Day: February 19, 2010

This book is the current missionary book of the year (2009) for the entire General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Some of the other English titles include “Signs of Hope” and “He is Coming!”. It is said to have been translated into over 70 languages, and over 15,000,000 printed. It is your very typical evangelism book put out by our Seventh-day Adventist church over the years – for good and for bad.

The good is that things are written with authority – Christ is coming back, and we need to prepare. There are many Bible texts given to show clearly what the issues will be in the last days, and what to do to go to heaven and be with Jesus. The bad of it, is that there are many supposed “signs” to show the nearness of Christ’s coming, but many of them are wrong. Thinking readers of this book who rightly reject the writer’s assertion that crime is exploding, people around the world are getting poorer and poorer, that no one denies global warming (he obviously didn’t ask me!!), earthquakes increasing etc etc will have a hard time accepting the truths given about Jesus’ coming being literal, and soon. The next to last chapter showing how the Sabbath will be the dividing point for the whole world is excellent. It would have been great if he had just focused on the Bible itself, but then in the very last chapter of the book, after talking before how there will be such a big tribulation and many people dying and huge earthquakes and the sun turning dark etc, he says that the little cloud with Jesus in it will show up on a day just like any other day when people are going to work and to clubs to party and….

One thing i wonder is, why can our church go all out on something like this project, and yet let the inspired words God gave his church lie in the dust?

Why?

The main theme of this book is Luke 10:2 “Therefore said he unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest.” Derek Morris, pastor of the Forest Lake Seventh-day Adventist church in Apopka, Florida, exhorts us to take the words of this verse personally, and go out and spread the gospel. Excellent. This is something that all of us should have been doing already, but sad to say, we haven’t. So if this book helps wake up some people to how they should get serious about being used by God, then all glory to God 🙂

Meeting the objectives of the title nicely, the book only falls short in the area of saying parts of the Bible are not translated correctly, and that in talking about how to work for Jesus, it just mentions in how to work: “many people… only need to hear the good news, and receive the invitation.” Nowhere does it talk about the need to call people to repentance, the very first thing that Jesus did when starting his ministry. The last part of the book gives some real-life examples of people who allowed God to use them.