Every Seventh-day Adventist in America has broken the Sabbath and failed to "keep it" so many times God would have killed him fifty times a year if he had been under the Decalogue. So what happened to this zealous bunch of fanatics between 1900 and 1990? Their original position was that a Chris­tian had to keep all of the Decalogue to be saved. They no longer teach that. The original position was the Mark of the Beast was going to church on Sun­day instead of Saturday. They no longer teach that. The Adventists are the world's greatest backsliders; they number among the most cowardly professing Christians who ever showed up on this earth.   WHY I AM NOT A SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST by Peter S. Ruckman A MAJOR THEOLOGICAL BLUNDER   INTRODUCTION Many years ago (1950-1953) I noticed a pub­lication distributed widely throughout the Southland called Bible Readings for the Home. It was pub­lished by some outfit called Herald and Review. Later I found Sunday School Lessons for the Home published by an outfit called The Pacific Publish­ing Company. And a little later I noticed that the pictures I had found in these publications matched the works of a publishing company called simply The Southern Publishing Company. Two things impressed me at once. The first was that the colored pictures in some of these pub­lications were the airbrush work of a man who painted large billboards for the Coca-Cola Com­pany. The second thing was that in the "Bible Read­ings" I learned that Jesus Christ was never going to get a chance to reign on earth anywhere for a thousand years (Rev. 20: 1-6). Somehow or another, the writers of Isaiah 2, 11, 65; Amos 9; Zechariah 14; and Revelation 20 had gotten Jesus Christ con­fused with Satan. It was Satan who was going to reign 1,000 years on earth (Rev. 20: 1-5) during the Millennium. John had been deceived into think­ing that the "pit" (Rev. 20:1) was not the bottom­less pit; the EARTH was the bottomless pit. I found these books in nine out of ten of the rural homes that' I visited in Alabama, South and North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Some "colportage" peddlers had done some remarkable business as door-to-door "drummers" (American for "salesman": circa 1880). The next thing I noticed about these books was the fact that whoever was publishing them was afraid to tell you the name of the church they belonged to. Concurrent with their doctrinal con­tents (and matching them) was a weekly broadcast called "The Hour of Prophecy" conducted by their church. I found out, later, that it was the Seventh day Adventist Church, coming from the old "Sev­enth Day Baptists" of the Cumberland Valley Re­vival (1800-1850). Their "leading light" was Ellen White, a demon-possessed female. Then, between 1953 and 1963, I gave consid­erable attention to the doctrinal teaching of these Seventh-day Adventists. I discovered, for example, that Jesus Christ's death did not cover the MORAL commandments written on Moses' tablets (see p. ix). It only covered the ceremonial laws that God gave Israel. I then learned that the White Throne Judgment began nearly a century ago and the "dead, small and great" (Rev. 20: 11-14) were NOW being judged there: it was just being done where nobody could see it! Things went from bad to worse when I learned that Satan bore my sins (not Jesus Christ) because he was the "scapegoat" (Lev. 16), not Jesus Christ. If I had ever had any intention of taking this crew seriously when I began to study their literature I repented whole heartedly by the time I had read less than one-tenth of it. As young as I was in the Lord (five years old spiritually by the year 1954), I could see that the Jewish Sabbath was a CER­EMONY given as a SIGN to Israel (Ezek. 20:20). It was NOT a "moral" commandment like "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not commit adultery," etc. I also observed that God not only placed a ceremonial command in the midst of some moral commandments but placed moral commandments in the midst of ceremonial commandments (Lev. 19:29-32). Paul said a believer was justified "from all things" THAT HE COULD NOT BE JUSTIFIED "by the law of Moses" (Acts 13:39-40). That meant "all things." A distinction between "ceremonies" and "moral conduct" was not made. Christ redeemed us from the CURSE of the LAW (Gal. 3:13), not just ten commandments on stone or some set of ceremonial observances. And of course I could see (as anyone else could, with an IQ of 70) that the White Throne Judgment was no more taking place now than the Marriage of the Lamb. So here I will show you why I remained a Bible-believing Baptist instead of becoming a "Seventh-day Adventist." * read more by purchasing the book *
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