Colleen and Nikki discuss Adventism’s doctrine “God the Holy Spirit”. They discuss the confusing teaching of Adventism concerning “it”—Adventism’s often used pronoun for the Holy Spirit. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Today we’ll be discussing the Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief #5 on the Holy Spirit. As a new Christian, I remember being shocked by how much I didn’t understand about the gospel, the New Covenant, the finished work of Christ, and in some ways, most foreign to me was the biblical work of the Holy Spirit, both in our salvation and in our life after. Once again we have a lot to cover today, so we’re just going to jump right in. But before we do, let me remind you that if you have any questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails and online articles. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so Colleen, today I actually have a two-part question for you.
Colleen: Ooh, okay.
Nikki: So the first one is as an Adventist, what did you understand about the Holy Spirit? And the second one is what was most surprising to you to learn about Him as a new believer?
Colleen: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. As an Adventist, what did I understand? Well, I thought of the Holy Spirit mostly as a force. Somewhere along the line I learned that it was appropriate to call Him a person, but I referred to Him as “it” almost my entire Adventist life. As I got older and wanted to begin understanding the Bible, still very, very firmly Adventist, I was reading in the New Testament more, and I discovered that the Holy Spirit indwells believers, and I was really intrigued by that, and somewhere along the line I did read a book by an Adventist about being filled with the Holy Spirit, and it was a very convicting book from an Adventist perspective, and I believed I needed to pray for the Holy Spirit to fill my life. Now, it was not connected to believing the gospel, it was just connected to having the Holy Spirit, and I remember thinking, “Well, this does look biblical, it does look like something I need to do,” but I was afraid. I was afraid that He would make me do something I didn’t want to do –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – like, what if He makes me go stand on the street corner and preach the gospel and look like a fool? And it’s funny because now what I do is kind of like what I would have thought as a fool back then. And I also remember talking at the time to a friend of mine who was also questioning Adventism, and she said to me she always thought of being filled with the Holy Spirit as being sort of a positive demon possession, like a power that was good but not bad, but it would come in and fill your life and make you do good things, but they might be things that are really embarrassing and things you don’t want to do, and it’s like ewww!
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: What surprised me the most is probably how intimate and unobtrusive the Holy Spirit seemed to me once I understood the gospel, and yet at the same time completely overwhelming. I remember – and I’ve mentioned this before – that I would go to church after I understood the gospel and I know I was born again, and I realized that the truths of Scripture that were being taught from the word and sung in the songs would make me weep, and I couldn’t even tell why I was weeping, and I finally understood that it was the Holy Spirit –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – that He was convicting me and making me realize how different He had caused my life to be because I had trusted in Jesus. That was probably one of the most surprising things. And I just want to briefly mention that I asked Richard and our friend Steve about this as well. Richard said that he thought of the Holy Spirit as a power for good, the power to make him be good. And Steve came into Adventism having already been a Christian, a truly born-again Christian, and he said he was really surprised because he believed Adventists were Trinitarian, but he heard in their Sabbath school classes people referring to the Holy Spirit as “it,” and it scared him because they were using Jehovah’s Witness language to talk about the Holy Spirit, and he wondered if he had been wrong about their Trinitarianism, and he said as a Christian, before being Adventist, he so understood that he had the Holy Spirit in him and had a relationship with Him, and the Holy Spirit would actually translate his prayers to the Father, and he knew the Holy Spirit was working in his life, but he said he didn’t see that in Adventism.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I thought that was interesting.
Nikki: That is interesting.
Colleen: But what about you, Nikki? How would you answer these questions?
Nikki: Well, a lot like you guys did. I thought of Him as a force, as almost like a ghost, you know?
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: Because I didn’t have a concept of spirit anyway, and I heard people refer to Him as the Holy Ghost, and it was almost just God’s power.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: I was looking forward to the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit –
Colleen: Oh, right.
Nikki: – at the Latter Rain. I remember looking at other churches wondering, “Did we miss it?”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: You know, because I believed we were Laodicea, and we were the lukewarm church. And I would meet Christians – kind of the reverse of how Steve explained it. I would meet Christians, and they would talk about the Lord, about the Holy Spirit, about the Father like they knew Him personally –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and it affected their life and their affect, and so I did wonder if we had missed this Latter Rain. I believed that He would leave me if I didn’t, you know, live up to what I was supposed to be.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: So I had a very insecure understanding of His work. I didn’t understand His work.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: I realize now, after preparing for this podcast, that I had a pretty Adventist understanding of the Holy Spirit.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: So I think – there were so many things that were surprising to me. Like I said, understanding the biblical teachings on the Holy Spirit was the most foreign kind of language and concepts of everything that got corrected in my thinking –
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: – after I left. One of the most surprising things was that the Holy Spirit never leaves us once we are born again, that He brings our spirit to life –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and that He seals us, and He never leaves us once we are born of the Spirit and adopted by the Father, and that was incredible. And suddenly all of Scripture told the same story.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It wasn’t confusing, and whenever it did get confusing, I learned to trust that the Holy Spirit would help me see how I was seeing it incorrectly. So things just started making sense, and everything testified of Christ, everything became clear –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and it’s very life-changing when you’re born again –
Colleen: True.
Nikki: – and you have the Holy Spirit illuminating everything around you.
Colleen: And He is a He, He is a person. And not only that, but we have spirits –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – that are dead in sin and come to life when we trust Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is our seal. We’ll talk about that more. But it’s a completely different way to think of things.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I think we need to read this Fundamental Belief.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: Do you want to do that?
Nikki: Sure. So this is Fundamental Belief #5 on God the Holy Spirit. “God the eternal Spirit was active with the Father and the Son in Creation, incarnation, and redemption. He is as much a person as are the Father and the Son. He inspired the writers of Scripture. He filled Christ’s life with power. He draws and convicts human beings; and those who respond He renews and transforms into the image of God. Sent by the Father and the Son to be always with His children, He extends spiritual gifts to the church, empowers it to bear witness to Christ, and in harmony with the Scriptures leads it into all truth.”
Colleen: And then the string of texts, which they always attach and don’t necessarily say anything specific about what they’re actually saying. So what stands out to you in this, Nikki, that should be a little bit of a yellow if not a bright red flag to people?
Nikki: Well, you know, there are several things. I honestly find it interesting, and if you’re listening, you can’t see this, but they have Creation capitalized.
Colleen: Yes, I noticed that.
Nikki: I’m curious about that.
Colleen: It’s like a proper noun. And the next Fundamental Belief that we’re going to study, #6, is entitled “Creation.” And for Adventists that’s really significant.
Nikki: And I also found it interesting that they say, “He is as much a person as are the Father and the Son.” They’ve already covered their doctrine on the Godhead.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: If you understand all of their history –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – this really does seem like a PR statement.
Colleen: I agree.
Nikki: You wouldn’t see something worded like this in a Christian doctrinal statement.
Colleen: No. But an organization that began as an Arian and antitrinitarian offshoot of Christianity, well if you want to look authentic, you would have to do some damage control in your language.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I see that in that sentence.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I was also struck by the next sentence, “He inspired the writers of Scripture.” Well, we’ve already covered the first Fundamental Belief on the Word of God, and we talked about the fact that Adventism believes the Holy Spirit inspired the writers, He gave them thought inspiration so they could write down however they understood it. Scripture says the Holy Spirit inspired the words.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They’re definitely referring to their first belief on the Word of God here.
Nikki: So that’s a great example of how a Christian can go on their website and just read them listed off and read through the Fundamental Beliefs, get to #5, see this, “Yeah, He did, the Holy Spirit inspired Scripture.”
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: They don’t understand what’s behind it if they don’t do an in-depth study.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: And the same thing is true of the next one. “He filled Christ’s life with power.” We’ll see in this episode that that essentially is proving their belief that Christ was stripped of power.
Colleen: Yes, and was given sinful flesh like all of us, and He didn’t even have the power and the “advantage” that Adam had.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Well, as we look through this doctrine, before we look at some of the statements from their book Seventh-day Adventist’s Believe, where they explain it – and Nikki, you’ve also found some great quotes from their official website – I just want to read three quotes here from two of Adventism’s founders that will help us understand how Adventism understood the Holy Spirit in its founding days when the doctrines were hammered out. The first is from Uriah Smith. Now, Nikki, in a past podcast you mentioned and quoted from Uriah Smith. He was an original Adventist. He was the editor of the Adventist Review for, like, decades. He was a contemporary of the Whites. He wrote their book Daniel and the Revelation. Many people think of that as Ellen White, but it was Uriah Smith, and he said this in the Review & Herald in October of 1890, and those of you who are familiar with the dates realize that this is fairly late. James White is already dead; Ellen White has already written most of her Conflict of the Ages series and all of her early works. He wrote this: “Respecting this Spirit, the Bible uses expressions which cannot be harmonized with the idea that it is a person like the Father and the Son. Rather it is shown to be a divine influence from them both, the medium which represents their power and by which they have knowledge and power through all the universe when not personally present.”
Nikki: There goes the Trinity.
Colleen: Exactly. There goes the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is an influence, a power, the means by which the physical, as we discussed earlier, the physical Father and the Son know what’s happening in the universe. They can’t know because they can’t be everywhere. The Holy Spirit, the emanation from the Father and the Son, lets them know. Now, Ellen White herself wrote really surprising strange things about the Holy Spirit. This first one is from a book entitled The Coming King on page 33, and she says, “The Spirit of God, with its vivifying power, must be in every human agent that every spiritual muscle and sinew may be in exercise. Without the Holy Spirit, without the breath of God, there is torpidity of conscience, loss of spiritual life. Many who are without spiritual life have their names on the church records, but they are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. They may be joined to the church, but they are not united to the Lord. Unless there is genuine conversion of the soul to God, unless the vital breath of God quickens the soul to spiritual life, unless the professors of truth are actuated by heaven-borne principle, they’re not born of the incorruptible seed which liveth and abideth forever.” Well, what is she saying? [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] I don’t know.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: But I did pick up on her referring to Him as an “it” –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – with its vivifying power.
Colleen: Yes. Exactly. And hiding behind her prophetic vivifying talk. She makes it clear that the Holy Spirit is the breath of God. Notice that? Because that is her definition of the human spirit as well, our breath. She makes it clear that He is, as you said, an “it,” and that He is a heaven-borne principle which actuates believers. He is not a person, in her mind. And then here’s another one. This is from her book Adventist Home, which, frankly, I always had trouble reading as an Adventist, page 350. “Keep cheerful.” Oh, I hated it when Ellen with that dour face would say, “Keep cheerful.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: “Do not forget that you have a comforter, the Holy Spirit, which” – not whom – “which Christ has appointed. You are never alone if you will listen to the voice that now speaks to you. If you will respond without delay to the knocking at the door of your heart, ‘Come in, Lord Jesus, that I may sup with thee and thee with me,’ the heavenly guest will enter. When this element, which is all divine, abides with you, there is peace and rest.” Well, once again the Holy Spirit is an element.
Nikki: And you’re never alone if.
Colleen: Exactly! If.
Nikki: And it’s interesting too because she’s talking about the Holy Spirit, but contained in the “if” is “come in Lord Jesus.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So we see again that she really did see the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, who could not be everywhere.
Colleen: That’s right. That’s exactly right. She taught that in so many ways. When she spoke of Christ, she taught that way. When she spoke of the Holy Spirit, she speaks that way. When she speaks of the life of the Adventist in becoming holy, she speaks that way. He is a power that is not Christ, He represents Christ, “it” represents Christ. When we look at the book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, we see all of these founding ideas present in the way they speak, but they’re really careful not to be as overt as Uriah Smith or even Ellen White. What is one of the first quotes that you see that is alarming from a Christian perspective?
Nikki: Well, just to begin with, all of these chapters begin with some kind of flowery, embellished, not scriptural language kind of descriptions of things in Scripture.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: It says, “When Jesus broke the shackles of death, the kingdom of God dawned in their hearts. Now unquenchable fire burned within their souls.” They go on to say, “They confessed their faults to one another and opened themselves more fully to receive Jesus, their ascended King.”
Colleen: Hmm.
Nikki: So this is after Jesus ascended to the Father, and they’re waiting on Pentecost.
Colleen: Yeah. And I want to say, “What?”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: When Christ broke the shackles of death, the kingdom of God dawned in their hearts? Where’s that in Scripture? You know, Jesus had preached the kingdom to them. They believed who He was, but they were obeying Him and waiting for those ten days, until the Holy Spirit was poured out. They didn’t know what they would experience or what that would look like. They just knew they weren’t allowed to go out and preach, and they were still hiding out from the Romans and from the Jews, who were really mad that they had lost Jesus after they thought they’d killed Him.
Nikki: And the kingdom doesn’t dawn.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: There are two kingdoms. There is the kingdom of the beloved Son and there’s the kingdom of darkness.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: So this isn’t something flowery and emotional and metaphorical that happens. There is a reality that we are born into the kingdom of darkness.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And then when we are born again, we’re transferred into the kingdom of the beloved Son. But they use these words that sound almost right –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – to create something pretty.
Colleen: Like “unquenchable fire burned in souls”? You know what? No unquenchable fire burned anywhere until the flames of Pentecost came on them. That was the unquenchable fire that Jesus had promised they would receive. And where does it say, as they waited, that they confessed their faults to one another and opened themselves to more fully receive Jesus? Why would this even be included in this book, Nikki?
Nikki: You know, I was looking for footnotes. I was thinking, this must be Ellen because this is embellishment; right? There’s nothing to indicate that it’s from her, but I know, being a former Adventist, that we have ideas in our head –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – that we don’t even always know come from her.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so it’s very possible that the person writing this chapter had that in their thinking from one of her books.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Right. And as you said to me earlier, this kind of sentence is setting the stage for believing that in order to receive the Holy Spirit we have to make ourselves ready.
Nikki: Yup.
Colleen: There’s no hint that God fulfills His promises, the Lord Jesus keeps His promises regardless of us. This is not a conditional promise. Jesus told them to go and wait, and He would send the power from heaven. He didn’t ask them to confess faults and make themselves ready.
Nikki: No, this is a part of the unconditional covenant.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: I just want to gripe a little bit about their statement that Pentecost is described – or they describe Pentecost as “like a roar of a tornado,” and the Holy Spirit came “like a rampaging fire.” I understand they’re trying to be creative and engaging, but Scripture is history.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: This is a historical reality. And the words of Scripture are sufficient.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And so when we start getting flowery and embellishing, we’re conditioning people to engage their imagination and to not rely on the words of the text.
Colleen: I agree. On page 71 I noticed another quote, “At Pentecost the Spirit made the one God-man, Jesus, universally present to all willing recipients.” Well, what’s wrong with that?
Nikki: Again, we have evidence that they have stripped Christ of His omnipresence.
Colleen: Right. Exactly. The Holy Spirit did not make Jesus the God-man universally present. Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit was sent for the believers’ benefit. He is God who never leaves, indwelling us, but it doesn’t negate the fact that the Father and the Son also make their home with believers. We don’t make ourselves ready. We don’t have to be willing to receive Him. He promises Himself when we trust Him.
Nikki: So we see all of this antitrinitarian language in these chapters, and it’s interesting because there are within Adventism different groups with different ideas and different opinions based on what they have gathered to collect their Fundamental Beliefs –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and I have seen antitrinitarian Adventists using quotes like this –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – to say, “Ellen White didn’t believe in the Trinity. We have fallen for the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Trinity.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “The Holy Spirit is not a third person, it’s the Spirit of Christ because He couldn’t be omnipresent.” And it drives a lot of Adventists crazy to hear them talking this way, but the fact of the matter is the people saying this are being the most truthful –
Colleen: I agree.
Nikki: – with the original Adventist beliefs.
Colleen: I totally agree. In fact, this book reveals that they are still cautious about – they will not renounce that original belief. Listen to this quote from page 71, “From eternity God the Holy Spirit lived within the Godhead as the third member.” Well, you can’t look at that and say technically that’s wrong, but the choice of words is very clearly chosen to define the Holy Spirit as separate from the Father and the Son. The idea of a tritheism is rampant through all of these doctrines. God is not one being expressed in three persons who share substance, and that’s very clear from sentences like this. There are three beings who are not sharing substance.
Nikki: Right after they say that, they say “The Father, Son, and Spirit are equally self-existent.” So again, that sounds almost right. Orthodoxy says that God is self-existent in three persons.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: But the way they worded that, “The Father, Son, and Spirit are equally self-existent,” it leaves room for that Godhead, like you said.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But you see that conflict between these different groups all through the book. They say right at the beginning, “The Bible reveals that the Holy Spirit is a person, not an impersonal force.” Well, that’s completely contradicting Ellen White and Uriah Smith.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: So they’re playing to both groups here.
Colleen: It’s carrying out the deception that was born in the ’50s when the Adventists wrote Questions on Doctrine to deceive Walter Martin and the evangelicals, as they called them, and they reworded Adventist Fundamental Beliefs about the nature of Christ and the atonement so that the Christians would not understand how cultic they were. They’re still doing that kind of deception in their wording.
Nikki: Um-hmm. They also say that, “When the Spirit comes to believers, He comes as the ‘Spirit of Christ’ – He does not come in His own right, carrying His own credentials.”
Colleen: So again, He’s not a person, He’s an emanation from Jesus. I also want to notice that on page 71 the author of this book says, “Adam and Eve’s sin separated them from both the Garden [capitalized] and the indwelling Spirit.” This is another sentence that almost seems right, but when you look at it, it’s not what the Bible says. When Adam and Eve sinned, they died, and yes, that means some sort of separation from God. But it was never defined as the indwelling Spirit.
Nikki: And in Adventism they needed it to be the indwelling Spirit because, of course, Adam and Eve didn’t have spirits, remember.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: So we understand that their spirits died. God said, “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” And their spirits died.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: But they have to describe it as the Holy Spirit leaving. And right after that sentence they say, “That separation continues wherever sin reigns.” Well, okay. So that might sound right, but what they’re saying here is where sin isn’t reigning you’ll have the Holy Spirit –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and as soon as sin enters into your life, He will leave.
Colleen: That is what they’re saying because that’s what Adventists believe.
Nikki: And they don’t believe in original sin. So here again, we’re talking about origins.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Christianity has a different understanding of the nature of sin, the nature of man, and the need for the Lord as does Adventism.
Colleen: That’s right. Absolutely true.
Nikki: You know, they say right after that that “While the world remained in the hands of the usurper, the pouring out of the fullness of the Spirit had to wait. Before the Spirit could be poured upon all flesh Christ must carry out His earthly ministry and make the atoning sacrifice.” So here we have the phase one, earthly ministry. Once He does that, now He can send the Holy Spirit so He can go and do His phase two heavenly ministry, which we’ll get into later.
Colleen: And while this sentence almost sounds right, it’s not right, for all the reasons you said. It’s leaving room for the Investigative Judgment, the earthly and heavenly “ministries” of Christ, the phases of His ministry, but in reality the Holy Spirit was poured out by God’s sovereign choice, not on waiting for anything to happen. It was God’s choice that Jesus’ finished atonement would occur, His ascension would occur, and then the Holy Spirit would come. Jesus Himself told His disciples that would happen. So He was poured out by God’s sovereign decree on the Day of Pentecost, which by the way, had been the traditional yearly feast the Jews had always celebrated on the first day of the week, 50 days after Passover. This was the fulfillment, as Acts 2 says, of Joel 2:28-32. This was about the atonement being completed, not about a phase of Jesus ministry having been completed and then a new phase beginning.
Nikki: So the book moves then into the mission of the Holy Spirit, and I found it interesting that under the origin of the mission they talk about essentially who or what – I don’t even know how to talk about it [laughter] –
Colleen: Uh-huh. [Laughter.]
Nikki: – from their perspective – that the Holy Spirit is. And they say that He’s called the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of His Son, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ. They are blending the Holy Spirit with the Lord Jesus.
Colleen: Um-hmm. That’s true.
Nikki: And I found it interesting that as they kind of bulleted off what He does in the world, we never see that He seals believers.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: They never bring up, in this chapter or on adventist.org, they never bring up Ephesians 1:13 and 14.
Colleen: I noticed that too. It is completely missing. And for Christians, that’s the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives once we’re born again. It’s interesting to me too that they said Jesus was the first person to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit and that they said, “We are given assurance that, through the Holy Spirit, Christ ‘the true Light,’ illuminates ‘every man coming into the world.'” And they credited the verse John 1:9 for that idea. Well, there is so much wrong with this. How would you respond, Nikki, to “Jesus was the first person to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit”?
Nikki: Jesus is God the Son. He’s been in perfect relationship and unity with the Holy Spirit for all eternity. They’re self-existent together.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: So that bothers me.
Colleen: Um-hmm. And they make it about His humanity, the first person.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, Jesus is unique. He is a singularity. He is the incarnate God the Son, and we cannot use Him as our example for how to live and please God. He came to be our substitute. We cannot compare ourselves to Him as the incarnate Son of God and say, “Okay, He was the first. I can also achieve that.” He was God. And it’s also interesting that by saying, “Through the Holy Spirit, Christ ‘the true Light,’ illuminates ‘every man coming into the world.'” John 1:9 actually says that the true Light was coming into the world. It goes on to say that the world cannot see Him because it loves darkness rather than light, but there’s no mention of Jesus needing the Holy Spirit to illuminate the world when He came. He was the Light. That’s like Ellen White saying she’s the lesser light leading to the greater light. We don’t need somebody to enlighten the light. Jesus was the Light, and He illuminated the world. That’s what the verse says. They’re misusing the verse and inserting the agency of this power of the Spirit. It’s not what the verse says.
Nikki: It’s all very crazy-making to me that the Holy Spirit is empowering Jesus, but the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: It’s so convoluted.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: You know, under His mission for believers there is a quote here that I want to share.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: It says, “His sanctifying influence leads to obedience, but no one continues to experience His abiding presence without meeting certain conditions.”
Colleen: Oh, my.
Nikki: “Peter has said God has given the Spirit to those who continuously obey Him. Thus believers are warned about resisting, grieving, and quenching the Spirit.” We have to earn the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Well, this isn’t what Scripture teaches at all.
Colleen: No, not at all. On 74 there was a quote that bothered both of us, Nikki. Could you read that?
Nikki: It says, “Cumbered with humanity, the man Jesus was not omnipresent, which was why it was expedient that He depart. Through the Spirit He could be everywhere all the time.” Then it says from Desire of Ages, they quote Ellen White, “The Holy Spirit is Christ’s representative but divested of the personality of humanity and independent thereof.”
Colleen: Okay, so what’s wrong here?
Nikki: [Laughter.] Well, all of it.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Now we have divine simplicity tossed out the window.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: That’s just, Jesus can’t possibly be God because He doesn’t have all the attributes of God, and the Holy Spirit isn’t actually anything other than Jesus without His body.
Colleen: So we have Jesus not being omnipresent and the Spirit being required so Jesus could be everywhere all the time. Well, that negates the person of the Spirit and makes Him what Adventism really believes, He’s more the emanation of Jesus –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and the emanation of God. And like you said, they’ve adjusted their language to say He’s a person, but in point of fact, the way they speak of Him, He’s not a person, He’s the extension of the Father and the Son, and it’s no wonder that as an Adventist I almost never referred to Him as “He.” He didn’t function as a “He” in my Adventist paradigm. He was an “it.” He was power.
Nikki: Um-hmm. We were very confused because their PR does not blend well with their true beliefs.
Colleen: That’s a really good way to put it.
Nikki: In the book they have a quote here from Leroy Froom –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – in 1949 on how He guides the operation of the church, and it says, “The distinctive feature of Protestantism is that the Holy Spirit is the true vicar or successor of Christ on earth. To depend on organization, or leaders, or wisdom of men, is to put the human in place of the divine.” And then I have this lovely quote that came to mind from Ellen White in Testimonies, Volume 3, page 492: “When the judgment of the General Conference, which is the highest authority that God has upon the earth, is exercised, private independence and private judgment must not be maintained but be surrendered.” So you have the Holy Spirit replacing Jesus.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: He’s the vicar, and you’re not supposed to listen to any human agency. And then along comes Ellen, and if the General Conference speaks, you suspend all thought –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and you submit.
Colleen: Because the General Conference is the voice of God on earth. Now, this is interesting. There are so many implications here. The quote you read by Froom, it really is interesting for me to realize that this Froom was the head of the team of men that the General Conference appointed to speak to Walter Martin when he came and did his research about Adventism. He’s the one who wrote to the General Conference president about how they described the nature of Christ and the atonement and said: The words will be a little different than we’re used to, but you have to understand the nature of these evangelicals and the kinds of words they used and how they think. If you understood that, you would understand why we had to fudge on our doctrines. In essence; that’s not a quote, but that’s essentially what he said.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: So that’s the Froom who’s saying this, and it’s also interesting to me that he uses very specifically this definition of the Holy Spirit as the true vicar of Christ on earth. Well, he’s directly assaulting Catholicism here.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Their belief in the pope as the Vicar of Christ, and he’s saying the Holy Spirit is the Vicar of Christ, and no, the Holy Spirit is not. He is the third person of the Trinity, the same substance as Christ and the Father. There’s so much heresy here.
Nikki: When you understand that they believed that the General Conference is the highest authority that God has upon the earth, you might scratch your head and say, “Well, that was back then, you know. We’re different now.” But I found a current article online, and I wish I could reference it here. If you want it, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. We’ll get that to you. But there’s an article that is written to the staff at the General Conference in DC telling them: You are a part of God’s highest authority on earth. You as secretaries, you’re not just normal secretaries. You are the people that the whole world is looking to for God’s truth, and you need to live like it.
Colleen: And just by the by, for Froom to say that the Holy Spirit is the Vicar of Christ on earth, well Ellen White has made the General Conference the Adventist vicar.
Nikki: So the book went on and talked about spiritual gifts, and I noticed this in the paragraph for Fundamental Belief #5, where it says that the Holy Spirit extends spiritual gifts to the church. I don’t know if you noticed that “extends” there. In Scripture, He gives them.
Colleen: Yes, that’s right.
Nikki: In Adventism, He extends them, and it’s up to you to take it and use it.
Colleen: You’re right.
Nikki: And I couldn’t help but think about a quote that I’ve shared already here before from the adventistworld.org website where the author is teaching parents how to instill Adventism into their young children. And when she gets to the topic of spiritual gifts, she says, “Get your children to identify their spiritual gifts and then encourage them to serve in church programs and other community projects. If Justin has the gift of singing, let him join the children’s choir to sing at a senior citizens home on Sabbath afternoons. For Maria, who’s gifted artistically, let her help paint the backdrop for vacation bible school.” They don’t have a biblical understanding of what spiritual gifts are –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – or that the Holy Spirit gives them to us according to His own will.
Colleen: Yes. It’s not up to us to take them and to define our talents as gifts of the Spirit. Well, related to what the Holy Spirit does for believers, according to the Adventist idea, they also say in this book, “The infilling of the Holy Spirit continues the work of sanctification begun at the new birth.” Now, a Christian reading this without an understanding of Adventist belief will not be alarmed, but Nikki, from our perspective, knowing Adventism and knowing Christianity, what is this Adventist argument actually saying?
Nikki: Well, honestly, it’s contradicting what they say in other places, that you cannot be born again until you’re sanctified.
Colleen: They say you can’t receive the Holy Spirit until you’re ready, until you’ve overcome your sin. They don’t actually believe in the biblical new birth, but they haven’t divulged that to the reader. The new birth requires our spirits coming to life and being born again through trust in Jesus’ finished work. There is no mention of the cross here. There is no mention of the gospel. There is no mention of the Holy Spirit being God’s promise to people who trust the blood of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and have confessed their sins and have received His full atonement for them. This is completely lacking from this whole chapter. So for them to say the Holy Spirit continues the work of sanctification begun at the new birth is just Adventist speak for saying, once you change your mind about your sin and accept the Adventist doctrines, the Holy Spirit continues to help you overcome sin.
Nikki: The new birth is, like you said, it’s conversion.
Colleen: In an Adventist perspective.
Nikki: On adventist.org they give a list of the 28 Fundamental Beliefs, and then they have the links where they explain each of them. And in their link on the Holy Spirit they talk about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: I never heard about this when I was an Adventist, but they have it on their website now, and there’s this quote that says, “To be baptized, or filled, with all the fullness of God, we must first allow God to empty us of the things contrary to His word. Just as you cannot fill a milk carton with water until it is empties of its contents. Similarly, we cannot be filled with the Spirit until we allow God to do His work through the Spirit. This is called the ‘sanctification of the Spirit.'” And then they have 1 Peter 1:2 right there. “Christ is simply waiting for entrance so He may begin this process. Day by day, you and I are to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, so as we interact with those around us, they may see we too have been with Jesus.”
Colleen: Oh, my goodness. That’s just not the way the Bible describes the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Nikki: No, and it’s not the way that salvation works at all.
Colleen: Not at all.
Nikki: And just read Ephesians chapter 2 and it will destroy everything I just read here. While we were dead we were raised to life in Christ, and when we believed, we were sealed with the Holy Spirit. Sanctification comes after all of that, it doesn’t precede it. We were already dead.
Colleen: And it’s really important to know that Scripture describes the sealing of the Holy Spirit as something very specific, very unique, something that this chapter, as you said earlier, never mentions. And here’s what it says in Ephesians 1:13 and 14, and notice how the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is directly linked to the gospel of the finished work of Christ. “In Him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation – and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory.” And just by the way, please notice that the Bible tells us the Holy Spirit is the seal that guarantees all of our inheritance in the Lord to a believer. Adventism and Ellen White teach that the Sabbath is the seal of God. That’s blasphemy. That’s replacing the work of the Holy Spirit with something else. Keeping Sabbath, never is that mentioned. Our seal is our guarantee, and it is the person of the Holy Spirit.
Nikki: And it’s not something we earn.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: This is a gift of grace. This is God’s mercy and His love for us. They never mention John chapter 3 when they’re talking about the Holy Spirit.
Colleen: No, they don’t.
Nikki: They never talk about Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus and our need to be born of the Spirit.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: That doesn’t come up.
Colleen: And another thing that’s out of John that they don’t mention is John 1:12, where John says that to everyone who believes in Jesus, in Him, He gave the right to become children of God. And he goes on to say that these children of God are born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. This book does not mention that, this Fundamental Belief does not mention that. The Holy Spirit is involved in our being born of God through faith in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is not a power who comes along and makes us good enough to belong to God. He is the seal when we trust Jesus.
Nikki: There’s so much more we could share from this chapter. It starts to get really frustrating. Really the bottom line is they have a different story of origin.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: They have a different need. In Adventism they need to vindicate God’s character, they need to uphold the law, and they need to be able to obey God perfectly, and so how do you do that? You draw from this power, like Jesus drew from power, and He’s your example, and that’s their story. But Scripture tells us a completely different story. It tells us that we’re born in the likeness of Adam, that we are born dead. Ephesians 2 says we are children of wrath.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: We are destined for God’s wrath in our original state –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – but God sent His Son who, like you said so many times, smuggled life into the world, and He came and He paid the price for our sin, He died on the cross, He was buried, He was resurrected. Peter tells us that God causes us to be born again by the resurrection power of Christ, and when we put our trust in Him and His finished work, He fills us with His Spirit, and Ezekiel 36:26, He puts His Spirit in us and He gives us a new spirit, our dead spirit is quickened and brought to life, and we live in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and everything is different, everything changes, and apart from the work of Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit and the calling of the Father, we are hopeless. There is nothing we can do to earn salvation –
Colleen: No.
Nikki: – to earn sonship and inheritance or anything. We can be as moral as the world says we are –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and we are still destined for hell.
Colleen: Last Saturday I heard a sermon by Randy Roberts at the Loma Linda University Church, and it was entitled “How Do You Know You Have the Holy Spirit?” And I was interested because I knew we would be doing this podcast, and he basically came up with two ways that they can know they have the Holy Spirit. He said, “If you have a desire for Christ, if you want to know Him more, if you love Him, that’s an evidence that you have the Holy Spirit.” Well, I want to stop right there and say that may be an evidence that the Holy Spirit is working on the heart of someone and calling them to believe, but the Holy Spirit indwelling someone is not promised until a person has trusted the blood of Jesus, and that was never mentioned. The second way he said a person could know they have the Holy Spirit is if they have a desire to help others, to look outward, to do good deeds, to help the needy and the poor. And again, the Bible describes those kinds of things as the work of the saved, of the church in this world, but they are not described as the evidence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is promised to people who believe. And when I looked at Scripture, I looked at some texts that tell us how we can know we have the Holy Spirit. We’ve already read Ephesians 1:13 and 14. He is given to us when we believe in Jesus and trust the finished work of His death and resurrection to pay for our sin and to give us His resurrection life. He works in the world to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgement, John 16:8-11. You know, we’ve often said, Nikki, if Jesus fulfilled the law, He had to fulfill every work and part of the law, and the New Testament tells us that the law was given to convict and to increase sin.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This word of Jesus in John 16 says that the Holy Spirit would be sent to convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. And that is all related to the finished work of Christ in the context of John 16. He convicts the world that Jesus came as the righteous Son of God. He convicts the world that He is now with the Father because He was righteous and His work was complete, and He convicts the world of judgment by convicting them that the ruler of this world has been defeated because Jesus was righteous. It’s all about the work of Jesus. We also find in John 5:24 that when we believe in Jesus, we pass from death to life, and we receive new hearts and new spirits and new desires and new power and new purpose, as so many other chapters and verses in both the Old and New Testament say, and as Jesus basically said to Nicodemus, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, Spirit gives birth to spirit.” We know that we have the Holy Spirit when He teaches us to recognize God as our true Father. We learn this in Romans 8:14-17. He teaches us to call God “Abba,” to trust Him to care for us personally, to talk to Him as someone we know intimately because we’ve been born of Him, John 1:12 and 13. We know we have the Holy Spirit when we understand Scripture. Jesus told His disciples in the upper room that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth, and by extension they, who wrote or contributed to the foundation of the church and the writing of Scripture, they are the ones who give us the word that we believe, and Jesus told them that He was praying not only for them but for we who would believe them. And when the Holy Spirit works on our hearts, we understand Scripture. We also know we have the Holy Spirit when we find that He gives us His words and His understanding and the ability to love and minister in ways that are not natural to us. He gifts us, as you said earlier. So having the Holy Spirit does not mean we have infused power to keep the law. It means we have life living in us. He convicts us when we fail to trust Him, and He reminds us of what the Lord Jesus has already done. The Holy Spirit reveals that Jesus’ sacrifice and atonement are finished. There are no two phases. And His sacrifice and His resurrection are sufficient for all who believe and for all eternity. And if you haven’t believed in the sufficient sacrifice, the sufficient work of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we just urge you to consider what the Bible says. Go to the Book of John and read John 1:1-18, read Jesus’ discourse to Nicodemus in John 3, and discover the work of the Spirit is to bring our spirits to life, to give us new birth because we trust in Jesus, God the Son, who became incarnate, took our sin into Himself, paid the price of our sin, suffered as our substitute, and rose from death to break the curse of the law.
Nikki: If you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for weekly emails and online articles. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us next week as we discuss Fundamental Belief #6 on The Creation.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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