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X sda investigative judgment terror

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It was a rare San Diego thunderstorm. Evening came on, but the clouds were so thick we barely noticed the change as day slid into night. Lightning and thunder seemed almost continuous. Rain sluiced our windows, soaked into bone-dry soil, then overflowed into gutters and storm drains.

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We finally slept. Then a lightning bolt struck an air-raid tower. These were yellow steel towers perhaps 30 feet tall, dotted around the city for warning the inhabitants of an imminent atomic attack. Its rise and all, its mournful wail, was familiar to us, for every Monday at noon, they cried their warning. I often thought that would be the perfect time to attack. The Russians never sent their missiles or planes. The cold war froze to a stop 25 years later. We never had to do more than duck-and-cover drills. Back to that stormy night.

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My sister, age six or seven, woke, startled, by the sirens. She screamed in terror. It wasn’t the air raid sirens that she feared, but Jesus. She was afraid that she would have to meet Him in His judgment.

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This was important in the fifties and sixties for we believed, a la Ellen White, that there was an on-going judgment, begun in 1844 against all who named the name of Jesus. One never knew when one’s name would come up in judgment. If, at that moment, there were any unconfessed sins in one’s life, that person’s name would be blotted out of the Book of Life forever. They would join the rebels who would be destroyed by the wrath of God sometime down the road to eternity.

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I experienced this terror once. My brother and I were home alone. Sometime in the wee hours, a bright light in the east shone into our bedroom. It was perfectly still, but very bright. We wondered at it. “Is it Jesus returning in the clouds at midnight?” we asked each other. I called the police department inquiring if there were any helicopters in east San Diego county. Hearing their negative response and noting that the light did not move, we went back to bed, our fears only partially resolved. Next morning, we discovered the neighbors on the hill above us had installed pool lights on a high pole which shone directly into our bedroom window. We were relieved.

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Looking back, these stories are almost funny until I remember the terror of a lost salvation, of the anticipation of burning alive, of the exquisite pain promised as long as a fragment of my body remained.

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The Adventist hell is shorter, but just as painful, as the hellish doctrine of hell. It’s good to be relieved of its terror and to know that Jesus, in His death, resurrection and glorification, removes all judgment from us. (See Romans 8:1)

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