FROM YOUR PASTOR’S DESK:
November 8
THE SANCTUARY DOCTRINE EXPLAINS THE WAY OF SALVATION OF THE GOSPEL (Part 41)
The dying Lamb of God makes His last recorded glorious promise, moments just before He expired—-not to His disciples or his earthy mother, Mary (as would normally be expected)—-but to a criminal condemned to die by crucifixion with Him at the Calvary Moment of the Plan of Redemption! That hopeless, nameless thief never thought his individual probation was still open, that he could still be eternally saved, having been condemned to die by human justice for his crimes.
Greater still the human impossibility and chance that he would be crucified on the same ignominious “hill of skulls, “Golgotha, just outside the walls of Jerusalem alongside God in the flesh, the long-awaited promised Messiah, the prophesied “Lamb of God,” the very Antitype of all the typical lambs and specified clean animals offered as a blood sacrifice starting with that first lamb offered at Eden immediately after the fall of the first Adam, down through two thousand years of successive generations to that eternal epochal Calvary Moment!
It was the last “preparation day”FRIDAY when type would meet Antitype, shadow would meet substance, the terminal point of the Old Testament Mosaic dispensation. It was in the dying moments of Christ that momentous Friday, a couple of hours before sunset when the Sabbath would begin that He promises the penitent thief on the cross, “TODAY,” or “this day,” “this preparation day Friday.”
‘I say unto thee TODAY, thou shalt be with Me in paradise.’ (Luke 23:43). Christ DID NOT promise that the thief should be with Him in Paradise THAT DAY [that Friday, specifically!].
HE HIMSELF DID NOT GO THAT DAY [Friday] TO PARADISE. He slept [rested in death] in the tomb [of Joseph of Arimathea], and in the morning of the resurrection [first day of the week, our Sunday], He said, ‘I AM NOT YET ASCENDED TO MY FATHER.’ John 20: 17.
But on the day of the crucifixion, THE DAY OF APPARENT DEFEAT AND DARKNESS, the promise was given, ‘Today,’ while dying upon the cross fo a malefactor, Christ says to a poor sinner, ‘thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.’” – Desire of Ages, p. 751.
If we who claim to be “red, white, and blue” are genuinely Christo-centric and CALVARY-CENTERED, as loudly asserted in doctrines and worship services, we confuse ourselves and countless others by contradicting the very New Testament account of Christ’s last moments before dying on the cross and the promIse made to the thief on the cross, and the very prophecies and its fulfillment regarding when Christ would be crucified, when and where He would be buried, when He would resurrect from the grave, and when He would ascend to Paradise—-when twe also believe, teach, and preach that when a “saved”’believer dies he or his “soul” immediately “flies to Paradise,” etc.
Think “with the mind of Christ,” not with the “mind of the church,”’dear friend in Christ!
(To be continued). Bless all, NMF.