Giving an Answer #1

Scripture: 1 Peter 3:15-16

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, having a good conscience...

Giving an Answer

One of the commands of Scripture for we who live in the last days—the closing moments of the battle between good and evil—is that we live always in readiness. There are many ways in which we need to be prepared, but let's focus today on the particular issue of being always ready to give an answer for the hope that is within us.

Christians take a stand for certain beliefs and certain moral boundaries. We join ourselves to ideas, saying that we stand on this or that side of the line between what we understand as right and wrong. But we don't decide what these beliefs and values are by a roll of the dice or a flight of fancy. We hold to what we find built into the Word of God (the Bible) and in documents that we consider inspired guidance. We accept as authority for our lives that which comes from heaven.

It does not come as a gushy, cotton-candyish feeling, or an ill-conceived mish-mash of chaos. Our God is not the author of confusion. And so heaven has urged us to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, having a good conscience..."

There is much to unpack in those few thoughts, but our focus today is upon the idea of our being ready to give an answer "to every man" who seeks for one. Is this readiness to give an answer limited to only our knowing what we believe? If there ever was a day when this was enough, perhaps that day is past. Our foe is sophisticated and smooth, and he baits his hook in a very shrewd manner. He builds walls into his deceptions so that once one has entered in, to them it is quite difficult to ever get back out.

I recall a line from a song years ago, called "Hotel California." The line went like this: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." And that is the way that Satan crafts his ideas. Because of this, I believe that readiness to give an answer means having a knowledge of both our own beliefs and the beliefs of those with whom we interact. Some people are locked into rooms that they can never leave unless someone will show them the way out. And that means we must get inside of their room with them, in order to lead them to freedom.

Here we are in "Utah;" another way of spelling what? "Mormons!" Let's explore how we can share our beliefs with them.

An Approach that Sometimes Works

Through the years, Seventh-day Adventists have produced materials dealing with winning Mormons to our church. Some respectable energy has been put into these productions. Perhaps you have seen some of them on your bookshelf. Most of these documents could be summed up as arguing as follows:

The Bible teaches this.
Mormons teach that.
The Bible shows that that is wrong. Here is the proof...
Therefore, you should follow the Bible instead.

Now let me ask you; is that argument right or wrong? Quite right in most cases—right in terms of factual information and a sincere intent to help an LDS person understand God's will from the authority of the Bible.

Another question then: how successful has this approach been?

For some of us it has been helpful. Some gathered here today are former-Mormons. For some of us, this type of argument carried a good deal of weight.

Why was that?

Some of us come to the Bible having already accepted (or open to establishing) that whatever the Bible teaches, that is what we will follow (once we are sure it is biblical). For those of us who came this way, I say "congratulations"—you and I were very fortunate. It is probably not being overly bold to say that we were Adventists waiting to happen.

And yet some persons do not come to these ultimate questions through this approach. It may be that they are a great distance from readiness to hear what God would say to them through His Word. Because of this, some, be they New-Agers, Mormons, or others, present a greater challenge in our witnessing effectively to them. We are going to have to work a bit harder and be a bit more thoughtful if we would be successful sharers.

A Different Approach

I would like to add another tool to your faith-sharing toolbox. Let me unpack it with an illustration:

In your home, if someone is present in same room that you are, it is easy to converse with them. If they are in the next room, you can probably speak back and forth to each other and be heard. But if someone is several rooms away, perhaps at the opposite end of the house from you, and if between them and you stand running dish-washers, televisions, or lawn-mower noise from outside, they may not be able to make out what you are saying. In fact, they may not be able to hear you at all.

It is the same way with ideas. More people convert to Seventh-day Adventism from certain religious groups because their beliefs were nearer to ours to begin with. We do well among Baptists, but converts to our movement from the Unitarian church are not crowding into very many of our sanctuaries. This is because the Baptists are usually nearer to the "room" that we are in, while the Unitarians are several rooms away, or may not even be in the house!

Seventh-day Adventists want to win souls. And if we want to do that, we have to get a hearing. And in order to get a hearing, we may have to temporarily change the room we're in in order to make meaningful contact with someone in the room that they are in. If we can get to the room that they are in, we can traverse the pathway back to the room we were in to start with, perhaps with them by our side.

"Giving an answer" to "every man that seeketh" for one means giving an answer that so far as possible will make sense to that person. But if they are in a distant room, our voice may sound indistinct to them. I would like to propose that we can liken these rooms to the fabric of ideas surrounding our lives. We are talking about more than doctrines. Our personal worldview takes in the whole tapestry of what is most meaningful to one's self; it is even more basic than one's lifestyle. We are talking about an individual's baseline value-system.

If you were trying to describe an elephant to somebody who had never seen anything but a few mice, you might be wise to start by describing how an elephant is like a mouse. Next, you could begin to explain the differences in size and other things. In terms of making a beginning, that is an approach you could take; it is a start. And that is what we want to do. We want to make a start in helping another person understand.

I would suggest to you today that the Mormon world is wall-papered with a very different color and pattern than the Bible wall-paper that we Seventh-day Adventists have in our room. I propose that in order to win Mormons to Seventh-day Adventism, and "give an answer for the hope that is within us" in an effective manner, we should make ourselves aware of the differences between the rooms we and Mormons are in. Getting a grip on these differences will help us to "find their room" so that we can lead them back to our room, where the truth of the Bible changes lives and prepares us for the second coming of Jesus.

Reviewing What We Believe

As Seventh-day Adventists our self-understanding includes several ideas. Chief among them is that we are a movement of prophecy, established upon the foundation of the Bible, called to act our part in bringing to fruition the changed people that are the expected result of God's gospel in the last days. We understand that when time marched through to our day, prophecies made long ago that Jesus would, in heaven, investigate the lives of all who had lived and through them demonstrate to the universe the power of His love, would shed great light on the world. We believe that through this cleansing process experienced in the lives of His people, our God will expose the bankruptcy of evil and provide an enduring safeguard against sin ever rising up again in His universe. But humankind will be left forever free to choose right or wrong for themselves. Adventists believe that Jesus, Himself fully God, died in man's place and that we are saved by the atonement He makes for us. His life is counted in the place of our lives, and yet our hope is not only in His work for us but in His work in us. He changes His children. He remakes all who will let Him into truly human people. And God gets the glory.

Seventh-day Adventists understand that we were called onto the map of this battlefield between good and evil at a crucial time, and that we are given a crucial work to do. We are commissioned to share the everlasting gospel and all that it means with a world that needs the everlasting gospel and all that it means. We are called to live according to the teaching of the Word through the power of Jesus.

God announced our movement 600 years before Christ through the prophet in Daniel 8:14. The 2300 day prophecy there given, standing for 2300 years, finds its fulfillment in the fall of 1844 A.D. Those years saw the development of our movement and the great disappointment when Jesus didn't return to earth as expected. A closer look into the prophecies revealed that Jesus at that time made a transition of vast importance in His ministry for us, entering the most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary. Then commenced the investigative judgment of all who have ever lived. When Jesus finishes this work, and when his character has been perfectly reproduced in His end-time people through His intercession for us in the courts above, Jesus will return—literally, visibly, physically, and quite audibly! We will then meet Jesus in the air, ever to be with our Lord.

In an all-too condensed nutshell, that is what we believe.

But what do they believe?

What Mormons Believe About Themselves

It will usually do little good to try to tell the Mormons what we think of them and their beliefs. A much more productive start can be made by our seeking to discover what the Mormons think about themselves and their own beliefs. Let's attempt this.

While their beliefs are in many ways quite similar to those of more conventional Christianity, there are considerable differences. Let's begin with their view of the spirits.

Mormans believe that many spirits are waiting for bodies to inhabit in order to live out their probationary experience on this planet. Mormon families are especially encouraged to be fruitful and multiply. The church President is considered to be a prophet; once elected, he speaks with great authority. The current "prophet" speaks with much greater influence than earlier prophets, even including Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. A word must also be said about the position of Mormon men and of women. On resurrection day, men get to call their wives up out of the grave; the decision belongs uniquely to him.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints understand themselves as participating in a restoration of the true and original religion of God. They believe that with the death of the apostles, God removed His gospel and His "authorized priesthood" from the planet. They hold that the Bible has been tampered with to the extent that it provides only a limited witness to truth. They understand that about 600 years before the birth of Christ, a group of Jews were commissioned by God to leave Judea, cross the ocean, and populate the American continent.

These persons carried with them records engraven upon metal plates, managing to add many additional records that were preserved in the same manner. This people are said to be the origin of the American Indians. Their history is said to have been one punctuated alternatively by great wars and great revivals. Shortly after Jesus was crucified in Judea, they write that He appeared to them on the American continent, organized a church there, and left for heaven.

But just as the LDS hold that "historical Christianity" completely apostasized in the old world, the proposed American planting of it is understood also to have. Through a series of wars, the civilization of the Americas was nearly destroyed. God intervened and caused the records to be preserved in a chest on a hill in New York, to be brought forth at the future point in time when He would choose to restore His gospel. To the LDS way of thinking, the Mormon "Scriptures" provide much more reliable information about the gospel than does the Bible. After all, God preserved the plates and those records never underwent the centuries of handling and mishandling that the Bible is said to have been subjected to. For this reason, if a conflict should arise between the Bible and the Mormon Scriptures, it is they which trump the Bible.

Young Joseph Smith, Jun. Was the chosen vessel to accomplish this restoration. He was told by two "divine personages" appearing to him (understood to have been the Father and Jesus), that none of the churches on the earth in his time were legitimate—that all were false. He, Joseph, he was told, must bring forth again the ancient records on the plates and restore the gospel and the priesthood to the earth again. This restored church then, would be the religious body through which God would bring His kingdom to final triumph on the earth.

The LDS worldview provides a comprehensive framework within which one locates their own identity and purpose in life. They learn that they are immortal—essentially "gods," who, at an earlier phase of their existence consented to come here and inhabit flesh, to live out lives and in a practical way show their worthiness for advancement in a probationary life. After they die, they believe that they will be assigned to one of three spheres or levels of dominion. All live forever. It is commonly said that most of the thinking is taken care of by the church authorities. As the commercial says, "leave the driving to us."

Discovering Common Situations and Pathways

I want to share with you today four fascinating intersections between Adventism and Mormonism. If we will begin to understand these points, we will be better equipped to give an answer for the hope that is within us to our Latter-day Saint friends.

Situation: Both Movements arose in a strong alienation experience

One situation common to both Adventists and Mormons is the origin of our respective movements: both arose out of a strong experience of alienation. In fact, several history books treat Adventists and Mormons together, as for example in "Millerites and Mormons," pp.191-197 in the chapter "Outsiders" in A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, by Mark A. Noll (1992).

\The controversies separating the various sects left Joseph Smith's head spinning. When he is said to have experienced his first vision, his keynote question to the beings appearing to him was which church he ought to join. Their response was that he was not to join any of them, for they were all wrong. When Smith told of the gold plates and the book of Mormon, finally publishing it, he was thoroughly ostracized. Early Mormons sometimes experienced violent treatment at the hands of their neighbors. They were not accepted into the mainstream. The prophetic claims of Smith led them to be viewed as heretics. They moved enmass not just once, but actually several times, first leaving New York for Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois, and then far westward to Utah. Evangelicals have constantly dogged the Mormons, writing a plethora of books against them and charging them with being a "cult."

Seventh-day Adventists never undertook the kind of migrations that the Mormons did, but they did move their center of operations from the Northeast, to Michigan, and then from there to Washington D.C. Like the Mormons, Adventists also arose as a prophetic movement. They calculated time prophecies (correctly too, we might add) and preached imminent judgment. For this offense, our pioneers were disfellowshipped from their churches, or made so uncomfortable in them that they were practically forced to leave. When events didn't come to pass as expected in late 1844, and with Ellen G. White's visions being published, Adventists met the same fate as their LDS neighbors; they were laughed at, mocked, sometimes treated to physical violence, and but rarely taken seriously. In the southern United States some even were imprisoned and served on chain-gangs for their refusal to submit to Sunday laws. Adventists have long been considered questionable, and outsiders. Often sold on the same shelfs where books assail the LDS for being a cult are also stacked with books identifying Seventh-day Adventism with the same label.

Adventists and Mormons have experienced in common strong rejection by the world that they have sought to evangelize.

Pathway: But Adventists and Mormons Approach to Their Alienation Differed

Whereas Mormons accepted new "Scriptures" as being authentic, and were guided by them, Seventh-day Adventists looked yet more tenaciously to the Bible for guidance. Whereas the Mormon prophet encouraged the fledgling LDS church to turn to the Book of Mormon, Ellen G. White encouraged her brothers and sisters to turn more attentively to the Bible. Even her visions, she said, were to be tested by the Bible. We share a common type of experience; but the response of each group to it was markedly different. Because of their reaction, Adventists experienced freedom to go where the Bible goes; Mormons experienced freedom to go in an altogether different direction.

Situation: Both Movements Strongly Emphasize Restorationism

Mormons, holding that all the sects then current were wrong, set about on a plan of restoring the gospel. They understood that God had elected to restore His church to the earth through Joseph Smith, Jun. The coming forth of the book of Mormon and the restoration of the "priesthood" meant to them a restoration of the kingdom.

Seventh-day Adventists also see themselves as agents of restoration. Most of Christendom had departed from Sabbath observance, a loving mark of obedience and fealty to our Savior. Adventists see themselves as fulfilling the mandate of Isaiah 56:1-8, Isaiah 58:12-14; and Isaiah 59:9-12 to restore the Sabbath breach that has been made in God's law. They see the Sabbath commandment in the book of Revelation that speaks of worshiping the Creator (Revelation 14:7), and keeping His commandments, including the Sabbath (Revelation 12:17; Revelation 14:12). This restoration is not just of the Sabbath, but of the fullness of Christianity. As Adventists, we understand that we are commissioned to preach the "everlasting gospel" to every kindred, nation, tongue, and people (Revelation 14:6).

This strong purpose of restoration is probably one of the most compelling commonalities between Adventists and Mormons, yet one we have but rarely discussed with them.

Pathway: Adventists and Mormons Diverge on How to Restore

Whereas Mormons embarked on a pathway following "restored Scriptures" and contemporary revelation as their guide in the restoration task, Adventists chose a pathway holding to the ultimate authority of the Bible, supplemented only by prophecy harmonizing with it. For Adventists, the Bible remains the final and absolute acid test.

Situation: Decided Interest in Discovering God's Will

Mormons sincerely desire to know God's will. They look especiialy to the sayings of the contemporary prophets: the church President. They believe that their church leaders even speak can even to them in oral "scripture." The discovery of truth is also achieved through tests of one's feelings. For example, at the close of the Book of Mormon we find the challenge to "ask God, the eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost." Moroni 10:4. After reading the book of Mormon, one is not asked to compare its evidences with Scripture, or even to use reason. Instead, one is urged only to ask whether it is true or not. While there is nothing wrong with prayer (it is, after all, essential!), the Bible never asks us to make our decisions in this manner (subjectively and apart from the Bible evidence). Yet this is a key means by which Mormons discover "truth."

Seventh-day Adventists are also keen on discovering what God's will is. We want that will, and often study quite diligently in order to attain it. We seek to discover His will by comparing Scripture with Scripture within the Bible, and further, by searching the writings of Ellen G. White for any additional insight.

Pathway: Adventists and Mormons Diverge on How to Discover God's Will

While Mormons focus on internal tests, Adventists focus on external tests. The internal, subjective feelings after one has read or prayed are decisive for the Mormon. For the Adventist, external, objective tests predominate, weighing Scripture (the Bible), comparing text to text, looking for truth outside of one's self. If the LDS viewpoint seems woefully naive to us, we must keep in mind that the Mormons have a radically different view of human nature than we do. The fall is not seen as carrying nearly the same destructive and distorting impact upon human nature and perceptions. We Adventists, who see that the fall has catastrophically damaged our nature and faculties, making human emotion and reason undependable, find our safety in looking for confirmation beyond our unreliable nature. These pathways of our respective groups are quite unreconcilable with each other. But it helps to know where the other fellow is coming from.

Situation: Adventists and Mormons Desire to Emphasize Man's Responsibility

Mormons insist that man is responsible to obey God, and remind us that He has given men "agency" (free will). They insist that today we are not counted guilty for Adam's sin, and instead only for our own sins. This is a major departure from historical Christianity, which has generally upheld the idea that we are held guilty for Adam's sin.

Adventists have generally, (until recent times) very much concurred with the Mormon position. Our doctrine of the investigative judgment and character development disagrees with the Mormon evaluation of the human race's fallen nature; but while we understand the resulting impact of Adam's sin upon the human race to have been so much more destructive than they do, we also hold strong faith in heaven's ability to change us here and now.

Pathway: Adventists and Mormons Diverge on the fallenness of man's nature

As we have above stated, this is a major difference, and impacts what the meaning of salvation is all the way through one's thinking. Knowledge plays a much greater roll for the Mormon, who understands the fall in a much different way than we do. Adventists emphasize repentance and obedience. Obedience is important for the Mormon—quite important. But Don't forget that in Mormonism people can be "saved" through proxy baptisms in which they have no personal choice. How different this is from the Bible!

Bridging With Commonalities

These four situations more or less common to Seventh-day Adventists and to Latter-day saints can provide fruitful starting places in your interaction with Mormons. Besides love and friendship, you can use these points to build bridges to them. Keep in mind how your approach and theirs go in different directions; consider focusing on the fundamental similarities:

1. Both movements arose in a strong alienation experience.
2. Both movements strongly emphasize restorationism.
3. Both peoples have in common a strong interest in discovering what the Lord's will is.
4. Both theologies strongly emphasize man's responsibility.

By becoming more aware of our own heritage and their heritage, we render ourselves more able to hear them, and may open the door so that they can hear us. By trying to see how they see, we prepare ourselves to help them see as we see. They are not going to come to our room; we need to go to theirs. And gently bring them back with us.

Conclusion: Binding the Strong man

In closing, let's turn to Matthew 12:29:

Or else how can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house.

The LDS worldview is the strongman for the Mormon. It surrounds him. It formats his outlook on all of life, including most decidedly his religion. The strong man needs to be bound. Unless we can cross over by the bridge of ideas and engage the strong man in his lair (unless we can enter the "room" where the Mormon lives), we will continue to be limited in our work, and be effective in reaching only a small number of LDS.

We are not interested in taking away anything that the Mormon has—we want to add to what he has. We are not involved in stealing sheep—these are our Father's lambs. We are not motivated (I hope) to prove ourselves right by proving others wrong—but we want to see our close friends, relatives, neighbors, and loved ones in the kingdom too. We don't wish to take away the real gospel, the true Spirit, or the authentic Jesus from anyone—but we want them to experience the real gospel, to know the true Spirit, and to trust in the authentic Jesus for salvation.

May God give us energy, interest, thoughtfulness, comeliness of spirit, and grace to apply new things we have learned and new ideas to the opportunities that He gives us. May we more effectively share what the Bible teaches with our Mormon friends. This we can do with the help of Jesus.