After an Adventist discovers the gospel and realizes that Jesus completed the atonement at the cross and we are saved by trusting Him alone, no Sabbath required, the next paradigm shift we usually face is that of our true nature: are we merely bodies, or do we have an immaterial component called spirit?
This question of whether we are merely bodies that breathe or whether we have spirits that are separate from our bodies identifies what may be our biggest adjustment as we learn a biblical reality: what happens when we die?
The Adventist “soul sleep” is one of the organization’s most powerful means of control. This idea negates the fact that we are born with spirits that must be born again, and without a spirit that is born dead, a person has no way to understand that we are born truly sinners. The true nature of our spiritual condemnation and the need for the Lord Jesus to make us alive through His gospel is something that Adventists actually deny.
We recently received a poignant email from a person who is questioning his Adventist beliefs and trying to understand the biblical teaching about death and salvation. Because this struggle is nearly universal among all of us former Adventists as we become planted in Scripture, I am sharing this letter this week with my response.
Questions about death
I’ve been listing to your podcast on Colossians which has been very helpful for my wife who is not Adventist to learn about the teaching I grew up with.
While there are several subjects I’m trying to sort through, I wanted to ask some questions about death. As you can imagine this a point on which we definitely disagree.
So, in my understanding, the breath of life that we have goes back to God when people die, and from that point until God/Christ resurrects them, they are in a sort of sleep. The only example of this I can recall right now is when Christ resurrected Moses and others prior to their going to Heaven.
I’m having trouble understanding one’s soul going to heaven but then later having their body resurrected. Wouldn’t God just form new bodies for those already ascended?
What is the purpose of Christ resurrecting the dead or of putting souls back in sinful bodies?
When Lazarus died, did Christ pull his soul from heaven back into his body?
I apologize if these questions are ill-structured & discombobulated. I have a lot of things on my mind. As I’m sure you understand well, it’s difficult feeling like you were well-versed in Scripture and solid in your beliefs—and then you start considering whether you know anything about the Bible at all!
To ironically quote an atheist, I feel as if, as an Adventist, I was “Knowing enough to think you’re right, but not enough to know you’re wrong” —Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Tackling the Adventist confusion
I so understand your struggle with these topics.
Before we can understand our condition in death, it is necessary first to understand that Adventism misdefined our spirits. Adventism taught us that we are “body + breath = living soul.” Their use of “breath” is used unbiblically; the Hebrew word “ruah” can be translated in various ways including “breath”, but when the Bible uses it of “spirit”, whether the spirit of man, of angels, or of God, it does not mean “breath”. It means a literal immaterial identity.
For example, in John 4:24 Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well, “God is spirit, and true worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth”. In that sentence Jesus clearly identifies God as “spirit”. That does not mean breath; it means non-physical. It is immaterial, but not non-existent. It is not merely a puff of air, either, as in a breath or as wind.
Angels are “ministering spirits” (Heb. 1:14). God is spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not “holy breath”. Moreover, Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 5:1–9 that “we” dwell in mortal tents, and when the tent dies, “we” go to God; “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord”.
Ephesians 2:1-3 tells us that we are born dead in sins. Now, we are born breathing and moving, yet Paul tells us that we are by nature “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3), and John 3:18 records Jesus saying that when people believe in Him, they do not come into judgment, but those who have not believed are condemned already. In other words, we are born spiritually dead even though our bodies are alive. When we believe, we pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24), and this new life is not a metaphor. It is our literal spirit that comes to life. In fact, God Himself transfers us out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son when we believe (Col 1:13). This transfer is a spiritual REALITY, not a metaphor. We literally are born again and become alive in our spirits.
As for Moses; Ellen White said Jesus resurrected Moses and uses Jude 9 as her proof. But Jude 9 only says Michael the archangel contended with Satan for the body of Moses. We are not told WHY he contended, but we are told that Michael did not dare to rebuke Satan but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” This verse actually says the OPPOSITE of what EGW taught.
First, she said that Michael the archangel was another name for Jesus. She is wrong. Jesus is never called any sort of angel. He is God the Son, the creator of all angels—and the angels know He is their creator. Second, Michael did not have the authority to rebuke Satan; they were of the same essential order of creation: they were both angels. Instead, Michael said, “The Lord rebuke you.”
Jesus, in contrast, directly rebuked Satan many times during His time on earth. He went head to head with him and rebuked him in the wilderness temptation right after His baptism. He rebuked him when He drove the demons out of the Gadarene demoniac and sent them into the pigs. And so forth. Jesus repeatedly rebuked Satan directly. HE IS LORD!
Second, Jude 9 doesn’t even HINT that Moses was resurrected. There is absolutely no mention of such a thing anywhere in Scripture. Moreover, Jude 9 only talks about the two angels wrestling over Moses’ body. From an Adventist perspective, only a body is needed for a resurrection, but that idea is not biblical.
Philippians 1:22, 23 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-9 both are clear that when people die, their spirits go to God. In other words, we are spirit beings, as are the angels, but we also have bodies. That makes us different from other spirit beings. Yet being made spirit beings is what makes us in the image of God. God is spirit!
Animals are not created with spirits; they have no spiritual insight, and they do not continue to live when they die. But Jesus came to earth, God the Son who is spirit, and was incarnated into a human body. He was fully human, having body plus immaterial human spirit, and fully God—the eternal God the Son who never ceased to exist. He became incarnate in order to save humans. His mission was not to angels (Hebrews 1 and 2) nor animals; it was humanity.
Moses not resurrected
Third, Moses was not resurrected and furthermore could not have been resurrected because Jesus had to be the first fruits from the grave. He had not yet died when Moses appeared on the Mt. of Transfiguration. When Jesus raised Lazarus, for example, it was not a “resurrection” as the Bible defines resurrection. Rather, it was a resuscitation in the sense that Lazarus was not resurrected with a glorified body. He still died again later. Jesus was the first to rise with a glorified body.
Moses and Elijah appeared on the Mt. of Transfiguration because God sent them. The essence of each of them—their spirits—were with God from the time of their departure. Elijah makes sense to Adventists because he was “translated”, yet we are not told what happened to his body when he got to heaven. Jesus had not yet broken the bonds of death, and glorification is something God does as a consequence of Jesus’ resurrection and breaking the bonds of death. All to say, we are not told; we just know he is with the Lord, and in both him and in Enoch, God has give us examples showing that He can catch up His own believers even without their dying. In other words, death is not our only means of entering the presence of the Lord.
I other words, Moses was not resurrected. His appearance with Jesus at the Transfiguration was God’s gift to Jesus and to us. In that event, God clearly demonstrated that the law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah) were represented with Jesus. God covered the three with a cloud, and the three disciples heard Him say, “This is my Son: listen to HIM.” When the cloud lifted, Jesus ALONE stood before them. The law and the prophets had disappeared, and God had declared that Jesus ALONE was their source of truth and access to God. Further, Jesus told the three not to tell anyone what had happened until He rose from death. Until Jesus died and rose again, the law and the prophets were the marching orders for Israel. Only after the resurrection would Jesus be the sole fulfillment and the sole access to God. Until then, Jews had to observe the Mosaic covenant.
Regarding Lazarus—yes, Jesus did put Lazarus’s spirit and body back together, but it was his earthly body he brought up. When Jesus raised Jarius’s daughter, for example, Luke tells us that her spirit returned:
And all were weeping and mourning for her, but he said, “Do not weep, for she is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. But taking her by the hand he called, saying, “Child, arise.” And her spirit returned, and she got up at once. And he directed that something should be given her to eat (Luke 8:52–55).
Adventist will say it was literal breath that returned, but it was her essence, her identity—her spirit that returned. We further know that our spirit is not breath because of Paul’s words:
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Romans 8:15–17).
The Holy Spirit is not breath, and He does not witness to us in our breath nor in the synapses of a physical brain, although our spirits do inform our brains. But the clear words of Scripture say we have spirits that can hear and understand the Holy Spirit. He makes us alive and makes us His own children, and the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirits that we are His children. We KNOW these things are true because He tells us in our spirits. That is not physical, but it is real.
Jesus’ resurrecting the dead during his ministry on earth was a sign that He was the Messiah. The prophets had said the Messiah would raise the dead, make the lame walk, make the deaf hear, and so forth. Jesus went through His earthly ministry demonstrating that He was the One they had been waiting for. Only God could do what He did, and He spent His ministry demonstrating who He is!
At the end of all things, at the resurrection, He will rejoin our spirits with resurrection bodies that are equipped to exist in eternity. Jesus’ own resurrection shows us what we can expect; as Jesus goes, so go we, in essence. When He rose from death He had a physical body, but it functioned differently from ours. It is somehow equipped to function in dimensions we cannot. For example, He appeared in rooms where His disciples were without needing to open a door to walk in, yet he ate food with them—fish, to be exact—he ate flesh in His glorified body.
In other words, His glorified body can function on earth with still-mortal people, and it is also equipped to be taken to heaven where He sits at the Father’s side.
He has to resurrect us because we are not human without our bodies. During the intermediate state after death, we are still US, and Jesus knows us. In some way the Scriptures do not explain, we are kept hidden in Christ even in death. Paul says this condition is “very much better” than remaining on earth in our decaying mortal bodies (Phil. 1:22-23). Jesus had to take a human body in order to deal with human sin, and He has eternally committed Himself to sharing a human identity with us. It makes me emotional to think of this—yet He has never ceased to be eternally almighty God with ALL of God’s divine attributes.
And just by the way, the parable about Lazarus and the rich man describes a real scenario. As Gary Inrig once told us at FAF when we remonstrated with him that it was “just a parable” meant to teach the eternal outcomes of the greedy as opposed to the humble poor, “Jesus would not use an untruth to teach a truth.” I realized that was absolutely true. Ellen White had said God would trick us to achieve His ends; she said God held his hands over William Miller’s mistaken date so that people would get ready.
NO!!! Jesus cannot lie, and He would not teach a story about death that was false just to make a moral point!
I am going to give you some links that I think will help. Your questions are not confusing or petulant or discombobulated. They are NORMAL. We all have these questions because of the dreadful, deceptive worldview Adventism foisted on us.
Here are the links:
Here is a video from the 2018 Michigan FAF conference that explains our dead spirits and our living spirits in Christ.
I am so glad you wrote. I understand your questions; your are normal, believe me! Understanding the biblical nature of man is a HUGE hurdle, but it opens up so much of what is real about Jesus, our own sin, the nature of salvation, and our security! †
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