Colleen and Nikki have published over 50 episodes! They talk about their favorites and also about having a mediator during the pandemic. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And we’re back again with you to do another check-in. But before we get started, I just want to say, we had kind of a fun thing happen this week, didn’t we?
Colleen: We did.
Nikki: We published our 50th episode of the podcast this week.
Colleen: Can you believe it?
Nikki: No, I can’t. It’s gone by so quickly. It’s been a lot of fun, and I wanted to ask you, Colleen, what some of your favorite episodes were that we recorded together.
Colleen: Oh, how fun! Well, let me think back.
Nikki: I know it’s hard, huh? [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] It is! It seems much longer ago than maybe it has been. And I’m sure that the whole COVID thing has added to that feeling of length.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Some that stand out in my mind include – and I can’t say these are necessarily favorites, but they do stand out – the book burning on Reformation Day.
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: That was fun, when we had people here. And I’ll never forget Trini’s tears as she burned an Ellen White book. It was her first. She was recently out, and she knew what she was doing. And another was our Great Contentment Party on October 22 –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – when we ate shrimp and Nathaniel played the shofar. [Laughter.] That was a fun one too.
Nikki: Yeah, it was.
Colleen: And perhaps my most rewarding ones have been the Bible studies.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Because it’s interesting that it seems that the Bible studies are the podcasts that get the most listens. They are certainly the ones that bless me the most.
Nikki: Yeah, me too.
Colleen: I have loved the covenant studies and doing the New Covenant through the lens of Hebrews. These have been real highlights for me. I feel like I’ve grown a lot. What about you, Nikki?
Nikki: I love that every time we do a Bible study I see new things. It’s so exciting. And the things that we have known and studied together before just become even deeper and more real and more a part of me as we look at them again. It’s been a huge blessing and kind of a surprise to me, how wonderful the Bible studies have been. Those would probably – I’d have to say are my favorite. But you know what? I have really loved our interviews. I loved sitting with Dale and then with Carolyn when we did individual interviews with them and got to hear a little bit of their heart and why they do what they do.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And listening to Richard tell stories of growing up Adventist –
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes.
Nikki: And I can’t believe how wonderful it was that Justin Peters and Phil Johnson had time to sit with us at the Truth Matters Conference in October.
Colleen: That was amazing to me. It still is amazing to me.
Nikki: Yeah, very surprising. You know, it was just a blessing to sit with brothers who weren’t looking at their watch the whole time, wondering, you know, “How am I going to get through this?” They really took time with us and cared about what we were doing, and that meant a lot.
Colleen: It did to me too. It meant a lot to me too that they weren’t really pushing back and arguing that we weren’t fully representing Adventism correctly. They actually believed us.
Nikki: And can I just say that the one that surprised me the most was when we walked through the different layers of brainwashing by the cults.
Colleen: Oh, yes. That was one of our first ones, like maybe our second one.
Nikki: Yeah, it was very early.
Colleen: That one has had a lot listens.
Nikki: So it’s been a lot of fun, and we’re so grateful that you guys have hung in there with us. If you’re new listeners, we would encourage you to go back and listen to some of that, especially if you don’t have an Adventist background. We spend some time explaining some of the things about Adventism that you’re not going to get from their PR or their explanation of themselves. Also, if you’re relatively newly coming out of Adventism and you’ve never done a study on the covenants, please go back. Start at the beginning. This has been such a rewarding walk through Scripture.
Colleen: I feel like it makes even more sense to me now. It’s so rich.
Nikki: Yes! And Hebrews has just been amazing.
Colleen: It has.
Nikki: So speaking of Hebrews, Colleen, you’ve been talking about what it is to have a mediator. Can you share a little bit about that?
Colleen: Well, yes. This whole isolation and then the strange civic unrest that we’ve lived through, but the being locked down in quarantine and separated from one another has been a very disorienting thing in my life in many ways, and it’s the sort of thing that has – I didn’t initially feel it. It’s been over time that I’ve realized how deeply it’s impacted me. And I’ve been thinking about it because tomorrow I am scheduled to get my cast off –
Nikki: Yay!
Colleen: – from my broken wrist. Thinking through that, I remember the three weeks ago when I went in for my surgery – or was it four? Whatever. The day I went in for my surgery. Richard had to drop me off at the door because social distancing said only patients could go in the surgery center. Now, I’ve had surgeries before, but Richard has always been able to come in and sit with me. And when I had my knee replaced over a year ago, they expected him to stay in my hospital room overnight. They counted on that. They wanted him there. It was helpful to them to have him in the room with me. And I felt safer because I knew that if I needed something and was too incapacitated from anesthesia [laughter] to speak for myself, he would speak for me. And I also know, from having been, like, the family advocate for both my mother and Richard’s mother over the years, when they were hospitalized in their later years for various things, if it hadn’t been for somebody from the family intervening when the hospital staff didn’t necessarily pay attention – you know, an example I’m thinking of besides the mothers was my father, when they visited us 20 years ago, and my father had developed pneumonia on the plane, and he had been in Emergency for an entire day, and they had apparently just thought he was a senile old man, but he was actually very sick and had lost some of his cognitive ability because of the fever, and it took Richard going and intervening after several hours for them to actually look at him. And he recovered, after five days in the hospital. It’s a little bit of a frightening thing to think that now, in this climate, if something happens to either Richard or me, we’d go into the hospital alone, like I went into my surgery alone. He dropped me off at the door, and I didn’t see him until I was ready to be picked up, and I’ve never had to wait for a surgery and go through all of that by myself before. Now, I’ll tell you, the Lord was with me. He kept me calm, but it’s made me think of my fear as an Adventist at being without a mediator, because I grew up thinking that, that during the time of trouble, those who had passed the Investigative Judgment, and believe me, none of us knew if we would pass or not, and we were told we wouldn’t know until Jesus came, but the fact is, we were told we would have to go through the time of trouble without an intercessor or a mediator because God would withdraw His Holy Spirit. That terrified me. Having to deal with medical things and medical emergencies without the benefit of having my husband with me, if that should happen, it made me remember the terror of that. But it’s just been so reassuring, as we finish doing Hebrews 7, that we do have an intercessor who lives forever to intercede for us. We’re never without an intercessor, and I just want to day, that includes if I have to be hospitalized or Richard has to be hospitalized or other loved ones and I’m forbidden from visiting because of COVID scares, we still have the Lord, and He’s still at work, just like He kept my heart calm on the day of my surgery.
Nikki: That’s incredible. I don’t remember being taught that we wouldn’t have a mediator. I remember hearing stuff about it, kind of outside of my circles, but I didn’t know much about it. I sort of just wrote it off. But when I sit and think about what I thought a mediator was as an Adventist, I don’t think I ever thought I had a mediator. I think I didn’t think about not having one because I never really thought about having one. I want to know, what did Adventists say about Christ as a mediator? What was He actually mediating? Because my understanding is He went – after the cross He went to judge us.
Colleen: Well, that’s a good question. You know, even in my mind it was a little vague. And it involved the Holy Spirit being on earth and somehow being on our side if we were God’s people and that God would withdraw that Holy Spirit and that we would be just standing alone in an evil world on the basis of our own character perfection. So there was never a sense that our going through the time of trouble was on the basis of having the righteousness of Christ Himself but on the basis of our moral perfection, which would allow us to go through the time of trouble like Jesus went through the wilderness temptation. It was a very scary thing, but somehow Jesus’ mediation, as I understood it as an Adventist, was His being up there applying His blood if I confessed a sin. Because I had said I accepted Jesus, then my sins were no longer on me, but Jesus’ blood transferred them to heaven. And then, once they were transferred to heaven in the heavenly books and they were not on me, Jesus had to go through them and see if I had confessed them before He could actually write “pardoned” beside them. If I had a sin on the books that was not consciously confessed, He could not pardon it. Only if I confessed it could it be pardoned, so all of that business of going through the books and checking and applying His blood if I confessed it, that was His mediation.
Nikki: Which isn’t really mediation. That’s not mediation. When you think about even a legal mediation, you have lawyers who are there representing you, speaking to each other on your behalf. If mediation is the Holy Spirit, according to the Adventist worldview, even that isn’t mediation because the second you sin, He leaves you, He’s not actually there to help you deal with that.
Colleen: Well, Ellen White did say that Jesus is our advocate and that when Satan came and accused us before God the Father, Jesus would say, “Oh, no, my precious blood has covered for that.” And then, that would be the way we would be justified before God in the face of Satan’s accusations. So that was also part of His mediating, but of course, that presupposed that His blood was justifying us because we had confessed. It was kind of complicated. It was never totally clear to me. But it was such an amazing thing to me several years ago when I realized in 1 Timothy 1:6, I believe it is, that it says there is one Father and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, and I realized that Jesus is our mediator because He is God and man in one person, both sides of the unreconciled, the unreconciled parties, are represented in Him. And when we trust Him, He perfectly mediates between us and the Father. He represents both of us equally. And it’s such a reassuring thing.
Nikki: And it’s on the basis of faith, and it’s not because we deserve it. I’m comparing in my head as we talk, I’m comparing the Adventist description of a mediator or an advocate with a loved one with us in the hospital, and I’m imagining that this loved one would say, “Well, now, if you behave, I’ll get you the help you need.” “Now, if you cut it out, you be nice, I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of.” That doesn’t feel like a loving mediator, and yet Scripture tells us that Christ lives to make intercession, He prays for us, He – on the basis on who He is, what He’s done, and His life, we are reconciled to God forever. It’s a very different kind of mediator, isn’t it?
Colleen: It is. And He is the assurance that sin will never trip us up again, not even in eternity. His blood is eternal, His mediation is eternal. We can count on it.
Nikki: And we’re going to be looking closer at that as we go into Hebrews later this week. We hope you’ll join us. And we’re so glad that you guys have been listening to us for all this time. It’s kind of amazing. If you have any questions or comments for us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and you can visit proclamationmagazine.com to get back issues of the magazine or sign up for our weekly blogs and emails, and don’t forget to like us and follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you again for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.
Colleen: Goodbye.
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—God the Holy Spirit | 114 - October 17, 2022
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—Unity in the Body of Christ | 113 - October 17, 2022
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—The Remnant and Its Mission | 112 - September 7, 2022