By Kaspars Ozolins
There is a passage from Scripture that has become something of a life verse for me in the time that I have been a born-again Christian: Galatians 2:20. Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, gave the following instructions regarding this verse (above): “Read these words with great vehemence: ‘lives in me’ … ‘loved me’ … ‘gave himself for me.’”
The fact of the matter is, as a Seventh-day Adventist, I could not have followed Martin Luther’s instructions. I could not read this verse in that way, because I could not and did not understand it in that way. I believe now that I did not have the spiritual eyes to see that verse, because of the organization that shaped my background.
I am originally from Latvia, a country in Northern Europe (which explains my strange name!). When my brother and I were still very young, we moved to the United Kingdom in order that my father could pursue an education at Newbold College, which is a major Seventh-day Adventist educational institution in Europe.
As a matter of fact, I have very deep Adventists roots. I was a fourth-generation Adventist. My ancestors were some of the first people to be evangelized by Adventist missionaries in Latvia. My father is to this day a Seventh-day Adventist minister and seminary professor. We would eventually move to the United States, to Los Angeles, after my father had completed his education at Newbold. I went through the entire Adventist educational system, starting from first grade, through high school, and then to Newbold College where I returned to study for a semester.
I grew up in a very loving family with wonderful parents. In some ways we were raised as traditional Adventists. I remember vividly Friday evening preparations for the Sabbath—cleaning the house, getting everything ready. Then came sundown devotions, Sabbath school the next day, and the iconic Sabbath activities: potlucks (with haystacks, which I still love to make!), afternoon nature walks, and so forth. All these are still clear in my memory, and in some ways I feel a great warmth about my childhood. Yet in other respects, we were perhaps not so traditional.
My father rarely talked about Ellen White and almost never preached referencing her. I would come across White’s writings on my own initiative, not his, and gained some interest in them in my early teens. There were also stimulating conversations in our family about legalistic Adventism, and this or that other negative aspect of our religion.
In my childhood, I acquired something of a reputation of a Bible nerd. I would carry around a big blue NIV Bible almost everywhere with wonderful life-like Bible illustrations. I was always active in Sabbath School, and later on, I would occasionally teach or lead discussions. I was baptized in my teens by my dear father, which was a very emotional event both for him and me. These things, I believe, make it hard for some to believe that I really could have been lost––an unbeliever at heart––and not truly born-again.
I entered college, first in Newbold, and later in Latvia, where I got my Bachelor’s degree and also got to know and fall in love with my future wife, Ieva. I was an active participant in church life there as well. I remember fondly engaging in spirited theological discussions and debate with my Latvian grandfather, who leaned more to the conservative wing of Adventism, even though he was a very sharp thinker and open to new ideas. He had been horribly persecuted for keeping the Sabbath during his mandatory army draft which occurred at a time when Latvia was illegally occupied by the Soviet Union.
Denying Jesus
I returned to the United States after graduating with my Bachelor’s degree and began my studies at the University of California Los Angeles, as I had been planning to do. I studied for a PhD in historical linguistics––a field concerned with ancient languages and their evolution across time. I remember having great ambitions for scholarly and financial success, yet these desires were also mixed with my sad realization that life was short, that an academic could never hope to attain the riches, success, fame, and power of someone like a president or CEO of a major corporation or like an innovative scientist. These trappings of success were the very things I craved, yet they eluded me. I thought a lot about mortality and was quite morbid about death, although I don’t think I evidenced it externally. Life seemed unfair. It felt like I was grasping onto something with as firm a grasp as I could muster––even as that very thing was slipping from me before my eyes. In fact, I had a strange preoccupation with the subject of death, as I used to read about the deaths of celebrities with a mixture of fascination and horror.
Besides this restlessness and death-fixation, I had begun to slip further and further into sin. While outwardly I still played the part of “the Bible guy,” I fell into secret sin and became enslaved to it. Yes, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it was here that my Adventist understanding of God sold me short. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians instructs Christians not to live in the passion of lust like the Gentiles—who do not know God.
You see, I didn’t know God. In particular, I didn’t know the attributes of God. I was like the wicked man in the Psalms who says in his heart, “There is no God,” as he lives and sins as if there were no God. In particular, the concept of God’s utter holiness and wrath against sin and even sinners was foreign and abhorrent to me.
This ignorance of God expressed itself in certain ways. My brother had meanwhile begun his own journey of doubt, and after reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, he came to me really frightened that he might lose his faith, which he absolutely did not want to do. I myself had even begun entertaining little doubts about God’s existence, and I distinctly remember telling him one day, “Look, don’t be afraid to go where the truth leads. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. If there is no God, there is no God.”
Looking back now, I am amazed and think to myself, “Does that really sound like someone who knows Jesus Christ?” Another time, I remember driving home one evening from Malibu with my wife, and she asked me, “So, you know my boss is Jewish. Do you really think that he’s not going to be in heaven simply because he doesn’t believe in Jesus?” My answer was sheepish. “I don’t know, I’m not the judge. It’s up to God. We can’t know these things.” I didn’t realize it then, but I had denied Jesus Christ before men.
I am God’s property
In my darkness, an intellectual pursuit of mine became watching YouTube debates between atheists and Christians on the subject of the existence of God. In the process, however, I came across some YouTube sermons by Francis Chan, a well-known pastor whose ministry has impacted many lives. If you’ve ever heard Francis preach, you know he has an earnestness and passion that I haven’t seen anywhere else. He preaches constantly about eternity, about the nature of God, about sin. I was struck by a number of things while listening to him. They might sound obvious and apparent to you, but they got to me in a very profound way. My first realization is hard to describe and may sound trivial, but I kept saying in my mind, “There is a God! There is a God.”
Francis used to use an illustration that demonstrated God’s centrality and sovereignty in the lives of all human beings (whether or not they acknowledge Him) in a powerful way. He asked his congregation to take a breath. Then another one. He then said, “Don’t you realize that God just gave you that breath? And the next one? Every single breath, every moment of life, is a direct gift from God! Don’t you realize that He could take away your breath, your life, just like that!?”
How much had I thought about this truth, if ever? I realized that the vast majority of human beings go about their daily lives planning, working, playing, and busying themselves…how much do they even stop and think about their Creator? He who made them personally owns them! I am God’s personal property! He has a right to me by virtue of His having created me.
It was at that point that I began to understand the ugliness of sin. Up until then, I had nursed a grandfatherly image of God that I believe came partly from my Adventist background. I had a nebulous concept that God’s grace would somehow eventually cover everything, but I had no understanding of the basis and application of the biblical concept of grace. I had to come to terms with the Being against whom I was sinning.
This was my realization: I was a sinner, hostile by nature to God. Because God is infinitely good and wonderful, altogether beautiful, I could never make things right or repay the wrong I had done. By God’s grace, I became utterly convinced that I was on my way to an eternity of eternities in hell––a place that I with my Adventist theology had abhorred as being contrary to the very character of God. There was no mistaking that the God I now had encountered did not match the God I had believed from my Adventist background.
No longer the same person
I believe now that God saves desperate people. I was a desperate person faced with a horrifying truth. One prominent preacher I later heard put that truth into stunning words: “If God is good, He cannot forgive you.” That comes as a shock to most people who claim to have some religion. But the more I examined my life and my sin, the more I could see no other explanation. How could a good God ever forgive me in my wretchedness?
The only answer had to be the gospel––that story that I had heard a thousand times, yet never understood spiritually. That very same God who is utterly unapproachable in His holiness stooped down to humanity, and took on flesh. He perfectly lived the life I could not live for one second. He loved His Father and fellow man with the perfect love that is demanded of all by the greatest commandment.
Yet sinful men took him and beat him mercilessly, hanging him on a tree shamefully. Jesus Christ faced the wrath of sinful man alone. More importantly, Jesus Christ alone stood in my place and bore the righteous wrath of a holy God! Every sin I had ever committed against God and my fellow man, every cruel word, every sinful glance, every prideful thought––all of it was placed upon the Holy One of God. He was crushed for my iniquities, but praise God, three days later He was raised for my justification! Because of my Savior, God is now “just and the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26).
I praise God for His wonderful Son, and I praise God for His penetrating Holy Spirit. God brought me to the light of the gospel, and I became a new creature in March of 2013. I, who had been dead in sins and trespasses was now made alive in Christ! In those early days I remember often singing a song to myself: “Lord, I need you; Oh, I need you. Every hour I need you. My one defense, my righteousness. Oh God, how I need you!” My sins dropped away from me like rocks off a cliff, and I was forever free from guilt and condemnation. God also began a process of sanctifying me and growing me in holiness––a process that has often been painful and humbling. But I know whom I belong to, and I know that I am not the same person I was.
Leaving Adventism to retain integrity
My salvation then launched me on a three-year quest. I wondered, “Why had nobody from my Adventist background told me that I must be born again, as Jesus said in John 3?” Should I (or could I) stay in the Seventh-day Adventist church? At the time, although I had serious disagreements with the denomination in which I had grown up, I was unwilling to condemn it as a cult outright. For a while, I continued to believe in the validity of the Seventh-day Sabbath for Christians. I was also largely unaware of many of the underlying issues, such as the Great Controversy worldview, the Adventist doctrine of God, and the serious implications entailed by the Adventist understanding of man. Along the way, however, I also began to delve into these issues, especially through the online ministry of Proclamation!
As I became aware of the cultic origins of the Seventh-day Adventist church, I examined the modern church and considered it. I imagined that there were three broad camps in the current church. The first, historic Adventists, fully accepted the teachings of Ellen G. White and other Adventist pioneers. The second, progressive Adventists, were largely like progressive mainline Protestants. They didn’t believe in the supernatural, downplayed the authority and accuracy of the Bible, and minimized the gospel. My sincere hope was that a third group existed, an evangelical group of Adventists, if you like. They would reject Ellen G. White as a false prophet and refute the unbiblical Great Controversy worldview.
The difficulty was identifying such a third grouping. I considered organizations within Seventh-day Adventism such as the One Project. Certainly, here was a group that claimed to advocate for the supremacy of Jesus Christ in the church. Outwardly, the songs they sang and the services they held had the appearance of being just like an ordinary American evangelical worship service. I noted, too, that one of their preachers had at least acknowledged the Arian heresy of the Adventist pioneers. Yet what was his response to the tritheism into which the early Adventist understanding of Christ had morphed? They often used words like “gospel,” but what exactly did they understand it to be? Did they call for sinners to repent and place their entire trust in Christ and his finished atonement on the cross? Did they understand the absolute deadness of man in his sin, and the necessity of the new birth?
I came to realize over a long period of time that it is not enough for a church merely to downplay its old heresy or sweep things under the rug. How could I ever be sure that the old Adventist worldview no longer influenced those who would style themselves as “evangelical” if they refused to acknowledge that Ellen G. White was a false prophet? By nature, I am not confrontational at all, and I was reticent to call a person esteemed in the church of my family a false prophet. In time, however, I came to realize that I had to leave the Seventh-day Adventist church, if for nothing else than to maintain my integrity. I understood that if I wanted to be a reforming voice that would point Adventists to the gospel of Jesus Christ, I could not do so while still an Adventist myself.
Acknowledging this reality was one thing, but actually leaving was another story! After all, my beloved family was Seventh-day Adventist. The church in which I had served and had so many friends was Adventist. The majority of the people I knew on Facebook were Adventists.
It took a good bit of coaxing from some dear brothers and sisters on the Former Adventist Fellowship online forum for me to take the final step and write a letter requesting my membership removal. A month before I left, I became a student at The Master’s Seminary (TMS), a school founded by Pastor John MacArthur. I like to joke that I am most probably the only Seventh-day Adventist who has ever been accepted to TMS!
Currently, I have just completed my studies and have moved to the UK for a research position at Tyndale House, Cambridge, an evangelical research library that serves the global church. Thanks be to God for His precious gift of life, for my dear wife, my two boys, and above all else, the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ my Lord, “who loved me and gave himself for me.” †
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