By Colleen Tinker
It was Sunday, almost time for lunch. Members of our local Former Adventist Fellowship Bible study were arriving for our weekly meal together. Sunday lunches were high points of the week; we would talk about what we had learned during that day’s sermon and discuss questions that inevitably came up as we grappled with the swift adjustments to our former Adventist worldview.
One family who had been coming a few months arrived. They had just had their membership interview with an elder prior to becoming members of their new “Sunday church”, but they seemed shocked rather than pleased. Finally able to unload their reactions, they began to tell us what had happened.
“When the elder asked us to tell our story of being saved,” the husband began, “we explained that we had been Adventists, but that we had finally understood the gospel and left our former religion.”
“Then the elder looked at us,” the wife continued, “and he asked us, ’Well, why did you leave?’”
Stunned, the couple hardly knew what to say. That were so excited to be alive in Christ, to know they were saved, and to realize that the Lord had rescued them from terrible darkness, and the elder’s push-back intimidated them.
“He had studied at Loma Linda,” they explained, “and he believed Adventists were Christians. He couldn’t figure out why we thought we had to leave!”
That elder’s reaction is common. Because Adventists have perfected their “Christian vocabulary”, the average believer usually thinks Adventists may know Jesus and just be off about the Sabbath. Even if they know that Adventism teaches some heterodoxical beliefs, many Christians believe that Adventists are changing, or they think there are certain branches of Adventism that understand the gospel and have left their historic heresies. Besides, as we hear so often, “They are such NICE people!”
Why do we expose them?
The fact is that many Adventists do not really know what their organization officially believes, either. They believe that they can pick and choose which aspects of traditional Adventism they will embrace, somewhat like a potluck, but they all retain a certain foundational grid through which they understand reality.
They all believe (unless they were raised Christian and converted without really understanding) that humans have no immaterial spirit. This belief changes EVERYTHING including the definition of sin, of salvation, of death, and of the nature of Christ.
Further, they all believe that Jesus could have failed. He could have sinned, and He could have failed to carry out His death and resurrection. Doug Batchelor has stated that, if he failed, the Trinity would have been torn apart and the universe plunged into chaos. This “possibility” is what Adventists all believe. Jesus was fallible, had “no advantage” that we don’t have, and showed us that we can keep the law perfectly in the same way He did: by praying and depending on the Holy Spirit.
Thirdly, Adventists all believe the Sabbath is eternal and is “holy time”. The arguments about the covenants leave them essentially unmoved because their proof-texting has given them supposedly air-tight support for believing that God created Sabbath from the beginning, and even God Himself will observe the Sabbath in eternity with the saved.
Fourth, Adventists all believe that Ellen White is significant in some way. They may believe she is a prophet or a godly woman who gave spiritual advice to a floundering organization in its beginning years; they may believe she is a great devotional writer; they may believe that God used her even though she was flawed. They may even say she was “not a prophet” and see her as a somewhat embarrassing “great aunt” that the family knows is eccentric but whom they still honor. What they will NOT say is that she is a false prophet. Simply saying she is “not a prophet”, however, does not make her spiritually dangerous. They will not admit she WAS a prophet: a false one.
Finally, Adventists all believe that Satan is the scapegoat on whom Jesus will place the sins of the saved after the investigative judgment concludes, and Satan will “cleanse heaven” by carrying those sins away to the lake of fire. In other words (and they adamantly refuse to state this fact, but the reality of their soteriology makes this unavoidable) Satan is the final sin-bearer. Jesus’ blood defiles heaven by transferring sins there while awaiting “processing” in the investigative judgment, but Satan cleanses heaven by carrying away those sins that have been confessed and being punished for them.
Not all individual Adventists understand the implications of their beliefs, but these five things are the structure of Adventism, and all Adventists believe them. They may talk a good talk and sound oh-so-Christian, but under the hood they do not believe the biblical gospel. Former Adventists are passionate about these things because we KNOW these facts are true, and we KNOW that Christians do not understand the deep and depressing bondage in which Adventists live.
We were not hurt. We were deceived, and when the Lord opened our eyes and revealed Himself and the truth, the horror of Adventism began to make sense: it is darkness and is from the father of lies. I can only pray that Christians truly are willing to understand that Adventism is a dark cult that does not teach the gospel.
Former Adventists are not bitterly reacting to an organization that hurt them nor being disloyal to a system that has a few wrong ideas. In fact, Adventists are taught to misrepresent themselves to Christians exactly for the purpose of proselytizing. We ALL learned not to reveal what we really believed to Christians. We ALL learned the public arguments to defend our beliefs and to sound “biblical”. We do not “have an axe to grind”.
We know those nice people, and we pray for the Lord to reveal reality and truth to those who interact with them. †
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Only those willing “to come out of her,” know just how dark the darkness is and how the legalism and fear chokes the life out of you! I could not even shower without hearing in my head just how EGW said i should do it! I understand how hard it is to leave! I came close to a breakdown. I loved God (still do!), and she showed how i kept failing to show it. Now i realize it was nonsense and brain washing of sorts. Then i remembered what a happy Christian i was before joining that church. Everything seemed to snowball then with them following us and threatening us when we just visited another church; doing research into some of their statements and finding they distorted and lied; and then receiving a copy of Walter Rhea’s, The White Lie, and my marriage of 15 years suddenly ended! I was reeling! God got us (the kids and me) through it all. That was in 1987 and i STILL did not know all they believed in 2018. I still wondered about the sabbath. I wondered about some lessons that never made sense. Nothing seemed to answer the sabbath issue authoritatively to me. I felt like i was rationalizing. Thanks to you, i finally understand and am totally free! I praise God for your ministry! Thank you!
Lenore, thank you. I feel emotional reading your story. I so KNOW that loss and depression and fear and craziness…and yet the Lord is faithful and never leaves us. He does not leave His sheep in darkness. I am so sorry for the loss of your marriage, and I just thank the Lord that you understand how the new covenant renders the law obsolete in Jesus! Thank you for posting.
I always thought EGW was a false prophet and questioned repeatedly…always getting in trouble to the point that I stopped reading my Bible and focused on EGW…to please my parents…to earn their love…did not work. When I finally left home, I threw all her books in the trash but remained SDA through years of sinful living and unrealized rebellion against God. The belief that she was a false prophet was the only thing I held to be true…the rest had me entangled in the web of deceit…not connecting it to her but to proof texting and eisegesis…until God lovingly captured my heart when I went to Him in the depth of despair. Amazing grace is a reality!
Beverly, YES! The Lord knows how to capture our hearts when we think there’s no reality but our despair. You are inspiring to me.