September 12–18

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 12: “A Message Worth Sharing”

The entire message for Sabbath afternoon is a wonderful statement about salvation. I won’t repeat it all here; just read it in the lesson down to the the very last sentence. There it diverges from the Bible and tries to insert the Adventist Church into the plan:

“Together we will discover anew Jesus’ appeal to His last-day church to share this end-time message.”

That may sound good, but if you have ever read any of the Adventist dissection of Revelation, you know that the three angels’ messages are twisted into something that is not at all related to the gospel that is so clearly stated in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. 

Furthermore, to call one late-coming, man-made denomination “the last-days church” to the exclusion of all others is to contradict the New Testament where the Church is the body of believers and is called the Body of Christ. It has nothing to do with an artificial division into separate entities that fight over the doctrines of man instead of being united in the love of Christ.

Also, one of the arguments that “Sabbath-keepers” often used to “prove” that the seventh-day Sabbath is still a requirement is the claim that God never changes. But think about it; if God never changes, then He will not change the requirements for salvation either. It must always be what it was at the beginning—justification by faith, not a formula suddenly developed requiring a specific day on which one goes to church. In Romans 9, Paul points out where the Jews missed the point. They thought that their law-keeping saved them, and they missed the fact that it was always about faith (Romans 9:30-32).

In an attempt to give the Adventist Church legitimacy, this week’s entire lesson tries to manipulate Revelation in an attempt to show that the Adventist Church is featured prominently there. 

The lesson says:

“From the beginning to the end, Revelation reveals Jesus and His work in behalf of humanity.”

While that is true, there is a lot more there than just that. Revelation also reveals the last terrible days of judgment on a Christ-rejecting world before it gets to the joyous ending of the Millennium on earth—the second Coming—and then, briefly, giving us tantalizing peek at eternity.

Having studied the Adventist interpretation of Revelation, I can truthfully report that according to EGW, most of the book is only history, not about the future, as she jumps all around through history from the start of the Church in Acts until her time which she thought was the very last days. Each and every prophecy she read was applied to something in history that she said fulfilled it—without any personal understanding that from chapter six onward, Revelation is about after the Church Age, not the history of the Church Age.

In fact, in the letters to the churches we see an outline of the history of the Church Age. Then, starting in Chapter 4, John is told what is to be “after these things”; and what were “these things” discussed immediately before? It was the Church Age.

Is it any wonder that the Adventist interpretation is so confusing that most people give up trying to understand it and just accept what they are told? Sadly, passively accepting the organization’s narrative can cause you to miss out on the blessing promised only three verses into chapter 1:

“Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near.”

Understanding the true meaning of Revelation is not a requirement for salvation, but reading it and learning from it brings the promised blessing. I can testify to the truth of that promise from my own experience.

Many unique Adventist doctrinal beliefs are inserted into Revelation to “explain” it, but they don’t fit in with everything else we are taught in the New Testament. For example, consider things such as this from the lesson:

“Christ, coming quickly? John wrote those words about two thousand years ago. However, given our understanding of the state of the dead, why is Christ’s second coming never more than an instant after our death? How does this fact help us to understand how quickly, indeed, Christ is coming?”

If the soul sleep idea is correct, then just what did Paul mean when he said in Philippians 1:23, 24:

But I am hard-pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better; yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake.

He wanted to depart and “be with Christ”, not depart and cease to exist until Jesus came. 

The lesson also falls back on the Adventist idea that the three angels’ messages in Revelation 14 is actually not the duty of those angels but is the duty of the Adventist Church.

From the lesson:

“They” (the Seventh-day Adventist Church) “have been given a work of the most solemn import—the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages. There is no other work of so great importance. They are to allow nothing else to absorb their attention.” –Ellen. G. White, Evangelism, pp. 119, 120.

But compare that to what Paul called “of most importance” in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. To him—and we know that he spoke words from God—the most important thing was the gospel, the good news of salvation. Jesus died as Scripture predicted; He was buried and rose again. That is the most important message we are to give to the world, not the warnings that all churches but one are corrupt, and if people don’t leave those churches, they will be lost. It was never about denominations, it is about souls that are dead in sin that need to come to Christ and be made alive so they can live for eternity with Him. 

In the Adventist effort to combine law and grace, we see a subtle substitution in the lesson:

“There is a relationship between an attitude of reverence for God, obedience to God, and the judgment. Obedience is the fruit of a saving relationship with Jesus.”

But what does the Bible say is the fruit of the Spirit—a “saving relationship with Jesus”? Consider Galatians 5:22, 23:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 

While the New Testament is full of instructions on how to live for and in Christ and injunctions to obey the Spirit, nowhere does it combine reverence for God, Law-keeping (what the lesson calls obedience) and judgment. It isn’t our law-keeping that keeps us from judgment; it is our faith in Jesus and His payment for our sins that delivers us from judgment or condemnation (Romans 8). In fact, our total inability to keep the Law is what points us to the cross and grace (Galatians 3:23, 24) but once we came to Christ in faith, we are no longer under the tutor of the Law (Galatians 3:25).

Then, further down in the lesson:

“Read Revelation 14:12. What is this text saying, especially in the context of what came before? How are the law and grace both revealed in this text, and what should this teach us about how law and grace are two inseparable aspects of the gospel?”

“Two inseparable aspects of the gospel”? Oh, how that distorts the gift of grace and makes us responsible for keeping ourselves saved by putting us back under the Old Covenant of death! The whole point of Romans 7 is that the old (Law) and the new (grace) cannot be combined, and to try to do so is the equivalent of committing adultery.

Read Romans 8:1–11:

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 

For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 

For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. 

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

For more of the difference between living by the law or living by the Spirit, we can back to Romans 7:5, 6:

For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

Even Adventists admit that “the letter” refers to the letters written on stone, the 10 Commandments. And yet they don’t want to be released from the letters of death but try to hang on to them in the hopes that somehow, just in case Jesus blood was not sufficient to cover their sins, they can point to their law-keeping to keep them safe.

In the questions at the end we read this:

“How do the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 identify the essence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church?”

Sadly, the Adventist Church as an organization sees those angels’ messages as the identifying “essence” of their church. They do not say love is their identity, nor the gospel. Instead, they twist Revelation 4:9–11 into a warning that if you don’t join them in going to church on Saturday, you will die.

How does that message compare to what Jesus told His disciples about how they will be identified as His followers?

“By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

The Adventist Church, where it is known at all, is known by the day they go go church, by being vegetarians and by their Revelation Seminars—seminars in which they hide their identity, then beat around the bush at first, but eventually tell people that if they belong to any church but the Adventist Church, they are part of Babylon and will die.

Somehow I don’t see any love in that at all. †