(Traducido por Carlos Enrique Espinosa)

This week’s Adult Bible Study Guide quotes Ellen White: “The law of God, spoken in awful grandeur from Sinai, is the utterance of condemnation to the sinner. It is the province of the law to condemn, but there is in it no power to pardon or to redeem.” (SDA Bible Commentary, VI, 1094).  God’s power “to pardon and to forget” is, as the influential Adventist theologian G. D.

(Traducido por Carlos Enrique Espinosa)

This week’s lesson’s title is “Happy are you, O Israel!”; its theme is the centrality of worship in the experience of the ancient Children of Israel; and its chief point seems to be that worship ought to be God-focused, not self-focused. This last is a view that I wholeheartedly share, as readers of the print edition of Spectrum may remember.

(Traducido por Carlos Enrique Espinosa)

We probably don’t always think of the story of the sacrifices of Cain and Abel as a story about worship––but in fact it is. As Ellen White points out, these were not sacrifices to atone for sin: instead, “these [were] offerings ... to express faith in the Savior whom the offerings typified, and at the same time to acknowledge their total dependence on Him .... Besides this, the first fruits of the earth were to be presented before the Lord as a thank offering.” [Patriarchs and Prophets, 7]

In response to the blog post here, the General Conference Office of Archives and Statistics helpfully just sent this over.

Supporters of women’s ordination have been ruing the decision of the thirteen division presidents to keep the issue off the agenda of this year’s General Conference session, even though few can have believed that, if female ordination were debated and brought to a vote, it would have passed.