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 12: “The Restless Prophet”
This week’s lesson seems almost like an anomaly, a lesson that doesn’t fit a quarter’s studies about Sabbath rest. Yet the placement of this lesson is revealing. By the author’s focussing on Jonah being a reluctant prophet—a reluctant witness—to Nineveh, the lesson is clear: Adventists who have settled their minds on the Adventist version of seventh-day Sabbath rest need to boldly go into the hostile world (everywhere that Adventism is not flourishing) and witness.
Furthermore, while the lesson did not make this point, Adventists use the story of Jonah to validate Ellen White’s prophetic “ministry”. In other words, they call Jonah a “conditional prophet”—one whose prophecy might or might not come true. By preaching to Nineveh, Jonah delivered the warning to this cruel, pagan people: repent and honor God! If they had not repented, they would have been destroyed. Nevertheless, they DID repent, and they honored God and were spared God’s destruction.
Adventists use this account to say EGW was the same kind of prophet; if her prophecies appear not to come true, it is because the people followed her advice and forestalled the punishment of God—or whatever the particular issue is regarding each specific prophecy. Adventism uses this argument because it KNOWS that EGW said many things that do not hold up in the light of either Scripture or of history. They rationalize away this fact by saying her prophecies, like Jonah’s were conditional, and if they seem not to come true, it’s because the people responded in a way that they did not need to come true.
Further, the lesson states that Jonah needed saving, and God sent him on this mission to confront his reluctance and to call upon God for deliverance. The biblical account, however, says nothing about whether or not Jonah needed saving. His running away cannot be linked to being saved or unsaved. The most we can say is that he demonstrated a paralyzing lack of faith in God, but the Lord revealed His sovereign care and delivered him—to go do the thing he feared doing.
Why Jonah?
The lesson presumes to know why God called Jonah in particular. Although Scripture says nothing about the reason God called Jonah, the lesson’s author’s seem to know:
God called Jonah to go to Nineveh because Jonah probably hadn’t spent much time thinking about his relationship to the Assyrians before this par- ticular call. He probably knew that he didn’t like them, but he had no idea of how much he hated them or the extremes to which he would go in order to avoid them, even after he got the call. Jonah wasn’t ready to have a Ninevite as a next-door neighbor in heaven. Jonah hadn’t learned to love as God loves. God called Jonah to go to Nineveh because God loved the Ninevites and wanted them in His kingdom. But God also called Jonah because God loved Jonah. He wanted Jonah to grow and become more like Him as they worked together. God wanted Jonah to find the true rest that comes only by being in a saving relationship with Him and by doing God’s will, which includes reaching out to others and pointing them to the faith and hope that we have.
The author then develops the point that Jonah was only able to grow and to find rest in God by “reaching out to others and pointing them to the faith and hope we have.”
This conclusion is not the point of the book of Jonah. This is an appropriation of the Jonah account for the purpose of guilting Adventists into sharing Adventism with non-Adventists. In fact, the lesson overtly claims that true rest comes only by witnessing and sharing one’s faith—specifically Adventism.
The discussion questions at the end of the week’s lessons include this:
Jonah’s story seems to suggest that God not only is in the business of saving wayward people but also is very interested in transforming His followers. How can we get a “new heart” and a “new spirit,” even if we already know the Lord and the truth for this time? What is the difference between knowing truth and being transformed by it?
It is clear in the question that the Adventist worldview has no idea what it means to get a “new heart” and a “new spirit”. These terms are borrowed from new covenant prophecies such as this in Ezekiel 36:25–27:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
This new heart and new spirit which God promised Israel is something only He can do for us, and it is the new birth that Jesus spoke about to Nicodemus in John 3:3–8:
Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ [8] The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
When a person believes in the Lord Jesus and His finished work, he is born again. God gives him a new heart and a new spirit and places His own Spirit within him as a guarantee of his eternal security (Eph. 1:13–14). When a person is born again, the veil falls from his eyes, and He sees Christ and looks away from Moses and finds true freedom (2 Cor 3). When a person believes and is born again, he passes at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24).
This lesson has no concept of being born again, no idea what it means to receive a new heart and a new spirit. These things happen once: when we believe and are made alive, transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col. 1:13).
Further, we don’t receive new hearts and spirits over and over as the lesson says. The author betrays that he doesn’t know what it means to “know the Lord”, but the reality of his meaning becomes clear with this phrase: “even if we already know the Lord and the truth for this time?”
The “truth for this time” is Adventism. That phrase MEANS ADVENTISM. One cannot know the Lord through the medium of Adventism. It teaches a false Jesus, a false view of the nature of man, a false view of the Law and of Ellen White, and it includes Satan as playing a role in the atonement as he removes sins from heaven!
Adventists do not know the Lord unless they come to Him IN SPITE of Adventism! Once a person truly knows the Lord, however, he will be unable to remain Adventist.
Jonah in NO WAY represents the experience of Adventists or of Adventism. His inclusion in this set of lessons is a misuse of Scripture.
One final meaning
The lesson fails to speak of what may be the most important connection between Jonah and the new covenant: Jesus’ own statement that the only sign the unbelieving Jews would receive was the “sign of Jonah”:
And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed (Matthew 16:1–4).
Jesus Himself validated the story of Jonah as a historical account that really happened. Furthermore, He said that the “sign of Jonah”, his being hidden in the belly of a fish at the base of the mountains, as Jonah’s prayer said, foreshadowed Jesus’ own burial—His three days in the heart of the earth.
Just as God spoke to the fish and told it to vomit Jonah onto the shore, so Jesus rose from death on the third day. His finished work of atonement and of breaking the curse of sin is THE message which believers take to the hostile, unbelieving world!
In fact, God even foreshadowed His own love for the world and His sending His Son to become a man and to take the sin of humanity into Himself, paying the price for it. We are familiar with John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
But far fewer know the ending of the book of Jonah:
And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:10–11).
The very last verse of the book of Jonah (which, incidentally, gives the account of a Jewish prophet whose God-appointed job was to bring salvation to idolatrous gentiles who hated the Jews) reveals God’s motivation for sending Jonah to Nineveh, and it has nothing at all to do with Jonah specifically. God had pity for the great, evil city of Nineveh which had 120,000 persons who were so steeped in spiritual darkness that they could not tell their right hands from their left. Furthermore, God also revealed that he had pity on their animals as well!
If God had destroyed Nineveh with fire—if they had not repented—the animals would have died as well. But God saved all of them, and Jonah was only the instrument. God opened their hearts to the truth about Himself!
Jesus used the story of Jonah to say the only sign He would give the unbelieving Jews was the sign of Jonah who spent three days and nights in the belly of the whale before being delivered back to “life” and taking the good news of God’s salvation to an unbelieving people!
The account of Jonah is both fascinating and revealing—and it is a sign of the Lord Jesus! It’s significant that this lesson never mentions this most powerful reference to Jonah in the New Testament—a reference used by the Lord Jesus Himself!
No, the story of Jonah is not about taking Adventism to the world and finding a new heart and new spirit through proselytizing. It is a shadow of Christ’s burial and a confirmation that God’s will cannot be thwarted. When God saves evil people, no matter how reluctant the messengers or the people themselves, it is He who opens their eyes and softens their hearts to respond to Him.
We cannot convince anyone to be saved; that is the work of God. And once we are born again and given a new heart and spirit, nothing can snatch us out of Jesus’ hand or the hand of the Father (Jn. 10:28, 29)! †
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