ADVENTISM’S FUNDAMENTAL BELIEF #26
The wages of sin is death. But God, who alone is immortal, will grant eternal life to His redeemed. Until that day death is an unconscious state for all people. When Christ, who is our life, appears, the resurrected righteous and the living righteous will be glorified and caught up to meet their Lord. The second resurrection, the resurrection of the unrighteous, will take place a thousand years later.
Commentary on this statement
There are only a few Seventh-day Adventist beliefs that are vehemently defended by most Adventists: free will, state of the dead/annihilationism, Sabbath, and possibly diet. The doctrine of death is one of the key pillars of Adventism’s belief system; it is directly tied to the nature of humanity. For example, if a person is nothing more than the functions of their physical bodies, a direct entrance to heaven isn’t possible. This doctrine is also critical in maintaining the sanctuary and investigative judgment doctrines. If believers go straight to heaven at death, 1844 loses all significance, and the Adventist church can’t identify itself as The Remnant Church.
There is one word in this belief statement that could be misleading: “unconscious”. Technically, Adventists believe that the dead do not have consciousness because in their theology there is no part of the person that remains after death. They cease to exist entirely except as a memory of God.
What the words mean
Let’s examine the statements in this Fundamental Belief beginning with “The wages of sin is death”. It is hard to argue with a direct statement from Scripture taken in context. This is an accurate statement about sin and death. The gap in this belief statement is the scriptural understanding of death. When one applies a secular meaning to a spiritual term, the result can be confusion. For example, consider Nicodemus’ confusion about being born again.
The term “death” in Scripture has a unique definition. Ephesians 2 provides a clear example: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins … But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved” (v. 1, 4-5). The term “death” in Scripture often references a separation from God, but there is also a second definition that is directly linked to this separation. This second definition is difficult for Adventists to grasp because they have been taught that the spirit is only breath.
Man has a spirit, not just breath, and this spirit can even be distinguished from the soul (Heb. 4:12). Only believers are described in Scripture as having a living spirit (1 Cor. 2:11; Heb. 4:12; Jas. 2:26). When the Bible speaks of being made alive in Christ and being born again, these are not mere metaphors; they are speaking about a reality that occurs within the person.
The result of sin is death. In the immediate time frame, those without Christ are spiritually dead and separated from God. But there is also an eternal death defined by Scripture in Rev. 20:14b: “This is the second death, the lake of fire.” The wages of sin is also, and finally, found in the lake of fire. (The fate of the wicked will be discussed further in the next issue discussing Fundamental Belief 27.) The Bible provides its own definitions when one is willing to set aside one’s secular mindset.
The other main question to address in this Fundamental Belief is what happens to believers at the time of their death. According to Adventist beliefs, a person ceases to exist when they die until they are re-created at the resurrection (while these aren’t the phrases that an Adventist would typically use, it does accurately describe Adventist belief). This idea is not what Scripture teaches. Jesus declares, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn. 11:25-26a).
The fact that Adventists believe people cease to exist at death is likely why this belief statement uses the phrasing “unconscious state” to describe death. If they openly admit that nothing about the believer remains alive between death and resurrection, they would openly contradict these words of Christ. By using a sufficiently vague term, Adventism can obscure this contradiction with Scripture.
There are multiple places where Scripture describes believers being in heaven immediately upon death:
2 Corinthians 5:6–8 So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
Philippians 1:22–23 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.
Hebrews 12:22-23 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Luke 23:43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
The Hebrews 12 passage is an important, and often overlooked, contribution to this discussion. This passage doesn’t place this heavenly Jerusalem only in the future (or even only at the time of the first century Hebrew Christians), but in the now. When we worship God (see Heb. 12:28) we enter not only into His presence, but into the heavenly Jerusalem, the presence of angels and the “spirits of the righteous”. The straightforward reading of this passage indicates that the spirits of departed believers reside in heaven with God the Father, Jesus, and innumerable angels.
Adventists are quick to dismiss Jesus’ words in Luke 23 because of what they claim is a misplaced comma. There are several flaws in that argument. First, the phrasing simply doesn’t make sense. Jesus is obviously making the statement today, rather than yesterday or tomorrow. More telling, however, is that Jesus uses the phrase “Truly, I say to you,” over 30 unique times (and over 70 times total across all four Gospels) in Scripture without informing people that He is saying it “today”. Jesus’ repeated use of the phrase plainly argues for continuing to use the phrase in the same way that He uses it in all of the other cases: the comma belongs before the word “Today”.
Adventists also argue that Jesus was dead in the tomb rather than with the Father, so Jesus couldn’t have been promising the thief that he would be with Christ in paradise that day. However, this claim is based on their flawed theology of human nature that denies having both a physical body and a spirit. When we understand that Jesus had both body and spirit and that He was fully man and fully God in both body and spirit, Jesus could truly suffer death in the body yet continue to have a living spirit. The thief’s body could die and be in the grave, just as Jesus’ body was. Yet the thief’s spirit could also be with Christ’s spirit in Paradise. Jesus could not have been in an “unconscious state” in the grave, as Adventist doctrine claims, and also have been instrumental in raising Himself as He said He would do (Jn. 2:19-21 and Jn. 10:18). Jesus had the consciousness and the power to take up His life again, just as truly as He laid it down.
The other big confusion for Adventists is how they understand certain Old Testament passages about the dead ceasing to praise God or have conscious activity. However, this view depends on cherry-picking a few verses and insisting on the interpretation that these few verses would provide. By expanding the search (and surrounding context) one can see how the Old Testament authors used these expressions. For instance, Psalm 115:17-18 reads, “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence. But we will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Praise the Lord!”. If one only reads the first part of this passage it would be easy to conclude that the writer was supporting the Adventist viewpoint, but if one continues with the passage, the “forevermore” tells us the rest of the story. From the perspective of the living, the dead are no longer engaged in our daily activities. But this fact does not mean that the righteous dead are not engaged in any spiritual or heavenly activities. They are praising God “forevermore”. There are two perspectives, an earthly and a heavenly. By understanding that these two perspectives exist, sometimes in the same passage, one can rightly interpret the verse. Therefore, passages that discuss the dead no longer planning, worshipping, or having knowledge are properly understood as referring to our earthly perspective. Those who have passed on are no longer involved in our earthly life.
This Fundamental Belief presents Adventist teaching on the subject innocuously, but that doesn’t mean that the Adventist teaching is accurate. The passages of Scripture that this belief statement ignores are critical for having a proper understanding of the doctrine. †
- Our Journey Out of Adventism - July 27, 2023
- 30. Adventism’s New Earth - July 27, 2023
- 29. The Adventist Millennium - July 20, 2023
If the spirit of man lives in heaven, in the New Jerusalem, what is the purpose of the resurrection at the Second Coming of Christ? Do the ghosts of people of criminals, murderers, thieves and others like them also live in heaven or are they somewhere else?
The Bible doesn’t teach that the dead live in the New Jerusalem. It says their spirits are “with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:1–9; Phil. 1:22-23). According to Revelation, the New Jerusalem is the final home of God’s people after He has destroyed the present earth and heavens with fire (Heb. 12:26; 2 Peter 3:7). When people die now, they do not go to the New Jerusalem. They go to the Lord.
Moreover, they do not have bodies when they die. Their spirits, the part of them that defines them and either knows God or disbelieves Him, goes to God. Those who die in the Lord enter an intermediate condition which is only described as “very much better” (Phil. 1:22) and as as situation which Paul says he would prefer to continuing in his body on earth (2 Cor. 5:8).
Furthermore, Paul says we “have as our ambition, whether at home [in the body] or absent, to be pleasing to Him” (2 Cor. 5:9). When we are absent from the body and with the Lord in death, we are able to please God in that condition.
The wicked dead are also in the care of God. Their spirits also go to Him, but they are not enjoying the Lord because they did not trust Him in their lifetimes. Peter says that just as God knows how to rescue the righteous from temptation, He knows how “to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment” (2 Pet. 2:9).
The resurrection is for the purpose of bringing us back from the separation of death. God created us to have bodies that house (using Paul’s metaphor in 2 Corinthians 5) our spirits. When we die, body and spirit separate, as Jesus Himself said when He died: “Father into Your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Jesus also clarified that this spirit was not merely His breath but the essence of Himself and His identity when He said to the thief, “Today I will be with you in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43) and no, the comma is NOT in the wrong place.
Because humans are not humans without body and spirit, God resurrects us when He comes for us, giving us glorified bodies for our spirits which He has kept while the bodies slept in the ground. 1 Thess. 4:14 says that when Jesus returns, God brings “with Him those who have fallen asleep”. Jesus returns WITH the spirits of the dead who died in Him, and He then resurrects the righteous (v. 16). We have to have a resurrection because we are not human without body and spirit!
The dead do not wander about the universe, and they are not in their bodies. They are either in Christ, cared for by Him in some way Scripture does not define but which it states is so, or they are not in Christ, kept “under punishment” (again in a way not defined) until the day of judgment.