May 2–8

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.

 

Lesson 6: “Why is Interpretation Needed?”

The lesson starts off well, if perhaps a little long-winded, with a discussion of the importance of hermeneutics—how we interpret and understand the Bible and its message.

Hermeneutics is a very important thing to consider as wrongly understood Scripture does lead to very wrong ideas. Although I’m not sure why it should have taken three days’ worth of “study” just to establish the need to rightly interpret the message of the Bible, nevertheless, the author did establish the thought very thoroughly.

But on Tuesday, once we get to the actual study, there is immediately a deviation from the clear words of Scripture:

A background knowledge of Near Eastern culture is helpful for understanding some biblical passages. For example, Hebrew culture attributed responsibility to an individual for acts he did not commit but that he allowed to happen. Therefore, the inspired writers of the Scriptures commonly credit God with doing actively that which in Western thought we would say He permits or does not prevent from happening, for example, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” “Methods of Bible Study,” section 4℗.”

Here, the author takes the clear words of the Bible and writes them off as just a misunderstanding between different cultures. But God Himself said that He would harden Pharaoh’s heart.

He said it to Moses 4 times in Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 14:4 and 17. Each time He said, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart”. 

It is unclear to my why the author would purposely change what God said and turn it into a matter of culture and language differences. When God says He will do something, can we honestly turn that into saying that God only allowed it to happen? The only reason I can fathom for changing that would be to reduce the power of God to the level of having to allow something to happen, perhaps even being unable to prevent it from happening. While completely unbiblical, it would fit in with the Adventist concept of a weak Jesus Whose power is hampered by being forced to submit to the power of choice of His created beings.

In Wednesday’s lesson, titled “Our Sinful and Fallen Nature”, we see this subtle effort to ignore the Biblical reality that we are dead in our sins unless we are reborn from above:

“There is no question that sin has radically altered, ruptured, and fractured our relationship with God. Sin affects all of our human existence. It also affects our ability to interpret Scripture. It is not just that our human thought processes are easily employed for sinful ends, but our minds and thoughts have become corrupted by sin and, therefore, become closed to God’s truth.”

This explanation reduces our sin nature to simply being messed up because of sin; but it is so much more than that! 

Go back to the beginning and look at what God said to Adam in the garden:

The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:16).

First of all, if you are going to properly interpret the Bible, then you must take it at its word; that means you have to acknowledge that God told Adam that he would die that very day. It says nothing about “beginning to die”, or “becoming subject to death”; it says you will die that day.

Since Adam live almost 1,000 years longer, we know that his body didn’t die that day, so either something else died that day, or God lied. 

It was Adam’s spirit that died that day; sin separated him from a holy God, and to be separated from the very source of life is to be dead in spirit. He did die that very day—his spirit died, and as a result, death spread to all of us. In Romans 5 Paul goes to great lengths to say over and over that sin and death came from Adam. And it is clear that he wasn’t talking about physical death; he meant spiritual death. That much is clear by how he repeatedly said that we became alive in Christ—past tense. He was speaking to living, breathing people, so he was obviously not talking about physical death and life and the possibility of a future resurrection. No, he was talking about something that has already happened,

And in Ephesians 2:1–7, he says it so beautifully:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. 

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 

Again, he was talking to living, breathing people, so the death he talked about could not be physical death.

This altering of the Biblical reality is contradicted by these quotes from the lesson:

“A prideful person elevates himself or herself over God and His Word. This is because pride leads the interpreter to overemphasize human reason as the final arbiter of truth, even truths found in the Bible. This attitude diminishes the divine authority of Scripture.”

and:

“Some people tend to listen only to those ideas that are attractive to them, even if they are in contradiction to God’s revealed will. God has warned us about the danger of self-deception (Rev. 3:17). Sin also fosters doubt, in which we waver and are inclined not to believe God’s Word. When one starts with doubt, the interpretation of the biblical text will never lead to certainty. Instead, the doubting person quickly elevates himself to a position where he judges what is and is not acceptable in the Bible, which is very dangerous ground to be standing on. Instead, we should approach the Bible in faith and submission, and not with an attitude of criticism and doubt.“

Did you get that? The lesson openly points out how judging the Bible by your own ideas and feelings is to be on very dangerous ground. It is indeed!

So, in light of the necessity of adhering to the meaning of Scripture’s words, what would you say to the person who says that since God is a loving God, He can’t possibly send people to an eternal hell? That is putting human understanding and notions of what is “kind” in place of God’s clear words of the eternal destiny of those who stay dead in their sins by refusing to accept the free gift of eternal life.

We see this warning in Jesus’ own words in Matthew 25:46:

“These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Notice that both the punishment and the life are “eternal” which, according to Strong’s Concordance, are the exact same word. Only by applying our own “human reason”, to quote the lesson author, can we arrive at eternal life but only temporary punishment.

Thursday’s lesson is where it really go off the rails with this:

“Read the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14:6–12. What are the theological issues here, and why is a correct understanding of them so important to our mission?”

The mission of the Church (Biblically the entire body of Christ, not a denomination) is to spread the gospel of salvation. On the other hand, Revelation 14 is a message that will be spread by three angels that will be sent during the Tribulation to warn people about taking the mark of the beast.

There is much discussion happening online about whether that mark is already here as the proposed ID2020 vaccine with an implanted tracking device. This isn’t the place for that discussion, but the people who are the most frightened by the possibility are those who don’t “rightly divide” or understand the Bible. Much of the fear this engenders is because they have invented their own interpretation of the Bible which relegates much of Revelation to a position of myth and symbolism which leads to a completely distorted understanding of the timing of that mark as well as what it actually entails.

The fear that we are seeing there is a direct result of not taking the Bible at its word, and it is combined with a profound lack of understanding of our security in Christ.

And that can be directly contributed to the level of dependence on an extra-Biblical authority in direct contradiction to this in the lesson:

“Indeed, if we are a people of the Book, who want to live by the Bible and the Bible alone—and we do not have other authoritative sources such as tradition, creeds, or the teaching authority of the church to interpret the Bible for us—then the issue of a correct hermeneutic of the Bible is so important because we have only the Bible to tell us what we shall believe and how we shall live.”

Yet the greatest fear is a direct result of depending on just such an “other authoritative source” that is held in a place of authority over that of the Word of God. This fear leads to an even greater irony in this quote that is trying to sum up the whole thought:

“The issue of the interpretation of Scripture is vital to the theological and missiological health of the church. Without a correct interpretation of the Bible, there can be no unity of doctrine and teaching, and thus no unity of the church and our mission. A bad and distorted theology inevitably leads to a deficient and distorted mission. After all, if we have a message to give to the world but are confused about the meaning of the message, how efficiently will we be able to present that message to those who need to hear it?”

It is quite true that no one “needs” to hear that distorted message; they need to hear the pure gospel, the gospel that Paul outlined in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. In fact, the gospel that is so important that he declared “anathama” on any other so-called gospel that people might try to teach, even if it was from an angel from heaven! The entire book of Galatians is a very strong message of condemnation of a different “gospel” from the one he taught them, and he clearly meant that, as he did not soften his message in the least!

So this week’s lesson, after a slow start, said quite a bit that is solid and truthful about the need to correctly understand the Bible without filtering it through the lens of our own pre-existing notions, all the while ignoring the fact that much of the “gospel” that Adventists preach is heavily filtered through the lens of the semi-hysterical nineteenth century religious fervor that was found in places like New England. It seriously distorted the love of God, the blessed assurance of our certain salvation, and the joy we have in Christ, while turning it into something about which we cannot be sure and which we can lose if we don’t work hard enough to hang onto it—to say nothing of not even knowing if we still have salvation until we reach heaven at which time, apparently, we can be cast off for not being good enough.

How much better to treat the message of the Bible as the author recommends—take it at its word and trust its Author as the absolute source of truth that we know Him to be and avoid all other outside so-called authorities who contradict the clear, simple message of love and redemption—a message that Jesus said we should accept as a child would—with simple faith and trust. 

That is the gospel that needs to be shared with a lost and dying world; it is the only message worth sharing. †