So you’ve been studying the Bible, and you’ve been seeing that Adventism doesn’t teach what Scripture teaches. One day you face reality: you have to decide if you are going to leave or if you are going to stay and try to speak out.
The temptation to stay is seductive. I remember living through it. Richard and I were quite sure we could stay and “make a difference”. We could teach the gospel in Sabbath School. We could sneak gospel truths into the publications we produced for Adventists. We could help Adventists around us see the gospel and begin to know how it’s different from Adventism. We could be under-cover missionaries to our people!
We finally faced our self-deception head on. Our sons would know. They would know we were living a lie. How could we model lives of deception to them? They would have to be part of the charade. They would go to Adventist schools, but they would not believe what they were hearing. How could we expect them to have integrity if we didn’t?
That was the moment we knew we had to leave. We couldn’t endorse a belief system we no longer believed; we couldn’t attend its services and pretend to belong.
This last week the editor of Adventist Today, Loren Seibold, published an article entitled “Abusive Eschatology” in which he railed against the fear that paralyzed countless Adventists as they worried about the end-times as they are taught by Ellen White. Who has remembered to confess every sin, anyway? How can anyone keep the law so well he or she can stand without an intercessor during the time of trouble? Who wouldn’t capitulate as papists hunt to kill the loyal Adventists who are hiding in the hills because Sunday-keeping has become the law of the land?
Seibold’s article has been received with enthusiasm by many former Adventists—understandably. He rightly exposes the cruel and abusive reality of Adventist eschatology. Yet Seibold, a recently retired Adventist pastor who, incidentally, waited until his active employment was over to publish this piece, offers nothing to the people with whom he empathizes. He affirms that Adventism is his home—yet Adventism absolutely holds the eschatology that Siebold denounces. What is really accomplished by his criticism of Adventist doctrine while offering no clear alternative?
One may decide to believe differently in one’s head from the beliefs of one’s Adventist family, but remaining Adventist while denouncing its beliefs only makes one live in cognitive dissonance. It’s crazy-making. Such compromise erodes one’s desire to know truth. Instead, truth becomes relative, based on ones subjective experience—but truth is bigger than one’s experience!
Are nice Adventists Christians?
This “truth confusion” works in another way as well. Adventism may be deceptive, but are all the earnest and accomplished Adventists deceived? Can’t they be good Christians who just happen to find themselves in a false church without quite realizing how “off” it is?
We received a letter this week from a man who knows Adventism is deceptive, but he just couldn’t reconcile the polished public figures he knew with its cultic doctrines. He wrote:
I really enjoy your podcasts. I am not Adventist but was for about two years in the early 1980s. So my question is this: is the Adventist church a cultic organization with some lovely Christians in it? I think about many musicians including [the late] Del Delker, Marilyn Cotton, and even soft spoken men like George Vandeman [the late Adventist televangelist]. (I’ve even seen negative things about him on internet.) Did they use their talents to prop up false doctrine? In other words, there is a disconnect in my mind between Adventist deceit and certain high profile people involved in it. Any thoughts?
Here is our answer to him:
I understand the confusion that you feel when you compare Adventist doctrines to lovely people you have encountered. Here’s the bottom line: we are not about examining individuals’ personal lives and experiences; we are here to address Adventism as a system of beliefs. There are lovely people within most false religions; for example, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is an icon of great religious music—but those singers are not what defines Mormonism. Rather, Mormonism defines them.
Here’s what we can say: people who give their lives to serving a religion, taking their salaries from it, using their talents to make the religion appealing, and so forth—these people are endorsing in the strongest possible way whatever that religion teaches. If they were truly born-again Christians, they would have internal conflict if they continued to support a religion they believed to be false.
I believe it is possible for some people to be Christians inside of Adventism IN SPITE of the Adventism—especially among those Christians who were converted into the organization. Such people are generally not told the complete reality of Adventist beliefs, but the Lord never leaves His sheep lost in the wilderness. He leads them to Himself.
There is only ONE Adventism. George Vandeman believed Adventism and spent his career evangelizing people—especially Christians—into his religion. The same can be said for Del Delker and Marilyn Cotton. They endorsed the religion with their talent and reputations and took payment from the organization, undoubtedly paying tithe back to Adventism.
One must evaluate a “church” on the basis of its beliefs: who is Jesus to them? What is the truth about the condition and nature of humanity? How are they saved? Is the finished work of Jesus alone enough? These things define Christianity and separate it from false gospels. People who endorse and support a false gospel cannot be assumed to be Christians. A false religion cannot be defined in any way by the lovely people who endorse it.
God deals with each person; we, as His creations and as His children, must trust His word and use it alone to reveal whether or not a religion is true or false. The public faces of a religion do not make a religion acceptable—and usually those public faces are true followers of the religion, or they would not be there. They know its doctrines.
God absolutely has the last word. He knows and calls His own; as Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (Jn. 6:37). People who represent Adventism to “outsiders” cannot be assumed to be true believers. In the same way, Adventists who claim Adventism as their identity while exposing and criticizing it publicly are delivering a mixed message.
Each of us answers to God for our loyalties. If our beliefs oppose the doctrines of our religion, we owe it to ourselves and to God to submit our religious identity to His word. We have to make our behavior match our beliefs, or we live in unresolved anxiety.
Jesus has to be more important to us than our Adventist identity. He asks us to place our trust entirely in Him, and when we do, the internal contradictions resolve. When we cast ourselves on the mercy of Jesus alone, we are born again and adopted as God’s true children. All we loved as Adventists vanishes in the reality of being hidden with Christ in God.
If we compromise with untruth, we end up misrepresenting our Savior and hurting those who trust us. Criticizing a religion we do not believe while staying in it does not give us credibility or help others. Only clinging to Jesus alone and leaving what deceived us gives us credibility to speak the truth. †
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