“Families of Faith”—Lesson 11
By Colleen Tinker
This week’s lesson addresses the concern of keeping one’s faith pure and living, from generation to generation, in spite of cultural traditions. It asks how one can know which cultural practices one may embrace without compromising one’s faith? How does one contextualize one’s faith within the culture?
From the perspective of Adventism, the question of cultural influences is a bit ironic. Adventism, as opposed to biblical Christianity, is itself a culture. It is a religion built around a particular worldview shaped and endorsed by the visions of a modern prophet. In fact, at the end of Sunday’s lesson the question is asked, “How much of your faith is shaped by your culture, and how much is biblical truth?”
In reality, the Adventist faith is a unique set of beliefs packaged in a specific lifestyle. It is a sub-culture that exists within a member’s ethnic culture, and neither is built on real biblical truth.
Also significant is the fact that the lesson’s introduction on Saturday uses “Sabbath to Sunday” as an example of cultural encroachment on the church. The author says,
“Our parents, our children, our homes, our families, even our church—all are impacted by the culture in which they exist, and greatly, too. Though other factors were at play, the change of the Sabbath to Sunday was a powerful example of how the culture of the time, powerfully and negatively, influenced the church. Every time we drive by a church and see a sign for Sunday services, we are given a stark reminder of just how far-reaching the power of culture can be.”
In fact, culture did NOT change the day of worship. The seventh-day Sabbath was the sign of the old covenant between God and Israel. In the new covenant, the law has been fulfilled in Christ, and the entire old covenant including the Ten Commandments is obsolete as a rule of faith and practice for believers.
In the new covenant, there are no “holy days” or times. Jesus is holy. The Christian church began meeting together on the day of Jesus’ resurrection—the first day of the week—from the earliest days of the church, especially in gentile congregations. There is no command to observe any day of the week in the new covenant.
For the lesson to use the Adventist “Sabbath to Sunday” argument as an example of cultural encroachment that has impacted the church is a completely erroneous and invented thing. Ellen White made that argument, but Scripture does not support it. Christians have met together on the first day since the earliest days of the church. There is no command to do so, nor is there any command to meet on Sabbath. Romans 14 commands that whatever people choose to do—to observe a day or not—they must do so to the Lord, and Colossians 2:16-17 commands that no one allow himself to be judged for keeping or not keeping any day.
Man’s mistakes
The lesson further uses the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and of Rachel and her father’s household idols which she hid under her saddle as Jacob fled Laban to show how culture affected God’s families. The Teachers Commentary explains that these practices were borrowed from the common culture of the day, that within these people’s local framework, these behaviors made sense.
The Commentary continues:
“Centuries later, Israel’s obstinate insistence on having a king to rule over it would serve as an example of cultural accommodation with disastrous consequences for the destiny of the entire nation. And the people said, “ ‘Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations’ ” (1 Sam. 8:5, ESV). God knew this choice was an outright rejection of Himself as their king (1 Sam. 8:7), with no better reason offered than to be “like everyone else.” This desire for a king is cultural accommodation at its worst. Anyone who has read the account of Israel’s and Judah’s kings knows that for the most part, their desire for a king resulted in disaster. But there are two important points worth noting: (1) God allowed them to make this cultural accommodation, even choosing their first king for them; (2) God worked within the framework of Israel’s sinful decision, even to the point of rooting Messianic prophecies into the monarchy. What a God! Setting a human king over Israel was not God’s perfect will. The entire history of God’s people might have been vastly different if they would have chosen to remain, possibly, the single nation on the planet without a visible human leader. But God is able to initiate plan B or C or Q, regardless of our choices. He does not easily give up on His people.
When the church or its families make sinful cultural accommodations, even ones that have long-lasting effects, it seems God is big enough to work around, and through, our misguided decisions.”
Typically, from the Adventist perspective, this lesson places God under the constraints of human free will. First, the above statement claims that Israel’s “obstinate insistence on having a king” changed the course of Israel’s history and “was not God’s perfect will.” The author concedes, however, that God allowed them to make this “cultural accommodation” and “worked within the framework of Israel’s sinful decision, even to the point of rooting Messianic prophecies into the monarchy.”
These claims, however, do not reflect what Scripture says. Long before Israel demanded a king, God prophesied through Jacob that the kingly, ruling line would descend from Judah, Jacob’s fourth son. As Jacob was about to die, he blessed each of his sons. To Judah he said,
The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Binding his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, he has washed his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes. His eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk (Genesis 49:10–12).
In this prophecy found in the first book of the Bible we find the promise of the Davidic king. David is not named, but Jacob prophesied that Judah’s descendants would hold the “ruler’s staff”. All the people would obey him. This prophecy was not just about a king over Israel’s sons, but over all the people. Embedded in this blessing was a Messianic prophecy that designated Judah as the tribe from which a royal ruler would come who would rule the nations.
Furthermore, Moses stated that Israel would take a king for themselves. Before the nation entered the Promised Land, as Moses reiterated the covenant with the wilderness generation before he died and Joshua took over, Moses said this in Deuteronomy 17:14–20:
“When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set a king over you whom the LORD your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the LORD has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.
“And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.
Long before there was a monarchy—before the sad time of the judges and before Moses died, God gave Israel the instructions for WHEN—not IF—they would one day have a king. He instructed them that the king would be one He would appoint, that it would not be a foreigner but would be their brother. He even gave instructions for each king’s mandate not to acquire many horses, and never to return to Egypt for political and military help. The king, furthermore, was to copy for himself a complete copy of the book of the law.
Notice what the passage identifies as the reasons the king was to make his own, hand-written copy of the law. He was to read that copy all the days of his life—and hand-copying the law would impress those words and their nuances into his mind in a way not possible if he simply read the law. Writing it required him to interact with every word, verb tense, and definition. Having the word imprinted in his mind this way would teach him to fear the Lord and to honor His statutes both in principle and in action.
Making God’s word a daily, personal commitment in his life would keep him from feeling superior to those over whom he ruled. He would remember he was their brother, not their dictator. Practicing God’s word in his decision making and rulership would communicate God’s will and mercy and love and justice to Israel, and God would honor him with longevity for his obedience.
Yes, in the story in 1 Samuel 8 in which Israel demanded a king, Samuel felt rejected, and God told Samuel that their rejection was not of him but of God—these things are all true. Israel did depart from God’s will. They did seek after Canaanite traditions, wanting to be like the nations around them, and having a king was part of what they believed would make them fit in. They were rejecting God.
Nevertheless, their demand for a king wasn’t a surprise to God; in fact, it was always His plan. He knew they would want a king, but He also intended to give them a KING who would not only come from their gene pool but who would bring His salvation to the world and ultimately rule over all peoples.
Adventism explains away God’s complete foreknowledge and election, making men’s (and angels’) free-will the ultimate determiner of God’s ability to act. In fact, they teach their members exactly what this lessons states: that Israel got a king because they rejected God and demanded a king.
At one level that conclusion is true; at a different level, however—the level of God’s utter sovereignty—God always planned for Israel to have a king. In fact, both a promise and the provisions for a king were built into the Torah, as we have seen above!
God has no Plan B
The lesson actually states that when humans made bad choices, God adapts and changes His plans for accomplishing His will. It even says that God “is able to initiate plan B or C or Q, regardless of our choices.”
This statement is false.
God has ONLY Plan A. Our freedom to make choices is real, but God’s sovereignty is a fact as well. This tension is one we cannot explain because we are finite. We are limited, and we cannot see the whole picture. God alone can see the BIG PICTURE.
God accomplishes His plans exactly as He intends to accomplish them, and when we chafe against this fact of His sovereignty, we fail to understand that we are subject to Him, not He to us.
We are not robots, programmed either to love Him or not. Our choices are real and have eternal consequences. We deviate from truth and reality when we try to explain HOW the apparently contradictory facts of God’s sovereignty and election can be true at the same time our need to make choices is true. What we know is this: the Bible teaches both. In Jesus both of these are true and do not contradict. We have to hold these two things in tension, or we ultimately lose the cross where the human desire of Jesus met its only point of deviation from His Father’s will.
Jesus prayed that His Father would remove the cup of suffering from Him—but He submitted to His Father’s sovereign will and took the cup anyway.
We know that Jesus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Jesus’ death was not a surprise but an eternal plan of God.
We cannot explain this fact, but we believe it because Scripture teaches it.
Families of Faith
The lesson makes much of HOW parents can help their children become individual believers, not just inheritors of a tradition. In fact, within Adventism, the question of how to be a “true believer” means something different from “belief” as shown in Scripture.
Adventism is not the biblical gospel. Becoming a “first generation believer”, as the lesson puts it, requires each individual to recognize his inability to avoid sin and to repent, admitting his need of a Savior and of Jesus’ fully completing everything necessary for our salvation.
When a person admits his own depravity and trusts in Jesus and His finished work alone, he is born again and given a new heart and a new spirit, and he is sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise who guarantees our eternal inheritance (Eph. 1:13-14).
The only way a person can become a true believer is to hear the real gospel and to trust the real Jesus of Scripture. Aside from that, religions such as Adventism can only hope to replicate their own sub-culture and to reinvent their practices so they don’t look out of step with the culture.
The true gospel, however, is not culturally specific. Christianity is the result of people trusting in Jesus’ completed death and resurrection for the propitiation of our sins. This belief can become the experience of anyone in any culture. It changes the person into one with integrity and compassion and spiritual life.
True families of faith teach their children the gospel, and the Lord God convicts each person individually with the truth of Jesus and of His eternal word. Only God can make a true believer, and only a true believer can teach and teach God’s word to the next generation.
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