By Nicole Stevenson
I remember vividly staring at the pages of Genesis, horrified, almost frozen in time, and wondering how God could allow Abraham to lie to Pharaoh about his wife. How could God choose a cowardly, dishonest man who sent his wife into a pagan leader’s harem, to be the father of His people and the one whose life would be immortalized in the pages of Scripture? I couldn’t read on. Instead I turned my reading time into prayer and began to question God about why that story was in the Bible.
I believe I was only about 20 years old at the time. My younger sister had invited me to be a part of her small Bible study group that she and a couple friends had started. Our task was simple: just read the Bible. We began in Genesis. There certainly were surprises along the way leading up to Abraham’s life (beginning with the truth about Eve being with Adam while speaking with the snake). The real surprise, however, came when I discovered that Abraham lied even after following God out of Ur. Up to that moment I thought God only put people in the Bible whose lives and choices He wanted us to emulate. Even if Abraham had failed in that way, why would God put that story in the Bible for us to know about it?
I wouldn’t understand for another 10 years that the purpose of Scripture was never about giving humanity endless examples of moral men who teach us how to live correctly. It was never intended to be a public relations handbook for God’s people. Please don’t misunderstand me, I believe with all my heart that Scripture is the inerrant word of God and is supremely important in our sanctification and in knowing Him.
I am, however, pushing against the idea that all the people in the Bible whom God calls His own are perfect examples of saintly submission. Only God is perfect, and perfect submission is found only in the life and death of the Lord Jesus.
As I’ve unpacked my Adventist worldview my previous assumptions about the Bible have made more sense. From childhood I was told that Seventh-day Adventists were living out their lives in front of watching worlds. If we could manage to keep the 10 Commandments perfectly, we would prove to these worlds that God is fair in expecting us to keep His law. Thus, we would vindicate His character to the entire universe. If, on the other hand, we could not keep His commandments, we would demonstrate that God’s requirements are not fair and that He is, in fact, harsh and unworthy of His role. (What a merciful God we have to forgive me for having such a disgusting view of Him!).
As an Adventist, I believed that the man Jesus came to show us the 10 Commandments could be kept, and our obedience would be the evidence in this cosmic trial that we could do the same. So, it only made sense to me that although not everyone in Scripture would be an example of perfect submission, God’s men and women—the heroes of faith—would be people who kept His law perfectly. I thought they were there as examples I was to emulate. Therefore, when I encountered this story of Abraham, a man chosen by God who failed and was never really overtly reprimanded for it, I began to question God’s character myself. If God’s man is a liar, doesn’t that incriminate God? I wondered.
A legacy of failures, faith, and faithfulness
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation” (Heb. 11:1,2).
Since coming to understand the purpose of Scripture, Hebrews chapter 11 has made a lot more sense. So many of the people the Holy Spirit listed in this chapter were not upstanding pictures of perfect obedience. Instead, they were examples of people who sinned against God in some of the ways we might call the worst, but they were people who believed God. That belief was their commendation. They were people who left us a legacy of faith in the midst of failures, and their stories, laid bare for all to see for all time, are places where God glorified Himself and put His faithfulness on display for all who would look.
When we understand that the Bible is meant to reveal reality, suddenly the human failures forever in the pages of His word make sense. It is in the pages of Scripture that we see the depravity of man, the holiness of God, the faithlessness of even those who profess faith, and the faithfulness of the God who keeps His own for His purposes. It is on the backdrop of darkest evil that the radiance of God’s holiness shines in undeniable ways. It is in the most hopeless places that redemption reveals a God of miracles who brings life from death. If we were never meant to see the sinful depravity and failures of all humanity, we would be manipulated into a total break from reality. We would be imprisoned in deception.
It is God’s mercy that has revealed to us the sinfulness and fallenness of man. It is in knowing truth that we know our need for a Savior, and it is in Christ’s work of redeeming fallen man that God is most glorified.
Public Relation Specialist or Truth teller?
According to the Public Relations Society of America, public relations is defined as, “… a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” A PR agent would be concerned with the benefit of both parties when working to establish a relationship between them, and when I was an Adventist, this type of relationship is what I believed we were to have with God. We needed God to be saved, and God needed us to be vindicated—but God does not “benefit” from being in relationship with us!
“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things…” Acts 17:24, 25
While it is true that God calls us into a ministry of reconciliation and that the Lord Jesus has commanded us to go into all the world, baptizing in the name of all three persons of the Trinity and teaching all that He has commanded us, this work He has commanded of us is not about protecting His reputation or making Him look good. God does not need us!
To be fair, it is not only the cults who have this sort of idea about humans’ relationships with God. There are Christians who spend a great deal of time trying to make Christianity appealing to others by living attractive lives and hiding their flaws or shame. While the motive may be noble, the real fruit of this kind of evangelism is to put a chasm between the “perfected” and the broken, establishing a power structure that leaves the “needier” feeling unworthy of the other.
The work of the redeemed is not fixing either the message or the messenger to make God attractive. Surely we are to live honorable lives worthy of our calling, but shame-filled hiding or editing out the hard truths about ourselves and our lives is dishonest. This kind of dishonesty is not the fruit of worthy living. We may convince ourselves we are doing something noble when we hide our struggles and the ways the Lord has taught us to trust Him as we struggle, but I have come to believe that this “hiding” is not nobility as much as it is shame-filled pride. We lie to ourselves when we refuse to be honest about our lives.
We are called to a great but difficult work: spreading the truth about God and man, and about the salvation offered to man through the finished work of Jesus Christ. It is a work of truth-telling motivated by and expressed in love, of proclaiming the realities of the goodness of God and the fallenness of man. It is the difficult work of sharing with the world that, without the intervention of the God who made them, all humanity is on a definite course for eternal hell. It is the difficult work of guarding the purity of the gospel even at the cost of losing homes, families, relationships, and reputation.
It is the difficult work of standing in front of the arrows of persecution to proclaim truth at all costs. It is the difficult work of living honestly in the body of Christ, of long-suffering with other believers who may hurt us, of confessing our sins to one another, bearing our burdens together, and glorifying God in every aspect of our lives, giving all—even our prideful hiding—and holding nothing back, to bring honor and glory to our Most High God and Father! This work means being vulnerable and giving up the rights to our story, confessing that it is God who wrote it and who owns the right to use it for His glory.
So, what does this kind of truth-telling look like?
God doesn’t need an editor
One of the women from whom I have learned a great deal about biblical hermeneutics has often told me to look for patterns in the pages of Scripture when I have questions about the biblical way to do something. For example, in today’s culture there are many new “methods” of prayer being promoted among Christians. However, if we want to know what Biblical prayer looks like, we can go to the pages of Scripture and look there for examples of how to do this. It is a wonderful rule of thumb when evaluating our Christian practices, so I applied it to the matter of glorifying God in our lives when telling our story. The pattern seems to be clear; it is in the honest telling of the darkness and brokenness of fallen man that we see with undeniable clarity the Holiness and faithfulness of God.
From Genesis to Revelation the glory of God shines most brilliantly in contrast with the darkness of sin. From Genesis to Revelation the Holy Spirit reveals to us that God is sovereign and that He purposes even the darkest moments of our lives for our good and His glory. From Genesis to Revelation God is a truth-teller, and His reputation is never compromised. Rather, God’s character is magnified as the Holy Spirit honestly details the stories of the people of God who lived before us. It is also important to say that while the Holy Spirit never sugar-coated the heinous sins of those who came before us, He also never gratuitously indulged in the details of those sins. I do not believe that speaking truthfully about our lives involves bragging about, or finely detailing, our sins.
As we look in Scripture to see examples of how God reveals truth, we also see how fallen man seeks to hide his weakness and sin from God and from others, beginning with Adam and Eve. It is our shame-filled pride that keeps us from being forthcoming about all the parts of our lives that require God’s intervention and healing. It seems counterintuitive that when we boast in our weaknesses, when we own the darker parts of our lives from which God has rescued us, we most powerfully put God’s merciful and redeeming ways on display. Yet, that apparent contradiction is exactly the reality that we see in Scripture.
God sovereignly chose to reveal Himself in Scripture to fallen man through a series of many stories of the faith and failings of fallen man as God interacted with them. He purposed the lives of those we read in Scripture to reveal who He is. The Holy Spirit chose to write honestly about these people who are our great cloud of witnesses, and I believe He has modeled for us the kind of honest life-sharing, truth-telling witnesses we are to be. Those who have not yet known our God as well as our brothers and sisters need truth-telling burden bearers to run alongside them.
Sometimes our stories are dark. Sometimes they are filled with more shame than we can bear to know let alone share with others. Sometimes, it’s all we can do to try to forget the pain we have tucked away in the most ignored parts of our hearts and minds. The temptation is often to say that we really don’t need to talk about these things. The past is the past. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if editing our stories is rendering our pain nearly useless. If God didn’t feel the need to edit the sin out of the lives of those who stand in the great hall of faith in order to put the faithfulness of a Holy God on greater display, why would we feel the need to edit our own stories?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:3-5).
How can we comfort others in affliction if we all hide what we have been through? How will we know when someone needs our help if they never say they are struggling? How will they know we can help them if we never share our story honestly?
Our story is actually God’s story
Just as God didn’t give us a book of endless examples of perfect humans, He also is not calling us to be examples of perfect humanity to a fallen world (let alone to watching worlds!). We do not need to clean up our stories—actually, they are not really ours to clean up. We can attempt to deny them, or redefine them, but when we do, we miss the glory and sovereignty of God in our lives. A beautiful example of speaking the truth in love while crediting a sovereign God with the outcome of his life is Joseph before his brothers.
“Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Please come closer to me.’ And they came closer. And he said, ‘I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.’” (Gen 45:4).
Joseph spoke truthfully about how he was sinned against. He did not redefine the sin against him in some kind of false humility to appear benevolent and keep peace. He said what they did: they sold him into Egypt. Yet, by the grace of God Joseph spoke the truth in love and he immediately put the sovereignty and glory of God on display:
“Now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life…God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Now, therefore, it was not you who sent me here, but God;” (Gen. 45:5,6,8a).
Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives were written in God’s book before even one came into being. Acts 17: 24,25 tells us that God chose where and when we would live so that the circumstances of our lives would cause us to grope after Him and find Him. Hebrews 12:2 tells us that God is both the author and finisher of our faith. The circumstances of our lives are known and purposed by God—even the fact that many who are reading this now were once in Adventism. I know far too many Christians who were once Adventist who are shamed into not discussing that part of their past. Too often I hear from formers who feel they have no one who will let them talk or process their walk away from Adventism within the churches they attend.
When the body of Christ seeks to silence sheep in their most vulnerable need (whether they are recovering from addiction, false religion, abuse, or a broken marriage) we perpetuate a mentality that ministry is about keeping things palatable and not about sitting in the ashes with those who are disoriented and seeking help, and we shame the most vulnerable among us. When we deny what God has written into the pages of our lives, we deny that God ever had a purpose for any of it, or that He is using it to prepare us for the work He has given to us now (Eph. 2:10). To be clear, God’s Sovereignty does not make him responsible for sin; at the same time, our sin does not make God less sovereign. When we choose to edit our stories, what we are really doing is editing God’s story.
Shame-filled hiding, whether it’s through strictly managed conversations, hiding behind our careers or roles in work or ministry, shallow social interactions, or a private refusal to speak the truth about our lives even to ourselves, is deadly to genuine Christian fellowship, and it is deadly to our witness to the work of God in our lives. The heart of the gospel is not that God promises us a better life and to clean us up; if all we offer the world is a sanitary version of our best self that might be all the message they see.
The heart of the gospel is that the Lord Jesus is the Christ, and through His act of penal substitutionary atonement He gave Himself as a propitiation for our sin and has justified all who believe in Him once and for all; reconciling us to God, freeing us from sin and death, bringing us to life in Him, and bringing us into the family of God both through the new birth and through adoption. The heart of the gospel is that He has rescued us from darkness and that He is a God who continues to rescue us from the darkness of our own hearts and the power of sin in the flesh. The posture of believers ought not be one of feigned perfection, but one of honest confession and repentance before a Holy God who is mercifully sanctifying us by His Spirit through His Word, and of honest living, refusing to hide the truth of God’s work in our lives before those He has given us both to serve and to learn from. It is in this posture, I believe, that we are most able to put on display our great God of redemption.
“If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.” 2 Timothy 2:13
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“If we could manage to keep the 10 Commandments perfectly, we would prove to these worlds that God is fair in expecting us to keep His law. Thus, we would vindicate His character to the entire universe. If, on the other hand, we could not keep His commandments, we would demonstrate that God’s requirements are not fair and that He is, in fact, harsh and unworthy of His role.”
Thankfully, Adventism has been addressing this poor theology in newly released books directly challenging the LGT doctrine released this past Spring. George Knight, The End-Time Event and the Last Generation and the Symposium book of Andrews seminary professors, God’s Character and the Last Generation, edited by Molaska and Peckham. This doctrine, systemized by M. L. Andreasen in the 1930s has plagued the Adventist movement since the release of Questions on Doctrine in 1957 and threaten to divide the church. This is a large part of that which is rejected by Formers and rightfully so. May you continue to find peace in your journey and let God lead.
“Thankfully, Adventism has been addressing this poor theology”
Respectfully, Karlwagener, this sentence gives away Adventism’s refusal to obey what the Bible commands we do when we realize a prophet is false.
“But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’— owhen a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; nthe prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” Dt. 18: 20-22
“Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,” declares the LORD, “who steal My words from each other. “Behold, I am against the prophets,” declares the LORD, “who use their tongues and declare, ‘The Lord declares.’ “Behold, I am against those who have prophesied false dreams,” declares the LORD, “and related them and led My people astray by their falsehoods and reckless boasting; yet I did not send them or command them, nor do they furnish this people the slightest benefit,” declares the LORD. Jer. 23:30-32
The doctrines I wrote about in the blog, and that you point out above, came directly from the writings and visions of the same prophet who gave Seventh-day Adventism their distinctive doctrines– all 28 fundamental beliefs– as well as the “gospel” of the “three angels” end-times message.
If Adventist’s begin to see “poor theology” (aka, false teachings) that EGW taught, while claiming to possess the spirit of prophesy, and while sharing “light” that came from God Himself, then they ought to repent and reject her entirely. It is not enough to challenge elements of her doctrines, true believers must stand in Truth and challenge the very source of this “poor theology” with repentant hearts.
Beautifully expressed, Nicole! Thank you!
Thank you, Beverly. I hope you come see us again soon!