Closer To Heaven
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Support for the mission activities of the Seventh-day Adventist church has always been part of the Sabbath School program. This video is Mission Spotlight for this week.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrhg1Qrwddw]
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My mother turned to me as she was dying from gallbladder cancer.
“You must go to church,” she said.
Mother had taken me to church every Sabbath since I was a young girl, but I had stopped attending as I got busy with my shop in Hanam, a suburb of South Korea’s capital, Seoul.
Image © Pacific Press
Mother’s words troubled me as I struggled to both work and raise my son, daughter, and three nephews. I realized that I could not succeed on my own, and I returned to Jesus.
As my love grew for Jesus, He gave me a heart to care for needy neighbors. A relative introduced me to Hong Soon-mi. A year after we met, Soon-mi’s husband was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. When I learned that he couldn’t afford surgery, I set up a donation box on the street outside my shop. Many people ridiculed me, saying, “Why are you raising money for someone who isn’t a relative?” But I kept the donation box in place.
On Soon-mi’s birthday, I presented her while a 45-pound (20-kilogram) bag of rice. “Take this gift from my shop,” I said. She later told me that her whole family cried when they saw the gift.
Soon-mi didn’t come to church right away. But she read the Adventist magazines that I gave her and learned that Seventh-day Adventists love Jesus and people. I put Soon-mi in charge of my shop and provided her with a salary and daily necessities such as fruit and rice for about two years. After that, I made her the manager of a small restaurant that I ran. A year after managing the restaurant, she asked, “Why don’t you invite me to church?”
“Why?” I said. “You know that you are welcome.”
“Then I’ll go,” she said.
After six years of friendship, Soon-mi visited West Hanam Seventh-day Adventist Church for the first time. Three years later, she became a deaconess, and later her husband and son were baptized.
When I first opened my shop, I was the only Adventist in the neighborhood. Now seven merchants are Adventist. The church has a good reputation in the area. I thank my mother for giving me a heritage of faith, and I give all glory to God for using Adventist merchants like me for His good.
Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org
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Here’s how one scholar seeks to answer the hard questions about what the Israelites did to some of these nations:
“As Creator of all things and all human beings and as sovereign over all, God can do anything [He] wants with anyone and be right in doing so. … The ways of God are a mystery.
Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com
Since we will never completely understand [Him], we might as well relax with the questions in our minds. Isaiah 55:8-9 offers some consolation. According to the biblical picture of the Canaanites, these peoples were extremely wicked, and their annihilation represented God’s judgment for their sin. The destruction of the Canaanites was neither the first nor the last time God would do this. The differences between the Canaanites’ fate and the fate of humanity (except for Noah’s family) as described in Genesis 6-9 involve scale and agency. … God never intended for the Israelites to make the policy of herem [the total destruction] as a general policy toward outsiders. Deuteronomy 7:1 expressly identifies and thereby delimits the target peoples. The Israelites were not to follow these policies against Aramaeans or Edomites or Egyptians, or anyone else (cf. Deuteronomy 20:10-18). … The Canaanites suffered a fate that ultimately all sinners will face: the judgment of God. … God’s elimination of the Canaanites was a necessary step in the history of salvation. … Although the Canaanites as a whole were targets of God’s judgment, they had at least forty years of advance warning (see Rahab’s confession in Joshua 2:8-11).” — Daniel I. Block, The NIV Application Commentary: Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2012), pages 98, 99.
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In Deuteronomy 2 and 3, Moses continues to recount Israelite history and how, with God’s blessing, they routed their enemies; when they were faithful, God gave them the victory, even over “giants” (Deuteronomy 2:11, Deuteronomy 2:20; Deuteronomy 3:13).
Image © Bible Adventure Collection at Goodsalt.com
Of course, this brings up the difficult topic, which we must at least touch on, regarding the destruction of these people. Though the children of Israel would often speak peace first to a nation ( Deuteronomy 20.10-11), yet if the people didn’t accept that offer, sometimes the Israelites would go in and destroy them, including women and children. “And the LORD our God delivered him over to us; so we defeated him, his sons, and all his people. We took all his cities at that time, and we utterly destroyed the men, women, and little ones of every city; we left none remaining” ( Deuteronomy 2.33-34, NKJV).
Some try to get around this simply by saying that these stories are not true. However, because we believe that “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), that’s not a viable option for Seventh-day Adventists. Thus, we are left with the difficult question regarding these incidents.
There’s no question that many of these pagan nations were exceedingly brutal and cruel people who justifiably could have faced the wrath and punishment of God long before then. That’s true, and even if God waited patiently for them to change their ways, and they didn’t change — this still doesn’t alter the hard reality about the killing of everyone, including children. (Of course, probably many more children were killed in the Flood than were killed by the Israelites.)
The fact is that, for now, given the limited information we have about the full context of the events, we just need to accept this hard reality and trust in the goodness of God, which has been revealed in so many other ways. Faith isn’t just about loving God on a beautiful day in a pretty forest full of wonderful sights and sounds. It’s also about trusting in Him despite what we don’t fully understand.
| Read 1 Corinthians 10:1-4 and John 14:9. How do these verses, and many others like them, help us learn to trust in the love, justice, and goodness of God, even when we see things that seem hard to square with this understanding of God? |
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You can view an in-depth discussion of Moses’ History Lesson in the Hope Sabbath School class led by Pastor Derek Morris. Click on the image to view:
With thanks to Hope Channel – Television that will change your life.
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