Too Many 2300 Days Knowing, Vegemeat Eating Legalists?

While listening to much of the discourse in the sermons from many preachers one can come to a few interesting conclusions. First, vegetarianism must somehow be related to a meanspirtedness. In addition, this meanspirited vegetarianism must be rampant in the church. Why would I make this assumption? Well because often in the illustrations it is the vegetarian who is the foil. He is the one that is upsetting the equilibrium and hurting the new Christians who are seeking to follow God but have not grown to the full stature of Christ. Now certainly there is a place for this type of rhetoric. There are some who use vegetarianism as some sort of "get out of hell" card when it was never meant for that kind of thing. However, my problem is that the proper purpose of vegetarianism is hardly ever spoken of. When you hear about it, it is usually the obviously problematic person in the story that the preacher is speaking of.

Sanctuary and Vegetarianism? Anti Christian?

[caption id="attachment_979" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The Tabernacle"][/caption]

The same again with the knowledge of the 2300 days. There are some preachers who never even refer to the 2300 days or the sanctuary message except when saying that a knowledge of it is not necessary for some reason. They may preach that you need to know Jesus more than you know the Sanctuary. OK, I can go along with that to a certain extent, but doesn't the Sanctuary tell us something about who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing? (but i Digress)...The same preacher may preach a story about the person who studies the Sanctuary doesn't have the Love of God. Certainly there are those types of people. But when you never balance this rhetoric with either a proper presentation of the Sanctuary (demonstrating the unavoidable description of Jesus) or a proper role for the doctrine in the Christian life, then we end up with a distorted view that seems to think that these doctrines are almost problematic for Christian living.

Never Placing the Doctrines in Proper Context

Certainly many of these preachers are not saying that explicitly. Many of these preachers don't even mean that at all. However if you only speak of the Sanctuary within the context of the hypocrite and the unloving foil and you never place the Sanctuary in the proper context of a loving Christian experience, then you are in essence teaching that the Sanctuary is a useless appendage. The same with other doctrines and vegetarianism.

Certainly there are some preachers who go to the opposite extreme, and there are some who place all of the doctrines in the context of Biblical Christ-centered Christianity. But in much of the discourse there is a strong undercurrent that seems to imly that the Sanctuary, vegetarianism, and other things that we have been called to teach are actually problematic. In short, if the Sanctuary is not a Christ-centered doctrine, then we either must start teaching it correctly, or openly toss it out, but we cannot continue to badmouth the very doctrines that were given to us to help us understand our purpose in these last days.