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 7: “Law And Grace”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- Moral beings need a moral law to define morality; thus the moral law existed in heaven from eternity.
- The refusal to see the Mosaic law as temporary for a specific time and people.
- The equation of the Ten Commandments with God’s word and the Law of Christ.
- The equation of the law with grace: “The law is grace…”
This lesson is pure confusion. Underlying Adventism’s entire framework of teaching an eternal law that is necessary and required is their exalting the law to the status that only God has: eternal. In making the law eternal, they have also succeeded in making its power greater than the power of God. The lesson teaches that without the law, no human can know what is moral; without the law no human can avoid sin, and without the law no one would know God’s character.
In fact, these assumptions deny Scripture and rewrite reality. First, the Ten Commandments are defined in the book of Exodus as the very “words of the covenant”:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” So he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights. He neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:27–28).
Thus we see that the Ten Commandments are not eternal and are not an overarching principle upon which God made His supposedly eternal covenant. Rather, they were the very words of the Mosaic covenant. They were not principles underlying the covenant nor its foundation, as the lesson portrays; they were the actual covenant.
When the Mosaic covenant was renewed in Deuteronomy with the wilderness generation, they did not get a new covenant; they had the old one restated. They received the very same Ten Commandments (Deut. 5), and thus the very same covenant. They received the same terms of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience that their fathers received when they were at Sinai.
Furthermore, Galatians describes the time frame of the law. It had a specific beginning and a specific ending, and the Law did not affect the terms of God’s covenant with Abraham nor become part of the Abrahamic covenant. Paul explains:
To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise (Galatians 3:15–18).
God’s promises to Abraham (read Genesis 15) were UNCONDITIONAL and eternal. Nothing undoes those promises—not even the law which was given to Israel 430 years AFTER God made His covenant with Abraham. In fact, the law, which God first gave on Mt. Sinai 430 years after Abraham, only lasted until the Seed—the Messiah—came. When He came, He ushered in another covenant in His own blood: the new covenant. It also was UNCONDITIONAL and eternal, and it fulfilled many of the promises of God to Abraham.
The unconditional covenants God made with Abraham and with Israel when He brought the Messiah who inaugurated the New covenant did not incorporate nor negate the Mosaic covenant. In fact, the Mosaic covenant ran concurrent to the promises God made to Abraham. The terms of these two covenants did not overlap but coexisted.
God Is The Eternal Definer
God Himself, not the Law, defines morality and teaches it to His sentient creatures. God did not give Adam the Ten Commandments, but He gave him the law He made just for him and Eve: Do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He even told Adam why he should not eat of it: if he did, he would die the day he ate.
There were no other laws He gave Adam—but Adam was sinless. He did not have any twisted desires and habits that drove him to perversion. He had God’s life in himself, and He knew God! Knowing God is the THING that keeps people from sin. Believing God is what places us in the right relationship with God. Like Abraham, who believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:6), every other person in the history of the world who believed God and acted on the truth of His word and revelation has been counted righteous.
Righteousness has NEVER been defined nor demonstrated by law-keeping (Rom. 3:20, 21). Furthermore, the law is NEVER defined as revealing the “character of God”, or the transcript of His character. Instead, Scripture shows us that the Lord Jesus is the very image of God. If we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. The law never reveals God. Jesus reveals God because Jesus IS GOD.
On the contrary, the law reveals human SIN. Adventism has gotten this exactly backwards. They say it reveals God and draws us into Him so that people know Him. Scripture tells us that believing/trusting in Jesus is what reveals God.
Notice Paul’s words in Romans 7:5–9:
For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.
Notice that Paul says Christians have died to the law, that the law awakened people’s awareness of sin in them and their inability to avoid sin. Furthermore, he even says that without the law, “sin lies dead”. He says further that without the law, he wouldn’t have known what sin was.
In fact, he says that death—which is the consequence of sin—reigned in humanity from Adam until Moses, but until the law was given sin was not imputed (Rom. 5:13, 14). In other words, mankind was bound in sin and death from Adam until God gave the law on Sinai, but in general, no one knew that their specific sins were actually SINS. The law came to reveal that they were sinners, and it revealed that God was providing atonement for human sin.
Adventism, however, says that the law is eternal and reveals GOD and morality. NO! God Himself, the triune God, reveals Himself and places His morality in human hearts. The law never reveled morality. It held Israel inside its boundaries, rigidly, to protect them from their own sinful selves and to keep them separate from the pagan world until the Savior came who became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him! When Jesus came and completed the atonement for sin, the law was fulfilled. It is now obsolete! (See Hebrews 8.)
Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit would come, He—not the law—would reveal sin and righteousness and judgment to the WORLD. He didn’t say the Spirit would reveal these things to the church, to believers, but to the WORLD—Unbelievers! (See John 16:8–11.) In other words, Jesus’ fulfilling of the law fulfilled every function of the law. With the coming of the Holy Spirit after Jesus’ ascension, God Himself would reveal peoples’ sin to them through the work of the Holy Spirit and the revelation of His own word, not just of the Ten Commandments. The Decalogue is merely a part of the whole counsel of God’s word, and the Holy Spirit convinces humans of sin and truth using the whole of Scripture.
Galatians further explains that when people turn back to the law from believing in Christ, they return to worldly elemental things; it is the same as returning to paganism (Gal. 4:8–11), and the person is severed from Christ (Gal. 5:4).
Adventism teaches that “accepting Jesus” leads people to God’s “requirement” to keep the law. In fact, this conclusion is simply false. The law was temporary and was intended to reveal sin and to serve as a guardian to keep Israel safe from paganism until the Seed would come.
The law—including the Ten Commandments which cannot be separated from the rest of the law—cannot exist without the sacrificial system and the levitical priesthood. In fact, the book of Hebrews explains how all of these parts of the law are fulfilled in Jesus, and with Jesus now being our new High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, there had to be a Change of the Law (Heb. 7:12). The Ten Commandments are not authoritative without the levitical priesthood!
The Law is not grace, as the lesson claims. Grace is an attribute of God, and it is summed up in Jesus’ incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection. We are all born dead in sin (Eph. 2:1-3), citizens of the domain of darkness (Col 1:13, condemned already (Jn. 3:18). When we believe and trust in Jesus, we pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24). We do not into condemnation (Jn. 3:18), and we are transferred into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13).
God’s grace is the Lord Jesus and His propitiation for our sin. The law was His covenant with Israel which served to show Israel its sin and to separate them from the rank paganism of the surrounding nations. It revealed their need for a Savior and God’s intention that His people worship HIM, not idols of their choosing.
The law is not grace, and grace does not lead believers to the law. Rather, Jesus fulfilled the law, and now we answer to Him. If we look back, like Lot’s wife, and return to the law, we are severed from Christ and fall from grace.
Adventism keeps its members in the bondage of the law and tries to prevent their seeing their true need and the work of Jesus.
Believe Scripture; Jesus has done everything necessary for our salvation! Believe Him! †
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