@Bible Highlighter
I knew Desmond Doss, personally, and what you say about him here is true:
"Besides, there was one Christian I know of who has even served in the military who did not take up a weapon to protect himself, and he still put his life on the line to save many lives."
But this is, quite frankly, a rather blatant falsehood:
"Granted, he was not a perfect man. He did hold to the error of the SDA Church in that says we must keep all of the 613 Old Testament Law of Moses (like keeping the Saturday Sabbath, etcetera; For the Old Law is no more because we are not under the Old Covenant contract anymore according to Scripture. Believers are to follow the commands of Jesus and His followers in the pages of the New Testament, instead)."
It's odd that it seems important to you to qualify your positive statement about him with your understanding that he wasn't perfect because he espoused error. As if being something other than Seventh-day Adventist would have made him perfect. After all, the only way you could judge him less-than-perfect would be in the same way that all men are not perfect—because all have sinned...
...or that this had anything to do with the topic of the thread at all.
(But since you brought it up:
The "Saturday Sabbath" is not a "law of Moses." It is the law of God and was etched in stone in a fearful display at Sinai by the finger of God Himself. Until about 50 years ago, virtually no one disputed this—not even unbelievers. There is only one Sabbath—the seventh day of the week as stated plainly within the commandment, and as is substantially evidenced by the dozens of languages the world over that use some form of the word "Sabbath" for the day we call "Saturday." The old covenant was never meant to be a complete system of redemption. It never saved anyone. Only the New or Everlasting Covenant has the power to do so.)
I met Brother Desmond
(as he preferred to be called—he didn't care much for "Sir" or "Mr. Doss") in the early '90s when he made an appearance at a denominational convention I was also attending
(I had always hoped to meet him—one of the nice things about being a Seventh-day Adventist is that those who are also high-profile, so to speak, are always willing to make themselves available to common people). He was gracious enough to talk with me for about 20 minutes. I ran into him several times after that, and we also spoke by telephone several times later that year when I was considering becoming a chaplain in the Army. Both he and a serving chaplain told me that the challenges facing a Seventh-day Adventist believer in the military were not something that would be wise to voluntarily subject oneself to in a peacetime environment. And since I had served 4 years in the Air Force long before becoming a Seventh-day Adventist, I couldn't bring a reasonable argument against their advice.
Doss was a member in good standing of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist church until the day he died and never, during his entire life, did he believe or teach that the "Mitzvot" was incumbent upon Christians. The "Mitzvot" is not even without controversy within Judaism itself. And while the Seventh-day Adventist church does teach that some of the Old Testament laws
(in addition to those of the Decalogue) are not without holy merit
(as do non-Adventists—Leviticus 18:22 comes to mind) we also, as do most Christians, believe that the 1050 commands given in the New Testament are to be obeyed by Christians as well. Unless one believes we're not "under" that law, either.
I'd be interested to see if you could provide some documentation for this "613" claim you've made. You won't find it at Adventist.org or any other official website of the church.
