Colleen and Nikki discuss Adventism’s doctrine “God the Father”. Hear how Adventism’s “Father” is different from the Biblical teaching of the Father, including His very substance. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: In today’s episode we’ll be examining the third Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief on God the Father. And we’ll be comparing it to the orthodox Christian beliefs rooted in Scripture and affirmed by believers for millennia. We have a lot of information to cover, so we’re going to just jump right in. But before we get started, let me remind you that if you have any questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past articles or to sign up for our weekly emails containing ministry news and links to weekly blogs. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Colleen –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – I have a question for you.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: Before we start on this Fundamental Belief on God the Father, I want know, when you were an Adventist, what did you think about God the Father?
Colleen: That’s a vague memory. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Because I understood Him to be separate from Jesus, separate from the Holy Spirit, like we talked about last week with the Trinity, but yet kind of like the Big Honcho in the Trinity, in the Godhead.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I thought of Him as probably fairly benign, a bit removed. I wasn’t afraid of Him because I was taught that the word “fear” in the Bible, to fear God and give Him glory, didn’t mean fear, it meant respect and awe. So okay, I could do that. But I thought of Him as distant, fairly uninvolved, the one who delegated all of His work to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but I would have had a hard time saying very much else about Him. I did have a very clear concept of Him as having a physical body, which, of course, kept Him very separate from the Son, who had a physical body, and from the Holy Spirit, who was really an it and was a power that came out of them. All in all, I had a vague understanding of Him. I knew whoever He was He existed, and He was like the head God in the Godhead. I don’t really think I can say much else about Him. What about you?
Nikki: I had a very similar picture. I understood Him to be more transcendent, just kind of far above, sort of removed from us, more so than Jesus, more so than the Holy Spirit. He was uninvolved, really, apart from Jesus engaging Him.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And I thought that He was indifferent to me personally. I had heard that Jesus came and died for me, and if I was the only person here, He would have died for me. But that was Jesus, that wasn’t the Father. The Father didn’t even want Him to come from the beginning, according to my previous worldview. And so I had Him sort of at odds with the Son in terms of His desire and His interest. I thought of Him as being very ready to punish me, which is interesting, because I thought He wasn’t interested in me, but He was ready to punish me and ready to cause very hard things to happen to me so that I would learn lessons. If I wasn’t catching on to something that I was supposed to be learning, He was going to cause something bad to come into my life to punish me for it. So whenever difficult times came for me, I thought, “Oh, no, what did I do? What am I supposed to be repenting for? How did I mess up?” When I got older, some of those pictures of the Father changed a little bit for me as I had non-Adventist Christian influences in my life. For a time, I was going to a nondenominational women’s conference every year, and the story I would get about the Father and His provision was very different from what I understood, and so I added that to what I already believed about Him. But that did not subtract the error I had in my head that started from the story of origins that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I ended up as an adult with a mixed bag of ideas about the Father and just really very confused.
Colleen: So let’s talk about that story of origins. Before we read this particular Fundamental Belief, remind us, Nikki, what you learned about God the Father from Ellen White’s story of origins, and don’t forget, I just want to remind our listeners, in the first podcast in this series, where we did our introduction, we talked about Ellen White’s story of origins, which is not in Scripture, but which set the stage for her whole Great Controversy worldview, and that particular viewpoint is what underlies every single one of these doctrinal statements. So what did you learn about the Father from Ellen White’s origins story?
Nikki: Okay, well, first let me just say that the way I learned her origins story was through oral tradition, it was Adventist oral tradition. I didn’t read Ellen White. I had been taught about her from family and schoolteachers, but I didn’t read her. What I understood was that there was this big conflict in heaven. Satan became very jealous because Jesus was elevated to have the same power and authority that God the Father had, and Satan thought it should have been him, and so he began to slander and malign God’s character and try to win over a bunch of the angels and create a problem. God the Father was helpless to do anything about it because nobody would really understand that He was in the right if He just handled Satan right then, so He wanted to send Satan away and allow for this all to play out on a cosmic level where all of these other worlds and all of these others creatures were looking on to see who was the bad guy, God or Satan? Who was really telling the truth? And that was all going to play out on earth. This is how we see God before we ever enter Eden. And He had a body, I understood Him to have a body. Once we get into Eden and we have the fall of man, I understood that Jesus wanted to come and redeem man, but the Father didn’t want Him to, and Jesus had to go before Him three different times to earn His permission to come and redeem man. And so you have God with a body, you have God with a PR problem –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and you have Him at odds with His Son, who didn’t eternally have the same authority and power as the Father.
Colleen: And where’s the Holy Spirit in all of this? Well, it was never mentioned – “it”.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: I had the same picture in my head. It led to a lot of confusion, but our understanding – as I understand you telling your story, comparing it to my own, our understanding of the Father was very different from the God of the Bible, who is real. We actually had a false God –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – that was premised on the visions of an extrabiblical prophet. These were visions that are nowhere found in Scripture but actually resemble Mormonism a little bit.
Nikki: Yeah, I was going to say that, it’s a lot like Mormonism. And to be honest, I did not know that this wasn’t in the Bible. I knew that she was able to give us details that weren’t in the Bible. That was kind of our privilege, that she knew the thoughts of God and the thoughts of Satan and she could embellish all of that. But I thought the whole story was in there.
Colleen: Absolutely. Well, Nikki, why don’t we read this Fundamental Belief and talk through how the Adventists explain it in their book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, because that book is like the secret code for members to understand and to reinforce their Great Controversy view of every one of their doctrines. This is Fundamental Belief #3, God the Father, and it’s surprisingly short. Why don’t you read it, Nikki?
Nikki: “God the Eternal Father is the Creator, Source, Sustainer, and Sovereign of all creation. He is just and holy, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. The qualities and powers exhibited in the Son and the Holy Spirit are also those of the Father.”
Colleen: Now, at face value, is there anything in that statement that would raise an alarm bell in a Christian just looking at it for the first time?
Nikki: I would hope so, but I’m not sure.
Colleen: What would you hope they might notice?
Nikki: First of all, I think that it would be of interest to them that this is three sentences long –
Colleen: Yes. [Laughter.]
Nikki: – that there is a lot missing, and that last sentence, “The qualities and powers exhibited in the Son and the Holy Spirit are also those of the Father.” I think that would be a little bit of a red flag. I would want to understand what’s behind that because it doesn’t sound like the oneness of God, the shared attributes of God. We talked about that last week when we talked about the Godhead. But this would sort of cause me to wonder about that.
Colleen: Right. Now, before we talk about more specific ways this is explained, and before we compare it with what the Bible actually says about God, I want to remind us all of our assumptions and explain where we got those, besides just the general idea that Ellen White had visions. This idea that God the Father has a body is something that’s not generally explicitly taught to Adventists, but it’s pretty generally understood, and I find that really quite fascinating because as time has gone on and the public has become more aware of the Seventh-day Adventist movement and there have been more questions asked, especially since Walter Martin in the 1950s, about the beliefs of Adventism, Adventism has changed the way it speaks about these things. It never repents for the past, it never says, “We were wrong, we now believe this.” But they just change the way they talk. So this business of having a physical Father, like the Mormons do, is something they don’t generally publicly acknowledge, but the fact is, it was in the foundation of the organization. I want the people who hear us to understand that this didn’t even originate with Ellen. Ellen endorsed it, but it originated with her husband, James. Now, James, if you recall – we’ve mentioned this before – had been a pastor, an ordained minister, in the movement called the Christian Connection, which was a restorationist movement, and it was overtly antitrinitarian. In the year 1846 James wrote a pamphlet entitled, The Personality of God, and in this little pamphlet, The Personality of God, James made the point that God’s personality was equal to a “person,” which he explained in his document had to be physical. And he created a rather elaborate argument that said if man is created in the image of God, that can’t be a moral image because then he would have to have all the qualities of God, like omnipotence and omniscience. Now, it’s actually a pretty strawman argument because he’s not making any clear, logical connections in his argument, but he’s saying that if we are in the image of God, that has to be a physical image. It’s interesting that when I was in Adventist school as a kid, I learned that part of being in the image of God was how I looked. Did you learn that, Nikki?
Nikki: That’s what I understood, and you know, that’s not just in Adventism. I’ve seen in other Sunday school curriculum where teachers will say, “Oh, look in the mirror. What do you have?” But that’s just not taught in Scripture.
Colleen: Not at all. So James White was a firm believer in that. James said this in his document Personality of God, and I’m quoting James White here: “As proof that God is a person, read His own words to Moses, ‘And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by. And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts” – I just wonder what that was supposed to look like – “but my face shall not be seen.”‘ Here God tells Moses that he shall see His form. To say that God made it appear to Moses that he saw His form, when He has no form, is charging God with adding to falsehood a sort of juggling deception upon His servant Moses.” Well, Nikki, when we read God telling Moses that He would show him His back, that he couldn’t see His face, and that He stretched forth His hand, how do we understand those references to the body, given the full counsel of the Word of God?
Nikki: Well, we know that God is spirit. These are statements of anthropomorphism.
Colleen: This is a figure of speech that’s using a human characteristic to describe an activity or a quality of an invisible God. It’s worth mentioning, just because I know our audience has the same background we have, at least many of them do, it’s Jesus Himself who lets us know that God does not have a body. He says it in John 4:24 when He said to the woman at the well, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” We learn that God is not limited to or described by or even existing in a physical body. So an anthropomorphism is when a writer – and in this case, God inspiring Moses – is using a metaphor describing human parts to explain what He is going to do. He is not going to reveal to Moses His full self because Moses is a sinful man, and he would not be able to survive a full revelation of the eternal, almighty, holy God. He is going to reveal to him His glory, some of His weight of magnificent, holy, righteous glory, and we don’t even know exactly what that looked like to Moses. But He’s using anthropomorphisms so that he understands that he’s not seeing the whole of God.
Nikki: And Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:17 that God is invisible. It says, “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Colleen: That’s an amazing passage. It’s interesting, we were just talking about, Nikki, because he also repeats this idea in the very last chapter of 1 Timothy, and he says, “No one has ever seen God or can see Him.” So we know that God does not have a physical body, and James White’s declaration and publication is what set the foundation for the Adventist belief about God. Just by way of confirming that I’m not completely making this up, Jerry Moon, whom we’ve quoted before, who’s written a document, The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen White’s Heavenly Trio Compared to the Traditional Doctrine, Jerry Moon is a professor at Andrews Seminary, the Seventh-day Adventist seminary at Andrews University, and in this document he says, “Ellen White based her particular understanding of God on her visions. In 1850″ – notice this is four years after James White published The Personality of God – “In 1850 she wrote that she had ‘often seen the lovely Jesus, that He has a person.’ Further, she asked Jesus if His Father had a body like His, and He told her, ‘I am in the express image of my Father’s person.'” And Jerry Moon continues, “Thus” – and this is really important because this is current, present Adventist belief and doctrine, and it underlies this particular, as well as all the rest, of the Fundamental Beliefs. “Thus her visions confirmed what her husband had written in 1846, that the Father and the Son are ‘two distinct, literal, tangible persons.’ The visions also disproved to her mind the claim of the Methodist creed that God is without body or parts. Thus these early visions steered her developing view of God away from creedal trinitarianism.” He also says, “Ellen White was much interested in the question of Jesus’ body. Twice in early visions of Jesus she asked Him questions related to the form and person of God. In one early vision she reported seeing a throne and on it sat the Father and the Son. She said, ‘I gazed on Jesus’ countenance and admired His lovely person. The Father’s person I could not behold for a cloud of glorious light covered Him. I asked Jesus if His Father had a form like Himself, and He said He had, but I could not behold it, for He said, “If you should ever behold the glory of His person, you would cease to exist.”‘” All to say, this God that’s being described in Fundamental Belief #3 is assumed to be somehow predicated on the belief that He has a physical person. It’s interesting to me that Adventism does not generally overtly teach that any longer, but it is nevertheless the idea that formed the entire basis of Adventist theology, the belief about God. And like you said, Nikki, this comes right out of her pre-history visions and the Great Controversy worldview. We have a God the Father who is a completely separate being from God the Son and the Holy Spirit, whoever He is to Adventists, they’re all three separate, distinct beings, not one God expressed in three persons.
Nikki: And when they planned the redemption of man, they also had separate will.
Colleen: Yes. That is such a good point. It’s especially interesting, since Adventists say that in the Godhead they all share a will, a purpose, and clearly in the beginnings, in Ellen White’s visions, they didn’t.
Nikki: No. It was more like a democracy, “Let’s argue this out.” So, Colleen, talking about the story of origins and the Great Controversy worldview, it’s so important when we’re talking about the Fundamental Beliefs of Adventism because so many Adventists say, “I can believe the 28 and not believe Ellen and not believe this worldview.” Can we just walk through this chapter and show people really how Ellen is just laced inside of all of these topics of discussion. The first one for me that jumped out is right at the introduction.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Now, I’m still reading from the 27 Fundamental Beliefs. I don’t know if this is worded different in the 28, but this one paragraph, right before they get into their doctrine on the Father, it says, “The entire universe has been waiting for this moment. God the Father will execute His justice against all wickedness. The sentence is given: ‘A judgment was made in favor of the saints.’ Joyful praises and thanksgiving reverberate across heaven. God’s character is seen in all its glory, and His marvelous name is vindicated throughout the universe.” So they begin their discussion of God the Father at the end of time when the Great Controversy is all tied up and God declares His judgment and He’s finally vindicated before all those watching universes.
Colleen: Poor God. What a long time He had to wait.
Nikki: So Ellen White isn’t specifically mentioned, and I noticed in my book she isn’t specifically quoted in this chapter. That picture right there is not in the Bible.
Colleen: It’s the Great Controversy. Once again this doctrine is used to uphold the Great Controversy worldview. The Great Controversy in Adventism is not used to support biblical truth and biblical revelation about our God. It’s the other way around.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: What they believe about God supports Ellen White’s worldview. That’s really significant.
Nikki: And then they go right into claiming a special kind of authority on understanding the Father because they quickly say, “God the Father is frequently misunderstood.”
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes.
Nikki: And I remember feeling, as an Adventist, like I was so lucky that we actually understood Him because all these other poor people didn’t understand the truth. They didn’t understand that God is love, that He’s not vengeful.
Colleen: So under this idea of God being misunderstood, this book tries to explain how God is presented in the Old Testament. And it’s interesting that they end up by saying, “Even the Old Testament conveys to us its portrait of God the Father through the agency of the Son.” It’s so interesting to me that they do that because their point is: When Jesus came, He revealed the Father and showed that the God who killed people in the Old Testament was really just a way He expressed Himself to primitive people who didn’t understand anything but violence and warfare. Jesus came and showed how gracious and loving and forgiving the Father is. And they’re denying the clear statements of the entire Old Testament and saying their view of this loving Jesus is who has always described God.
Nikki: Yeah, this felt like a familiar method, to state that they know better than other people do. And it engenders trust, you know, from the reader, who is now going to move through the chapter and learn the truth from them.
Colleen: Yeah. It’s interesting to me that as I read through this chapter, I kept getting the impression it’s hard to say the words are wrong, but the way they describe Him is of a weak, a limited, a passive God who’s just longing and waiting for us humans to see how much He loves us and to acknowledge Him. They don’t have a sovereign God who is authoritative over creation, who is authoritative over salvation. They have a simpering God almost. For example, they have a section called “A Covenant God,” which is ironic in itself, since Adventists never really deal with the biblical reality of the covenants. And they lead, in my particular version of this book, by saying that God is “eager to establish lasting relations.” God created us. God created everything. He’s not “eager to establish lasting relations.” He is in charge of relations, in all of creation.
Nikki: He has always had a purpose as He’s moved through human history. We see that recorded in Scripture. Just before that section, in my book it says that, “At Sinai God expressed His desire to be Israel’s friend.” But we know from the testimony of God’s word that this was something that He had told Abraham years before, that He was going to do this. It was always a part of His plan, and it wasn’t about friendship and relationship. It was about His plan of redemption for the glory of His Son.
Colleen: He intended to make Israel a nation before there ever was an Israel. And like you said, He promised it to Abraham. And it’s interesting that as they talk about a covenant God, they don’t even mention His promises to Abraham of making a nation and bringing redemption. It’s all about He promised Abraham lots of progeny and a land where they could live. He doesn’t say anything about bringing a Savior. He misses the point of the covenants in the Bible and instead talks about God as just wanting relationship, doing whatever was necessary to have people be His friend. And then this sentence, which I understand is not in your version of the book, Nikki. In this 2018 version it says this about God in relationship to covenant: “Both here and later in the promise of a new covenant with Israel, (Jeremiah 31) and again with the covenant transferred to the Christian church (Hebrews 8:7-13), God repeatedly reveals Himself as a covenant-keeping God.” Nikki, there was no covenant transferred to the Christian church. They even use as their proof text Hebrews 8, which ends with the verse that says the old covenant was made obsolete, it was not transferred to the Christian church. But it’s just tucked in there as part of a sentence that the membership of the Adventists can read and just have all of their Ellen White suppositions confirmed.
Nikki: It’s one of the reasons why we can go to our Adventist family with these very texts and they see something completely different.
Colleen: That’s so true. A couple other ways that God is described in this chapter that just sounded insipid and weak to me: “God’s forgiving love is so great He yearns for us to return to Him so that He may forgive and heal us. God’s continuing forgiveness reveals His character of unconditional love.” You know, that’s true, but that’s not the description of our sovereign, almighty Father. There’s so much more to Him than that. It’s like upside down. Adventism presents a God who is subservient to and waiting for humanity to come around and see how much He cares. The Bible describes a God who cares about us before we know we need Him, and He comes out and finds us.
Nikki: You know, one of the things that I was frustrated with as I read through this is that when they got to the part on God being a redeemer God, there was no mention of the cross. And when they got to the part about God being faithful, it read more like He was faithful in His pleading and calling, not that He was faithful to keep His promises.
Colleen: Right!
Nikki: We read in Scripture that He is faithfully keeping us because He cannot deny Himself. He sealed us with Himself, with the Holy Spirit, and He keeps us in salvation because He cannot deny Himself. That’s God’s faithfulness. That’s an incredible aspect of His faithfulness that the church celebrates, the Christian church celebrates. But here in this professing Christian Fundamental Belief, you get to faithfulness, you get to redemption, you get to covenant, and there’s nothing of the Christian experience according to Scripture.
Colleen: The cross is left out. The only place I see a mention of the cross is under the section entitled, “Jesus Reveals the Father,” subheaded, “A God who gives.” And it’s interesting, it says, “We see His giving at Creation, at Bethlehem, and at Calvary.” Now, listen to how it describes God functioning in creation, “In creating, the Father and the Son acted together.” Now, of course in the Trinity the entire Trinity acted together as three persons of one God in making what exists. God the Father is from whom all things come, and they all come through the Son. That is an intimate connection. But this wording is not describing a one God picture of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This is describing two separate physical, we might say, beings standing side-by-side going, “Let’s make a world. Oh, let’s make a cosmos,” and working together to come up to join their ideas together.
Nikki: Right. Provoking Satan’s jealousy because he wanted to be in on this but they said, “No, you can’t.”
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: There’s a whole picture behind these words that either uneducated Adventists or Christians who read this and don’t know what’s behind it, they don’t see, they don’t understand, and so they see the Father and the Son working together, and that goes through their filter and what they know about God. They don’t understand the deception.
Colleen: That’s right. Also, this one about Calvary. They make the point that God gave His Son at Calvary and, like you pointed out, Jesus had to plead with the Father three times in Ellen White’s scenario, and the Father reluctantly finally agreed, “Okay, if it means that much to you, you go ahead and do it,” which is not the biblical picture, but this says here in this book, “The Father, being divine, suffered the pain of being separated from His Son – in life and death – more acutely than any human being ever could.” Well, my goodness.
Nikki: How was He separated from the Son in life? I know how they do it in death, but is this because Jesus gave up His divinity when He became a man? Are we tipping our hand now?
Colleen: Yes. It was preceded by saying, “What pain the Father experienced when His Son entered our sin-polluted planet! Imagine the Father’s feeling as He saw His Son exchange the love and adoration of angels for the hatred of sinners; the glory and bliss of heaven for the pathway of death.” Adventism believes that God the Father was physically separated from His Son when Jesus came to earth and took a human body, that He, like, watched Him walk out the door and said, “Goodbye! I’ll see you when you get back!” and then was sad. It’s that physical God thing. But they don’t acknowledge it in this book, but it is the underlying foundation that came right from Ellen and James White.
Nikki: You know, moving on to the next section there, where they talk about the Father being a God of love, there’s this sentence that says, “Christ knew that revealing the precious love of His Father was the key to bringing people to repentance.” So we don’t have a sovereign God. We don’t have any kind of effectual calling or choice coming from God. Jesus figured out that showing the love of God is going to draw people to repent. It was the key.
Colleen: The key. And showing the love of God, according to this book, included washing the feet of His betrayer, Judas, in the upper room before He was crucified. It says, “Jesus revealed the loving nature of the Father in stooping down and washing the feet of His betrayer.” There’s nothing here of what the Bible describes of His being betrayed by a friend, as prophesied in the Psalms, by the way, of going to the cross for sin. Oh, no. It’s displaying the love of the Father, and you want to say, “Oh, poor God. Poor God!” And, “Poor Jesus, having to somehow show all of us humans how loving God really was,” never understanding – I did not understand as an Adventist that the cross was the ultimate display of God’s love, His faithfulness, His glory, His majesty, His righteousness. The cross is the great reveal of our triune God. That was just missing from my understanding as an Adventist.
Nikki: Um-hmm. As they conclude this chapter, they say, “With a longing heart the Father anticipates the Second Advent, when the redeemed will finally be brought into their eternal home.” And the last sentence in this section on their doctrine on God the Father, “How could we spurn such love and fail to acknowledge Him as our Father?”
Colleen: It’s kind of shocking. Right after that sentence where He’s longing for the second advent, the Father is longing for the second advent, “Then His sending of ‘His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him’ will clearly not have been in vain. Only unfathomable, unselfish love explains why, though we were enemies, ‘we were reconciled to God through the death of His son.'” Nikki, His second coming is not what reveals that sending His Son into the world was not in vain. Where was it shown clearly that the Son’s coming was not in vain?
Nikki: At His resurrection. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes. [Laughter.] Jesus died on the cross and shed His sinless blood for our sin. And took the curse and broke the curse and rose from death, the evidence that His sacrifice was sufficient for our sin. No, God the Father is not longing for the day when it will be clear that none of this was in vain. The Father is in charge. The battle has been won. We are the ones waiting for His appointed day.
Nikki: So this topic of the love of God, it tormented me as an Adventist. And even as I came out of Adventism, trying to understand the love of God was a struggle because they really trademarked their brand as being the very picture of God’s love, and it wasn’t until I began to have a clear scriptural understanding of God, the triune God, and the roles within the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and when I began to accept that the words in Scripture were authoritative over even my reason and my logic in my mind, then I began to understand in new ways the love of God, which is something that Paul prays we will, that we will come to understand the depths of the love of God. There is a book that I really want to recommend our listeners. It’s written by D.A. Carson, and it’s called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. It’s only four chapters, but it will help to undo so much of this mess.
Colleen: I agree. As we were studying for this podcast, I realized that even though we’ve talked about this when we talked about the Trinity last week, it’s important to talk about it again as we talk about the Father because within Christianity a doctrine of God the Father is not always taught separately from the doctrine of God. The work of the Holy Spirit, the work of Jesus, those are discussed separately because those are roles that were assigned to the Spirit and to Jesus, but the doctrine of God clearly explains God the Father. Unlike Adventism, who separates Him out of the herd and tries to present Him as this loving, benign, hopeful, yearning, longing person who’s hoping everybody else will take His cues and come around, that’s not the God of Scripture. So I just wanted to quickly review the incommunicable attributes of God which describe the Father. It’s so different from the Adventist Father. For example, independence – and I’m getting these definitions from Wayne Grudem’s book, Systematic Theology. “The attribute of independence is this: God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything, yet we and rest of creation glorify Him and bring Him joy.” Now, Grudem succeeds that particular statement with a lot of texts and a lot of examples. Just as a thumbnail sketch, I’m just going to read these attributes and the definitions because this describes God. The second is His unchangeableness, or His immutability, and here’s how Grudem describes that: “God is unchanging in His being, His perfections, purposes, and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and He acts and feels differently in response to different situations.”
Nikki: That’s something that’s covered in that D.A. Carson book that I mentioned on The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. That He acts and feels differently in response to different situations is something that the church has wrestled with for a long time now. So people will talk about God as being impassible, the impassibility of God, or the passibility of God. And impassibility of God says that when God has – and it’s extreme – when God has emotion, it is anthropopathism. It isn’t really that He has emotion; it’s just a description, a metaphor, to try to express something. And in the extreme with passibility, God is very much like what we’ve read in the Adventist books, that He’s kind of mushy [laughter] –
Colleen: Uh-huh [laughter].
Nikki: – and reactive. If you walk down the middle of this, like D.A. Carson does in this book, you’re able to take all of the texts of Scripture and all of the attributes of God and put them together and understand that He is a God who responds differently. He doesn’t react emotionally.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: He responds. And He responds from His own sovereign omniscient will. When you go to one extreme you end up with deism, a God who’s distant and doesn’t feel, and when you go to the other extreme you end up with open theism.
Colleen: That is very similar to the way Adventists think of God. That’s a really important distinction. When you try to take away the tension of texts that seem to say opposing things instead of saying, “The Bible means what the Bible says,” you often end up with something that approaches a heresy. You have to know that what the Bible says about God, about anything, is true, even if you can’t completely explain how they work together. It’s tension that we have to live with. It’s interesting to me, when I think about God being unchanging in His purposes and promises, these two texts stood out to me. Psalm 33:11, “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations.” Think about that compared to the way that book describes the Adventist God the Father, who’s longing, hoping, yearning that we’ll come around and love Him. No! The counsel of the Lord stands forever, His plans to all generations. These are set. God knows His own will, His own purposes from all eternity. And Numbers 23:19, I really love this one because this is so corrective to my understanding of God as an Adventist, “God is not a man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind; has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?” And then we move to the third incommunicable attribute Grudem mentions, and that is His eternity, God’s eternity. Here’s how he explains it: “God has no beginning, end, or succession of moments in His own being and sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time.” And it’s interesting, when you think about it, this means that God is timeless in His own being. He sees all time equally vividly. Sometimes I think when I get out of this world and am glorified and with the Lord, I want to see the beginnings of creation, what happened between creation and the flood, but God sees all of that equally vividly. Because God stands above time, He’s able to see it all as present in His consciousness. And then Isaiah 46:9-10, he says, “For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.'” That is not the Adventist God.
Nikki: No, it isn’t. And the fact that He’s from eternity and that He is immutable, and we know that He’s all-powerful –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – now we have a problem with the Adventist story of origins.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Because you have the Trinity expressed in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, for all eternity. Nobody was elevated to the Sonship, and nobody was given additional power. God the Father is all powerful, God the Son is all powerful, God the Holy Spirit is all powerful, always.
Colleen: Yes, you can’t have an all-powerful God and have the Adventist definition of the Father. His omnipresence is another characteristic of the Father, and Grudem describes it this way: “God does not have size or spatial dimensions.” That’s really important when we think about the physical God James and Ellen White gave Adventism. God is present at every point of space, yet God acts differently in different places. And then we have Psalm 139:7-10, and by the way, Psalm 139 is an amazing Psalm, which declares that each person is known to God before we are born, and He designs us in our mothers’ wombs. I think of that when I think about my previous Adventist understanding of abortion. That’s just by the by. But if you haven’t read Psalm 139 lately, you should. This is what David says in Psalm 139: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol” – the place of the dead – “you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” God doesn’t have spatial dimensions. He can be present at all places at all time to do whatever is needed to punish, sustain, bless. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and there is no way to limit God. He does not have a body.
Nikki: So when we talk about God like this, we’re talking about the Trinity.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Because the Trinity – we know from the attribute of divine simplicity that the entire Trinity has all of the attributes all the time. And we know that God the Son took a form to Himself, but He didn’t lose any of what you’ve just described. He’s able to be present at all times, even in this form, and that wasn’t something we learned as Adventists. We actually learned the opposite of that. So we know from Scripture that God is three persons, each person is fully God, there is one God, that there’s unity in the Trinity. But when we start talking about the doctrine of God the Father, of God the Son, of God the Spirit, now we’re talking about the perfect plurality within the Trinity. And so when we discuss God the Father, we’re going to talk about His role, how it’s distinct and different from the role of the Son and the role of the Spirit. Scholars call this the economy of the Trinity, meaning the ordering of activities. And we see in Scripture that God the Father spoke the creative words bringing the universe into being. And when we look at God the Son next week, we’ll look at His role in creation as well. And in redemption, God the Father planned redemption and sent His Son into the world. He didn’t concede. He didn’t give in. He didn’t go belly up. He planned this. He purposed this. If you were with us through our podcast on Ephesians, you know in Ephesians chapter 1 that we were chosen by the Father in the Son before the foundations of the earth. So there’s one of our texts that shows that they’ve been Father and Son even before the creation of the earth. He chose us. He draws us to the Son, John 6:44 and 65. He predestines us to be conformed into the image of His son. In Romans 8:29 we see that. We have the Father working in a unique way to bring us into reconciliation with Him, and He does it even in the Son while He’s on the cross. So Wayne Grudem says that the only distinctions between the members of the Trinity are in the ways they relate to each other and to the creation. So it’s not in those incommunicable attributes that you talked about. Those always belong to every person of the Trinity, and we’re going to see all throughout this book that that is not the case in the Adventist story of their God and their Jesus, which is not my God or my Jesus.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: So he says that the Trinity can be summarized by the phrase “ontological equality but economical subordination,” so they are one in essence, they share all the attributes all the time, but they have different roles.
Colleen: As Grudem also says, God is a unity, and everything He does is an act of the whole person of God. And we can’t examine God the Father apart from the Son, apart from the Spirit, and take Him apart and think of Him as a separate person who’s hoping that the Son has carried out His work adequately, that the Spirit is going His adequately, and that we’re responding adequately. No. God the Father is sovereign, and we are His because He chose us in Christ.
Nikki: Now, what’s missing from this SDA Fundamental Belief? That the Father is the one who predestined us, that He’s the one who chose us, that He’s the one who sent the Son, that He reconciled us to Himself through the Son, that He testified to the Son, that He draws us to the Son, that He keeps us in salvation, 1 Peter 1:3-5, that He’s the Father of spirits who disciplines His sons.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: That’s a special relationship between those who are born again and adopted by Him. And that, apart from the reconciliatory work of Christ, He has wrath against sinners.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And that He’s sovereign in all He does. These are things that they never mention because this picture of God doesn’t convey the salvation story that Ellen White does. In Adventism, you don’t have security; you don’t have predestination choice –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – you know, the choice of God. You don’t have any of that stuff. That’s in Scripture.
Colleen: I will never forget how much my world was turned upside down as I started to understand that God is sovereign and that all the acts of history are interconnected and were given in Scripture for a reason, not as random stories to beat us with moral lessons, but to reveal that God is sovereign over us, sovereign over creation. We were never left on our own. He always had sent the Son, who was slain from the foundation of the world. God is our Father, and when we trust the Son, He’s the Father of our spirits because we are born of God.
Nikki: And when we understand all of these truths about God, about the Father, and we understand that all of His attributes inform each other, then we know that God’s love isn’t mushy. God’s love is informed by His omniscience. He knows everything about you. He’s outside of time. He knows everything you’ve done and everything you will do. He chose of His own sovereign will to set His love on you, in particular –
Colleen: In the Son.
Nikki: – in the Son. And we know that because of Scripture.
Colleen: If you haven’t trusted the Son, if you haven’t seen what our triune, sovereign, amazing, magnificent, holy, loving, merciful God has done in Himself in sending His Son to the cross to take your sin and pay its price and to shatter the curse of the grave, if you haven’t recognized that and trusted Him, we ask that you do because your view of God will never be the same, and you will know you have an identity that will be eternally secure in Him, loved, adopted, born again, daughter or son of God.
Nikki: If you have any questions or comments for us, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past articles, to sign up for our weekly emails, with ministry news and new online blogs, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And please, leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week as we look at the Adventist Fundamental Belief on God the Son.
Colleen: See you then.
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