Answers to Objections 67 & 68

Objection 67: Seventh-day Adventists declare that the great meteoric shower of November 13, 1833, was a fulfillment of the prophecy that the stars shall fall from heaven as one of the signs of the nearness of Christ's coming (Mat. 24:29-30; Mark 13:24-26). But astronomers inform us that a swarm of meteorites, known as the Leonids, come within the orbit of our earth about every thirty-three years. There were showers in 1866 and 1899, though very small, because, as the astronomers explain, the planet Jupiter deflected the meteoritic group from the direct path of the earth. Probably this or a similar reason explains the absence of a star shower in 1933.

Just because a phenomenon has been explained does not mean that it has been explained away. If God has seen fit to permit His divinely appointed laws of planetary motion to operate so that a comet should be shattered and some of its parts scattered like flaming stars over our earth, who is man to argue that God may not use this as a sign of His coming, and that He must employ some other, more supernatural (to us) means of making a sign in the heavens?

And if God, once having produced that phenomenon, should allow the wreckage of the comet to remain in our path, so that at recurring intervals until the final end we should be reminded of the great sign that earlier occurred, why should a man declare that he will see in it no sign?

Although the Leonid meteor showers are, to some extent, a recurring phenomenon, the 1833 showers were very special, and far more significant than those before or since. Cannot this be a sign, even if we can come up with some natural explanation for it?

Moreover, it seems reasonable to suspect that the 1833 showers will not be the last celestial sign we will see before the Second Coming. Something similar will happen again in the future, and it might not have any natural explanation.

Objection 68: The whole idea that Christ will appear in flaming glory in the heavens, suddenly to change the present order of nature, destroying the wicked, and taking the righteous to heaven, belongs to the age of superstition. We who live in this modern era know that all this is incredible and contrary to the laws of nature.

First, as we have already discussed, Scripture clearly teaches a real, physical and visible Second Coming. Additionally, Scripture narrates that there have been many miracles, some of them world altering, beginning with the creation in six days, a universal Flood, the miracles associated with the Exodus, as well as all the many miracles worked by Christ during His earthly ministry. So this objection is really a frontal assault on the authority of the sacred canon, the acceptance of which is the basis of all our answers to objections.

That said, let us take this opportunity to respond to the notion that there is no need for a miraculous Second Coming, because things are gradually improving all across the world, and we will eventually reach perfection through human progress and improvement.

In the period from the late 19th to the early 20th Century, there might have been some basis for the optimistic liberal/progressive worldview that the world is gradually getting better, because there is operating throughout the universe a great law of progress. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and the outbreak of what is now called the First World War in 1914, there was a century of widespread peace and very rapid economic, scientific, technological, and cultural development.

The transformation of the world of horse and carriage to automobile and then to airplanes, from wooden sailing ship to steel steamship and submarine, from carrier pigeon to telegraph and telephone, was perhaps the most dramatic transformation ever seen in one century. It appeared that humanity was becoming better, and perhaps her baser instincts would be overcome as poverty and want were steadily eradicated. This century of astonishing progress is why we see liberalism developing in the late 19th Century and peaking in the early 20th Century.

But the liberal/progressive theory of natural human moral progress suffered a mortal blow with the events of the 20th Century. The 20th Century demonstrated, in a most horrific and unforgettable manner, that there was no correlation between technological advance and moral advance. We saw continual genocides and mass murders throughout that century, beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and ending with the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (in which Seventh-day Adventists participated). We saw two devastating world wars, more destructive than anything seen before, and the beginning of chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons “of mass destruction.”

To utterly dispel the notion of moral progress, one need only contemplate the history of Germany. The last nation in Europe to coalesce from a loose confederation of small kingdoms, duchies, city-states, and principalities into a powerful united nation-state and then an empire, Germany was the mightiest and most advanced nation in the world. Her universities were the finest on earth, her scientists were unrivaled, her chemical industry was the envy of the industrial West, her engineering synonymous with excellence, her arts and culture peerless. And yet all of Germany’s many advantages and achievements did not prevent the horrors of the death camps.

Even that great host of liberal clergy who in earlier times declared most confidently that we were headed for the millennium have gone silent. Ask them what solution they now have for the world's tragedy, what way through to a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, and they will be forced to admit that the human condition forecloses any hope other than divine intervention.

The sane liberals who still retain any regard for theism and the Scriptures now admit that their former view (that the world was steadily moving upward by some undiscovered natural law of progress) was absurdly erroneous and must be abandoned. How then will God usher in the millennium? This leads us back to the Bible and to the doctrine of the personal second coming of Christ.

The Bible is the Book of God, and when we open its pages we find clearly taught the great doctrine of an end to this wicked world and the creation of a better one. There we find explicit declarations that, at the climax of earth's history, Christ will come in flaming glory bringing joy and glory to the righteous, and terror and death to the wicked. (1 Thess. 4:16-17; Rev. 1:7) In that awful and climactic moment it will not occur to the children of men to protest the event because it is contrary to the laws of nature!