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 9: “Turn Their Hearts”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems With This Lesson:
- Limiting God’s ability to act within the paradigm of the great controversy
- Exaltation of man’s supposed free will and daily repentance
- No understanding of the new birth and belief in the gospel
Once again, this week’s Sabbath School lesson utterly misses the fact that Deuteronomy reflects the terms of the Mosaic, or the old covenant—and that the Mosaic covenant does not apply to people on this side of the cross.
The author has consistently attempted to apply the terms of the “renewed” covenant Moses restated to the wilderness generation with the new covenant the church inherits. This equation is false. The Mosaic covenant was conditional and temporary; it was given by God through Moses on Mt Sinai in its first iteration to the people rescued from slavery in Egypt. The covenant was two-way and included promises made by both God and nation Israel.
When that first generation failed to keep its terms of the covenant and distrusted God’s promises in the wilderness, God disciplined them by refusing to allow them to enter the Promised Land. That first generation died in the desert as the nation wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. As the 40 years neared their end, the next generation had grown up and was ready to take the land.
God through Moses reiterated the Mosaic covenant to them, reminding them of the covenant’s terms: blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience—and the covenant included provisions for blood sacrifices to atone for sin and the levitical priesthood to mediate God’s word and will and forgiveness to the nation. The book of Deuteronomy is the restatement of the covenant to the wilderness generation. It is not a new covenant but the same one with exactly the same terms.
Moreover, Moses prophesied that Israel would ultimately disobey God and be exiled from their Promised Land. Yet God would keep His word and promise to Abraham—His UNCONDITIONAL covenant with Israel’s father, and God would one day circumcise Israel’s hearts and turn them toward the Lord.
The lesson, in keeping with Adventism’s doctrines, denies that the Mosaic covenant was temporary or that it was not somehow inserted into God’s covenant with Abraham. Galatians 3, however, explains that the Mosaic covenant was made 430 years AFTER Abraham and would last only until the Seed would come. Moreover, Paul details that the law given to Israel does not negate God’s promises to Abraham. Rather, the promises are superior to the legal requirements of the Mosaic covenant, and God’s true people will be people who believe God by faith, as Abraham did—not those who continue to try to define their righteousness by the law.
A limited god
The tone for the lesson is set in Sunday’s lesson. On page 12 the author says this:
“Biblical Hebrew, like most languages, is sprinkled with idioms, when specific words are used to mean something different from what they actually say. One idiom in the Old Testament is Mi-yitten. Mi is the question “who?” and yitten means “will give.” So, literally, Mi-yitten is “Who will give?”…
“Here is the Lord—the Creator God, the One who made space, time, and matter, the One who spoke our world into existence, the One who breathed into Adam the breath of life—uttering a phrase generally associated with the weaknesses and limitations of humanity. What an example of the reality of free will! Here we see that there are limits to what God can do in the midst of the great controversy. This use of mi- yitten reveals that even God can’t trample on free will; for the moment He did, it would no longer be free.
And just as we humans are free to sin, we also are free to choose the Lord, to choose to be open to His leading, to choose, by responding to His Spirit, to repent from our sins and to follow Him. Ultimately the choice is ours, and ours alone, and it is a choice that we have to make day by day, moment by moment.”
Then the day’s lesson ends with these questions: “What are some of the choices that you are going to face in the next few hours or days? How can you learn to surrender your will to God so that, in His strength, you can make the right choices?”
Here the lesson reveals the foundation that renders all its arguments false. First, there is no great controversy. The Adventist paradigm of Christ and Satan engaged in an ongoing battle for souls which, if Christ wins with the help of believers, will vindicate God’s character and the validity of the Ten Commandments, is heresy.
Jesus disarmed Satan at the cross and humiliated him publicly (Col 2:15). There is no cosmic question about God’s fairness or character, nor is there any question about the role of the law. The law is not eternal; only God Himself is eternal. The law was given at Sinai, not in eternity past. Satan did not sin by breaking the Commandments, and Adam and Eve did not sin by breaking the commandments.
Satan is already a defeated foe, and Jesus is already seated at the right hand of the Father where He is abolishing all rule and authority and power and putting all His enemies under His feet (1 Cor. 15: 24–28().
Further, humanity is not born with sovereign free will. We are all born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:1–3), unable to seek, please, or know God (Rom. 3:9–15). We must be brought to LIFE by God Himself intersecting our darkness and granting us repentance.
The lesson assumes that repentance is a choice—a decision to turn from one’s habits and sins and to give them up, keeping the law instead. We are born depraved—a spiritual reality that Adventism denies (because Adventism denies humanity’s spiritual nature), and we are not able to transcend our natures to seek and know God.
Jesus said no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him (Jn. 6:44). Further, when the Father draws us to Himself, we are drawn to BELIEVE, not to keep the law. Jesus said the work of God was to believe the One whom He sent (Jn. 6:29).
Moreover, repentance is not a free-will decision that we make when we get enough information to decide to fall into line. True repentance is a gift from God, something we cannot do without His intervention.
In Acts 5, after Peter was released from prison by an angel, he and the apostles were in the temple the next day teaching the gospel of the Lord Jesus. The priests were angry, and this exchange ensued:
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:27–32).
Peter clearly stated that Jesus died and rose from the dead and was exalted to the Father’s right hand as “Leader and Savior”. Then he gave the reason for Jesus’ death, resurrection, and exaltation: “to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.”
Repentance is a gift granted by God, facilitated by the finished atonement purchased by Christ’s blood and by His resurrection!
Even in the Old Testament repentance was granted by God; David, for example, repented of his sin when the Lord confronted him with it. Repentance is a heart change that comes as a result of a person’s responding to God’s conviction and intervention in one’s spiritual darkness.
Adventism presents repentance as a choice, a decision based upon getting all the information needed to see that the Sabbath is required and to adopt the notion that the great controversy is really a “thing” and that Jesus’ death was done to vindicate the law.
Adventism does not teach the finished work of Jesus, and it does not teach that the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation was to propitiate for human sin and to take God’s wrath against sin. Rather, they teach that Jesus’ life and death were examples for how to live righteous lives.
We are not able to live righteous lives. We can only respond to God’s conviction and revelation of our own NEED, granting us repentance and making us alive in Him.
Our need is not to obey the law. Our need is to be made alive through faith in the Lord Jesus and His finished work!
No one can “surrender your will to God so that, in His strength, you can make the right choices.” We can only submit to God’s own revelation of His Son as revealed in His word. We can only allow the Holy Spirit to convict us of our need and of our sin, of our inability to please God, and to trust that the Lord Jesus has truly done all we need to have new life.
Adventism puts people in bondage to the law, living their lives on a treadmill of failed efforts to please God and to “make right choices”. But our need is not to “be good”. In fact, God will not make us good, no matter how hard we plead!
Instead, He will make us alive. He will give us faith to believe, spiritual sight to know our need, and grant us repentance when we believe His word and trust His Spirit’s conviction.
This lesson keeps people’s eyes on themselves, on their own attempts to live clean and obedient lives so that they’ll do God’s will. This attempt to please God will never happen.
We can only believe Him when He says we are dead in sin, unable to please Him, condemned already because we have not believed—and then to trust Him when He shows us who we are and who Jesus is.
Only in trusting and believing the gospel of our salvation will be find new life and enter a completely new existence. Only in believing will we be born again and sealed with the Holy Spirit.
I appeal to the reader: abandon the quarterly and read Scripture alone. Begin with Galatians and move to Hebrews and then to John. Ask God to reveal reality and truth, and trust Him. He will never trick you nor deceive you.
You can have new life in Jesus alone. †
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