T.A. McMahon & Dale Ratzlaff (Part 2)

Program description: Tom welcomes back his guest Dale Ratzlaff of Life Assurance Ministries and a former SDA pastor. Tune in as they discuss such Seventh-day Adventist Church subjects as Ellen G. White’s forgeries and the Investigative Judgment.

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with T.A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could join us. In today’s program, Tom continues his conversation with Dale Ratzlaff of Life Assurance Ministries and a former SDA pastor. Now, along with his guest, here’s TBC executive director, Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. This is part two of our discussion of Seventh-day Adventism - the beliefs, the doctrines - and our guest has been Dale Ratzlaff. He’s a former SDA pastor, trained in Seventh-day Adventist schools and seminary. He’s the author of four books, which we’re going to refer to our books - Gary will bring those at the end of the program. Dale, we’re also going to give your website, if that’s okay. This is important information, folks, especially those who are at their workplace or know people who are into Seventh-day Adventism. We’re going to talk about - well, we’re going to get Dale’s recommendation of how you minister, how you witness to them. But we’re going to do that a little later.

Anyway, Dale, welcome back to part two.

Dale: Well, thank you. It’s a privilege to be part of your ministry for a few minutes. [laughs]

Tom: [laughing] Okay. Dale, as you know, last week we ended with what may be the most important doctrine with regard to its relationship to the biblical gospel, and that is the Investigative Judgment. Now, you described that, and it sounded like you give the straight doctrine from an SDA source. Is that correct?

Dale: Well, the summary that I gave last week was my summary, but every single sentence and every fact is footnoted. That’s in the book Cultic Doctrine, which I think you sell…

Tom: That’s right.

Dale: …and your listeners could order it from Berean Call - but page 159 for the reference. So everything is documented, and that’s exactly what Ellen White taught. And I might say that they have tried to reinterpret the whole 1844 - you know, that whole scenario - about three, four, or five times, and they know it’s wrong. And when I was a pastor, I studied into it thoroughly. I read well over a thousand pages regarding the investigative judgment and came to the conclusion that I could not teach it with a clear conscience.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: And my conference president said, “You have to promise to teach it.”

And I said, “I can’t do it unless you can show me how to do it from Scripture,” which nobody could do.

Tom: Yeah. So I recommend, folks, if maybe you’ve just joined us, or you’ve just started with part two, go back to part one, because Dale does explain this teaching, which is antithetical - and here’s the problem: it is antithetical to the biblical gospel. So if people are believing that, you can’t have it both ways. You’re basically…

Dale: That’s right.

Tom: …rejecting Christ, and what He accomplished on the cross.

Now, Dale, just for the sake of…let me put it in my words, and then you correct me for those who want to follow the program - don’t have time to go back. So Jesus enters into - in heaven - into the Holy of Holies, and basically He’s investigating those who profess to be Christians - their lives, whether we have angels taking notes - or is Jesus just seeing us with His omniscience, or whatever it might be?

Dale: Well, you see, Adventists believe that there are beings on many, many other worlds that are unfallen.

Tom: Wow.

Dale: And they’re all looking to this earth as an object lesson to see if God is really going to be just. And so they have this scenario - in fact, Ellen White had a vision once and it was interpreted at that time that there were beings that she saw on Jupiter, but they’ve backpedaled on that now.

Tom: [laughing] I guess so.

Dale: But anyway, their whole idea is that God just can’t save the sinners, you know? [laughs] They need to prepare to be in heaven, and one of the theologians said that you have to be safe to save, because if you get up there, you don’t want to live next door to a Bin Laden or something like that. So it’s a very cultic doctrine. It does away with the finished atonement; our sins are not blotted out until just before the Second Coming; Satan actually becomes the sin-bearer - he suffers for the sins of the righteous. There is no assurance of salvation - it just rips out the foundation of the gospel.

Tom: Yeah. Wow. Again, this is more than bizarre. And you know, as I mentioned last week and I’ve mentioned on the programs, it seems you’re going to get a better deal from the Roman Catholic Church with its purgatory! That’s not just tongue-in-cheek, folks, that’s the reality. If you believe as a Seventh-day Adventist - if you put your faith in the teachings of the church - you’re at odds not only with the gospel, but you’ve rejected what Christ has accomplished for you.

Dale, with regard to - you know, as I mentioned earlier, we have friends who are Seventh-day Adventists. We have friends maybe in our work place and school, whatever it might be - how would you recommend… What’s your suggestion with regard to how you minister, how you witness to somebody like that? Do you come on like gangbusters? Do you get right in their grill, or - I like to ask questions. How do you go about it?

Dale: Well, you know, by the Lord’s grace, our ministry has helped actually thousands of people transition out of Adventism, and our goal is to help them find a healthy evangelical church. And we have found there are several ways that work depending on the individual. And let me say that many Adventists are afraid to study, and that’s a very cultic mindset that you probably find in all the cults.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: But my feeling is that I began to question Adventism when I understood the true gospel of Romans, and that was the opening step for me, and it’s been the opening step for many people. We have the promise that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth, so I think the very first thing that a person needs to do when witnessing to a Seventh-day Adventist is to make sure that they’re a born-again believer, that they believe in the righteousness of Jesus Christ alone that is accredited to them the moment they believe, plus nothing. And if they can finally accept the gospel in all of its simplicity and fullness, then there is hope that the Holy Spirit will open their hearts so they can begin to discern truth and evil. And so we have found that’s probably a place to start.

Now, there’s a couple of books that we recommend, depending on how open they are to study. Typically we don’t start with the topic of the Sabbath, because that is the most cherished doctrine in Adventism, and most of them would say there’s no way that that can be wrong. There are three books - my wife’s book that she has: it’s My Cup Overflows, and the women like to read it. It’s basically our personal story from her viewpoint. Then my book Truth Led Me Out is my story, and there’s a book by Greg Taylor called Discovering the New Covenant. He’s a former Adventist pastor, and those are good books to give as a start. But start with the gospel. Make sure they understand the gospel first.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Now, you mentioned the Sabbath and Sabbath-keeping. Briefly describe that, because in my understanding of the teachings is it can carry the mark of the Beast, which really makes it a huge problem. But go ahead.

Dale: Yes, that is, as I said before, the most important doctrine in the Seventh-day Adventist church, and they believe that the Sabbath will be the dividing line between those who serve God and those who serve Satan in the last days. And it also serves as one of their most effective evangelistic tools. You know, if they can go, as they do in their Revelation seminars…

And what they will do - they will teach that the Sabbath, the fourth commandment, is still binding today. They will “show” from Revelation that the remnant church is defined as one who “keeps the commandments of God and keeps the faith of Jesus.” And then they will show that Ellen White is the spirit of prophecy. So you put these together now: the Sabbath is the seal of God, Ellen White is the spirit of prophecy, and the SDA church is a remnant church of Bible prophecy. It’s very, very easy for people to get sucked into the Adventist church. They do it all the time.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: Now, the problem comes a little later about how you keep the Sabbath, and as you said earlier - I guess it was last week - how some people manufacture their own laws that they keep, and their own laws that they don’t keep. No Adventist keeps the Sabbath according to the biblical guidelines, and Ellen White adds onto the biblical guidelines dozens of other laws, and it’s quite interesting how Adventists keep the Sabbath.

When I was a boy growing up in the Adventist church, my mother would not cook on the Sabbath because that’s an Old Testament command: you’re not to cook on the Sabbath. But it was okay to heat things up on the Sabbath, and I remember when we started using frozen peas. My mother decided that it didn’t take any more time to cook the peas than it is to cook them on Friday and heat them up on Saturday. And we never even realized that it was wrong to build a fire on the Sabbath. So when Adventists are struggling to try to get people to keep the Sabbath, all they’re doing is putting them under terrific bondage, because nobody keeps the Sabbath.

Tom: Right.

Dale: When I was a teacher in Monterey Bay Academy, a boarding school, when visitors would come by to eat at the cafeteria, because it was an Adventist institution, they could go ahead and pay for their meal on Sabbath, but they were not supposed to go out to a restaurant on Sabbath. And then some Adventists say, “Well, it’s okay to go out to a restaurant and eat after church on Sabbath as long as you pay with a credit card and not by cash.”

Tom: Wow. [chuckles]

Dale: When I was a teacher at Monterey Bay Academy, it was right on the Pacific Ocean. We had a half-mile of private beach. Well, what could you do on the Sabbath? Well, you could go wading up to your knees, but if it was over your knees, that was Sabbath-breaking. So as soon as you start keeping the Sabbath, you get into all kinds of fuzzy legalism. You never know when you’ve kept the Sabbath good enough.

Tom: Mm-hmm. See, that’s why Jesus in reference to the law, and the Scriptures being very specific about 613 laws…but when men get involved, they’re going to add to it and add to it and add to it, then you’re going to bring in the lawyers, and they’re going to figure ways to get around it and so on - it just goes on and on. “There’s a way that seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death,” or separation from what God instructed. That’s incredible.

Now, Ellen G. White: I want to go back to her, because she is “the spirit of prophecy.” Is it true that, you know, according to the research, that much of her writing was plagiarized?

Dale: Yes, that is true, and it’s interesting what the church has done after that. I left the church in 1981, I believe it was - it’s been a long time ago now - but one of the pastors that I knew in a Southern California conference was Walter Ray, and he was an avid believer in Ellen White. And he did a lot - in fact, he wrote several books on Ellen White, compiling some of her instruction, and had them published. And then he somehow got a list of Ellen White’s library and started reading them, and said, “Whoa, this sounds like Ellen White! These are all books published before her books were published!” And he began to see that she was plagiarizing tremendously, but she did it in a way that was very deceptive. They would change a few words here and there, but they followed the thought of the book that she was plagiarizing from.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: So he wrote a book called White Lie, and it created a tremendous stir in the Adventist church. And then they had Fred Veltman, who was my Greek teacher - he took several years to try to determine how much of Ellen White’s writings were plagiarized, and it was quite a bit, but he had limited access. He didn’t use all the books that she quoted from. So yes, Ellen White plagiarized tremendously.

Now, Ellen White’s son said that God told her in vision that she was instructed to go and get the “gems of truth” from other writers that were full of corruption - that she was to lift the gems of truth out for the Adventists. But their own scholars have found and published, actually, materials showing that when Ellen White copied others, she copied not only the gems of truth but also the errors. So that’s not true at all.

Tom: Yeah.

Dale: But what the Adventist church has done - and they have pretty well satisfied their members not to worry about plagiarism, and they do it this way: well, they say Luke in his gospel shows that he used sources - you know, he says, “I have searched everything carefully,” and so on. So if Luke can use other sources, then so can Ellen White. There’s no big deal there.

Tom: Yeah. Now, about prophecy: she’s “the spirit of prophecy,” and so on. Now I know many of our listeners - I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had this experience - but all of a sudden a really incredibly colorful brochure will show up; there may be a colorful ad in the newspaper, and the last one I got, I said, “Wait a minute - this kind of looks like the SDA marketing approach, but this is starting to sound more evangelical.” Well, it took me some research to figure out - “Here we go again!” This is a program of prophecy sponsored by and with one of the teachers being a committed Seventh-day Adventist. What do you say to that?

Dale: This is the way they operate, and it starts from Ellen White’s teaching: she said that when we go into a new community, we don’t tell them that we keep the Sabbath. First we want to build bonds with them, and so on. So the whole Revelation seminars - and they have all kinds of different names - but typically, this is the way it works: typically they have this beautiful full-color brochure that you mentioned, and it usually has pictures of some of the beasts of Daniel, or else it will have some current event, and it will be very appealing. It’ll say, “Well, come and learn about all this stuff,” okay? And it’ll be usually put on by some Adventist scholar or world traveler who is nothing but an Adventist pastor or evangelist.

And what they do in these evangelistic series: first of all, they will introduce what sounds like the evangelical gospel. They will have several meetings that most anybody could agree with. Then they will move into what they call the “distinctive truths,” or the “testing truths,” and that would be the Sabbath, and Ellen White, and man’s condition at death, and the Second Coming, and the remnant church, and all that. And usually, just before the end of the series, they’ll move from a building that is not owned by the Adventists - usually some other building - into the Adventist church right near the end. So it’s very deceptive in the way that they target people. And their whole mission - it is to the unconverted, okay, the unbeliever - but it is even more so to Christians in other denominations.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: And it is amazing how many people they baptize from evangelical churches, even pastors.

Tom: Wow. Wow. Prophecy again - give us the perspective of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on the Rapture.

Dale: They don’t believe in a secret Rapture. They believe in the Second Coming, one glorious Second Coming. They call what you would call the Rapture “translation,” when we’re translated to heaven.

Tom: Mm-hmm. So we’re to look not for our “blessed hope,” we’re to look for the Second Coming, in which the Scripture teaches we will be with Him - coming back with Him. Wow.

Dale: Yeah, they use that text in Thessalonians, but they don’t read the verse that says, “coming back,” okay? They skip that one. [laughs]

Tom: [laughing] Right. Now tell us about soul sleep, because that’s another important doctrine.

Dale: Yes, this is soul sleep - now I personally don’t believe that their belief in soul sleep is enough to divide - what I say, “divide fellowship.” However, their soul sleep is this: they believe that a soul is the body and the breath - you know, God breathed into man, and he became a living soul - dust of the earth and God’s breath - a living soul. They don’t see that breath as a life-giving spirit, rather they see it as just regular breath, and throughout the Bible, the pneuma, or the ruach, you know, of the Old Testament is - they interpret it just as “breath” or “wind,” not as “spirit.” And so when a person dies, there is no soul anymore. They talk about soul sleep, but really it is annihilation.

Tom: Right.

Dale: When a person is dead according to their theology, there is nothing that goes to heaven. And so they are in the grave, and then at the Resurrection in the Last Day when Christ comes, He will create a new person and put the memories of the person who died before into this new creation, and they just kind of skip over that, because if you look at it carefully and analyze it, really, it is a very horrifying thing that there really is no existence after death, because what value is it to me if I die and God’s going to create another person? Even if they do have my memories, it’s not me!

Tom: And in addition, Dale, Paul had it wrong: “To live is Christ, to die is gain. Absent from the body, present with the Lord.” So he was a bit confused according to that teaching.

You know, one last aspect about that, I remember an SDA person committed to the church telling me that it was an important doctrine, because it eliminated the whole problem of séances and talking to the dead afterwards and so on because of annihilation. Now, that’s like taking one error, okay, and using it to solve another problem! It doesn’t work that way. It’s just dead wrong.

Dale: Well, you know…

Tom: No pun intended, by the way.

Dale: …when I was still in the Adventist church, as I was beginning to study my way out, I decided that I would thoroughly read Ellen White and see what the real reason was for this soul sleep, and I came up with two basic conclusions (which you could even say was only one), but Ellen White said that in the last days - now this would be during the time of trouble, which Adventists believe they will be living in, not raptured out of… And there’s going to be a big controversy over Sabbath. There’s going to be a Sunday law, a national Sunday law, then a universal Sunday law, and all those not keeping the Sunday are going to be - there’s going to be a law that’ll put them to death. And so Adventists have to choose to die to keep the Sabbath rather than to live and worship on Sunday. And then she says that our departed loved ones will appear, but it won’t be them, it’ll be - Satan is going to make them appear to us, and they will try to teach us, convince us, that we should not die for Sabbath, you know? We should go ahead and accept Sunday. So I finally decided that that was the real purpose, the real reason, for this doctrine was so that these so-called spirits wouldn’t come back and convince us that we shouldn’t keep the Sabbath, which I think is an interesting thing.

Tom: Really. I mean, most of the things that you’re describing here, that you’re telling us from - this is Dale Ratzlaff; he’s the author of four books, a former SDA pastor - but the things that you’re telling us are just mind-blowing. You know, I thought I pretty much had an understanding of the SDA teachings, but wow!

Now, Dale, there was a time, and I remember this, that there was great hope that there would be a huge swing among Seventh-day Adventists, and in the few minutes that we have left, could you tell us where that is? It was going to be a swing toward evangelical, biblical Christianity. Where is that today for the most part?

Dale: Well, in the ‘50s, the Adventist seminary had many evangelical-leaning professors, and some even when I was there in the ‘60s and ‘70s. However, recently the president of the denomination, general conference president, has swung way back conservative, and they’re sending the book Great Controversy by the millions out to everybody in the world almost. That’s an exaggeration, but millions of copies are going out. And the seminary has swung back to be what I would say closer to the cultic past. So in the church today, it is struggling. There are pastors who are - I would say understand the gospel a hundred percent who do not preach Ellen White, who do not preach some of these false doctrines, but that keep very quiet about it, and they do it because they continue to get a salary and have retirement and not have to rock the boat.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dale: I don’t think the Adventist church can ever become evangelical, because they have three main doctrines, and it stands on these three main doctrines, and if you take any one of them out, the church will fail. Sabbath, Ellen White as the source of authority, and their Sanctuary Doctrine. Both the last…

Tom: That’s Investigative Judgment, right?

Dale: Yeah. Both the last two conference presidents have said, “We are not going to change our historic beliefs,” and then they specifically said, “an understanding of our Sanctuary Theology.” Now, the “Sanctuary Theology” is a term, an umbrella, for the whole investigative judgment, and they sometimes don’t even use that word anymore. They call it the Pre-advent Judgment.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Well, Dale, this has been, for me, really an eye-opener. But to the point that - I just don’t want to let things slide by. If I know some people… I mean, you’ve encouraged me with what I’ve heard to minister where I can, to ask questions, to - I mean, we want everybody to come know the gospel, which is the only basis for salvation, you know: through Christ alone. So I’ve been greatly encouraged by this, and greatly informed. So I thank you so much for joining us, and I’m going to have Gary give your books, your website, if that’s okay, and we’ll see where it goes from there!

Dale: Sure, that’ll be fine!

Tom: Okay, thanks again, Dale.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. For more information about Dale Ratzlaff’s ministry, go to ‘Life Assurance Ministries.com’ or call 928.554.1001.

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