November 14–20

 

Lesson 8: “Education and Redemption”

This week’s lesson tries—and fails miserably—to define what it means to be made in God’s image. After saying: “The phrase ‘the image of God’ has captivated interpreters of the Bible for centuries”, the author goes on to say that the Bible does not adequately define what that means, then jumps in and attempts to do what he just claimed that no one else was ever able to do:

“He made us in His image, the same way human parents have children in their image.”

“The image of God therefore is more of a ‘mental image’ that enables two beings, one divine and the other human, to have a meeting of minds.”

“Evidently God intended this process of education we know so well when, distinguishing us from many other life forms, He made us in His own image—He did it so that He can teach us and we can learn from Him, until His image (His mind) is reflected in ours.”

The image of God is just a “mental image”? And the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is nothing more than a way to provide a meeting of the minds? 

This would seem to be a direct contradiction to the admission in last week’s lesson that God is Spirit as said by Jesus in John 4. Of course, if you deny the biblical truth that God is Spirit and that humans have a spirit, then you are unable to admit or even to understand that our spirit is dead until it is made alive in Christ (1 Cor. 15:52; Ephesians 2; 1 Peter 3:18). To disbelieve in the human spirit diminishes the image of God to no more than a nice meeting of the minds, and if you follow the thought to its logical end, it makes salvation nothing more than changing your mind.

While it is true that biblical repentance is a change of mind, it is so much more than that! First we must change our mind about sin and our need for salvation, but then we must trust Jesus to provide what we are totally unable to do—to forgive our sin and make our dead spirits alive in Him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

If we do not take that step of faith, we aren’t saved but are simply trusting ourselves to make any necessary changes. And if we could actually change ourselves, we would not need a Savior, and Jesus would have died in vain.

Thank God that salvation is so much more than that!

The lesson’s pathetic dodging of the truth is reinforced by this:

“However, we can see that, after sin, this image had been changed, which is why Ellen G. White wrote that the goal of education is to restore in man the image of his Maker.”

It does nothing to answer the obvious question, “Just how has the image been changed?” Was Adam’s problem just a mental error? Did he just change his mind about trusting God? 

Actually, the partial answer to that question is “yes”, but the result is much deeper than that. This Adventist view ignores the reality that Adam died the day that he ate from the tree just as God warned him in Genesis 2:16, 17:

“The Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 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.’”

Either God lied, or Adam did die that day. Since the Bible records that Adam lived 930 years, it wasn’t his body that died that day. And it says nothing about merely “starting to die”!

As I have mentioned before, Romans 5 tells us in at least 5 different ways that we inherited death from Adam, and we become alive only with Jesus. And since Romans was written to living, breathing people, it is clearly not talking about physical death. 

Thursday’s lesson just carries on with the idea that our salvation is nothing more than the meeting of our minds with God’s mind. After quoting from Isaiah 40:13 which says that we cannot teach God anything, the author goes on to say:

“But Paul corrected that perception by concluding, ‘We have the mind of Christ,’ meaning that Spirit-filled Christians have access even to the mind of God, and thus to any amount of learning and understanding (1 Cor. 2:10–13) that would be needed to know the path of righteousness.”

Once again, our spiritual life and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is reduced to nothing more than a meeting of the minds. The not-so-subtle point of that idea is not to bring God down to us by the Holy Spirit, but it is to take us up to God’s level by the infusion of His mind into ours. 

Wasn’t that the whole start of sin—a created being wanting to be equal with God?

The Adventist understanding of salvation leaves our walk in the “path of righteousness” up to us to learn and perform, implying that if we just learn enough, we can accomplish the righteousness. †