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 6: “For What Nation Is There So Great?”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems With This Lesson:
- It states that the Decalogue is eternal and universal.
- It equates not adding or taking away from the word Moses was giving with changing Sabbath to Sunday, destroying the levitical food laws, and so forth.
- It emphasizes that Satan’s purpose is to get people to cast aside the law or one of its precepts.
This week’s lesson focusses on Deuteronomy 4 in which Moses urges Israel to obey the statutes of the covenant which God made with Israel. Ironically, the author camps on verse 2:
You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you (Deuteronomy 4:2).
With a measure of pride, the author mentions Christians’ changing Sabbath to Sunday as an example of breaking this command and asks the readers to think of other ways people change the law. The great irony, however, is that the lesson doesn’t even notice that the authors’ take pains to explain how today, the law can be seen in three parts. The eternal and universal parts of the law, they say in the Teachers Comments, are the Decalogue and the dietary laws. These, they say are “still applicable to any human being.”
The ceremonial law, they explain, are related to the temple and the sacrifices, and these “were bound to disappear” with the temple. The third type of laws they call the “circumstantial laws” which, they explain, “were bound to lose their normative character as soon as the ‘circumstances’ that generated them did not exist anymore. They explain:
This is, for instance, the case for the laws concerning the slaves and the way to dress, to till the land, to organize, and to administer the city. These last two categories of laws (ceremonial and circumstantial) were not designed to be observed forever. On the other hand, the Decalogue and the dietary laws do not belong to the ceremonial laws or to the circumstantial laws. These laws have nothing to do with the sacrifices.
This division of the law into time-specific laws and eternal, universal laws is entirely imposed upon Scripture. Nowhere in either the Old or the New Testaments is this sort of division authorized or assumed. Adventism, however, has built its unique doctrines on its internal commitment to explaining that God’s law has been changed since He gave it in Exodus and repeated it in Deuteronomy.
They have blatantly interpreted the law and removed whatever does not fit their theology. Moreover, they have utterly ignored Scripture’s teaching that Jesus came to FULFILL the law. Even more, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus addressed the law and said, “You have heard it said…but I say to you…”
Jesus clearly did what Deuteronomy 4:2 said no one could do. How could he get away with adding to the law? How could he say that one who lusted in his or her heart committed adultery? The law never said such a bold thing!
Jesus was demonstrating that He Is God! No mere man could add to or subtract from the law, but Jesus had the authority to change the law. He was the giver of the Decalogue, and He was also its Fulfiller. As God, He had the authority to declare truth and reality and to identify the depths of human sin. He alone had the authority to issue a new law—a law that can only be honored in the context of a person’s being born again and sealed by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Adventism, however, sees this warning in Deuteronomy not to add to nor subtract from the law through its own false gospel paradigm. It doesn’t even SEE that Adventism itself has both added and subtracted from the law and has ignored the reality stated in Hebrews 7:12:
For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well.
When Jesus fulfilled the law and completed the atonement for human sin by His death, burial, and resurrection, He ushered in a new law. The old law which Adventism insists is eternal and universal is now obsolete (Heb. 8:13). Now we who believe live under the law of Christ:
To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law (1 Corinthians 9:21).
Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load (Galatians 6:2–5).
The New Testament explains that the law given to Israel was neither eternal nor universal. Even more, Adventism arbitrarily extracts the Ten Commandments and the dietary laws, of all things, and tries to argue with logic that they apply to everyone!
Believers who are born again are not under any part of the law. Our new law, the Law of Christ, contains many of the moral commands of the old law, but its standards are even higher, even more impossible! In fact, the new law is only for those who are born again, and only the born again can live within its paradigm.
Adventism clearly tramples on the terms of Deuteronomy 4:2, and it does so with no sense of its own compromise and disobedience. Even more, Adventism denies the Law of Christ, the new law which the Lord Jesus inaugurated by His own death, burial, and resurrection. Moreover, concurrently with rejecting the gospel and the new law Jesus gave us, it creates its own new law by appropriating the levitical dietary laws for itself—without a levitical priesthood or the levitical rituals which were attached to the food laws, and attaching them to the Ten Commandments taken out of context.
Underlying its unlawful use of the law and its own transgression of the command not to change it is Adventism’s commitment to EGW’s “great controversy model” and its blind adherence to her putting Satan on center stage. Adventism insists that it keeps the law in opposition to Satan’s purpose to destroy the law and cause people to break it.
In focussing on the law and twisting it to fit its own great controversy paradigm, Adventism eclipses Jesus. They blindly turn away from His authority, His completely divine identity, His full atonement announced by His resurrection from the dead, and it sees the Mosaic law as the focal point of its religion.
Adventism worries about Satan instead of fearing God. If Adventists understood God’s holiness and sovereignty, they wouldn’t be able to give Satan center stage or keep the law as the apple of their eyes.
Once again, the Sabbath School lesson misses the point of the passage it uses to appropriate the law and to alter it to fit their religion. †
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