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 3: “The Promised Son”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- While claiming Jesus is eternal and is God, it diminishes Him and says His work is fighting for and representing us.
- The lesson assumes the old covenant is not fulfilled until the second coming.
- It states what God did for Jesus, He wants to do for us—equating our position with God to Jesus’ position.
For further study: Former Adventist Podcast “It’s Not About the Sabbath—Hebrews 3”
This lesson reveals Adventism’s dilemma with the book of Hebrews and its commitment to Ellen White. Hebrews actually contradicts Ellen White’s claims, but Adventism cannot deny either Hebrews overtly nor EGW; consequently they teach double-speak with vague reasoning that attempts to affirm Jesus’ eternality while maintaining EGW’s anti-trinitarian viewpoint.
For example, in Sunday’s lesson the author attempts to show that “Paul believed he was living in ‘the east days,’ and the lesson tries to say God’s promises to the “spiritual fathers” were fulfilled in Jesus. Look at this last paragraph in the day’s lesson:
Let’s think for a moment about God’s promises and Jesus. The Father promised that He would resurrect His children (1 Thess. 4:15, 16). The wonderful news is that He initiated the resurrection of His children with the resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 15:20, Matt. 27:51–53). The Father also promised a new creation (Isa. 65:17). He has begun to fulfill that promise by creating a new spiritual life in us (2 Cor. 5:17, Gal. 6:15). He promised that He would establish His final kingdom (Dan. 2:44). He inaugurated that kingdom by delivering us from the power of Satan and installing Jesus as our Ruler (Matt. 12:28–30, Luke 10:18–20). This is only the beginning, however. What the Father began to do at Jesus’ first coming, He will bring to completion at His second.
Notice that the paragraph ends the day’s lesson with the statement that what “the Father began to do at Jesus’ first coming He will bring to completion at His second.” To be sure, there is an element of truth in that sentence. The eternal kingdom—not to mention the millennial kingdom—will not be fulfilled until after Jesus returns. But this lesson—not merely in Sunday’s teaching but in the whole week’s presentation—completely ignores the fact that the old covenant came to an end in the Lord Jesus.
Some Adventists overtly state that the old covenant’s promises will not be fulfilled until the second coming—that the eternal rest God promised will not come to pass until people live in the New Jerusalem. Yet this statement is proven false by—ironically—the book of Hebrews itself! Chapters three and four and, indeed chapter 8 with its clear statement that the old covenant is obsolete and a new and better covenant has come render Adventism’s claims utterly false.
Yet this lesson attempts to uphold those claims while confusingly trying to prove that Hebrews explains Adventism. The quote above from Sunday’s lesson demonstrates the fact consistent throughout the rest of the week’s lessons: the author never deals with Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection as the reason for the Son’s coming and the event that moved God’s people from the old to the new covenant.
Adventism and Hebrews are incompatible.
What God Did for Jesus, He Wants To Do For Us
Monday’s lesson continues the confusion. Here we see the covert but persistent attempt to make Jesus less than God while trying to insist that He is God. The deception is dizzying, and, if one doesn’t really know the bottom line of Adventist theology, he or she would be confused and misled. Another quote will help illustrate my point. This lesson is attempting to say that God’s revelation through Jesus is superior to all the revelations He made through the prophets.
Before we look at the quote from the lesson, we need to remember a few caveats. First, the author, in agreement with Ellen White’s declaration assumes that Paul (contrary to the belief of most biblical scholars today) was the author of Hebrews. Adventism must assume this notion because, at its core, Adventism is shaped by and depends upon EGW’s interpretation of Scripture.
Second, in spite of Hebrews’ declaration that God spoke through prophets in the past but in these last days, He has spoken to us through His Son, Adventism believes God speaks to them through the living words of their own modern-day prophet: Ellen White. In fact, as we showed a couple off weeks ago, EGW put her own “testimonies” into the phraseology of Hebrews 1:2 and uses the biblical nuance to try to say her words live on and remain a continuing source of instruction for Adventism.
Third, while this lesson attempts to sound as if it is exalting Jesus to the highest revelation of God, as Hebrews proclaims, it stops short of actually endorsing Jesus as God’s final word. Here is a quote from page 33:
God’s revelation through Jesus, however, was superior to the revelation that God had made through the prophets because Jesus is a greater means of revelation. He is God Himself, who created the heaven and the earth and rules the universe. For Paul, the deity of Christ is never in question. It’s all but assumed.
Also, for Paul, the Old Testament was the Word of God. The same God who spoke in the past continues to speak in the present. The Old Testament communicated a true knowledge of God’s will.
However, it was possible to understand its fuller meaning only when the Son arrived on earth. In the author’s mind, the Father’s revelation in the Son provided the key to understanding the true breadth of the Old Testament, just as the picture on the box of a jigsaw puzzle provides the key to finding the correct place for every one of its pieces. Jesus brought so much of the Old Testament to light.
Meanwhile, Jesus came to be our Representative and our Savior. He would take our place in the fight and defeat the serpent. Similarly, in Hebrews, Jesus is the “pioneer” or “captain” and “forerunner” of believers (Heb. 2:10, Heb. 6:20). He fights for us and represents us. This also means that what God did for Jesus, our Representative, the Father also wants to do for us. He who exalted Jesus at His right hand also wants us to sit with Jesus on His throne (Rev. 3:21). God’s message to us in Jesus includes not only what Jesus said but also what the Father did through Him and to Him, all for our temporal and eternal benefit.
Notice in the first paragraph of the quote, the author says that “Paul” “all but assumed” that the deity of Christ is never in question. If one reads Paul’s epistles, however, there is no “all but assumed” belief in Jesus’ deity. Paul never communicated a fraction of a percentage of doubt that Jesus’ identity was fully God, One who shared substance with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Paul made no equivocation about Jesus’ identity, and that “all but assumed” phrase introduces doubt rather than affirms certainty.
This wording is no accident. Adventism does not believe Jesus shares substance with the Father. Even though the author will state later that Jesus and the Father share “essence”—a word never defined but which assumes it puts Jesus in a category different from mortal humans—still the author’s statements reveal an unbiblical view of Jesus’ relationship with the Father and an unbiblical view of Jesus’ reason for coming to earth. This heretical position is revealed through the suggestive phrases emphasized above as well as in other passages in the lesson.
For example, Jesus did not bring “so much of the Old Testament to light.” No! He fulfilled all its shadows—all the shadows of the law and the prophecies of a Savior. He was the Perfect Israel, the One to whom the entire story of the nation of Israel and the Mosaic covenant pointed. He fulfilled everything the nation failed to do, and He became the embodiment of every shadow of ritual and ceremony and command foreshadowed in the law! The lesson avoids that fact. Instead, they make Him merely a commentator, if you will, on the Old Testament, helping people to understand what it meant. The lesson never presents Jesus as the FULFILLMENT of the Old Testament shadows.
If they did present Jesus as the law’s fulfillment, they would have to acknowledge that He fulfilled the Sabbath as well as the sacrifices. They will not “go there”.
Finally, in the last paragraph above, the author puts Jesus and us on an almost-equal footing. The lesson states that Jesus was our Representative and the one who fights for us. It NEVER says He was our Substitute and the One who paid for our sin! It doesn’t declare Him to be our Savior!
Rather, the author creates the argument that, because Jesus was our Representative (and that word is NOT defined but is assumed to be something OTHER than the payment for our sin), we can assume that God wants to do for us what He did for Jesus.
Where does that idea come from? It does not come from Scripture but from EGW. God never gives us what He gives Christ—but the Adventist Jesus had to be exalted to the position of God’s Son. Thus, exalting US to be God’s sons can be explained in the same way as Jesus’ supposed exaltation. This whole idea is heresy!
Begotten Son
Thursday’s lesson is dedicated to making the point that, at His ascension, God adopted Jesus as His own Son and gave Him the throne over the nations which He promised to David’s son.
Again, this argument is based on an EGW worldview, not on a biblical one. Here is what the lesson says:
As we can read in Romans 1:3, 4 and Acts 13:32, 33, Jesus was publicly revealed as God’s Son. Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration were moments when God identified and announced Jesus as His Son (Matt. 3:17, Matt. 17:5).
Yet, according to the New Testament, Jesus became the “Son of God with power” when He was resurrected and seated at the right hand of God. It was at that moment that God fulfilled His promise to David that his Son would be adopted as God’s own Son and His throne over the nations would be established forever (2 Sam. 7:12–14)…
Thus, the idea of Jesus as God’s “only begotten son” is not dealing with the nature of Christ as deity but with His role in the plan of salvation. Through the incarnation, Christ fulfilled all the covenant promises.
This idea is not Scriptural. John 3:16 alone states that God so love the world that He gave His only begotten Son so we could believe in Him and not die. The word “begotten” in this context does not refer to procreation or generation. It is a word signifying “one of a kind”, a singular Son who was, as John says in John 1:1 “with God, and the Word was God.” He did not become the Son when He was incarnated, and He did not become the beloved Son when He ascended to the Father after the resurrection. All those things were done as the Son—the eternal, almighty God who took the name of God onto Himself. He is I Am—Yahweh!
In Friday’s lesson we find an EGW quote from The Desire of Ages, page 113:
“The word that was spoken to Jesus at the Jordan, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,’ embraces humanity. God spoke to Jesus as our representative. With all our sins and weaknesses, we are not cast aside as worthless. ‘He hath made us accepted in the Beloved.’ Ephesians 1:6. The glory that rested upon Christ is a pledge of the love of God for us. . . . The light which fell from the open portals upon the head of our Saviour will fall upon us as we pray for help to resist temptation. The voice which spoke to Jesus says to every believing soul, This is My beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.”
It is from Ellen that the authors of this lesson gain the permission to say that what God did for Jesus, He will do for us. This quote also reveals one of her statements which causes Adventists to think they can overcome sin if they pray enough. After all, as God helped Jesus overcome temptation when He prayed, even so He will help US resist temptation!
Adventism has an anti-gospel that says we find God and come to know Him when we pray hard enough and learn to obey the law. It further says that Jesus showed us this feat can be accomplished, and if God helped Jesus overcome temptation and obey, He will help us also.
This Jesus was not the innately sinless God who came as our Substitute because He absolutely could not sin. The real Jesus was fully God in human flesh. He has two natures—not a combined nature but two natures in one person: God and man. We cannot explain Him, and He didn’t come as an example.
He came as our Substitute! This central fact, that Jesus came and died a human death to pay for human sin—that He had to be human in order to pay for human sin, and that He had to be fully almighty God, sinless and eternal, in order to be the perfect sacrifice—this singularity is something Ellen didn’t know, and Adventism doesn’t teach.
It wasn’t Jesus’ words and deeds during His life that show us the Father. Rather, it was His sacrificial, perfect death that reveals the Father. Jesus’ death on the cross is where we see God’s glory. Adventism has given its people a weak Jesus who set a guilt-producing example of overcoming sin. It does not teach a victorious Savior who forever defeated Satan and broke the curse of the law and death!
This lesson is careful to craft its words so the real bottom line is obscured, but if one looks closely, it is obvious that it is teaching unbiblical heresy.
Our Jesus is LORD, and He has completed the atonement and sits at the Father’s right hand until all His enemies have been abolished (1 Cor. 15:24–26). The real Jesus is a Savior whom we can worship for eternity! †
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