By Nicole Stevenson
Unless you are “living under a rock” regarding popular culture (as I usually am), you are most likely aware of the song “Baby Shark”. In fact, it’s possible that simply reading “Baby Shark” has begun an unrelenting cycle of the song playing in your mind—sorry about that! This song seems to have captured the nation with over two billion views on YouTube and with performances and variations of the song that run the gamut from children’s entertainment to adult performances by Josh Groban and Sophie Turner! My home has not been immune to the Baby Shark craze, and, in fact, my children very much enjoy creating their own lyrics to the song, with Christmas vacation offering more opportunity than ever for me to hear their creative renditions.
As I was walking through my home one evening before Christmas, gathering decorating supplies for my kids as they hung ornaments together, I heard my son begin to sing his newest version of the song. I paused in the hall to listen as his words caught me by surprised and left me wondering if I needed to stop him for the sake of reverence, but what he revealed in his lyrics and his careful and thoughtful manner of singing them, surprised me and I couldn’t help but stand quietly listening as he sang and decorated the tree, “Baby God, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, do…. Born to die, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, do….gave me life, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, do….Now I’m free!” My son, without any confusion or hesitation, called Baby Jesus, Baby God! For some this may not seem to be a significantly meaningful moment, especially considering the tune that inspired the words, but for someone with my background, hearing my child proclaim the deity of Christ without pause is a reminder of God’s miraculous intervention in the lives of my little family.
The filtering veil of self-deception and “family secrets”
One of the greatest surprises to me as a Christian has been how impacting the truth about Jesus being God incarnate continues to be. Perhaps this is why the gospel of John is my favorite to read. The man Jesus was (is) also fully God! The surprise came in the fact that as a Seventh-day Adventist I would have told you that I believed Jesus was God the Son. However, those words were redefined with so much extra-biblical detail that I wasn’t fully aware they meant something different to me than they did to true believers. I didn’t know that I didn’t know that Jesus is God. I also didn’t know how impacting the truth about who Jesus is would be!
Willful self-deception is an evil unlike other evils. I believe it’s one we can’t easily see as we participate in it, certainly not without God’s intervention. It seems it’s often carefully packaged with false evidences and false witnesses to protect its fragile existence and ultimately the idol that sits on its back.
As an Adventist I willfully accepted whatever doctrines were spoon-fed to me with the lazy excuse that others who believed them were smarter than I was. I used the evidences I was most comfortable handling, and I allowed myself to hold dueling ideas about Jesus in different parts of my thinking for the sake of easing my cognitive dissonance about the contradicting details I grew up hearing. I did this “split thinking” because the alternative was unacceptable–Adventism had to be right. The nature of Jesus, in my world, was vague and unknowable, and yet thanks to our prophet we had intel that gave us “superior understanding” of Him in other ways.
As an Adventist I sang the Christmas carols. I knew the basic details of the Christmas story. I understood that we were celebrating the birth of Jesus, and I would have said that He came to die on the cross to save us from our sins. My beliefs all sounded orthodox, but the heresy is deceptively tucked into what isn’t said, rather than what is. I didn’t mean to be deceptive to others, but the nature of self-deception requires the self to deceive others as well.
It never seemed important to go into the details of the special knowledge I had with non-Adventists: knowledge about Jesus’ being elevated to the position of being God’s Son, about Him being Michael the archangel, about Him having “no advantage we didn’t have”, or about his purpose in coming to teach us how to uphold the law before the watching worlds so we could vindicate God and be saved. It was enough that we could agree on “the basics”.
The splits in my thinking and my dueling ideas about Jesus allowed me to believe I was an orthodox participant in the Christian worship of the Christ child. The part of my mind that chose not to engage with “confusing theology” was somehow able to filter out the clear gospel messages written into the carols that have been sung by Christians for hundreds of years, words that destroy the Adventist essential doctrines about who He is and why He came. I could stand side by side, Adventist and Christian, and proclaim the same truths in song, all with a distracted mind set more on trying to sing well than on what I was actually singing.
Not only were my understandings of the nature of Christ altered by the clear Adventist teachings I received “safely” behind the closed doors of the Seventh-day Adventist institutions, they were also altered by the “family secrets” I was not formally taught but heard around the dinner table, at Adventist social gatherings, and in lively debates hosted by “contemporary issues” Sabbath School classes for the more “progressive thinkers”. The nature and deity of Christ is a longstanding Adventist “family secret debate”. After all, the founders of Adventism were Arian, and the full deity of Christ presented great problems for E.G. White’s authority.
Growing up I remember hearing lively arguments, with Ellen White quotes lodged by both sides of the debate, over whether or not Jesus had a divine nature or was God. The issue seemed to revolve around the fact that He couldn’t actually be an example of perfect law keeping if He had an advantage we didn’t have. It would be unfair of God to ask us to keep the law perfectly if we didn’t have all the advantage Christ had. Since, as Ellen White taught, Jesus came to prove that man can, in fact, keep God’s fair law, the integrity of His mission hung on the fact that He had to be made JUST like us, otherwise God was dishonestly presenting an impossible mission to us.
As with all family secrets that children grow up hearing gossiped about in the corners of family gatherings, these discussions and debates made their way into my own understanding of reality, and without my conscious awareness they impregnated my thoughts about Jesus with heresy and gave me permission to elevate human logic and commentary above Scripture. The ways which all the people discussed the issue around me, many of whom were brilliant and successful men and women, left me certain that this issue was unsolvable and one we could never understand until we were in Heaven. I still marvel at the fact that I could sing Christmas carols and read familiar Scriptures which clearly reveal the nature of Christ, and never actually “see” how clear the Bible was about who Jesus is.
In Jesus the veil is removed
I’ll never forget the day, or where I was, in 2010 when I read Isaiah 9:6 as a born again believer. I was in my first year of trusting Christ, and my Bible went everywhere I did. My appetite for the Word was insatiable, and as the mother of a young toddler boy and a baby girl, I took advantage of every quiet moment I could to read. That afternoon I sat reading in the warmth of the sun streaming in through my car window while the kids slept in their carseats, and I waited for my husband who had just gone into the grocery store.
“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
My heart was filled with an overwhelming feeling I cannot describe. It was as if time had stopped and another layer of veil had dropped off my eyes; I stared down at the page and remember realizing that I was holding my breath. As a new believer I knew Jesus was God, but every time my eyes came across clear Scripture that revealed that truth yet again, the reality of His deity seemed to sink even deeper into my heart, soul, and mind. My eyes began to burn, and the tears rolled down my cheeks and fell onto the pages in my lap. There was no mystery as to who the Christmas baby was! The Lord Jesus, our Messiah, was truly and completely God. This text revealed that He would be called God. Furthermore, it revealed that all three persons of the Trinity were woven into the miracle this tiny Savior would offer to fallen man.
Scripture does not stutter; there is no debate; there is no question in the Word of God about Who the Word of God is. The man Christ Jesus is fully man and fully God.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1:1).
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (Jn. 1:14).
“ He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…” (Heb. 1:3).
“ And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life” (1 Jn. 1:5).
“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28).
“Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14,15).
“Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Do you believe because you see me? How happy are those who believe without seeing me!’” (Jn. 20:28-29).
“But of the Son he (God) says, ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom’” (Heb. 1:8).
“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’” (Jn. 8:58).
The message of Christmas—that the transcendent God of Scripture entered His creation at the fullness of time as fully God and fully man, becoming Immanuel, God with us, to rescue us from His own wrath and the just penalty for our sin‚ this was not the message I learned in Adventism. Adventism is fundamentally unclear about the nature and work of Jesus, and while many have not spent careful time evaluating their own beliefs about the nature of Christ or the reality of the incarnation, others freely admit that they do not believe about Jesus as orthodox Christians do. While many will say that God sent Jesus to be born of a woman, they will not understand that baby Jesus, was in fact, baby God.
My first Christmas as a believer brought many surprises to me. I cannot tell you how often I still find myself crying as I ponder the words of worship songs and Christmas carols I never “heard” as an Adventist. The longer I have been out, the bigger my understanding of God has become, and the bigger God is, the more overwhelmingly beautiful the incarnation of Christ has become.
This incarnation is inextricably related to God’s plan to save the world. If you are an Adventist and are willing to search the Scriptures honestly without the veils of Adventist doctrines, you will see that they do not teach that Jesus came to show us how to vindicate God. On the contrary, they clearly teach, from the Old Testament to the new, that He came to reconcile us to God through His shed blood on the cross.
One of the first Christmas carols to surprise me that December in 2010 was “What Child is This?” It was the following verse that caught in my throat and brought me to tears,
“Good Christian, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through
The cross be borne for me, for you
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary”
The cross be borne for me for you… God the Son was born to bear the cross. God the baby, the silent Word, was pleading for sinners with His very existence. He was the promised one from ancient days, foretold in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and into our depravity and poverty God came to give new life and an inheritance—not to those who would prove themselves worthy, but to those who would believe His testimony given to us by His own Word. I pray that if you do not yet know Him, that 2019 will be the year that you seek with all of your heart to know the Christ of Christmas. †
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