Lesson 4: “Jesus, Our Faithful Brother”
COLLEEN TINKER
For further study: Former Adventist Podcast “Enter Sabbath Rest Today—Hebrews 4”
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson presents Jesus’ destruction of Satan’s power not as His being our Substitute but as His being our Example, thus making our forgiveness merely possible instead of certain.
- The lesson says Jesus’ being perfected by suffering was the way He was equipped to be our Savior.
- The lesson equates Jesus’ brotherhood to natural mankind and not to redeemed mankind.
A Lesser Jesus
In spite of its arch language, this lesson presents Jesus as the one who made it possible for us to be obedient and to be saved. Because Adventism denies the spiritual nature of man, teaching that man does not have an immaterial spirit separate from the body that survives death, they have Jesus’ nature wrong as well.
Although Ellen White herself never consistently taught that Jesus was innately sinless—she waffled between saying He inherited Mary’s propensities to sin but also said that Jesus had no propensity to sin—this lesson takes the “sinless nature” of Jesus point of view.
In spite of this point of view being more nearly correct than the historic Adventist position that He had to overcome sin as the Son of Man, this lesson nevertheless misses what Jesus actually did.
Although the lesson jumps all over Hebrews to proof-text its way into a confusing picture of a Jesus who submitted to obey the Father unto death while showing us how to serve God, I will focus on Hebrews 2 and show how understanding the nature of humanity helps us understand Jesus’ true nature.
Perhaps the representative quotation from the lesson that provides the Adventist worldview most clearly is this one from Tuesday’s lesson:
Then Jesus destroyed the power of the devil by dying as the sinless Offering for our sins, thus making possible our forgiveness and reconciliation with God (Heb. 2:14–17). Jesus also broke the power of sin by giving us the power to live a righteous life through His fulfillment of the new covenant promise to write the law in our hearts (Heb. 8:10). Thus, Jesus has defeated the enemy and effectively liberated us so that we can now “serve the living God” (Heb. 9:14). Satan’s final destruction, meanwhile, will come at the final judgment (Rev. 20:1–3, 10).
First, the author states that “Jesus destroyed the power of the devil by dying as the sinless Offering for our sins, thus making possible our forgiveness and reconciliation with God (Heb. 2:14–17).” While the words sound right, the underlying assumptions are wrong.
To whom did Jesus offer Himself as the offering for sin? Read in context at face value, it is not clear that Jesus died to propitiate God Himself. Rather, without saying it directly, this sentence suggests that Jesus died to silence Satan. It states that by being a sinless Offering, Jesus destroyed the power of the devil. In fact, this idea is what I learned as an Adventist.
Further, the quotation above says that by destroying Satan’s power by being a sinless offering, Jesus made it “possible” for us to be forgiven. What does this even mean?
As an Adventist I understood this scenario to mean that by being sinless right up to His submissive death, Jesus more-or-less “check-mated” Satan. It was as if Jesus was saying, “A-ha! What are you going to say now, Satan? I kept the law and obeyed my Father, and I was a perfect sacrifice. What are you going to say now? If I can obey the law and please God, so can all these people I want to save! I’ve proven you WRONG!!”
Yet look at what Hebrews 2:14–15 actually says:
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.
Jesus became human not to “destroy the power of the devil” but to destroy the devil! That is a completely different object! Jesus didn’t one-up Satan by demonstrating greater power; Hebrews 2:14 says He destroyed the devil! Oh, yes—we all know the devil still exists, but He’s no longer a threat to God’s people because Jesus disarmed Him at the cross. How?
Let’s look at Colossians 2:13–15:
And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.
Here we learn HOW Jesus destroyed the devil and set us free from the fear of death. In His own body, Jesus took the “record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” to the cross and nailed it there.
What was that record of debt? What were those legal demands?
The LAW!! The entire law, including the Ten Commandments, was the document that defined our sins and disclosed the legal demands against us that we had to pay on account of our sins. The law demanded our DEATH. That demand was a legal demand established by the Author of the law: God Himself. Satan didn’t demand our death, although EGW says that Satan accuses us and demands that we die because we don’t obey. Yet Scripture reveals that God Himself is the One who says we have to die; that was the legal demand God gave Adam in the garden: if you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will die THAT DAY (see Gen. 2:17).
That death sentence was incorporated into the law. The law defined our sin, and it also stated God’s demand that if we sinned we would die.
This—the entire law that defined sin and defined our death sentence—was what Jesus nailed to the cross. By His nailing it to the cross as the Perfect Sacrifice who alone was able to take responsibility for all human sin and to offer a sufficient death to satisfy God’s demands against humanity, Jesus disarmed Satan.
He didn’t disarm Satan by showing the HE had been able to KEEP the LAW—like a “Nanner-nanner, I showed you” scenario as I had been taught to think about it. No. He disarmed Satan by destroying Satan’s weapon: THE LAW!!
Before Jesus fulfilled the law by taking its curse to the cross, Satan could point to the law and show that humans were sinning. He could use the law to oppress and terrify sinners. He could tempt people to despair by showing that God demanded their death!
Jesus came as the Perfect Israel, the only sinless human being ever born, and He perfectly obeyed His Father in every way. He FULFILLED the law’s shadows and took the law’s legal demand for death as a Substitute for humans.
It wasn’t by keeping the Ten Commandments that Jesus defeated Satan; it was by fulfilling every legal demand including the law’s DEATH SENTENCE that Jesus disarmed and destroyed Satan.
Satan has absolutely NO tool to wield against God’ people now! The law is fulfilled, and Satan has absolutely nothing he can use to hold over God’s people. Jesus has released us from the fear of death by becoming a curse for us and by destroying death! Satan cannot keep us bound to the fear of death because our death is utterly defeated.
We are now outside of Satan’s authority and purview. When we believe and are born again with the resurrection life of Jesus, we are transferred by the Father from the domain of darkness into which all humans are born, and placed into the kingdom of the Beloved Son. Satan has UTTERLY NO POWER over us. He is now “dead” to us.
Oh, he’s alive and seeks to devour God’s people, but we aren’t natural humans anymore. We are literally born of God, as John says in John 1:12. We are from the same Father as Jesus, as Hebrews 2:11 says. Satan is now an alien power instead of the one wielding the power over us because we are no longer in his kingdom of darkness (Eph. 2:1–3). He can only attempt to derail us from the outside; we are kept by the Lord Jesus and His blood of the eternal covenant (Heb. 13:20).
Jesus destroyed the devil and released us from the fear of death—not by making it possible for us to keep the law by looking to Jesus and His example, but He released us by literally making us ALIVE. Sin does not rule over us any longer! We are in the Son’s kingdom.
To be sure, we still have mortal flesh with a law of sin in it (Rom. 7), but thanks be to God, as Paul says, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1)! Satan has no legal claim over us and no legal charge against us.
Jesus has taken the charge and paid the penalty, and when we believe, we are made alive and transferred out of death (Jn. 5:24).
Natural vs Born Again
And right here is where Adventism has absolutely no understanding of the reality of man and Jesus and death and sin. We are born natural humans, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:42–49. We are born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:1–3), unable to seek or to please or to obey God or to do any good at all that counts as pleasing God (Rom. 3:9–18).
We are born spiritually dead. Our literal immaterial spirits are dead in sin. We are depraved. We are born dead in sin and unable to obey God. We cannot please God or obey Him by committing ourselves to the law and praying hard to be good. It will NEVER work, even if we grit our teeth and will ourselves to stop doing sinful behaviors.
In Matthew 5–7 Jesus gave the famed Sermon on the Mount, and in that sermon, Jesus revealed Himself as the new lawgiver who was greater than Moses. He pointed out, for example, that they had heard it said, “Do not commit adultery.”
“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt. 5:27, 28).
Jesus also said,
“[I]was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire” (Mt. 5:21–22).
Jesus revealed the depth of human depravity and showed that all mankind is GUILTY. Even if one manages to grit his teeth and avoid sinful behaviors, he can never control the unbidden desires and thoughts of a dead-in-sin spirit.
Jesus, however, did not have those depraved desires. He had spiritual life from the moment of His conception. He was born of the Spirit in Mary’s womb, and we are born of the Spirit when we believe and trust in the Lord Jesus and His finished atonement!
Because we are born of God through belief in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection for the payment of our sin and for the breaking of the law’s curse, the author of Hebrews can say,
For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren (Heb 2:11).
The author of the lesson does not grasp this amazing truth. Jesus does not call all mankind His “brethren”. He calls those who are sanctified—those who are born of God—His brethren.
The lesson attempts to make Jesus the brother of all humanity, thus serving as an example of obedience, law-keeping, and meek suffering—showing all humanity HOW to please God.
This assumption is utterly false. It depends upon the idea that we are merely physical bodies with minds and genetic tendencies to sin, and that Jesus also had a human body with genetic input from Mary, and He showed us how to keep the law.
Scripture never shows us this Jesus As Example. Rather, it shows Him as the Author of our salvation and our brother when we trust Him. He, the perfect, spiritually-alive God the Son incarnated as Jesus the Son of Man, sanctified us by taking our curse and breaking it, thus releasing us from the fear of death and from the devil who wielded that fear over us.
When we trust Him, we are sanctified, and that move from depravity to new life in Christ marks our identity as His brothers.
Jesus Himself established this identity:
While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:46–50).
Jesus redefined family. He isn’t a brother to depraved mankind, although He came as a substitute for all of us. He substituted for us on that cross, and when we believe and trust Him, we become part of His family. We pass from death to life! We who do the will of His Father are His mother and sister and brother!
And, just in case there is any doubt—what is the will of His Father?
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:28–29).
The will of the Father is to believe in the Son! That is IT!
This lesson is confusion. It destroys the clarity and miraculous revelation of who Jesus is and why He became a man. It destroys the reality of the finished work of Jesus’ atonement and leaves one feeling guilt-driven to follow Jesus’ example and to try harder to please God.
Jesus, though, told us plainly that what God asks of us is to believe in Him. When we believe, we receive His eternal, resurrection life, and our spirits pass from death to life. Even when our bodies die, we do not die. We do not cease to exist. We are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3), and not even death can separate us from His love!
Believe His word and let go of the entanglements of a false prophet who bound Adventist consciences to the devil and to the fear of death.
In Jesus is freedom! He is Life, and in Him we are eternally secure. †
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