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 5: “Children of the Promise”
In this lesson the author wrestles with God’s promise to Abraham that He would give him seed and make him a blessing. The lesson itself is superficial and convoluted, so I will attempt to deal with the underlying agenda, or worldview, that is revealed through various questions and statements scattered throughout the lesson—mostly, in fact, buried in the Teachers Comments.
The author of this lesson repeatedly compares the Seventh-day Adventist organization to Israel and asks the reader to think about how Adventists are to play a role in the world Israel was intended to play. This “remnant” mindset, this belief within Adventism that they are “spiritual Israel” is peppered throughout this lesson as an assumption, not as an idea the readers should ponder.
This idea, however, is utterly false. First, Scripture never teaches that the church replaces Israel. Israel is Israel, and according to Romans 9 through 11, God’s promises to Israel absolutely WILL be fulfilled. Read Romans 11:25–33:
Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”; “and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”
As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (ESV)
All that God promised Abraham will come true—including His promises to His genetic descendants. To be sure, all who believe are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise in the new covenant, but His promises to Israel STAND.
Notice further that Paul tells us that currently, the Jews—Israel—“are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.”
The forefathers are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Israel descended from Isaac, the son of Promise, and because of the forefathers and God’s unconditional covenant and promises to them, the Jews are still loved “for the sake” of those patriarchs who received the promises from God.
Believers only
I must make another point as well. Adventists appropriate Scripture, God’s promises, and the prophecies for the future and rework them for themselves. God’s word, however, is specifically given to His people in the specific contexts of the first audiences. So, for example, when God says that gentiles who believe will also be considered the descendants of Abraham and heirs of the promise, Adventists claim that promise and apply it to themselves.
Since they self-identify as the remnant church, God’s one true church that keeps all the commandments of God (meaning, of course, the Ten Commandments especially the fourth), they presume to apply God’s promises made to true believers to themselves.
This appropriation is utterly illegitimate. Adventism is not part of the the true church of God, the body of Christ. Only those who have trusted the Lord Jesus and His finished work of dying on the cross and rising from death for their eternal future, repenting and throwing themselves on His mercy and letting go of all other requirements, including the law, are part of the body of Christ.
God’s promises do not apply to unbelievers. Adventism does not teach the biblical gospel, and most Adventists do not even know who Jesus really is or what His work really was. They believe He was their example for godly character and actions—they do not know Him as their SUBSTITUTE who rendered the Ten Commandments obsolete (Heb. 8:13) because He fulfilled every one of them!
Adventists, therefore, cannot take God’s promises to Abraham and Israel and apply them to themselves, trying to see how they can work in the world as Israel was supposed to work in the world.
First, the Mosaic covenant is no longer applicable. It is obsolete and no longer meaningful for people today except as it reveals God’s faithfulness and Jesus’s fulfillment of it. Second, Adventism is NOT spiritual Israel. It is not the inheritor of Abraham’s blessings from God. Third, Adventism doesn’t worship the triune God of the Bible. In spite of appropriating Scripture for itself, it is a false religion, and the promises of God are not for people who are not submitted to God’s inerrant word and the finished work of the Lord Jesus.
Consider this quotation from page 66 in the Teacher’s Comments of this week’s lesson:
In Genesis 3:15, the preincarnate Christ predicted the Messianic advent, which was to provide atonement for the human race; to prove to sinless realms that there was no excuse for Adam’s failure and to validate the immortal blending of the law and the gospel by means of Calvary.
The author, in attempting to build the case that Adventism can find its unscriptural theology in God’s promises, literally puts words into the biblical account of God’s declaration that the serpent would bruise Eve’s Seed’s heel, but He would would crush the serpent’s head. In this horrifying paragraph, the author has declared there is “an immortal blending of the law and the gospel by means of Calvary.”
This statement is actually a lie. Galatians, Romans, Hebrews, Ephesians 2, and Colossians 2 literally explain that in Christ’s own body on the cross, the Law became obsolete as Jesus fulfilled every one of its demands. He became sin; He became the curse for us; and in His resurrection, He broke death—the curse the law demanded for all sinners—and rendered the law obsolete by having become its FULFILLMENT and having inaugurated the new covenant in His blood!
Jesus, not the law, is the complete summation of God’s promise in the garden. The law isn’t part of the fulfillment at all. Jesus set us FREE from the law when we trust His sufficient, completed atonement for our sin!
Conclusion
Finally, this lesson is confusing and inconsistent because the author does not know the biblical gospel or the biblical Jesus. The Ellen White gospel and the Ellen White Jesus are not those the Bible reveals. The people of promise, according to Scripture, are those who BELIEVE GOD, as Abraham did (Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4). Those who recognize their depravity, their helpless sinful natures that are dead in sin (Eph. 2:1–3) and repent before the Lord Jesus and receive the sufficient payment of His blood for the price of their sin—those people pass at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24). Those people are born again and are adopted by the Father (Rom. 8:14–17). Those people are considered Abraham’s descents and heirs according to the promise, as Galatians explains.
The people of promise are those who BELIEVE and are born again, sealed with the Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13-14). Adventism does not fill the bill. The biblical promises do not find fulfillment in false religions.
If you haven’t trusted Jesus, please do this: get a notebook and literally sit with the book of Galatians and begin copying the book, verse by verse, into that notebook. Ask the Lord to teach you what He already knows He wants you to learn, and ask Him to reveal Himself and His real truth to you. When you see Jesus for who He actually is as Scripture reveals Him, the darkness and confusion of Ellen’s syrupy descriptions fall away, and the holiness and eternal glory of our Savior will change you forever.
When we read Moses, a veil covers our hearts, but when we turn to Christ, the veil is taken away, and we are never the same again (2 Cor. 3). †
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