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 5: “Extreme Heat”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson again assumes the human experience is the focal point of suffering.
- The author misses Job’s repentance for assuming he understood God.
- Looking at suffering without seeing God’s glory misses reality.
Once again the lesson attempts to make sense of Abraham’s test of offering Isaac. In addition, the lesson brings up the story of Job and focusses on the fact that he didn’t know God subjected him to Satan’s harassment to demonstrate Job’s loyalty—but entirely misses Job’s repentance at the end of the book when he realizes he thought he had understood how God works and mourns for speaking of things too great for him to understand. Additionally, the lesson mentions Paul’s sufferings and the fact that suffering equips us to comfort others.
The central fact that these lessons do not address is God’s sovereignty. These biblical examples and the question of suffering cannot be adequately addressed without understanding that God IS SOVEREIGN, and humans are all born condemned, objects of wrath (Eph. 2:3), with God’s wrath remaining on them until they believe (Jn. 3:18).
Since Adventism does not believe humans have immaterial spirits that are born dead and must be brought to life, they focus on lifelong self-discipline to bring themselves into increasing “sanctification”. In fact, the lesson asks this in the first day’s study:
When things become really painful, some of us reject God completely. For others, like Lewis, there is the temptation to change our view of God and imagine all sorts of bad things about Him. The question is, Just how hot can it get? How much heat is God willing to risk putting His people through in order to bring about His ultimate purpose of shaping us into the “image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29, NIV)?…
How much do you think God is willing to be misunderstood in order to mold you into the “image of his Son”?
The great controversy worldview tips its hand in the above quote. Adventism believes that humans are involved in helping to vindicate God’s reputation and the validity of the law by choosing to obey the law and to discipline themselves to beat sin to death in their flesh. They further believe that the bottom line is proving to Satan that God is fair, and following Jesus demonstrates that Satan is a liar.
In other words, the Adventist worldview is all about rescuing God from Satan’s gossip and lies about Him. We, the poor creatures caught in this “cosmic conflict” between good and evil, have the power to choose to be on God’s team or Satan’s. But putting up with suffering and choosing to obey in the face of persecution for our obedience, we finally prove that Satan is wrong about God, and He is really good after all.
The worldview completely warps the Bible. Adventists cannot read Scripture without seeing it as their own story and finding evidence of how God may help them if they are obedient. Further, they find God to be inscrutable and a bit of a trickster, allowing them to misunderstand Him and also Satan in His commitment to “fairness”, to allowing His creatures to exercise their “free will” in an attempt to prove His own goodness and to defend His reputation.
Getting Reality Straight
This entire question of how God molds people into the image of His Son begins with a proper understanding of human nature. We are not born with “free will”, able to choose God or not. We are born dead in trespasses and sins, under the power of the prince of the air, the spirit now at work in the children of disobedience, by nature children of wreath (Eph. 2:1–3). By nature we are UNABLE to please, seek, choose, or even to desire God (Rom. 3:9–18).
God doesn’t mold us into the image of His Son by allowing us to misunderstand Him and to subject us to inscrutable suffering in the hope that we will choose to obey Him. On the contrary, He reveals Himself to us by bring the gospel of our salvation to us: Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture; He was buried, and He was raised on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).
When we hear this word of our salvation and believe, we are literally born again. God gives us a new heart, a new spirit, and He puts His own seal on us: His Holy Spirit of promise who will never leave us (Eph. 1:13, 14).
When we are brought thus from death to eternal life (Jn. 5:24), we are new and different. Now we have God Himself indwelling us, and He teaches us to trust Him. Our sanctification is NOT about learning to obey His law; it is about trusting that His Son has fulfilled the law. Now we literally entrust ourselves to Him, and when we face troubles, we trust Him and allow His Spirit to inform us how to proceed with faith and thanksgiving and patience with His peace guarding our hearts.
God doesn’t risk His reputation with us in order to mold us into the image of Jesus. That idea is heretical and puts God in the light of a narcissistic or borderline parent who guilts us with His own suffering as He tries to get us to obey Him.
What about Job?
The lesson’s use of the story of Job misses the point of the book of Job. To be sure, Job didn’t know the “back story” of Satan appearing with the sons of God and being assigned by God to touch Job and to cause his suffering. But God wasn’t testing Job or trying to perfect Him. Instead, God was demonstrating that Job did trust Him—and as Job trusted God, he learned that what he had thought about the way God worked in the world was not accurate. He had thought he understood how God interacted with humans.
After all of Job’s losses and sufferings, after his friends’ vine explanations of God’s ways, God Himself confronts Job and asks Him if he understood the ways of God. Was Job there when God created and named the stars? Was he there when He made the sea monsters? Did Job understand how God controlled the weather and the beasts and the plants and the crops and the ways of men and women?
Job 42 reveals the bottom line of the book of Job: Job repents:
Then Job answered the LORD and said:
“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1–6).
There it is: righteous Job repents in sackcloth and ashes, admitting that he had talked about “what [he] did not understand, things too wonderful for [him], which [he] did not know.”
Job THOUGHT he understood God, but he learned that he did not. This humility and repentance for thinking he understood how God worked among men was what God wanted Job to understand, and Job learned the lesson. He repented for his arrogance, for his incomplete view of reality, for his small sense of God’s ways.
This recognition, this repentance, is what Adventism needs. Adventism has an inside-out view of God and man. They have man’s free will at the top of the pyramid of value, and they have God cast as the one who enables man to be good while honoring his free will.
In reality, God is utterly sovereign. He is over all mankind. He is sovereign over every single spiritually dead human to enter the world, and He reveals His nature and identity through general revelation (Rom. 1:18–20), and He reveals the Lord Jesus as the One who became sin for us so that we can become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21).
God isn’t out there trying His best to get us to obey Him and to bolster our self-discipline so we fight the flesh with obedience to the law.
On the contrary, God is revealing Himself to us through His word as He equips us for the suffering we experience. When we are born again, we can expect to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Those who are alive in Christ will find the world to be hostile to their trust in Jesus and to the presence of God in them.
The lesson assumes that people become more like Christ by choosing to obey through life’s hardships while God trues hard to keep them from misunderstanding Him.
The biblical reality is that when we are born again through believing in the Lord Jesus, we KNOW God. We are alive in Him, and this intimate oneness with Him is what carries us through the world’s hostility.
Adventism does not understand the fact that people are either alive or dead. There is no middle ground. People are not born free with opportunities to choose to obey Jesus. Rather, they are born dead and presented with the One Way out of their death: repentance and trusting the finished work of the Lord Jesus on the cross where He paid for all our sins, past, present, and future.
The lesson is frustrating because it is not telling the truth. Adventists are entrapped in a prison of helplessness because they do not know that they CANNOT become sanctified by obedience and suffering. They can only be sanctified if they have been justified by believing in Jesus and His gospel, and then God works in them to become mature, to trust Jesus in their lives.
Adventism presents a false view of the nature of man and of God and of reality. The Bible tells us the truth. We are born dead, and Jesus shows us Himself. When we believe in Him, we are made alive, and He takes responsibility for us!
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:20–21).
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