BY COLLEEN TINKER
A Facebook conversation drew me in this week. The original post (written by a former Adventist) asked, in essence, how much personal discomfort and loss we would be willing to endure for the sake of the body of Christ. The answers given by both current and former Adventists were expected: the pandemic concerns affecting government regulations, health mandates, and freedom continue to polarize people across the political spectrum. In fact, the general sense of uncertainty in the world permeated even the most thoughtful responses as well as the original question.
I realized that many people who have Adventism in their backgrounds automatically think of persecution as direct attacks against doctrinal beliefs. For example, as an Adventist I learned that eventually, Sabbath-keepers would be hunted and killed for their loyalty to the seventh day. I learned that we could expect to be threatened with life and limb if we chose to remain loyal to the Sabbath—the day that represented being sealed by God in a hostile, Sunday-loyal, Babylonish world.
Even people without Adventism in their heads often think of persecution as being personal attacks against Christians who refuse to renounce Jesus on pain of physical harm or death. Indeed, this definition is all too common in the world today and in history. Yet what if opposition to the gospel creeps up on us subtly, almost unnoticed?
What if Christian persecution doesn’t present itself openly at first but poses as a social or a cultural—or a health—issue?
What if Christian persecution doesn’t present itself openly at first but poses as a social or a cultural—or a health—issue? What if our worldview has set us up to ignore attacks on truth because they look like humanitarian or moral mandates for the greater good? How can we know if we are acting in truth and integrity or if we are being engulfed in an unseen wave of deception that seems unrelated to the gospel?
How are we to figure out what is true and real and faithful to our Lord and His kingdom?
The Lens
I can’t answer those questions for people in general, but I know this: when we are born again through believing in the gospel of Jesus’ finished work, our triune God seals us with His Spirit and teaches us to say no to ungodliness and to live self-controlled, upright lives (Tit. 2:12). He teaches us through His eternal, living word, and He changes our worldview by embedding His truth in us as we submit to Him and to Scripture.
Ultimately, our worldview is the lens through which we evaluate the world…
Ultimately, our worldview is the lens through which we evaluate the world and its mandates, and our reactions to current events are shaped by whatever we value as the most authentic source of authority.
For us who grew up Adventist, our worldview was shaped by Adventism. We may not have known that our expectations and definitions were shaped by a false prophet—we believed we stood on the Bible alone. Yet our understanding of reality was entirely defined by the deceptions of Ellen White’s interpretations of Scripture. She taught us that Jesus was fallible, that He didn’t complete the atonement on the cross, that the Law was the “transcript” of God’s character, and that our obedience to the Ten Commandments would fit us for heaven and vindicate God’s reputation.
She taught us that what we eat affected our ability to “hear” God and to be obedient, and these concerns mattered because, she said, we are on probation while Jesus finishes investigating the records of our lives. She taught us to read Scripture through her eyes, seeing ourselves instead of our sovereign God in its pages, and she taught us to fear the devil.
These deceptions “worked” because she also taught us that we are bodies plus breath with no immaterial spirit that survives death. In fact, she taught us that our sin was essentially our genetic inheritance that we could overcome by enough prayer and determination. She denied that we are depraved by nature, born utterly spiritually dead in sin, and that our great need is not to become good and obedient but to become ALIVE.
She didn’t teach us to trust the words of Scripture; she didn’t teach us to fear God.
She didn’t teach us to trust the words of Scripture; she didn’t teach us to fear God. She taught us that our eternal future rested squarely on our shoulders and depended upon our ability to be good—and she taught us that Satan would eventually carry our sins away and be punished for them.
Even if we didn’t know all these specifics of Ellen’s legacy, they shaped our concept of truth and gave us the belief that we knew better than all those Sunday-Christians what God expected of us. We had His inside track because we had His messenger—and we had the restored knowledge of the Sabbath and the second coming that the apostate Christians had forgotten. We had special knowledge, and that knowledge made US special. We knew we would be persecuted and punished for it, but that very persecution would validate what we believed.
Ellen’s great controversy paradigm gave us our sense of reality. The only problem was—she was utterly wrong. We deeply believed we knew God’s will, but we didn’t. In fact, everything on which we built our lives was a mirage. Our foundation was flawed, and sooner or later our worldview would crumble. Without divine intervention, we would be exposed as frauds and victimized by our own deception. We would be lost because we believed a false gospel and did not trust the real Jesus unto salvation.
Hope
Praise God, there is hope!
There actually IS a solid, immovable foundation on which to build our lives. There is real authority and eternal truth that can correct our worldview, and this source of reality is the “thing” that Adventism tried to destroy. This source of truth is God’s word, eternal and living and able to change us and give us the knowledge of Him who has completed the atonement for our sins and already sits at the right hand of the Father!
The Bible needs no modern-prophet interpreter. It is clear and means what it says, and its Author, the Holy Spirit, teaches us what is real and true. God’s word tells us the truth about ourselves, and it reveals the Savior we need. In fact, God’s word is the only tangible thing that He has given us in this world that never fails and that course-corrects humanity no matter what time or culture or circumstance defines the world.
As an Adventist I felt annoyed when people would counsel me to pray and read the Bible. These things, I was told, would help me make good decisions and become good myself. The problem with this counsel, though, was that the Adventists advising me believed the Bible—as I did—through the unconscious lens of Ellen’s interpretations.
Her great controversy worldview altered every single belief Adventism holds—beliefs which sound mostly Christian, but which, when examined systematically, reveal themselves to be twisted deceptions that blind Adventists with a false gospel and a weak Jesus and a powerful Satan. This Satan cunningly lures Adventists into a search for special knowledge—that intellectual flattery that they know what those Sunday-Christians can’t know because they have God’s last-day messenger to help them.
In fact, his deception to Adventists is the same one he used on Eve: he promised that she would have special knowledge if she ate the forbidden fruit: the knowledge of both good and evil. She would know more than if she merely believed God’s word and acted on it. Eve fell prey to the deception—and Adventists continue to succumb to it today. Ellen White has opened the door to “secret knowledge”, and with almost unconscious arrogance, Adventists believe they know what ordinary Christians don’t.
The fact is, however, that God’s word is our Lord’s provision for us. He doesn’t reveal all mysteries nor give us all the answers, but He tells us His will for us and asks us to trust Him. He has given us a book which declares itself to be God’s own word, alive and able to reveal our own hearts to us and to reveal God’s truth (2 Tim. 3:16; Heb. 4:12, 13; 1 Peter 1:23).
Often when people leave Adventism they lose their confidence in Scripture along with Ellen White. This doubt is built into Ellen’s warnings; she stated that her words would live on and would remain after her death, instructing Adventists by her counsels. She even warned that people who rejected her counsels would be rejecting God’s own words (Signs of the Times, July 13, 1882). If people refused her correction, she wrote, “they reject not the messenger, but the Lord” (Review and Herald, Jan. 8, 1884).
If Ellen’s inspiration proves false, if leaving her means leaving God, then God cannot be reliable, either.
If Ellen’s inspiration proves false, if leaving her means leaving God, then God cannot be reliable, either. Thus unbelief—this atheism—is built into Adventist theology.
God, however, is not like Ellen White, and His word is from Him—the sovereign Lord of all. He never tricks us, and He never lies. If we pursue His word contextually, understanding that the words mean what the words say and we don’t have to try to make them mean anything other than their plain meanings, He will correct our confused beliefs and plant us in reality.
As we pursue His word we learn that He has told us what He wants us to know. We don’t have to speculate about end-time deception or look for legislation against our doctrines. Instead, we keep our eyes on Him and know that His death, burial, and resurrection have destroyed the one who held us in the fear of death—the devil (Heb. 2:14).
Our Adventist-skewed view of reality taught us to look for specific kinds of trouble, but Satan, our disarmed and humiliated foe (Col 2:15), will use even subtle deceptions. What God’s word gives us is protection from our own fear, and it gives us the ability to see what is real even when the world doesn’t look like what we were taught to expect. Freed from our programmed expectations of end-time persecution, we can see God’s commands to us to live for Him, honoring His body sacrificially as we commit to doing the work He has given us to do. We can see how the world is subtly encroaching on our identity in Christ, and by trusting Him, He will comfort and direct us through His own words as we navigate unsettling territory.
As Christians we are called to trust our Head who directs and protects His body. We answer to Him, and all other honor and obedience are secondary to our obedience to Him.
As former Adventists we know that trusting Jesus may require loyalty to Jesus that separates us from all we know and love. We may lose what is most precious to us in this world—but when we trust Him and know that His word cannot fail and His promises will be fulfilled, we know that our submission to the Lord Jesus is the only way we can live in peace.
We know the Bible tells us hard times will come, and loyalty to the Lord Jesus will trigger hostility. Yet we also know that the Lord Jesus will never leave us. He gives us truth and reality as we navigate this uncertain life, and our eternity is secure. We can obey His directions without fear, because He holds us, and He holds the future. Nothing can take us out of His hand. †
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