EXTRA: On Good Friday During Isolation | 34

Colleen and Nikki talk about Good Friday and the coming Easter Sunday in the midst of isolation and the pandemic. Podcast was published April 13, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Nikki:  Hi!  And welcome to Former Adventist podcast.  I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  And I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  Now, we are recording today’s episode on Good Friday, and we want to visit a little bit about how we’ve been doing in quarantine during COVID, but we also want to talk a little bit about what Good Friday is.  But before we get started on that, Colleen, how have you been doing?

Colleen:  Well, this week we’re actually doing okay.  As I’ve mentioned before, we’re used to working at home alone.  But I have to tell you, socializing a dog that has been an asset for show instead of a companion has been an interesting challenge.  How was yours?

Nikki:  It’s probably been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster for me.  There’ve been a lot of great blessings this week.  My kids starting school up was wonderful.  It was so good for them and good for me to have some time in the morning where I just had a little more space to be thinking, which isn’t always safe.  [Laughter.]  I’ve been able to finish writing out the Book of Hebrews, working more on Scripture memory, and that’s been really good.  One of the problems with creating space for thinking is then I end up finding myself also worrying.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  And so I can kind of get in a cycle of reading news headlines or being on Facebook and then having to go back to the Word.  So it’s been a little bit up and down, and I have to say, one of the things that has concerned me a little bit this week is the amount of attention that Christians, believers, are giving to conspiracies.

Colleen:  I know.  That’s distressed me a lot.

Nikki:  It’s made me feel bad, and I understand the temptation to make sense of what’s going on.  It reminds me of Jen Wilkin’s book, “None Like Him,” where she talks about certain attributes that belong only to God –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – but how we strive after them.  God is omniscient, and only He knows what’s causing this, how this came about, how it will end, but I see a lot of believers frantically trying to figure out what’s going on, and I want to ask, “To what end?”

Colleen:  All of the days of God’s actions in this world are predetermined –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – like Paul told the Athenians:  He will judge the world by the Man He has appointed on a day, on a certain day.  The day is coming.  God has all these days in mind; nothing is random from His perspective.

Nikki:  Yeah!  So I’ve been thinking about how, in a way, trying to figure it all out sort of robs what I’ve come to understand to be our Sabbath rest, our real, true Sabbath rest –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – resting in Christ, resting in His sovereignty and His governance and knowing that He’s caring for me.  And also because it’s been Holy Week, I’ve had the last week of Christ’s life here on earth on my mind as well, in light of that.

Colleen:  Yes.  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  Because He was in the middle of conspiracy, really, truly evil men who were conspiring –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – to take His life, and in the middle of that He made it His purpose to glorify God, to glorify the Father.  So I guess I’ve just been reflecting a lot on what is our impact, where are we putting our thoughts, and what are we robbing ourselves of when we seek after understanding, “What does this mean?”  “Is this the mark of the beast?”  “Is this the beginning of one world government?”

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  I don’t think we have to know that.

Colleen:  I agree.  I don’t think we do either.  It’s interesting that Good Friday, the commemoration of Good Friday, comes around every year, just like a birthday, and it is a time when the entire world can be brought to remember that Jesus died.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  I was thinking this morning about that too because we’ve been listening to the updates from President Trump through this whole COVID-19 pandemic, and this morning I was startled and so moved by the fact that [laughter] – whatever you think of President Trump, and I know there’s a wide range of opinions about him –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – whatever you think, he sat in his Oval Office this morning and said that on this day we are remembering the crucifixion of our Savior – he used the personal plural pronoun – of our Savior, and on Easter Sunday we will remember Him rising from the dead.  And he declared himself what Jesus did and why this weekend is important, and I thought, “You know, for a man who has a widely varied nation with a lot of religious convictions, either from atheism to religions that aren’t Christian, it was a statement of some sort for him to say something so clearly endorsing the heartof Christianity.  And it was kind of a message to the nation.  I don’t know that he’s a believer himself.  I don’t know.  Only God knows his heart.  But he spoke the words that the world needed to hear.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And it made me feel emotional.

Nikki:  Yeah, I watched that too, and I think at the end he even mentioned what Christ did was a gift of salvation.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And it’s interesting, you know, it’s always a little tricky talking about the president because you know –

Colleen:  Uh-huh.

Nikki:  – you’re going to have people who fall in all different places in their opinions of him –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – but let’s face it, God can use absolutely anyone and anything.

Colleen:  Absolutely.

Nikki:  This isn’t a statement about our president, but God has used a donkey to speak truth before.  The fact is, the words were truthful, and they were proclaimed to our nation.

Colleen:  That’s right.

Nikki:  And it was an amazing thing to sit and watch.

Colleen:  It reminds me of Jesus saying, when the Pharisees complained about the children crying out “Hosanna.”  He said, “If they’re quiet, the rocks will cry out.”

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  God knows how to get the truth about Jesus spoken to the world.  He will use whom He will use.  Even Balaam, the false prophet from Midian, prophesied for God in Israel’s favor when he was hired to curse them.  He could not outmaneuver God.  So whatever one thinks about the president, the Lord saw that that man spoke what the nation needed to hear through his mouth today.  It was quite interesting, very moving.

Nikki:  So that brings me to the question of Easter weekend, Good Friday –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – Easter Sunday.  What did you think about all of that as an Adventist?  What did you think about Good Friday?

Colleen:  Well, my thoughts about Good Friday morphed through my lifetime as an Adventist because I was taught traditional, historic Adventism, and it was only later, as I moved into college and beyond, that I began to hear, particularly beyond, a different twist on Jesus’ death than the classic historic Adventist one.  Graham Maxwell, as you know, Nikki, made the moral influence theory very popular, and he taught – he was active at Loma Linda in the ’80s, and that was when I began to hear about that.  And it started to color my view.  But as a child, I look back on it and I realize my understanding of Good Friday was very Catholic.  Now, I would have been horrified if anybody had said that to me, but I thought of Jesus’ death as something that had to be done, but it was very clear that it was because of mysin, because of me Jesus had to suffer like that, and I had jolly well better prove myself worthy of that.  So keep the Sabbath, keep the law, honor mom and dad, do whatever they say, be a good Adventist, and prove yourself worthy of that death, and I realize now that’s the Catholic paradigm.  As much as the Adventists I grew up with hated the pope and hated the idea of Catholicism, historic Adventist gospel is Catholic because it requires ongoing acts of good deeds and good work and obedience to keep accessing whatever the blood was supposed to have done.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  So it was a guilt-producing thing.  It made me cringe.  I thought Good Friday was a Catholic holiday.  Wewould never celebrate that, and furthermore I thought Easter was basically a pagan holiday.  Never mind the fact that it was okay to talk about the bunnies and maybe to hide some eggs and even have a chocolate egg, but to talk about the resurrection and celebrate it on Sunday was anathema.  It was such a confusing dichotomy.  What about you?

Nikki:  I didn’t think much more about Easter than the bunny and the eggs.

Colleen:  Uh-huh.

Nikki:  I never thought about Good Friday.  You know, there are a lot of holidays on the calendar that I don’t know what they’re for.  They’re for various religions and for various groups, and I don’t necessarily know what they’re about –

Colleen:  Uh-huh.

Nikki:  – and Good Friday was just like that for me.  It was just one more of those holidays for someone else.  When I became a young adult, when I was 19 and in my 20s, and I came to California and then I attended La Sierra University, I started, obviously, hearing more about this kind of stuff in the context of God not having wrath, that He died – I was specifically told at La Sierra University that He died to show us how evil we are, how bad we are –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – how far we would go, and then I did have to read a Graham Maxwell book at La Sierra.  I believe it was called “Servants or Friends.”  And so it started kind of reshaping my view of God and of the cross.  Not that I had a solid picture in my head to begin with –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – but it started forming something in my thinking.  There was even a point where people became very hostile toward other Adventists who believed in what they called the penal substitutionary atonement.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  But even Adventists at their root don’t believe that.

Colleen:  No, no.

Nikki:  So yeah, so I knew there was conflict around it, and then in terms of what I thought Good Friday was, I remember in 2010, as a believer, going to a Christian church, hearing that we were going to celebrate Good Friday, and I remember thinking, “But it’s Easter weekend.  What’s Good Friday?”  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  I had no idea that it was connected, and I think – I was nervous.  I wondered, “What is this going to look like? Is this where they put dirt on your forehead?”

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  Oh, that’s Ash Wednesday.

Nikki:  I didn’t know anything about it.  I didn’t understand it.  And then when I was told, “No.  This is the day where we remember Jesus going to the cross.”  And at the church we were attending at the time, Good Friday was a celebration, and people were being baptized, and I thought, “Why are we celebrating?  This is a really sad day.  This is when we hurt Jesus.”

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  So I just didn’t have a good grasp of what, like you said, Easter, altogether the whole thing was about.

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  And then, yeah, I would have described it as kind of a Catholic other holiday.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  I think I had kind of a cultic picture of it, kind of a dark, monkish –

Colleen:  Almost pagan.  All that blood.

Nikki:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Colleen:  The blood really upset me.  I didn’t know what to do with it.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And it just made me feel guilty.  Before we sat down to record, in our separate homes again, this podcast, we were listening to a livestream of the Good Friday service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  What I realized, listening to that service, there was a lot of music and reading and a sermon given by the vicar of the cathedral, who is a woman, I didn’t hear so much of the sermon, but what led up to it was very interesting.  The reading – well, or the chanting in Gregorian chant or plainsong of Psalm 22 that outlines a prophesy of what would happen to Jesus. That’s the psalm that He quoted from when He said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  So the whole psalm describes what happened to Jesus.  I was listening to the plainsong, centuries old, and it moved me to tears, and I realized that a person who was an unbeliever could tune in to a service like this, and whether or not it is considered an evangelical church with a true gospel message, when they do a service like this, where they are reciting Scripture, with readings from Isaiah, the Psalms, and Hebrews, anybody listening could be saved.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  The truth of who Jesus was and what He did was being clearly proclaimed straight from the Bible.  And I thought, how amazing.  Once again, like Christmas, where the world’s attention is put on the birth of Jesus, and if you don’t know who He is you can figure it out.  You can Google it if necessary because Christmas is everywhere.  Good Friday and Easter Sunday are two other times when the truth of what Jesus did is clearly spoken in the world.  God has done this.  God has not left us without the witness of His Word and the truth of His Son.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  No matter how desperate we get, no matter how bad the pandemic is, the truth of Jesus is still being proclaimed, almost in spite of us.

Nikki:  The fact that that is a reality helps me understand why there’s such an attack on the message, a public attack on the message.  There’s a documentary out right now that I highly recommend.  It’s called “The American Gospel:  Christ Crucified.”  There’s another one called “The American Gospel: Christ Alone.”  This is the second one, and it’s actually just being released, I believe on Amazon, this weekend for Easter weekend.  It’s a fantastic documentary that is combating what I didn’t realize was so prolific across our nation, the argument that Jesus dying on the cross is divine child abuse, and I thought that was somewhat unique to Adventism.  I thought that was in our moral influence theory.

Colleen:  Oh, no.  Uh-huh.

Nikki:  But as I watched some of this documentary, I learned that it’s actually rooted in very old heresies.  You watch the video, there are multiple religious groups who claim to be Christian who are attacking the cross and the purpose of the cross.  And so at the same time that we have this message being proclaimed, we also have so many people who are out there redefining it –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – twisting it and tweaking it and creating false, distorted gospels and grabbing people that way.

Colleen:  As the moral influence theory grabbed so many Adventists.  Which, by the way, is not unique to Adventism.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  The moral influence theory, made popular by Graham Maxwell, is actually related to a very old, heretical theology that is sometimes called the governmental theory of atonement, which isn’t exactly even atonement as we understand it.  But it’s the idea that God is just plain good.  He’s just a forgiving God who didn’t need Jesus’ blood to forgive.  He could declare us forgiven because He’s good.  Jesus’ death was just a demonstration of what He was willing to do to convict us of how bad we were, that we would kill God and He would go to the death suffering, like a sheep to the slaughter, without ever lifting His voice, that guilty example I always thought of Him as leaving me.  It’s like, eww, I’m going to be eternally guilty because of His death.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Which isn’t the point at all.

Nikki:  I remember around FAF weekend 2010 there was another conference going on in Loma Linda.  I can’t remember what the tour was called, but it was a tour.  Was it the Good News Tour?  Do you remember that?

Colleen:  Yes, it was, the Good News Tour.

Nikki:  So right after the weekend, I saw a video on YouTube where my previous pastor was being interviewed, and she said – Adventist pastor, and she said, “A God who is all good all the time would not direct His wrath at humans or at Jesus or at anyone.”  I was shocked to hear her say this and went on and did some more research on what was going on that weekend, and they were suggesting that God doesn’t have wrath, a good God doesn’t have wrath.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God.  They do not understand the attribute of simplicity.  They do not understand that He is all good, but He is also all-knowing, and He is also fully just, and He is all of His attributes, all of them, all at the same time.  They have to separate the godhead.  They have to separate His attributes in order to get their – I don’t even know if you could call it theory of atonement –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – because it’s not atonement the way they describe it –

Colleen:  No.

Nikki:  – but found in this documentary I was mentioning they talk about this idea being rooted in an ancient heresy called Socinianism, and this heresy actually denies the Trinity and denies, outwardly denies, the attribute of simplicity.  And they do not believe that Jesus was fully God.  Sound familiar?

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And because of that, they don’t believe that His sacrifice on the cross was efficacious for those who would believe in it.  They believe that it was an example of self-sacrifice.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  Also familiar.

Colleen:  Interesting.

Nikki:  Just by the way, they also teach annihilationism, they don’t believe in hell –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – and they would say that the Bible is authoritative, but that it’s to be interpreted through rationalism.  So this is all very familiar to me, and this is all very ____.

Colleen:  Totally!

Nikki:  To hear that and then to go and do some reading on it helped me understand the Adventist understanding.  Whether you are the original first Adventists with that first Adventist message or you’re on the progressive spectrum and you believe in this moral influence, this bloodless atonement, wherever you land –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – it is not atonement –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – and it destroys the Trinity. 

Colleen:  Exactly.

Nikki:  It completely takes them apart and makes it a unity, at best.

Colleen:  Well said.  That is so interesting, Nikki.  It does sound familiar.  It also denies and distorts the purpose of the atonement.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  I mean, if the Trinity is destroyed, what was the atonement about?  And what was the point of Jesus being human.  Everything the Bible teaches about what Jesus did is picked apart like a thread that comes loose at the end of a blanket, and you pull on it, and just little by little the fabric comes apart.  That’s what these heresies do.  They don’t look bad at the beginning when they’re first explained.  It’s like, “Oh, what a lovely picture of God,” but you follow and keep following it down to the core of what it means, these heresies, like the one you describe, Socinianism, totallydecimates the Trinity, the atonement, the nature of Christ, and the nature of who we are and why God did what He did.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  It leaves us completely helpless.

Nikki:  Despite the Adventist message of us vindicating God’s character, He does not need a public relations team.

Colleen:  No He doesn’t.

Nikki:  The minute we try to make Him palatable, the minute we try to make Him easy for other people to understand, we remove the things that make us uncomfortable – the wrath, the punishment, the payment for sin – as soon as we start removing that stuff, we are creating an idol.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  We’re completely creating an idol.  God’s ways are above our ways.  We can’t fully understand Him, but we can know what’s true about Him and His word, and we know that He is all good all the time, always.

Colleen:  And that cannot be separated from anything that He is.  That includes, love, justice, wrath, mercy, grace.  It includes justice, everything that He is.

Nikki:  And this notion that Jesus going to the cross is divine child abuse also betrays the fact that they don’t understand that Jesus is God.

Colleen:  Oh, exactly.

Nikki:  God took upon Himself the payment for our sin.  Jesus was not separated from God.  Jesus was always fully God and fully man, and God took God’s wrath for us.

Colleen:  Exactly.

Nikki:  That is not punishment, that is not child abuse.  That is love.

Colleen:  That’s the ultimate demonstration of grace, and that’s why His grace has been poured out on us.  So, Nikki, as we sit here on Good Friday, looking forward to Sunday, and I know when people hear this it will be Monday and Easter will have already happened, what are you looking forward to about Sunday and Easter this year?  I know it’s different.  We’re not going to be at church together, we’re not going to have our big Easter lunch with the egg hunt on the lawn, but what are you looking forward to and what do you know about Easter?

Nikki:  Well, you know, this is going to be such a unique one because the church is going to be united in spirit in a way that we’ve never experienced before.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And I think it’s going to be a powerful thing to know that people all over the world, inside their homes, even those – there are Christians in India who are hiding for fear of their life.  Churches are being burned down, missionaries are being hunted –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – but believers all over the world are going to be celebrating the risen Christ together on the same day, and I don’t know, that’s really exciting to me.  In terms of how we celebrate it, it will probably look kind of boring.  There weren’t a lot of eggs left on Instacart (laughter) –

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  – and not a lot of candy.  We will have a ham and make a dinner together, but I think what I look forward to the most is just knowing that we are united, not only in the Spirit, but in our circumstances –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – and that’s just going to be special somehow.  How about you?

Colleen:  I feel the same way.  Richard put up the cross again.  He has a PVC pipe cross that he puts up twice a year, Christmas and Easter.  At Christmas the lights are on the colored setting, and at Easter they’re white.  And it makes me really happy to see that cross up.  This is the first year we haven’t had people coming to our house during the holiday weekend, but it’s there for the neighborhood to see if they want to see it, and it’s a proclamation that the cross is empty and the tomb is empty.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Jesus has risen.  And like you said, Nikki, whether we’re celebrating this together, which is always a joy and something I’ll miss, there’s something remarkable about knowing we’re united by the Spirit.  We actually have Him in us, and as His body, when we’re celebrating Him we feel that connection with each other.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  We know it’s true.  He reminds us that it’s true.  We’re not alone.  And I’m really looking forward to that.  And yes, I’ll make the usual monkey bread for Richard and me, and I bought a tiny little ham because, you know, Richard is still not thrilled with ham every day, but he does like it for Easter.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  So we will celebrate in our own way, the two of us, but the big excitement is that Jesus is alive, and He’s alive in us.

Nikki:  One of the things that surprised me in my first years as a new believer was just how precious Easter Sunday was.  And understanding what that resurrection meant.  As an Adventist, He was just going to His next stage in the process.

Colleen:  Yeah!

Nikki:  He was going up to the holy place or the most holy place, whenever that happened, and He was going to go apply His blood.  Even shortly after I was born again it was the evidence that God accepted His sacrifice and my Lord had been brought to life, and it was a time of rejoicing, but as I continued to study Scripture, I began to get a better picture of the fact that it was that very resurrection life that causes us to be born again.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And one of my favorite verses comes from the first letter of Peter, in chapter 1 in verse 3 it says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Colleen:  I love that.

Nikki:  When we worship Christ every Sunday, not just on Easter, it reminds me that the very reason we have life is because He rose from the dead.  We have His resurrection life in us.  And it just makes Easter all the more special to me, that coming, that victorious resurrection out of the grave.  It burst life into the world.

Colleen:  Yes.  I love that:  It burst life into the world.  It shattered death from the inside out.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Yes.  [Laughter.]  I just am struck by Psalm 22, having just heard it chanted by a singer in Gregorian plainsong, but there are these passages that talk about what happened to Him while He’s hanging on the cross.  “They open wide their mouth at me, as a ravening and a roaring lion.  I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within me.  My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; and you lay me in the dust of death.  For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me; they pierced my hands and my feet.  I can count all my bones.  They look, they stare at me; they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.  But you, O Lord, be not far off; O you my help, hasten to my assistance.  Deliver my soul from the sword, my only life from the power of the dog.  Save me from the lion’s mouth; from the horns of the wild oxen you answer me.”  And then in verse 25 it goes to the end with this amazing promise, “From you comes my praise in the great assembly; I shall pay my vows before those who fear Him.  The afflicted will eat and be satisfied; those who seek Him will praise the Lord.  Let your heart live forever!  All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before you.  For the kingdom is the Lord’s and He rules over the nations.  All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship, all those who go down to the dust will bow before Him, even he who cannot keep his soul alive.  Posterity will serve Him; it will be told of the Lord to the coming generation.  They will come and will declare His righteousness to a people who will be born, that He has performed it.”

Nikki:  Amen.

Colleen:  This weekend, while we go from remembering the death of Jesus and celebrating His life, and then moving on into the next part of the year, which begins Monday, think about what Jesus has done.  Think about why we had this weekend, and if you haven’t trusted Him, if you haven’t acknowledged your sin before Him and realized that you didn’t need an example, you need a Savior, I just urge you to bow before Him and to tell Him thank you for dying, thank you for rising and for breaking the curse of death, and ask Him to be your Savior and your Lord.

Nikki:  If you have any questions for us or any comments, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com.  Also, if you’d like to sign up for our weekly emails, view past articles, or make a donation to the ministry, you can do so at proclamationmagazine.com.  We’d love for you to follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  And tune in Wednesday as we continue to discuss Jesus in the New Covenant in the book of Hebrews.  Until next time.

Colleen:  Goodbye.