Colleen and Nikki share how they learned that they believed in a different Jesus as Adventists. They talk about how they learned who Jesus really is and how knowing Him has changed their lives and brought peace and hope they had not known existed. Podcast was published November 13, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And again, I’m glad to be here with you, Nikki.
Nikki: Same here.
Colleen: I think I actually finished my maple coffee.
Nikki: Oh, no! [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] It’s fall, after all. I have to have the right flavor. Well, today, we are going to talk about something that’s really near and dear to both of us, and that’s Jesus. We’re going to compare a bit of how we understood Him and thought about him in Adventism and who we have come to know Him to be. So Nikki, I’ll just plunge right in. How did you understand Jesus as an Adventist?
Nikki: I think the easiest answer is to say I didn’t.
Colleen: I get that.
Nikki: But as I’ve thought about this, I’ve realized that I had kind of two different pictures of Him at the same time. One came from the doctrines that are clearly taught in Adventism that came from Ellen White, that are unique to Adventism. And then the other came from just living around people who I believed understood Him better than I did and then listening to how they spoke about Him or just watching how they lived –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – in relationship to what they thought about Him. In terms of the doctrine, I understood Jesus to be Michael the Archangel –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – who at some point in the past He was elevated to the Godhead. And this upset Satan and provoked his jealousy and began all of this Great Controversy, all of this War in Heaven.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: That part was always a little confusing to me, and I think it’s because you have a couple streams of thought in Adventism about the deity of Christ –
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: – so somehow I was able to allow myself to believe both that, you know, He’s God the Son –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and also that he was elevated to a Godhead. I didn’t see that those were conflicting views of Him.
Colleen: Right. Yes. I think Ellen’s words were that He was exalted to the position of the Son.
Nikki: Oh, okay. See? And I never read Ellen.
Colleen: Well, I read her after the fact, when I tried to understand what I thought. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] I understand that. So I had this messy idea of His nature. I believed that He had no advantage over us –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – because I believed His whole purpose was to show that God’s Law is fair and to make a way for us, to allow us a path to be made right with God. So I believed He came to keep the Law perfectly, to show us that we could as well, because God’s Law is fair.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And then to die on the cross for our sins, which is a loaded statement.
Colleen: Which I never totally understood.
Nikki: Yeah. I knew it had something to do with making a way for us to have our sins forgiven, but I didn’t understand that meant that it was done at the cross. Because we had the whole Investigative Judgment, where the ascension – the resurrection and the ascension didn’t really mean much to me in Adventism.
Colleen: Oh, no.
Nikki: It was just, He’s off to His next stage in His work.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: So that was kind of, you know, He could have sinned, He had a fallen nature like we did, and yeah, those were the doctrines that I had about Him. I didn’t even know how much of that was unique to Adventism and how much, you know, wasn’t. I didn’t know that it all came from Ellen.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So then, at the same time, I had a picture of Him that actually also altered my picture of God the Father. I understood Him to only want to be near me if I was – the more I obeyed. The better I behaved, the more access I had to Him.
Colleen: Right. I had to be good.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah. So it was really, I had a relationship with Him when I was doing the right things –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and when I wasn’t, then He didn’t – He would withdraw, and that was my choice. He was respecting my freedom to sin.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: So I constantly, if I didn’t feel connected to Him – which, what does that mean when you’re not born again? – I would question how. You know, “What am I doing wrong? How am I not behaving?” Because God blesses us when we obey Him; right?
Colleen: Very much like my view, um-hmm. So I also remember clearly thinking in junior high, sitting in Bible class, that Jesus was all God, I believed He was all God –
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: – but I didn’t know what that meant. I thought it was like they told me: All God is like a family, like the name of the family is God –
Nikki: Oh!
Colleen: – and there are three people in the family. It’s kind of like there’s daddy, mommy, and child, and in the Godhead we have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, so it’s like three separate beings who share a name and a place of living and a purpose and a will, and everything they do is for the same reason, but they were separate, and I remember thinking of Jesus, although I wasn’t overtly taught this, that He was a weaker version of the Father.
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: A weaker version, the children’s version. The name, “Jesus,” was the children’s name, and when I grew up and became more sophisticated, I would cringe at the word “Jesus,” and I would say “Christ” or “God.”
Nikki: Hmm.
Colleen: But Jesus was a little embarrassing, a little meek, mild, and maybe slightly – I wouldn’t have said wimpy, but He felt easily offended, like He was sad a lot because I was bad.
Nikki: Oh, yes. Yes. I definitely had that picture, that we could make Him sad.
Colleen: Yes. So anything else, Nikki? Did that progress as you grew up or did that pretty much sum up how it seemed to you?
Nikki: Well, I think the thing I’d add is I mentioned that I felt like my behavior had a lot to do with my relationship with Him, not the cross, it was my behavior.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: One of the things that I started to put together in my own thinking is that He is – well, He was the one who stood between me and an angry Father.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: And He had to ask the Father, beg the Father to be allowed to come and save us.
Colleen: I did believe that.
Nikki: So I felt a little disposable.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Although, I understood that the big kind of – the thing that Adventists were really proud of was that they had the God of love, not the God of hell.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so I knew He was loving, but I didn’t know what that meant, because it also was very much tangled up with punitive.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: And with this whole remnant message of Adventism, the call to bring Christianity into Sabbath-keeping, I really – I had this picture that the Father and the Son were tricky, that they wanted people who were smart enough to figure out what He wanted from us.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so I did have a picture of the Father and of the Son, the Holy Spirit being really less important in my thinking –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – I had a picture that they needed me to kind of read between the lines in order to get it right, and that was very stressful for me. How do I –
Colleen: Yes, I felt that too. Interesting, isn’t it? You know, another thing that colored my understanding of Jesus not being quite like the Father was that when I understood Him to be all God, I understood it – I’ll use a metaphor to explain it. In my thinking, it was sort of like this: If I cut a pie in three parts, each part is all pie. So if I have an apple pie and I take a third of it out of that pie pan, that one-third is all pie, but that one-third might have a stray seed in it that isn’t in the rest of the pie.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And another piece of that pie might have a little bit of peel, and another piece might have a little tinge of core.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And those things wouldn’t be in each of the thirds because they’re randomly scattered throughout, wherever they land. And when I understood that God is one being and that the three persons of God share substance, I realized that I had been believing in three separate Gods.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: In reality, if you can consider the seed and the core and the peel to be attributes of God, that means each one of the persons has the same seed, the same piece of core, the same bit of peel. In other words, you can’t take omnipresence away from any one of them and have God, and I had been taught that Jesus is no longer omnipresent, because He has a body.
Nikki: Yes, me too.
Colleen: I had been taught that God sent the Holy Spirit because Jesus could no longer be everywhere.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: What I didn’t understand was that if you take omnipresence away from Jesus, He’s not God.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Because omnipresence is an attribute of God. I would say, “Oh, yes, He’s God the Son, He’s all God,” but He wasn’t, because He didn’t have all of God’s attributes.
Nikki: Which is, there again, another redefinition –
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: – in Adventism that allows us to use the same words and mean something different from Christianity.
Colleen: And it’s confusing, because Adventists don’t know their meanings are different from Christians’ meanings.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: And Christians surely don’t know that Adventists have that distinction in their heads when they talk.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: So Christians think and Adventists think that they’re saying the same things.
Nikki: And you know, I want to say, in Adventism I do remember hearing about the attributes of God, but there were only three that I remember hearing. It was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I would hear, “God is good, God is love.” I didn’t understand those to be attributes. I certainly didn’t understand that they all shared the same attributes and that they had to in order to be God. My understanding, if I wanted to know who God was, I had to look at the 10 Commandments, because they were the transcript of His character.
Colleen: That’s right!
Nikki: That was the basis for knowing who God was.
Colleen: Yep.
Nikki: He was the One who created the earth, and this is what He expects from you. And so my entire basis for knowing God was obedience.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: That was it. I didn’t know that I could know Him and that I could know His heart –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – like we can, studying His attributes through Scripture.
Colleen: No, I didn’t know that either. I also didn’t know you could not split the attributes one from another.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: We had a class together a few years ago in which we studied the attributes of God –
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: – in a Christian setting, of course.
Nikki: It was wonderful. [Laughter.]
Colleen: And we learned the attribute of simplicity. Nikki, would you talk about that a little, because it was your favorite thing to discover. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] Well, it really was, it really was! I loved that one, and I’m not great at explaining it, but it’s the idea that God – all three persons – God has all of the attributes and that you cannot separate them.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: The minute you do, you no longer have God. He is all of it, at once.
Colleen: Exactly! And there are the communicable attributes, which we share, which are love and grace and faith and those kinds of things; and then there are the incommunicable ones, which we absolutely can’t share: omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, eternality. We can’t share those, but God has all of them.
Nikki: Sovereignty [laughter].
Colleen: And sovereignty [laughter].
Nikki: I love that one!
Colleen: I love that one! And God has all of those, all at the same time, so that when we say, “God is love,” that necessarily includes His attribute of justice, wrath, mercy, and grace. You can’t have God’s love minus any of those, so when Adventists say, “The God I serve wouldn’t do such-and-such,” like have an eternal hell or –
Nikki: Wrath.
Colleen: – wrath, because Adventists do say He doesn’t have wrath.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s just unbiblical, and you can’t separate God’s attributes. He is the whole package. All three persons are the whole package.
Nikki: And each of His attributes informs the other one, and I think that was one of the things I loved so much about understanding simplicity. Suddenly, that was the moment where I understood, “Whoa, I have a different God.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: But I have to say quickly, I struggled with the idea of being loved by God. I mean, I knew I was, because I believed Scripture, but I didn’t quite know how to understand what that love looked like. Over the years, that has definitely – God has been revealing that to me through his Word.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And this was one of those moments, where I understood that I can’t try to define God’s love. God is the definition of love.
Colleen: Oh, that’s a great point.
Nikki: And so I have to understand love according to Him, not according to, you know, the way that the world speaks about it.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And the picture that I got from the attribute of simplicity was that His love is perfect, it is not manipulative, it is perfect.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: That He is perfectly truthful and honest. He’s not going to give love and take away based on my fallibility.
Collen: Right!
Nikki: It is pure, and it proceeds from Him. It’s not on the basis of who I am.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And it does include justice, and it does include wrath, and it includes all of that. That is what love is.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And so that was just – that was just an incredible moment that just sort of blew the lid off of –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – off of Scripture and how it talks about God.
Colleen: It’s interesting, because Jesus is the One who revealed God to us, and as an Adventist, I understood that to mean He came to show us how to be nice and how to suffer gracefully. He came to show us how to allow sinful men even to crucify and kill Him without complaining.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And He came and showed us how to love all people and accept everyone.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that was showing us God. And as I’ve studied Scripture, I’ve come to realize several things were wrong with that impression. First, Jesus showed us the Father’s love by taking the Father’s wrath for sin into his own self on the cross.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It wasn’t that He came to demonstrate how to suffer gracefully. He came to be my substitute. He became sin for me (2 Corinthians 5:21), so that I might become the righteousness of God in Him. His revealing the Father was showing that He would take His own death sentence for sin into Himself in order to release me for eternal life if I trusted what He did. What an amazing demonstration of love. It wasn’t about graceful suffering, although He did suffer gracefully, but that wasn’t the point.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: The point was He was my substitute, not my example, primarily. And of course, Jesus is an example, but His example is for those who believe.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: He’s only an example of how to live to those who have trusted Him and have been born again. He’s not an example to unbelievers. For unbelievers, He is a substitute and a Savior. He’s a Savior for all of us, but our job isn’t to figure out how to be good by looking at Him.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: And I had been taught that if I prayed and trusted the Holy Spirit like Jesus did, I could overcome sin as He did.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But that wasn’t what He did. He didn’t sin, because He wasn’t a sinner. I sin because I am born a sinner, and Jesus was not.
Nikki: So when did you begin to think that maybe you were dealing with a different Jesus?
Colleen: That’s an interesting question, because I suppose the first inkling, which was just sort of subconscious, was when I first heard that the New Covenant is not something I keep with God. When I heard Dale Ratzlaff explain, back in the mid-’90s at a Forum meeting, an Adventist Forum meeting, that the Old Covenant was between God and Israel, with joint promises between the two, and the New Covenant was actually between the Father and the Son, and if I trust the Son, in Him I am ushered into the New Covenant, that was the first hint I had. But the real moment when I understood I had a different Jesus, was sometime in the early 2000s. I was a moderator of the Former Adventist Forum on formeradventist.com. Jeremy Graham was doing research for his website on the Adventist trinity, and he was publishing and discussing his research, and that was when I realized that the Jesus I had believed in did not have all the attributes of God. That’s when I realized that if He’s not omnipresent, He’s not God, so that even in His incarnate state on earth, He was all God. His omnipresence did not cease because He was in a body. His God nature was always God, and that’s when I started realizing I had a different Jesus. I had a Jesus who was not fully God, and that realization was nailed together one morning when – this was years ago, I don’t remember exactly how long – Richard came home from his men’s Bible study and said, “Do you know that in Colossians 1:17 it says that in Jesus all things hold together? That’s His role in the Trinity, and that means that even when He was in the tomb, all things were holding together in Him. Even when He was in His mother’s womb, all things were holding together in Him. God never stopped being God.”
Nikki: [Laughter.] Wow.
Colleen: And I realized I had not believed in the real Jesus. I had believed in a fallible Jesus who had no advantage I didn’t have.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: No. I have a Jesus who is fully God, and He asks me to trust Him. There’s a reason why we believed the wrong things about Jesus, and I didn’t understand all of this as an Adventist, but I became much more clear afterwards. The founders of Adventism were almost all anti-Trinitarian, or Arian.
Nikki: Yeah, that was a big surprise to me.
Colleen: James White –
Nikki: J.N. Andrews.
Colleen: Yes! Is that not interesting, that the one for whom the seminary is named, J.N. Andrews –
Nikki: He died an Arian; is that right?
Colleen: Yes. He did not believe in the classic Christian trinity, and his name defines the Adventist seminary. That should say something to Christians who are looking on from the outside.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The founders, Joseph Bates, James White, anti-Trinitarian, vocally so, and they never repented of that. Now, over the years their views of the Trinity altered. Ellen White altered the way she talked about it, but she never embraced the classic Christian Trinity, and even in the last years of her life, she was calling the Trinity “The Heavenly Trio” –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – “The Three Worthies of Heaven.” She did not believe in the classic Christian Trinity, and even today, the official understanding of the Adventist theologians is that Ellen White’s Trinity is the correct one, not the classic Christian Trinity, and Jerry Moon, who was a professor at Andrews, wrote a paper in 2006 explaining this, that The Heavenly Trio is the real Trinity, that the classic Christian Trinity of shared substance is not.
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: In a sense, what Adventists believe in is a tritheism, not a Trinity – three gods.
Nikki: And I have heard Adventists refer to the classic Christian Trinity as “Catholic.”
Colleen: Oh, absolutely.
Nikki: That it’s Roman Catholic, yeah.
Colleen: Absolutely. James White wrote that, and interestingly, there has been a resurgence of antitrinitarianism within Adventism over the last 30 years.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: And the reason for that? It most closely reflects the founders of Adventism. Even those who say they believe in the Trinity are still colored by that original Arianism, that original antitrinitarianism, that Jesus was not always God Almighty.
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: So who is Jesus to you now?
Nikki: [Laughter.] He is fully God. He is my Savior. You know, it’s funny, because my understanding of the Adventist Jesus being different, it didn’t come about in the same way as yours. It didn’t come through my own studying. Like I’ve shared before on here, I left Adventism pretty quickly.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So when I went to the 2010 Former Adventist Fellowship Conference, there were several people who kind of stuck close to me through that conference, and I understand that better now. It’s very exciting when someone new comes. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: But I remember hearing over and over during the weekend that the Adventists have a different Jesus. I remember being startled by that. I believed what I was hearing during the conference, because it was taught so well and so clearly through Scripture, but that statement, I had a really hard time wrapping my head around it. It seemed like, “It’s going a little too far,” and I just – that was the one thing I had the hardest time knowing what to do with, because I knew I had examples of God at work in my life up to that point.
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: I had seen God at work in my life.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I had seen answered prayers. I longed to know Him. I felt His call to me in Scripture, especially when I was in my 20s and I would constantly run into Isaiah 55:6, “Seek the Lord while He may be found.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I really did believe that God wanted me to know who He was, and so to decide that the Jesus I knew in Adventism was a different Jesus was hard for me. So one of the breakout sessions that I went to that began to open my eyes to this was John Rittenhouse. He was speaking about the security of the believer. I don’t remember the title, I think it was, “Is Once Saved Always Saved Biblical?”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And it was an incredible session, and he said during that time – oh, I don’t remember exactly, I can’t quote him, but it was something to the effect that what we think about God can’t change Him, He is changeless, who God is, is who God is, and I remember during the Q&A I raised my hand and I asked him, “If what we believe about God can’t change who God is, then how can we say that Adventists have a different Jesus? Why don’t they have the same Jesus, and they just don’t understand Him?”
Colleen: Good question.
Nikki: It was hard for me. And I don’t honestly remember his answer to me, although I think he wasn’t entirely sure how to approach that answer, because he did come to me a week later and then answered me then. But I really wanted to understand where that came from, how Adventists could have a separate Jesus. And so I began pressing into Scripture, and I felt comfortable with everything else I’d heard, but I wanted to know: “How do I explain this to Adventists,” because of course, I thought they were going to want to hear from me. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: “So how do I explain this to them?” And I found in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 where Paul is writing, and he talks about them putting up with a different Jesus.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: That some people had come, and they were preaching a different Jesus, and they were putting up with it. And I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. Okay, so the Bible does talk about a different Jesus,” and then over in Galatians, when Paul talks about some coming and disturbing them, troubling them with a distorted gospel, and the cross-reference there in verse 7 takes you over to Corinthians where it talks about a different Jesus, and I thought, “Okay, so we have Biblical language that talks about this.” And as I pressed into Galatians, I saw that what made Him a different Jesus that they were teaching was that they were giving different details about Him and what He did and what they had to do.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Those were the things that were making Him different, according to Paul’s Biblical, Holy Spirit-inspired language. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: And so then I started lining up, okay what do the Adventists say Jesus did and who He was and what does the Bible say Jesus did and who He was, and it was a different picture of a different guy.
Colleen: Totally.
Nikki: And I began to think, “Okay, so if I was to describe somebody that I knew to somebody else who didn’t know them, what I said to them about that person was going to inform them of who he is, and now, if they had to go and find him in a crowd based on the details I gave them, they’re going to come back with the person I described,” and so when you have this picture that the Adventists give you of Jesus being all of these things we’ve discussed, if they have to go out into a crowd and pick Him, they’re not going to choose the Jesus of Scripture.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: Because the details are different, and the message is different. His purpose for coming was different. And I began to see, truly Adventism has put forward a different Jesus using, somehow, Scripture to do it –
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: – and I saw the weight of that deception, and it was heartbreaking, but it was undeniable, and I have to say, one of the other things that helped me see that they have a different Jesus is their own testimony. So when a person comes to faith, when a believer comes to faith, they’re baptized.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Now, in Adventism when they proselytize and they bring Christians into Adventism, as of 2010 it was in their Church Manual that they are to be baptized into Adventism –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – even if they had been baptized as a Christian.
Colleen: True.
Nikki: But wait a minute, Scripture says there’s one baptism, so I sat there and I stared at that, and I thought, “Why would they have them do this again unless they thought that they had a different gospel, a different message, a different Jesus, the right one –”
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – “and the Christians had it wrong?” So now, by their own testimony, they have something different, something separate that requires a new baptism.
Colleen: That’s a great point.
Nikki: And I began to see the Adventist baptism is a public proclamation of the action of the believer to give their life to this Jesus, to ask this Jesus into their heart, so it’s a – they’re bearing witness of what they’ve done –
Colleen: Yes, yes!
Nikki: – which is why they can do it over and over. They can give their life to Him over and over.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But the Christian baptism, the believer’s baptism, is a public proclamation of what God did.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And that happened once, and the baptism happens once. It’s a different message, different baptism, different Jesus.
Colleen: That is such a great point, so well said. A couple of years ago I began to realize there’s another way I had misunderstood Jesus as an Adventist, and it was subtle, but pretty profound, and that was the picture that I had carried all my life because of the illustrations in the Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories –
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: – and the Uncle Arthur’s Bible Stories and all of the Prophecy Seminar art, and that was that Jesus is pictured in heaven wearing a high priestly garment, the ephod –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – the headdress, the linen robe, standing before the altar with the golden cherubim and the mercy seat over the area of the 10 Commandments. That’s how Jesus is pictured in heaven today.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And as I was reading through Hebrews 7, 6 and 7, I realized that that is a blatant misrepresentation of Jesus.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He is not a Levitical priest. He is a priest of a different order, Melchizedek. His work is not the same as a Levitical priest. He is not in heaven carrying out a heavenly version of the Israelite Old Testament high priest. His work was finished on the cross. Everything those high priests represented in the Old Testament, Jesus did in His flesh on the cross: He is the sacrifice for sin; He is the Day of Atonement sacrifice; He is the scapegoat who removes the sins far from us; He is the intercessor, the high priest; He is the Bread of Life, the Light of the World; He is the living law that indwells us when we trust Him. Every single thing in that Old Testament temple service has been fulfilled in the person of our Lord Jesus. There is no lower-ness about Him. He could not have failed. He could not have sinned, because He is God. Now, yes, that’s a mystery the Bible doesn’t explain. But He never stopped being fully God while He was fully human, though without sin. He was truly tempted as we are, but He could not have failed, and as Doug Batchelor says, “God risked the Trinity by sending Jesus, because if He had failed, the Trinity would have been broken, and the universe would have gone into chaos.” Nonsense! That is blasphemy.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That is not the Jesus of Scripture. The Jesus of Scripture is Yahweh. He claimed the name “I Am” for himself. “Before Abraham was,” He said to the Pharisees, “I Am.” He is the same substance as the Father, and everything the Father does is what He does, what He does, the Father does, but He has a different role from the Spirit and from the Father, but no difference in power or attributes. This Jesus is my Savior, not my example primarily.
Nikki: And He’s the fulfilment of all of these things –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – that I idolized in Adventism. He is the fulfilment of the Sabbath.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “Come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” He is the fulfilment of that –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – of that Sabbath resting, and I think one of the things that confuses so many Adventists when we talk to them about “Jesus is my Sabbath rest” is that they weren’t taught about the shadows, the way that the Old Covenant foreshadowed who Christ is and what He came to do. And there is also the sense in Adventism that He isn’t done.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Which I believe is why there was room for a remnant church to come in, for a prophetess to come in with a message, because Jesus didn’t finish –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – He wasn’t the last word.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Wrong! Hebrews said He is the last word.
Colleen: He is.
Nikki: There are no new messages. We don’t – you know, Jesus didn’t say, you know, “I’m going to send somebody in the future who’s going to give you the rest of the message.”
Colleen: Never.
Nikki: He never said that, but you know what? He said there will come false teachers, there will come people in My name who are going to give false teachings.
Colleen: Absolutely. Yes, He did.
Nikki: That’s where all the warning was.
Colleen: Yes. Hebrews 10:1 says the Law was a shadow. Colossians 2:16 and 17 says the Sabbath, the feasts, the yearly, monthly, weekly Sabbaths were shadows. Think about it: If you were wandering through the Sahara Desert dying of thirst and heat stroke and you saw a large building in front of you casting a long shadow that gave some relief from the heat and you arrived at the shadow, it would be a tremendous relief; right?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But if you didn’t go inside the building that was casting the shadow, you would never realize that inside the building is air conditioning and ice water.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Jesus is the fulfilment of the shadow of the Sabbath. We are not to sit in His shadow. We are to take Him, He asks us to take Him and to let him make us new, and He said of believers, “My Father and I will make our abode with him.” And He asks us to come to him and find life and rest and water and light and relief.
Nikki: And He says that He’s given us a new day, calling it “today.”
Colleen: Yes, Hebrews 4.
Nikki: “Do not harden your hearts.” Our obedience is faith, it’s putting our faith in the finished work of Christ and finding our eternal Sabbath rest there. It is not in keeping a shadow.
Colleen: Right. The thing that determines those who are saved is not the day they will keep when Jesus returns.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: The thing that determines it is belief in Jesus or unbelief. That’s it. It’s those who do not trust Jesus alone who will find themselves outside, and I just want to say, this Jesus who has all the attributes of God is omnipresent. He is not only omnipresent in the sense that all things hold together in Him, even when His body was asleep in the tomb, He is the Lamb, Revelation tells us, who will be in the presence of those who will suffer for their unbelief.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it’s so ironic to me that this passage is in Revelation 14, right after the fabled Three Angels Messages [laughter].
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: But it’s Revelation 14:9 and 10. John is seeing a vision of an angel, a third one, following with a loud voice, who is calling people out of worshipping the beast and his image, and it says, “If anyone worships the beast and his image” –
and Adventism says this is those who will be keeping Sunday, but John says, “If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger, and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone,” and here it is, “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” I can’t think of anything more horrifying than being in the presence of the Lamb of God and being unable to be in relationship with Him.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And those who don’t trust Him will be in that horrifying position. Jesus is omnipresent, and we can’t run from Him. He is God.
Nikki: You know, 1 John 5 talks about God’s testimony about His Son, and that was another big one for me, because in 1 John 5 he says, “You believe man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater,” and he says that not believing in God’s testimony, it’s synonymous with calling Him a liar.
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: And in John 5:11-12, it says that this testimony, God’s testimony, is that He gave us, past tense –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – eternal life in His Son. Adventism says you cannot know if you have eternal life –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – but God’s testimony is He gave it in His Son, and it says a little bit further down there that if you have the Son, you have eternal life.
Colleen: And that’s a given.
Nikki: Yes. So the gospel that God proclaims, that we are to believe, is very different from what I was taught in Adventism.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There is absolutely no Investigative Judgment in the Bible anywhere.
Colleen: No, no. There’s only the finished work of Jesus. And it is this gospel of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection, His finished work, that is the antidote to the false Jesus we grew up believing in.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because I believed in a false Jesus, I couldn’t understand the gospel. A fallible Jesus cannot have completed a finished work which is unalterable, but when I understand that Jesus is fully God and that He has fully paid the price for sin and has fully completed everything necessary for my salvation and that He gives me the faith to believe Him, that understanding, that that Jesus has done this, that comes through understanding the gospel. We can’t have the right Jesus without the right gospel, and that’s what Galatians is about. To close this, I just want to ask, Nikki, if you have any last thing you’d like to say to anybody who might be listening who’s an Adventist.
Nikki: You know, I really want to ask that you would know our heart, know that we want you to know the God of Scripture. We are not just trying to hammer on Adventism, we want you to know what the doctrines of Adventism prevent you from knowing when you put your faith in those. We want you to know the true Jesus of Scripture. That is where our heart is, and we pray for you, and we love you, and I just want you to read the Bible and know Him.
Colleen: I agree. And I would challenge you to get out that Book of Galatians and read it every day for a month.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: It is an amazing book. And ask God to show you what He already knows He wants you to understand from that book. Knowing Jesus is the greatest thing. There is nothing else. And that’s why we do this. That’s why we want you to know what drives us. That’s why we want you to know what the Bible says. So if you have questions, if you want to know more, if you want materials, or if you have suggestions for things you’d like us to talk about, you can reach us at formeradventist@gmail.com. And thank you, Nikki, for sharing your experience with discovering who the true Jesus actually is.
Nikki: Thank you.
Colleen: There is nothing greater than to share the joy of Jesus with another person who knows Him.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Thank you for helping with this podcast.
Nikki: And please join us again. †
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