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 1: “The Creation”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson establishes the Adventist idea that Sabbath is a creation ordinance.
- It emphasizes EGW’s idea that man reflects the image of God physically.
- It introduces the idea that food and food restrictions were God’s gift.
This quarter’s new set of lessons is entitled simply Genesis. Importantly, the book of Genesis establishes the foundation for understanding the rest of the Bible. It reveals God and our relationship to Him. It reveals the nature of creation and reality and establishes His limitless sovereignty over it.
This lesson leads by presenting an Adventist worldview interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2. Besides emphasizing the literal six-day creation with the establishment of the Sabbath on the seventh day (which Genesis never states), this week’s lesson emphasizes the symbolic significance of the Sabbath and of Jesus’ healing on that day. It quotes EGW sayin, “When Adam came from the Creator’s hand, he bore, in his physical, mental, and spiritual nature, a likeness to his Maker”(Education, p. 15).
It also makes the case that God’s second gift to Adam (after the garden itself and before Eve his wife) was the gift of food—with built-in restrictions on what could be eaten. It makes the point, “Enjoying without any restriction will lead to death. This principle was right in the Garden of Eden, and in many ways, that same principle exists today.”
Sabbath is not a creation ordinance
First and perhaps foremost, Sabbath is never mentioned in Genesis. The seventh day on which God ceased from His labor (rested) and then sanctified it was a unique day: it, like all other days in “creation week” was not bounded by an evening and a morning. The six days of creation each has an evening and a morning defining it, but the seventh day had no boundaries.
God’s ceasing (the real meaning of the word translated “rested” when Scripture says God rested from His labors) meant He was finished; His work was done, and He stopped working. His rest, or ceasing, did not end with the seventh day. It was a permanent completion. His work of creating was completely finished! He didn’t begin working again on the eighth day—or on a new first day of the week after that seventh day.
Furthermore, nowhere in Genesis does God give ANY command to ANYONE to keep the Sabbath. Adam and Eve were created INTO God’s perfect rest, His finished work. He did not command them to keep the seventh day; furthermore, God’s “seventh day” was Adam and Eve’s second day, not their seventh. There were no commands. Rather, they had perfect interaction with God without any barriers.
Adventism, however, is like a dog with a bone when it comes to teaching Sabbath is a creation ordinance. Because they know that basing their entire theology reflected in their name, Seventh-day Adventists, on the fourth commandment has exegetical flaws, they must keep insisting that Sabbath, along with marriage, was given by God at creation.
Without a pre-existing worldview that holds the seventh day to be intrinsically holy, however, a reader of Scripture would not derive this idea. It could be seen that God blessed that seventh day which had no cyclic beginning or ending, but that blessing would be associated with His finished work—the REASON that He ceased. His work was done, and it was very good. He called the whole thing blessed! That endless ceasing of His finished work was blessed—set apart for His holy purpose. It wasn’t physical hours that were blessed; it was His entire work!
The lesson stops short of saying that God created the Sabbath on the seventh day—a teaching which many Adventists have learned—but it does say that God gave the Sabbath on the seventh day. Adventists cannot abandon the idea that God made the Sabbath on the seventh day by resting, and thus He created “holy time” which is for everyone forever. This idea, however, is not in Scripture. It is a construct from EGW’s worldview that includes the Sabbath as the “seal of God” which marks all those who will be saved when Jesus comes again. This central doctrine MUST be made palatable and believable for Adventism to remain, and Adventists have taken liberties with the text and used allegorical and speculative interpretations to make a point about the Sabbath which the Bible never makes.
Man does not reflect a physical God
A second foundational doctrine of Adventism is the physicality of man without an immaterial spirit which survives the body at death. This lesson calls upon the authority of the prophet to insist that man was made reflecting the physical image of God. If questioned, Adventists might avoid directly addressing the problems with this assertion, but the fact remains that EGW did say that Jesus told her the Father had a form just like His.
In Spiritual Gifts volume 2, page 74, she said this: “I have often seen the lovely Jesus, that he is a person. I asked him if his Father was a person, and had a form like himself. Said Jesus, ‘I am in the express image of my Father’s Person.’ I have often seen that the spiritual view took away the glory of heaven, and that in many minds the throne of David, and the lovely person of Jesus had been burned up in the fire of spiritualism.”
This idea underlies Adventism’s view of the nature of man: God is physical, and man is physical. It is a core belief for Adventism that man cannot have a spirit separate from the body, and this idea begins with a twisted view of the creation of man in God’s image.
Jesus said that “God is spirit” (Jn. 4:24), and thus man’s being created in God’s image must include being a spirit-being even though God combined that being with a physical body—a form which the Lord Jesus took when He came to earth as our Substitute and Sacrifice.
Food With Restrictions
Finally, this lesson inserts the core Adventist belief that God gave Adam and Eve the right diet—the food from the plants of the garden. The command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil the lesson never explains other than to say they couldn’t eat from a certain tree. The importance of this restriction, though, are utterly twisted. In context, this command defined the “place” where Adam and Eve would have to trust God’s word—or not. The lesson, however, conscripts this idea for its own health-message purpose and says, “Enjoying without any restriction will lead to death. This principle was right in the Garden of Eden, and in many ways, that same principle exists today.”
Obviously this deduction was not the purpose of God’s command. Yet Adventism twists the account to lay the foundation for the health message which is necessary for their worldview: controlling that physical creation with restrictive eating which denies the full counsel of God and forbids eating foods which God created to be enjoyed with thanksgiving (1 Tim. 4:1–6).
False Foundation Laid
With this first lesson on creation, the quarterly lays a faulty foundation on which the entire Adventist worldview depends. If we get our origin story wrong, we lose the reality of God’s true nature, of His sovereignty, and of our true nature and our relationship to Him. If we get the origins wrong, we lose the significance of the incarnation and of the sovereign act of God in planning for the salvation of fallen humanity before the foundation of the world.
Adventism creates a false worldview which causes its members to live in the dissonance of unreality—while believing that their worldview comes from Scripture. In fact, it comes from their extra-biblical prophetess who taught a non-sovereign God who limits Himself to accommodate the free will of sinners. She gave the organization a weak Jesus who could have failed and who risked plunging creation into chaos—but all of these ideas are false, and they all have their roots in Adventism false interpretation of creation.
For further study on these subjects, here are some resources for your perusal this week:
Video:
Articles:
- Are Humans More Than Living Bodies?
- The Seventh-day Adventist Health Message: From Where Did It Come?
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024
- We Got Mail - April 25, 2024
- April 20–26, 2024 - April 18, 2024