithful believers were expecting the end of the world.  To them, Millerite followers, it meant the return of Jesus in Glory.  A friend of minie posted on the FB “we should be more sympathetic with folk thinking the world will end ...considering our “Great Disappointment.”  Hmmmm.  You have not thought it that way?  Have you?

BBC reported the day before 21/12/12 that Seventh-day Adventists predicted the end of the world in 1874.  Someone should have called in with correction “not us, the Jehovah’s Witnesses!”  But, let’s face it (and I am quoting now Walla Walla University pastor Alex Bryant) “Adventism was not born as a reform movement, or as a temperance movement, not as a theological innovation, not because of a unique private prophetic revelation.  Adventism was born out of a wrong calculation about the Second Coming of Christ, fueled by an intense, emotional, highly personal, fervent desire to be with Jesus.”

We had survived yet another failed prediction.  Are you settled that the world will go on...and on...and on.  Or are you still looking for the Day of the Lord, when the desire of all ages will be fulfilled, as Jesus will come in Glory, one day, to end the world as we know it?

This year we did not do an evangelistic series, not wanting to manipulate peoples’ fears of 21/12/12.  The world did not end.  Will you continue sharing your faith, and telling your friends that things will not always be like they are?

This Advent season let us remember the reason – Jesus came the first time to let people know Who God is, to remind people that we belong to Him, and that we are invited to the New World.  To celebrate Christmas is to remember that it was a historical confirmation that this world will end, even elements will dissolve.  And then Christ will create the New Heaven, the New Earth without end. 

Do you know Jesus?  Not the decorative babe in the manger, but the Soon Coming King of the Universe?

your servant, pastor Alex Golovenko