This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Commentary on Wise Words for Families—Lesson 5
This week’s lesson looks at a variety of Proverbs giving good advice to fathers, mothers, children, wives, and husbands. It advises men to “love the right woman” and to pursue good characters in order to impact their children positively. It asks parents how they can “set matters right” when their discipline has been too harsh. It asks how laughter can help a home and what persistent quarreling may signify. Finally, the lesson asks the reader how their cultural traditions may conflict with biblical principles regarding family.
These good ideas are pragmatic. In fact, there is hardly anything to discuss regarding this week’s lesson if one simply looks at the Proverbs and tries to apply them to life in a family.
The real issue becomes apparent, however, when we look in the Teachers’ Comments. On page 66 under the heading “Theological Introduction” is this paragraph:
God is a risk taker. He willingly created free moral agents with the potential of loving Him or wanting nothing to do with Him. In a sense, God lost His own wager. His universe rebelled. He lost His angels. He lost His humans. Worst of all, His own Son was murdered by the very ones He created. Yet, for God, it was all worth it—for the sake of having a family.…When we start our own families, we participate in the divine risk of creating relationships.
God is not a risk taker
This entire paragraph reflects an understanding of reality that bears no resemblance to Scripture. God is sovereign. He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He is not a “risk taker”. He knows all things, and when He created man, He knew what man would do.
God is immortal and the source of life, light, and the One whose word brought everything into existence. He was not needy before creating. The three persons within the Trinity have alway been together, in perfect relationship and oneness. God did not create us in order to have a family.
Human sin was not a surprise to God, nor was our salvation through the death of the Son. All this was in place before any of us took our first breaths.
In fact, in Revelation 13 we learn that when the beast is given authority over “every tribe and people and language and nation,” then “all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Rev. 8:7, 8).
We learn several things in this passage. First, we learn that those who names are written in the Lamb’s book of life were written there BEFORE the foundation of the world. Second, we learn that this book is the book of the Lamb who was slain. All the names in this book were written before creation, and those people recorded there were, from before creation, the people of the Lamb who was slain. These things were all known before the foundation of the world!
Predetermined plan and foreknowledge
Peter has even more to say about God’s omniscience and sovereignty over the event on the earth. In his sermon to the Jew on the Day of Pentecost, Peter was reminding them that God had attested to them Jesus the Nazarene through His miracles, sign, and wonders. Peter reminds the Jews that they KNEW God had worked through Jesus, and then he said this about Jesus:
…this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death” (Acts 2:23).
Notice the things Peter declares. He states that Jesus’ being delivered into the hands of the Romans was not an event that developed during a mob frenzy and a mock trial. He says the entire process of Jesus being delivered into the hands of godless men and killed by them was something that was predetermined.
Jesus’ crucifixion was the working out of God’s predetermined plan and His foreknowledge. Man’s depravity was not a surprise to God, and God’s omniscience knew and determined exactly what would happen, when it would happen, how it would happen, and by whose hands it would happen.
God did not take a risk. Jesus’ incarnation and death at the hands of His rebellious creatures was something God knew before He created the world or brought humanity into existence.
Peter further says this:
And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God (1 Pet. 1:17–21).
This verse tells us many details that Adventism obscures. First, believers are rescued from the “futile ways” of their forefathers by “precious blood”, the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Next, Jesus and His precious cleansing blood, like the blood of a spotless lamb, was “foreknown before the foundation of the world.”
Jesus’ incarnation and death were reality before God ever made the world. It was a predetermined plan set in motion by God Himself. Our fall and our salvation were God’s Plan A. There is no Plan B with God.
Moreover, Peter explains that Jesus’ incarnation and death were foreknown from eternity past, but He was manifested—made physically tangible—“in the last times” for the sake of us who are believers in God!
Believers are those who believe that God foreknew and sent His Son. they believe that God raised Him from the dead and glorified Him—all this so our faith and hope are in GOD alone.
Sovereign God knows all
In other words, God took no risks creating “free moral agents”. He knew what we would do; He knew what He would do, and the the slain Lamb was reality long before the universe was created. He was manifested in the fulness of time, at the very time God fore-ordained He would come, and His death occurred exactly at the time God had established from before the foundation of the earth.
God did not create because He needed family. The truth is that we do not fully understand why He created, because He has not revealed those purposes to us. His Word does not tell us why.
What we do know is that He loves the world, and He knew those who would be His before He created us.
When we marry and have children, we are not participating in any divine risk. Rather, we are fulfilling God’s design for us. When He created Adam and Eve He commanded them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
When Noah and his sons exited the ark after the flood, God repeated his original command: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it” (Gen. 9:1, 7).
Never did men or angels spiral into rebellion that God could not foresee or control. He did not take a risk either in creating or in sending God the Son to become incarnate and die for human sin.
God’s triune identity has never been at risk. Our identities have never been at risk. Our families are not “risks” but the fulfillment of God’s commands to the human race.
As the born-again children of God when we trust the Lord Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection, we have been known by God before He ever created us or our world.
The pain in families is the consequence of human sin and the fact that God condemned the creation to decay until the glorious resurrection of His sons (Rom. 8:18–25). The solution to this pain, however, is trusting the God who knows us.
The God who created us after already knowing us, after already knowing the Lamb slain, is the all-powerful One who can intercept our lives with the life of the Lamb and bring our dead souls to life through Jesus’ blood.
Our families will reflect our own belief or unbelief. When we see the truth about Jesus, when we trust that God is bigger than we can imagine and never bound by our “free will”, we can trust Him. He has the first and the last word, not we ourselves.
When we know and trust the Lord Jesus and are adopted as God’s true sons and daughters, we are able to bring the life of Jesus into our marriages and our families. We no longer have to protect and defend ourselves; we are hidden with Christ in God, and the mind of Christ is ours.
God’s word becomes our insight and wisdom, and the Holy Spirit administers reality and truth to us. When we know Jesus, we can pray to love our families for God. He, not we, know what they need, and He is able to minister to them through us when we are willing to stand and be His messenger to them.
Only when we truthfully see ourselves in relationship to a sovereign God who is bound by none of His creatures can we relax and know that our families and futures are safe. We can rest in a God that big!
- May 18–24, 2024 - May 16, 2024
- We Got Mail - May 16, 2024
- Should We Leave the “Isms”? - May 9, 2024