By Colleen Tinker
Occasionally we receive letters from former Adventists who still argue that the Sabbath was a holy day set apart at creation for all humanity. They sometimes use Romans 14:5–6 to argue that one may keep a day or not keep a day as long as he is fully convinced in his own mind. In fact, formers with family members who are Adventists sometimes use this argument to defend the Adventists’ Sabbath-keeping and to justify their own unwillingness to give up the day.
It is true that Paul states we are not to judge anyone for days one keeps or doesn’t keep. The context, however, is important. Paul says, “One regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind.” The days Paul speaks of are the holy days of the Old Testament law, and he is speaking to those who are used to living under the law.
To be sure, one may observe any day he wishes, but the holy days were part of the law that was meant only for Israel. It was NEVER meant for gentiles.
Adventists, though, consider themselves to be “spiritual Israel”, and they claim to be the one church that honors the Ten Commandments. They also claim to be the inheritors of the blessings God promised to Israel if they kept the law. Thus, within Adventism, Romans 14:5–6 becomes a defense for their Sabbath-keeping. They say the verses refer only to the yearly feast days such as Passover and Pentecost and not to the weekly Sabbath. They argue that Paul is not making Sabbath observance optional, and they insist that no one has the right to fault them for observing the seventh day.
There are two problems with the Adventist perspective: first, they are not “spiritual Israel”, and they are not the inheritors of Israel’s blessings or the vindicators of their law. Second, the law was never given to gentiles. In fact, the New Testament clearly forbade requiring gentile believers to keep the law.
Not spiritual Israel
The Bible does not identify any group as “spiritual Israel”. There is a belief among some parts of Christianity called “replacement theology” that says the church is the new “Israel”. Scripture, however, does not define the church as Israel’s replacement. Rather, the church—new covenant believers who have been born again through believing in the finished work of the Lord Jesus—is comprised of all those who trust Christ as their Savior and Lord. The church is different from Old Testament Israel in that believers are born again and indwelled by promised Holy Spirit. This new birth and sealing of the Holy Spirit make believers new creations (2 Cor. 5:17) who have passed from death to life (Jn. 5:24). Moreover, the church is not under the old covenant law as Israel was. Now, the church is comprised of new covenant believers who are in Christ who fulfilled the law, and they are under the supervision of the Holy Spirit, not of the commandments written in stone (2 Cor. 3)
Adventists use the spiritual Israel idea to define themselves—a deceptive label which ignores the fact that Adventism does not teach the biblical gospel or the true, infallible Jesus. No group which teaches a false gospel is part of the biblical church, much less God’s special, end-time people who can claim the name “spiritual Israel”.
In the new covenant, no day is considered sacred. According to Romans 14, observing a day is a matter of personal conviction, not a matter of law. In fact, Romans 14 concludes with these words, “Whatever is not from faith is sin” (v. 23).
The fact that we learned we were “spiritual Israel” as Adventists left us confused even after we left the religion that shaped our worldview. We were not “spiritual Israel”, and we were not the inheritors of Israel’s law and old covenant blessings. Even more profoundly, as Adventists we were likely not even part of the biblical church because we were not believing the true gospel nor trusting the true Jesus.
When we finally hear and believe the true gospel of the Lord Jesus, however, we become a completely new creation. We become spiritually alive and are baptized by the Holy Spirit into the church, Christ’s body. Our role is distinct from Israel’s role.
The law is not for gentiles
In Acts 21:15–26 there is the story that has caused many former Adventist to fear that they need to hold onto the Sabbath. The account is of Paul arriving in Jerusalem after his third missionary journey and learning that the gossips had preceded him. They were saying that he was teaching Jews to abandon the law and to stop circumcising their children. In order to demonstrate that he was not opposed to the law (and to the cultural, historic, and personal significance of the law’s defining the Jews’ identity), Paul sponsored four men who had taken a Nazirite vow. He paid for the ritual cleansing after their vows were complete and went through ritual cleansing himself since his travels in gentile territory had left him ritually unclean according to the law.
When people who have an Adventist background read this story, they nearly always choke on it. Paul, the apostle to the gentiles who wrote the books of Galatians and Romans, Ephesians and Colossians, observed a ritual law to stop the Jews’ hostile gossip? He actually paid for the law’s requirements for four other men to complete their own ritual vows?
What are we supposed to believe? Is the law obsolete or not? Why was PAUL performing a ritual law and supporting four others in order to keep the Jews happy? Are we as former Adventists supposed to keep the Sabbath and uphold the Adventist beliefs in order to keep them happy? Have we deceived ourselves into thinking the Sabbath and the law are not for us?
Let’s look at this question one step at a time.
First, Paul explained his own approach to fellowshipping among Jews and gentiles. In 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 he says,
For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.
Now, Paul was CLEAR that those rules and rituals were not necessary for him as a believer. He chastised Peter (Gal. 2:11–21) for falling away from God’s revelation and refusing to eat with Gentile believers when the Judaizers from Jerusalem came. But when he was with Jews, Paul was willing to live as a Jew in terms of his external observances.
It’s important to remember that Paul was a Jew. By his nationality and by his religion of birth, he was an inheritor of the blessings God gave to the Jews in a corporate sense. Importantly, these blessings did not mean that they were means of salvation for Paul or for any other individual Jew; Jews and gentiles alike are saved in exactly the same way: by believing God and His word, just as Abraham did.
Genesis 15:6 is the statement the describes how every human being is saved: “And he believed the LORD, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”
Paul explains in Romans 4 that it is this utter trust in God and in His promises and provision that is credited to us as righteousness. The law did not contribute to the Jews’ salvation—nor to any gentile’s salvation. Only belief and trust in the Lord God and His provision gives us salvation.
Nevertheless, Paul inherited the “advantage” of being born a Jew. In Romans 3:1–2 he explains some of this advantage:
Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.
By his genetic inheritance, Paul had the right to claim the law. The law, as Paul explains in Romans 7, is holy, righteous, and good, but it could not make sinful people good. It could only emphasize and reveal people’s sin.
Only Jesus can cleanse us and make us righteous, and only Jesus completely fulfilled the law—including its death sentence. Paul explains the workings of Jesus’ forensic atonement in detail, and he also explains the administration of the new covenant (Eph. 3:9).
As a Jew, Paul had the “right” to observe a purification rite that would publicly declare him ritually pure to enter the temple. Performing a ritual purification and entering the temple did not equate denying the gospel. It was simply a way of his communicating to the Jews that he did respect his heritage and he was not denying his Jewishness or the covenant God had made with them.
Paul would not, however, have done something that denied the gospel. For example, his public rebuke of Peter for refusing to eat with gentile believers in the presence of the Judaizers demonstrated that he would defend the gospel and its power. The ritual details of the law were not intrinsically bad; they had cultural significance that united the Jews around their shared God-given heritage.
Until God allowed the temple to be destroyed and the Jews to be dispersed throughout the nations, Jews followed their traditions in meeting together in the temple courts. Paul was legally able to participate in those traditions, and he did so in order to have access to teach the gospel to the Jews. The rituals did not represent false religion; they were the rituals God had given in the law. Paul was, therefore, not participating in forms of false worship when he observed that ritual of purification.
The verse that immediately follows the account of Paul’s vow, however, is a verse Adventists never pointed out, and most of us “formers” never really understood its significance. Acts 21:25 says, “But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.”
This verse quotes Acts 15:20 where the Council of Jerusalem issued the official word that gentile believers were NOT to be taught to keep the law!
As Adventists, we saw this verse as irrelevant; in fact, we likely didn’t stop to think much about it. Because we believed that we were “spiritual Israel”, we never thought of ourselves as gentiles in a spiritual sense. Yet this verse is inserted into the story of Paul and his vow for a specific reason: Luke is making sure that his readers know that no gentile was ever to think he had to take a Jewish ritual vow of any kind.
Our programmed system of belief left us unable to grasp the plain meaning of the text: we were gentiles, and we were never to think the law’s rituals applied to us.
We are not Jews
As a group, Adventists never have been Jews. We are gentiles, and the Lord has finally led us as former Adventists to Himself and His gospel. Jewish days and feasts have never been ours legitimately. Adventists illegitimately claimed them for themselves. Adventism, which was never Christian, which was established on the belief in a non-eternal, created Jesus and which continues to teach an incomplete atonement, has no biblical legitimacy in any sense. It has no moral right to claim the Ten Commandments or the Sabbath; Adventists as a group (there may be individual exceptions, especially among Christians who have been proselytized) are not part of the body of Christ.
Adventism’s practices have been copied from Jews to make themselves look moral and Bible-based. The New Testament, however, has always said gentiles must not be made to keep the law, and they were denied the “right” to “own” the law by not being circumcised. Only those who were circumcised and aligned themselves with Judaism were ever allowed to observe the law.
Adventism has been an imposter of Christianity from the beginning. The law was never theirs to keep!
The last verse of Hebrews 8 says that the old covenant has been “made obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.” When Hebrews was written, the temple was still standing in Jerusalem. In AD 70, however, God destroyed all the external trappings of Judaism. The law depended upon the temple and its rituals; when the temple was destroyed and the Jews were scattered, Judaism as a formal religion ceased. Old Testament Judaism simply cannot EVER be practiced again. It has disappeared. Not only has Jesus fulfilled the law and rendered it obsolete, but the temple and all the physical expressions of the laws and rituals have been removed.
God established a gentile world after the destruction of Jerusalem. There is absolutely no way for any Christian believer to practice the Law as God gave it. The Law depended on the levitical priesthood, the temple, and the animal sacrifices. Once the transitional period of the establishment of the church was completed (the events recorded in the book of Acts), Judaism ceased as a God-given religion.
In Christ vs. spiritual adultery
True worship of God is now done IN CHRIST. People who hang onto the law, who fancy themselves to be “spiritual Israel” (and that idea is not unique to Adventists) are committing the spiritual adultery Paul describes in Romans 7. You can’t honor the law and also honor the Lord Jesus without being a spiritual adulterer.
The law has disappeared as a rule of faith and practice for God’s people. It is, however, still a part of God’s eternal word that identifies Jesus as the One who fulfilled its requirements. In fact, it foreshadowed our rest in Christ long before the Lord Jesus came. God gave Israel the solemn responsibility of delivering the Holy Seed promised to Abraham; they were to honor the oracles of God and to live lives honoring and worshiping the holy God who called them by His will for His purposes.
We as members of Christ’s body, the church, have to face the fact that we are largely GENTILE believers. The New Testament is clear that gentiles have no “right” or “obligation” to any part of the law. Jews were allowed to continue to observe the practices that identified them as Jews, that were part of their identities and culture. But Judaism had been a God-ordained religion. He had personally given the Law to Israel!
Adventism, in contrast, has never been a God-given religion. It has been a false religion from its inception. God never gave it or asked any person to keep its practices. Adventists cannot identify with Jews and say that, just as Jews practice their Judaism as their identity and habits, Adventists can practice their understanding of the law, too.
We former Adventists cannot do that, because we have never been given biblical permission to HAVE the law as our rule of faith and practice. We have been given JESUS. We have to give up our cultic identities and arguments just as did the Ephesians who practiced magic (Acts 19) and burned their magic books. We had a false prophet who was a practitioner of spiritual deception. We have to renounce her completely, and we have to give up our comfortable practice of the religious traditions that were part of the false worldview we had because of her commentaries.
In Christ, a person is free to observe the Sabbath. I know how the Sabbath functioned in an Adventist’s mind and heart. I know how it functioned in an Adventist’s life and spiritual identity. I understand the visceral tie to that day and to the practice of observing it as a day of rest.
Former Adventists have to come to terms with where the Sabbath actually originated in their lives—and it didn’t come from an understanding of Scripture. It came from a false use of proof-texts and arguments. We formers have to be willing to see that even a good thing, a permissible thing, might be wrong for us because for us, it came from a wrong source and was part of a false system of worship. It was, for us, an idol. If we have trusted Jesus, continuing to worship in an Adventist service is a compromise that compares to a former Mormon continuing to go to the temple.
I appeal to all former Adventists: please examine what the Bible actually says about rituals and days. See what the Bible actually asks of gentile believers. We are gentiles, not Israel. Not only has the law never been given to us, but we have been told NOT to practice the rituals and days set forth in the law.
We are in Christ, and worshiping in spirit and truth means that we must give up our rights to rationalize our practices. All the shadows have been fulfilled in Jesus, and in Him alone we have security and rest. †
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Thanks for this Colleen! It was very well written and I enjoyed it immensely. Understanding the writings of Paul in their true context, is key to understanding his ministry to the Gentiles and also for us today who are part of New Covenant Christianity.
This article deserves applause. Well done Colleen for yet another serious look at a topic that Satan has used to befuddle believers and twist the gospel message. At the start, Paul had to defend the simplicity of the gospel of Christ from actual Jews who desired to retain and practice laws whose sole purpose was to foreshadow Christ. Now, two millennia later, we are dealing with Gentile Judaizers! May God open eyes and give understanding to those who remain confused about their place in God’s kingdom.
Yes, I agree. Very good article!