COLLEEN TINKER
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
I wondered, as an Adventist, why Jesus had to become human. On the one hand, I understood that as our creator, He had to take cosmic responsibility for dealing with us wayward creatures. After all, He couldn’t blame anyone but Himself for our very existence. He had made us, and we had gone astray. What’s a creator to do when His creation malfunctions?
I believed that God was loving and merciful, that His nature was to be forgiving and gracious. It seemed to me that He could have dealt with us and our sin without the complication of Jesus becoming flesh. He had every right to punish or to forgive us simply as God.
I did understand the Adventist argument that Jesus came as a man in order to make God more accessible, more visible to us. Because we could see Jesus living as a man, never sinning, honoring the law, and suffering silently without retaliation, we could see the kindness of God better. With Jesus as our example, we could see that we, too, could become more like God—and frankly, we were taught that we were to dedicate our lives to becoming more obedient and more sinless, imitating Jesus increasingly until we attained as much Christ-likeness as we could possibly attain by the time we died.
After that, Jesus would “make up the difference” for us—if we had done our best in this life.
Yes, I understood that Jesus’ blood was “necessary” for our sins to be forgiven, but my Adventist understanding of Jesus “paying for my sin” was a guilt-producing belief.
Yes, I understood that Jesus’ blood was “necessary” for our sins to be forgiven, but my Adventist understanding of Jesus “paying for my sin” was a guilt-producing belief. If Jesus did all that for me, if my sin caused Him all that suffering, then what could I do to repay Him besides committing to obey and be good to the best of my ability? My obedience would demonstrate my gratitude and my desire to be saved.
Yet, when I really thought about it, I still couldn’t figure out why Jesus had to become human except as an example for me. His suffering was an almost manipulative demonstration of His great condescension made necessary because of my great sin. As creator, He had a right to decide to forgive me, I reasoned, but as a man—Jesus’ sinless humanity shaped the core of my shame. His perfection was a constant reminder of my failure, and try as I might, I could never pray enough or depend on God enough to avoid sin.
No Propitiation
I will never forget when I first understood why Jesus became a man. Richard and I had been out of Adventism for about three years, and we were studying the book of Hebrews in our weekly Former Adventist Bible studies. I remember the day I read Hebrews 2:14, 15 as if for the first time:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
That was the moment the Lord opened my eyes and I saw that Jesus became a man because we wayward creatures were men and women! His becoming flesh was not for the purpose of figuratively rubbing our noses in our hopeless entanglement with sin, showing us that we could be righteous law-keepers if we just prayed enough. Quite the opposite: Jesus was not our example of how to be good; rather, He was our SUBSTITUTE! He came literally to die a human death because we humans were sentenced to death.
I couldn’t escape my death sentence because I couldn’t escape my sin. I was in slavery to the devil and condemned from birth (John 3:18; Ephesians 2:1–3). I couldn’t become good by following Jesus’ example. I was doomed—and there was no escape unless a human could be found who could stand in for me—not on the basis of perfect law-keeping but on the basis of being intrinsically righteous. This righteous Substitute was the only one who could actually PAY for human sin! He was the substance represented by all those lambs without blemish that the Levitical priests slaughtered as sin offerings for Israel.
He was righteous because He was God—and because as a man He was spiritually alive, not dead in sin. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, He was not born condemned. He was born SINLESS and alive, and His perfect obedience was a reflection of His intrinsic righteousness, not the accomplishment of a perfectly disciplined man who had to vindicate the law by showing it wasn’t too hard to keep!
Jesus was intrinsically righteous—He was fully God with all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, by the way—and His righteousness was NOT measured or credited to Him on the basis of His perfect law keeping, nor was His law-keeping even the “proof” of His righteousness.
At the same time, Jesus was fully man from the tribe of Judah, conceived by the Holy Spirit so He had spiritual life from the moment of conception. He was the only human ever born who did not need to be made alive—born again. He was sinless because He was spiritually alive. He was able to obey not because he “overcame” His flesh but because He had absolutely no desire or taste for sin. He desired only to serve His Father, and His perfect law-keeping revealed His identity instead of imparting His identity.
That day when I “saw” Hebrews 2;14, 15 for the first time, I realized exactly why Jesus had to be human. He had to die a human death in order to pay for human sin and thus to disarm Satan. It wasn’t enough that God is “forgiving” and able to forgive sin because He’s such a nice guy. In fact, it is God’s own law that states if a human sins, he must die.
God’s can’t negate His own consequences for our rebellion…If God had simply suspended His death sentence, He wouldn’t have been just.
God’s can’t negate His own consequences for our rebellion. He can’t just decide that He’ll suspend His judgment and our punishment because He can’t bear to lose us. In fact, his eternal righteousness says that the soul that sins shall die—and a death HAD to occur in order to carry out justice. If God had simply suspended His death sentence, He wouldn’t have been just.
Jesus—God the Son—became human so that He could die. He came to fulfill the law’s death sentence for all who believe in Him. The law had always foreshadowed a perfect, sufficient death for the sins of God’s people, but it wasn’t until God the Son came in human flesh that all those lambs became obsolete.
The Heresy of Jesus As Example
Hebrews 2 opened my eyes to be able to see the dark heresy of Adventist soteriology. First, while Adventism had taught me that God was “loving” and “forgiving”, that declaration had no substance. How can a loving and forgiving God be a just God if He dismisses people’s sins against Him without any consequence? Even we Adventists knew that if another person abused us or embezzled money from us, justice demanded that he or she be punished somehow and made to “pay”. Even we understood that Hitler’s genocidal evil couldn’t be dismissed by a wave of compassion.
Adventism had taught me that the law defined righteousness and revealed the character of God. The Adventist Jesus, therefore, came and vindicated the the law’s reputation which had been disparaged by Satan who supposedly claimed it was unfair—too hard to keep.
God, Adventism reasoned (on the authority of its prophet Ellen White) would never give a law that was too hard for us mortals to keep. Therefore, He sent His son Jesus to show us both that it could be kept and how to do it.
The problem with Jesus coming to show us how to keep the law, though, was that I could never live up to His example. In fact, Jesus’ perfect law-keeping condemned me! He was the Example that demonstrated over and over that I was fatally flawed. No matter how hard I tried, how much I prayed, how religiously I asked for the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to help me, I kept breaking the law.
The gentle Jesus, meek and mild, whom my Adventists eyes saw sailing through the pages of the gospels doing good, overcoming temptation, and spending whole nights in prayer, did not “feel” like a Savior to me.
The gentle Jesus, meek and mild, whom my Adventists eyes saw sailing through the pages of the gospels doing good, overcoming temptation, and spending whole nights in prayer, did not “feel” like a Savior to me. Instead He felt like the proof of my unworthiness. He gave up His God-glory and let bad people kill Him—for what?
Apparently, He came to reveal how evil we humans really were and to challenge us to follow His example. Furthermore, His blood was the means of moving my sin away from me and into heaven if I remembered to confess my sins. His death made Him the innocent but willing victim of my sin.
In other words, He became the vehicle of removing my confessed sins from me so they could finally be placed on the real culprit: Satan the scapegoat. After all, Satan caused my sin in the first place. Poor Jesus: within the Adventist paradigm, He concurrently revealed my sin by the contrast of His perfection, and He became the suffering victim who chose to die in order to pardon me by moving my sin from me onto the archenemy!
Hebrews 2:14, 15, however, suddenly revealed something different. The Jesus who partook of human flesh and blood so that, through death, He would “render powerless him who held the power of death, that is the devil,” was NOT the Adventist Jesus! The Adventist Jesus did not render Satan powerless. Quite the contrary; in Adventism, Satan wielded the ultimate power and paid the ultimate price.
The Adventist devil holds the responsibility for human sin, and the Adventist Jesus is the kind-hearted Good Samaritan who sacrifices Himself to make sure the powerful devil gets what’s coming to him: punishment in the Lake of Fire for our sin! In other words, the Adventist Jesus is not almighty, all-powerful God the Son who took responsibility for the sins of the world and took the wrath of God, dying the death humanity deserves. Rather, the Adventist Jesus plays the self-chosen role of a martyr who makes it possible for our mutual abuser to be punished for causing our suffering. Poor Jesus!
In Adventism, Example Jesus controls us with guilt. Oh, Adventists would never explain their soteriology this way, but in practice guilt is how it works. Perfect Jesus is always in front of us, his perfect law-keeping condemning us and challenging us to do better.
Furthermore, in Adventism the law represents God. The Ten Commandments always remind us of God’s character and His righteous demands that we be perfect like He is perfect. “Keep the law like Jesus kept it” is the operating principle in Adventism. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, and be perfect. Be overcomers like Jesus overcame! Remember that Jesus is coming back and GET READY! He is coming for those who obey the law and whose characters display the righteousness of Christ!”
In other words, in Adventism the righteous law reveals God, and Perfect Jesus reveals our sin. He is the elder brother whose goodness condemns us. We can never live up to His example—and ultimately He sacrifices Himself to save us from being destroyed by the sins which were never really our fault, anyway. The devil made us do them.
The Deception Revealed
Hebrews 2 began my understanding of why Jesus had to be human, but the cascade of truth that Scripture revealed after I “saw” that text has changed me and has evoked gratitude and worship I had not thought possible. It has also given me clarity on the evil camouflaged in the heart of Adventism. My former religion is not just misinformed; it is malevolent. It does not originate in the sovereign God of all; it is the fruit of the deceiver.
Scripture tells us that the law, not Jesus, reveals our sin. Look at these verses Paul writes:
Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.
Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith (Galatians 3:19–26).
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come (Romans 5:12–14).
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. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:7–12).
The passage in Romans 5:12–14 above is clear: the law was not given prior to Moses. In fact, Paul states that sin was “not counted”, or as the NASB says, “not imputed” where there is no law. In other words, before God gave the law on Mt. Sinai, the sins defined by the law were not imputed to people because they were not defined.
Oh, sin reigned in the world in spite of there being no law. Paul is clear about that fact as well! God had said that if Adam ate the fruit, he would die—and he did. He died that very day; his spirit disconnected from God’s life and died. That spiritual death is the legacy of every single human ever born—except for the incarnate Lord Jesus! But the law is what REVEALED sin to humanity. It defined sin, and it also foreshadowed that only a blood sacrifice could ever remove sin from humanity.
Paul says that God gave the law because of transgressions. He gave the law to reveal sin and to actually increase sin, as he explains in Romans 7:7–12 above. In fact, Paul says that if the law hadn’t been given, he wouldn’t even have known what coveting was—but when he realized that coveting was sin, he became aware of coveting and realized he coveted more than ever before!
No, the law was NEVER the revelation of God’s character. It was ALWAYS the discloser and definer of human sin! It was given to convict humans that they were sinners, to define their sin, and to drive them to despair because they couldn’t overcome their sin!
In fact, Paul says this about humans in Romans 3:9–18:Romans 3:9–18
What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good,not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.:
“Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
We are by nature unable to seek, please, or honor God. In fact, we are by nature “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). The law has never caused mankind to see God’s character or to know who He is. It has always been for the purpose of revealing the true nature of sinful humanity!
The law condemns us. It was never intended to be our “destination”. It was always for the purpose of revealing our need of a Savior—and it is our Savior, not the law, who reveals the character of God.
Adventism says that accepting Jesus makes it possible to keep the law, that in the law we see God and know Him as we obey. The Bible, though, says that the law was given to lead us to Christ, and when we come to Him and trust Him, we are no longer under the law.
Adventism teaches these things exactly backwards and upside-down. Jesus does not reveal our sin and deliver us to the law and thus to God. On the contrary, the law led people to Christ, and in Christ we know God. We don’t know His character in or through the law; we know who God is in Christ.
Jesus, fully God, came to us in human flesh. He did not come to show us how to keep the law and thus become sinless; He came and kept the law because He was sinless in His nature. Moreover, He kept the law and thus fulfilled it, not only fulfilling its behavior requirements but also fulfilling all its shadows contained in every law and ceremony! He came and REVEALED Himself by keeping the law! No other human ever has kept the law completely. His perfect obedience showed that He was the Promised One!
What Jesus Did
When Jesus came and took on human flesh, He received a body so that He could die the human death required to propitiate for human sin. God couldn’t just wave away His own decree and declare sinful humans to be forgiven. There would be no justice in such a move.
Rather, Jesus came as the Sinless One and “became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor 5:21). He revealed the Father and the Father’s grace by taking a human nature and literally taking our imputed sin into Himself as He hung on the cross. He took our sin and became sin for us. He didn’t merely transfer our sin to heaven and place it then on the devil.
Satan plays absolutely no role whatsoever in our salvation or forgiveness. He is not responsible for human sin; we are personally responsible for our own sin! Jesus took responsibility for the depravity of mankind and redeemed it by coming to earth as a sinless human, by taking our sin into Himself, and then by dying the death His own decree demanded. Jesus took God’s wrath against human sin, and He broke the curse: death!
Jesus came literally to redeem us by taking the responsibility of human sin—and no one except a spiritually alive, never-depraved human who could not fail could free us from the curse of our natures!
Adventism has made Jesus to be the pathetic one who suffered because of us before offloading the curse onto his archenemy, Satan. This scenario is blasphemy.
Jesus came as our Redeemer. He didn’t just come to suffer because of us; He came to restore us to LIFE. He came to break the curse which He Himself imposed on mankind for our sin, and by dying our death, He satisfied the Father and displayed His sufficient sacrifice by rising from the dead!
Jesus didn’t come as the incarnate Messiah in order to vindicate the law or to show us how to live. Rather, He came for one purpose: to die as a man to redeem us from our sin.
Jesus didn’t come as the incarnate Messiah in order to vindicate the law or to show us how to live. Rather, He came for one purpose: to die as a man to redeem us from our sin.
Adventism doesn’t like to juxtapose Christmas with the cross, but that reluctance demonstrates Adventism’s refusal to recognize Jesus’ finished atonement. Jesus’ blood is annoying to many Adventists, but in reality, His blood is the most amazing demonstration of grace and strength ever displayed on this earth.
Jesus came to die, and by dying He fulfilled the law. He paid the price and broke the curse, and by rising from the dead He has brought all who believe to life in Him. He has rescued us from the curse of the law, and He has placed us in a new kingdom. In coming to die and in breaking the curse of death, Jesus showed us God’s character.
Jesus, not the law, reveals God, and the law, not Jesus, reveals our sin.
This Christmas season I realize again that Adventism gave me the wrong Jesus. Reality, though, reveals the REAL Jesus: the One who knows my need and my suffering and opens my heart to receive Him.
Jesus has set me free from the fear of death and the accusations devil. He has destroyed Satan’s only weapon against me—the law—by fulfilling its terms and taking its penalty. I know I am alive in Him, and I know the Father has adopted me! I praise God for sending His Son in the likeness of human flesh for the purpose of disarming Satan and redeeming humanity.
I pray that you will see the real Jesus this Christmas, that the Holy Spirit will open your eyes to see the miracle of the incarnation, of God becoming man so that He could die a human death to atone for human sin.
God has come to us. The Word has become flesh and has dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory—the glory of the One and Only from the Father! Come, let us adore Him. †
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