Swept Clean But Dirtier

COLLEEN TINKER

I recently had a conversation with a former Adventist whom I have known for many years. This person is struggling with some serious medical concerns that are hard to treat, and she was near despair. While she is a former Adventist, she is not a born-again believer. I wanted to share my letter to her because I believe that what she is facing is similar to the experience of many who leave Adventism without embracing the Lord Jesus and His finished work.

A question of spirits

I’ve been thinking a lot about your weariness and anxiety with this persistent problem. I keep remembering your asking me if I thought you had evil spirits in you causing you to be sick. I really cannot make that evaluation, but I can share some of the things I believe based on Scripture and on living.

My first response to your question is this: the fact that you wondered if you have evil spirits harassing you makes me wonder if you may actually be having experiences of harassment with evil spirits. I’m not accusing; I’m just asking the question. First, I know that your husband had experiences with spirits, especially in the weeks before he died. I also know that he was consulting a shaman who was helping him get in touch with these spirits. Also, his expertise in Chi and Reiki were spiritual practices. I also know that you believe you have spoken to him after his death.

I mention all this to say—you have been surrounded by spiritual practices and beliefs that involve various spirits and spiritual powers that can appear comforting or empowering but which can also turn and terrify and harass you. I am not bringing up these things to accuse you or to criticize; what I really want to do is to talk about what I have learned about our common legacy of Adventism and about the reality which Scripture has revealed. 

The Adventist truth

The more I have compared Adventism to Scripture, the more dark and evil I see our former religion to be. We know that Ellen White was a manipulator and a plagiarist—and a false prophet. Leaving Adventism was necessary once we saw that we had been taught untruths and invented tales, and once we saw that abuse had been framed as godliness and morality. Preserving the public image was what mattered most! What went on behind the scenes must never be mentioned.

A lot of people leave Adventism when they see its corruption and the hopelessness of either fixing it or of living a fulfilling life as an Adventist. Those that simply leave and begin looking for something to satisfy the spiritual craving that is part of being human, though, often end up in even worse despair, fear, and anxiety than Adventism generated. 

Here’s what I deeply believe about Adventism: it is designed and driven by an evil spirit. I know these words sound dramatic, but as I look at the doctrines and at their source—the angel-driven visions and dreams of EGW—only an evil spirit could generate the consistent and integrated theology that so closely mimics Christianity while pushing Satan to the front as the one responsible for human sin and suffering and the one who will ultimately bear the sins of the saved. 

How clever is that? Adventism shows the world a squeaky-clean whitewashed (no pun intended) exterior that says all the right words to the Christians, but it really destroys the atoning sacrifice of Jesus by making him an Example rather than a Substitute. It denies Jesus’ identity as fully God—with the same substance and attributes as the Father and the Holy Spirit—and presents Him as fallible and somehow pathetic: poor Jesus. He demonstrated (irritating) perfect obedience and patience and silent suffering as His enemies killed Him. 

And why did He do all this? He did it, Adventism says, to vindicate the Ten Commandments and to show us the lengths to which He would go to model flawless grace in the face of our cruelty. They do not teach that His shed blood showed us the grace of God; instead they say His shed blood was the sad result of His tortured grace. 

At the same time, Adventism makes Satan its tragic hero; he is the powerful, brilliant opponent of Jesus, and he experienced (understandable) jealousy when God supposedly exalted Jesus above him—and he plunged the cosmos into his own drama: a still-unresolved battle with his nemesis Jesus. Poor Satan—he will ultimately carry our sins into the Lake of Fire and be punished for them—a strong and powerful leader who is ultimately destroyed by his own fatal flaw: jealousy run amuck. 

Adventism carries the thumbprint of its originator: Satan. Adventism fears Satan but not God. In fact, Adventists have a perverse and reluctant relationship with Satan—they live in anxiety and terror of being bad and of falling prey to Satan’s temptations. 

House swept clean

Literally thousands of people leave Adventism every year, but most of those people never really purge themselves of their Adventist worldview or understand the depth of their deception and shattered reality. In fact, it is uncommon for people who leave Adventism to admit that it is not merely false but evil.  

Jesus told a parable that really resonates with me as I deal with people leaving Adventism. I’ll quote it below from Luke 11:24–28; it also appears in Matthew 12:43–45.

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.”

As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:24–28).

In this parable Jesus told the story of us who leave Adventism. We escape that religion, often leaving all the trappings that we thought were true: food laws, Sabbath-keeping, a visceral fear of little black clouds that might presage the Second Coming—but we don’t know what to put into our lives to replace the identity we lost. 

Furthermore, we don’t realize that what we left is actually dangerous because it is evil—and we treat it like walking away from a club membership. And there’s the problem: not recognizing that Adventism is actually anti-Christ and against the biblical gospel means we remain connected to the spiritual power that designed it and holds it together. 

We have to actually face what we left and what we need: we had a false religion, a false worldview, a false understanding of ourselves—we were shaped by a counterfeit. We need truth and reality.

When we don’t face the truth about Adventism and repent of it, asking God to remove its spiritual hold on us that has grasped us in the deepest places of our minds and emotions where we can’t even see it, we remain inside the framework of its deception.

We can’t understand Scripture. We find the Bible’s claims of being God’s living, eternal word to be circular reasoning, and we rationalize our own interpretations of its words. We bargain and experiment with other traditions and worldviews. We examine life from our own internal perspective instead of from the perspective of Someone who knows what is true and who has no limits. 

I understand why so many of us formers rationalize Scripture: we were taught that Adventists believed in sola scriptura. All our doctrines came from the Bible, we were taught—and we can clearly see now that those doctrines were much too confusing to observe. Consequently, if the Bible didn’t make life any better for us as Adventists, we certainly have no reason to take it seriously now that we’ve left Adventism!

There is truth, though—and the truth that we had believed a lie means that we have to admit we were wrong. We have to repent of having lived shaped by a lie.

Repenting is not something shameful; it is a gift from the God who is True. He is the One who reveals to us that our Adventism wasn’t worth keeping. He is still at work, and He will show and teach us what is actually true if we ask Him to do so. 

If we leave Adventism and sweep our house clean of it but do not admit its true nature and replace it with truth, we are like that house in the parable. We are swept clean but empty. The deceiving spirit that had unconsciously managed us in Adventism goes out, but it sees that we are now empty. And here is the crux of the problem: when we are rid of Adventism, we are wide open to more and darker deceptions than we had previously.

If we do not turn to the Lord who shines the light into our darkness and reveals what is true, we will embrace those tantalizing deceptions that promise us special knowledge, special powers, special protections, and special insights—but they will turn on us. They are deceiving spirits exactly as the spirit of Adventism is. They will choke our minds and emotions in anxiety and confusion. They will snare us in deeper and deeper dependence, and we will lose ourselves as we attempt to manage them. 

I do believe our health often follows the curve of our inner lives; the more fear and anxiety we have, the more demands our experimental beliefs make on us, the more our health debilitates. 

Of COURSE we have legitimate illnesses—but the Lord Jesus gives our spirits hope and peace and comfort when we seek Him and trust His word. The demons of other false belief systems are demons just as real as that of Adventism. They bind their victims in the fear of death and helplessness. Despair defines life instead of hope. 

I love Hebrews 2:14, 15:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Jesus has literally disarmed Satan and his minions at the cross (Col. 2:14-15). He is the One we can trust. But the Jesus we can trust is not the Jesus revealed in Adventism or in other religious traditions. He is not a Christ-consciousness. He is not a great teacher who showed us how to love and live. He is not a man with sinful flesh who could (and maybe did) sin. 

The Jesus we can trust is the one revealed in Scripture. No other holy writings show us who He really is. We can’t interpret Scripture according to our experience; we have to ask the Lord to show us what He wants us to know and to submit our minds to it. If it is, as it claims to be, God’s own word, sharper than a two-edged sword and revealing us to ourselves as we read (see Heb. 4:2, 13), then we can put it to the test. We can ask God to show us truth and to plant us deeply in reality.

We can ask Him to grant us repentance for the deceptions we have believed and for the compromises we have made that have bound us in fear and deepening despair. We can ask Him to give us Himself and to grant us faith to trust and believe that Jesus alone is the One who takes our sin. We can ask Him to forgive us and to give us life and hope.

So—do I believe you have evil spirits in you that are making you sick? 

I can’t answer that definitively. I can say, though, that I believe you are being deceived and harassed by evil spirits—but the Lord Jesus is calling you. He is the One who redeems our frantic despair and replaces our internal fear with His peace. He is stronger than the spirits, and when we trust Him for what He has actually done—when we acknowledge His exclusive claim on us—the Father literally transfers us out of the domain of darkness and places us in the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col. 1:13). 

I will end with two things: first, get a notebook and literally begin copying the book of John into it, a few verses at a time. As the Lord to give you the concentration to sit with this and to make the words come alive. Ask Him to teach you what He knows He wants you to know from those words. And second, I am praying for you. The Lord knows your need, and He died for you.

Believe Him. He will credit His righteousness to you, and you will never be the same. †

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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