DALE RATZLAFF | Pastor and Founder, Life Assurance Ministries (1936–2024)
Republished and edited from Proclamation!, Fall 2016
It began in the early 80’s when a small group of us organized a church and began studying the Sabbath together. I had studied the Sabbath often before and had even received an “A” from Dr. Hans LaRondelle’s “Theology of the Sabbath” at Andrews University. In fact, every Adventist pastor knows the Adventist position on the Sabbath and how to defend it well. Yet the study we were doing was different. We were not going down a list of proof texts and explaining each one with another. Rather, we were seeking to squeeze everything out of a given text or section that was there, trying not to make the text say more than it did. For the first several months, I thought for sure we would end up with the traditional Adventist understanding of the Sabbath minus the belief that the Sabbath was the “seal of God”.
When we did a thorough, inductive study of the covenants, the tentative conclusions we reached on individual passages seemed contradictory to what we had believed. I was not sure we could find harmony. Then it happened. Like the explorers who first discovered Yosemite Valley must have felt, that “eureka experience” took us by surprise.
I was struggling to fit some of Paul’s “difficult statements” in Romans, Galatians, 2 Corinthians, and Hebrews into our old paradigm. I had always “forced” them to fit before, as if putting a puzzle piece into an opening that looked correct but wasn’t, thus yielding a messed up picture. Now, however, I had no reason to force anything. Rather, I thought, perhaps I need to accept a new paradigm and see if our tentative conclusions fit it. Therefore, I took Paul’s statements about law at face value: the law was “added” at the time of Moses and was to last “until Christ.” Christians are not under the law. Rather than try to fit Paul’s statements into my old paradigm which I could not do, I took Paul’s paradigm and tried to fit the other conclusions of our study into it. They fit! Suddenly, in an instant of time, my whole theological “picture” changed. No longer was the law the focus; no longer was the Sabbath the “testing truth”. Now Christ alone was at the center of theology and life. He was the testing truth. He was my true rest.
That study yielded the book that is now Sabbath In Christ, but I longed for a way to reach more people with the good news of the gospel than I could with a book. In 2000 we launched the printed version of Proclamation! magazine. Now, 16 years later, the demand for the magazine content is greater than ever. While some of us who have left Adventism years ago have settled most of our questions, there is an ongoing stream of new readers from around the world.
More and more Adventists are questioning the validity of Adventist doctrine, and they are hungry for the real Jesus of the Bible and for the real gospel of His finished atonement for our sin.
More and more Adventists are questioning the validity of Adventist doctrine, and they are hungry for the real Jesus of the Bible and for the real gospel of His finished atonement for our sin. As you know, the online magazine content is free, and many who receive Proclamation! do not support this ministry.
We continue to publish the truth of the gospel because Adventists need to hear it, and they need the safety of being able to study privately. We love our Adventist friends and family, and we long for them to know the freedom and security of being alive in Christ.
We are grateful to those who have helped to provide this magazine content to thousands of Adventists over the past years, and we pray that others will also join us in making it possible to continue publishing Proclamation! online to those who languish in a false gospel, starving for want of the true Bread of Life. †
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