Colleen and Nikki discuss Adventism’s doctrine “God the Son”. Learn the difference between the “Adventist” Jesus and the Jesus of the Bible who couldn’t sin and didn’t stop being God when he was born a man. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And Nikki, we’re together! [Laughter.]
Nikki: I know! I love it! [Laughter.]
Colleen: This is exciting!
Nikki: We’re back in studio.
Colleen: We are! Oh, this is so fun. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Well, as everyone knows who’s listening, over the past three weeks, we have discussed Seventh-day Adventism’s first three Fundamental Beliefs, The Word of God, The Godhead, and God the Father. Today we’re going to examine their doctrine on God the Son, belief #4. This might actually be in some ways the most central twisting of their doctrine, because everything that’s true about Christianity is centered on Jesus, and Adventists very subtly, very deceptively, portray Him completely wrong. Much of what we’ve said regarding the Godhead and the Father will relate to what we say about the doctrine of Jesus as well. But we’re going to show how Adventism’s Arian and antitrinitarian roots and their prophet Ellen White have distorted their doctrine of God the Son. And as you said to me earlier, Nikki, what they have done is far worse than merely inventing a false god and calling Him Jesus. They have taken what the Bible says about the real Jesus, and they’ve slandered Him. They’ve mocked Him. They’ve distorted the truth, just subtly, so what we’re seeing when we see the Adventist version of Jesus is just a caricature.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it’s so offensive, it makes me want to both scream and cry. But before we go further, I want to remind you all that you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com to give us your questions and your comments. You can sign up for our weekly Proclamation! Magazine by going to proclamationmagazine.com. It comes by email. And you can also find links to our FAF YouTube channel there, to this podcast, to the podcast transcripts, and to our online magazine articles. You can also donate on the donate tab. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review of this podcast wherever you listen. And now, Nikki, my question for you: How did you think of Jesus when you were an Adventist?
Nikki: For some reason this is really hard for me to know how to answer.
Colleen: I understand.
Nikki: I had a lot of different thoughts about Him. The older I got, the more I began to wonder about His natures, I became more curious about His natures, and I couldn’t find any consistent answers within Adventism. Could He have sinned? Did He have a fallen nature? Was He fully God when He came? Those kinds of questions didn’t get answered, and so the Jesus that I experienced or thought about or sang about was very much an experience. He wasn’t rooted in Scripture.
Colleen: He was subjective.
Nikki: Yeah. So when I would read about Jesus in the Bible, it felt like I was reading about a different guy. And I wanted so badly for my understanding of Him to merge with what I read in Scripture, but it just didn’t seem to. The Jesus in Scripture talked differently –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and behaved differently from the way I heard people talk about Him or sing about Him. I don’t even know how to explain it. It was just very subjective.
Colleen: That makes sense to me. In fact, what you just said reminds me of a dichotomy in my own head as an Adventist that I’ve heard a lot of other Adventists talk about, and that is that Jesus was always kind and sweet and loving and came to show us how the Father loved us –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – and He never spoke harshly or badly or rudely to people. And, you know, I want to say – and even as an Adventist I didn’t know what to do with that exactly. But now I want to say, what about those seven woes in Matthew 23? “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you brood of vipers, you whitewashed tombs!” Really? How do you jibe that with this loving Jesus who came to show the Father, which I had believed He did? I also thought of Him as less than the Father, weaker somehow, the sweet, saccharinized version of God. I never associated Jesus with the Old Testament God who destroyed His enemies –
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: – or who killed the pagans. It never dawned on me that was the same God, but Scripture tells us it is. So there was a lot I didn’t understand. I thought of Him as giving up part of His right to be God because He became man, giving up His omnipresence, kind of a demigod –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – kind of for children. And the older I got, the more uncomfortable I got to say His name. I couldn’t say the name “Jesus.” And one of my huge shocks when we left Adventism and joined a Christian church where Gary Inrig was the pastor was hearing him talk to us on Friday night at our FAF meeting about Jesus, and just as naturally as if I’m sitting here going, “Nikki, it’s so good to see you!” he would say, “Well, the Lord Jesus said, ‘X, Y, and Z,'” and I remember looking at him and thinking not only is somebody naturally and with actually a great deal of love in His voice saying “the Lord Jesus,” but it’s a man saying this –
Nikki: [Laughter.] Yeah.
Colleen: – not just a woman, who is, you know, trying to be demonstrative. I had a picture of Him as weak, mild, unconfrontive, a little bit victimy, who let Himself be cursed and crucified to show us how far He would go to show us how much He loved us. And I didn’t have the understanding of Him paying, literally propitiating, for sin.
Nikki: Yeah, same. And it’s interesting that you bring up hearing Gary teach because even as an Adventist, when I was around other Christians, when they would talk about the Lord and I would listen to them, it was like they were talking about someone they’d just been with.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There was a familiarity that they had with Him that I didn’t. I was just always trying to understand Him and trying to worship Him, but I didn’t feel like I knew Him personally like that.
Colleen: No. I didn’t feel love for Him. And I remember thinking about Gary, when he would talk to us, that he loved Jesus. Now, by that time I knew who Jesus was, and it was overwhelming to me to hear this emotional, personal approach and reference for Jesus, but I didn’t think of Him as fully, omnipotently God.
Nikki: It’s so interesting, reflecting on this, because it just solidifies the reality that we had a different Jesus in our head, in our thinking –
Colleen: We did.
Nikki: – and in our worship.
Colleen: We did. And He was based on the Jesus of the Bible, but He wasn’t the Jesus of the Bible, and they – actually, yesterday, when we were chatting about this, I realized that the way Adventists treat Jesus was a mockery much like what happened when He was here on earth and was taken to the cross, when people beat Him and mocked Him and called Him “King of the Jews,” and humiliated Him. In a sense, Adventism’s treatment of Jesus is that kind of mockery and humiliation. They make Him a caricature of who He is.
Nikki: Yeah. We see that in some of the quotes that we read in this chapter on What Seventh-day Adventists Believe where they undermine Jesus being fully God while He was here on earth.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so they describe why that couldn’t be possible because if that was true, then all these other things would be true, and that’s unacceptable, and that is a way of mocking the true Christ.
Colleen: It is. Well, Nikki, would you read this Fundamental Belief, please?
Nikki: “God the Eternal Son became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Through Him all things were created, the character of God is revealed, the salvation of humanity is accomplished, and the world is judged. Forever truly God, He became also truly human, Jesus the Christ. He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He lived and experienced temptation as a human being, but perfectly exemplified the righteousness and love of God. By His miracles He manifested God’s power and was attested as God’s promised Messiah. He suffered and died voluntarily on the cross for our sins and in our place, was raised from the dead, and ascended to heaven to minister in the heavenly sanctuary on our behalf. He will come again in glory for the final deliverance of His people and the restoration of all things.”
Colleen: Thanks. Right off the top, what strikes you in this passage that you just read that betrays the underlying meaning in the Adventists’ heads as they write this?
Nikki: Well, right there at the end: “He ascended to heaven to minister in the heavenly sanctuary on our behalf.”
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: We know that there is something behind that, and a Christian who doesn’t know what Adventism is will think, “Well, yeah, He’s a priest forever after the Order of Melchizedek,” but this is not what this is about. This is about the face-saving doctrine from their failed date-setting.
Colleen: Exactly. This is about the Investigative Judgment.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Their so-called “Sanctuary Doctrine,” about which much is made, I have to say. In conservative Adventism to this day the Sanctuary Doctrine is much talked about, much taught, and considered the core of Adventism. I also thought it was interesting that it said, “He lived and experienced temptation as a human being, but perfectly exemplified the righteousness and love of God.” To exemplify something is to give an example of, not to actually be it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It doesn’t call Him the righteousness of God or possessing or displaying His own righteousness. He’s just giving us an example. From the beginning – but, you know, a Christian reading this would think we were making too much of this if they heard us talk without understanding the underlying worldview.
Nikki: Yeah, and yet sometimes I wonder if when they hear these things worded just a little bit different, if there’s ever a red flag that comes up, because here they’re talking about Him experiencing temptation as a human being. What better place would it be to say, “Yet without sin.”
Colleen: Exactly!
Nikki: Or the biblical statement that because of this He’s able to be a merciful High Priest. They don’t use the Bible words. They use a little bit of them, but then this kind of, “Wait, that’s a little bit off” tends to be stuff that will hold together their origins story. So He is actually exemplifying the love the God –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – which Satan, of course, accused God of not having.
Colleen: Good point. You know, what you said about using not quite the Bible words but words that sort of rephrase it so that people are caught off guard reminds me of something that I have learned from our friend Amy.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: She has always said, “We need to use Bible words when we talk about God and when we talk about the gospel. We need to use the Bible’s words.” And more and more, I see how right she is.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because when we rephrase it, we insert new insinuations. We have to use what the Bible says, and it’s clear. So thank you, Amy. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Is there anything that you saw that was not included in this statement about Jesus that probably should be in a statement about Jesus?
Nikki: Well, anytime the Adventists talk about any of the persons of the Trinity, we see their tritheism.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Because there’s nothing in here talking about Jesus being of the same substance as the Father.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: That’s gone. The divine simplicity is gone. They’ve separated Him.
Colleen: And when they talk about what He did for salvation, there’s no mention of His resurrection being connected to salvation either, which is interesting to me, because right at the end it says, “He ascended to heaven to minister,” as you said, “in the heavenly sanctuary on our behalf.” It does say He was raised from the dead, but it doesn’t say anything about the significance of being raised from the dead. It just ends with, “He will come again in glory for the final deliverance of His people and the restoration of all things.” Well, if you know Adventism, you realize that’s very deliberate. Christianity understands His resurrection to be the means of our life.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: His death paid for our sin; His resurrection is our life. This is putting this final vindication, this final glorification – and to be honest, in the Adventist worldview people do not know if they’re saved until the second coming, so this last sentence is really significant for an Adventist. “He will come for the final deliverance of His people and the restoration of all things.” That’s when Adventists will find out if they’re saved or not. And that’s implied here.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It never connects salvation being a completed thing with His death and resurrection.
Nikki: When beginning this chapter, I was struck by the fact that they started with a discussion of Israel in the wilderness when the snakes were killing people, and God told Moses to make a bronze serpent –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and lift him up in the desert and for the people to look at him, look at the serpent, and they would be healed. And it wasn’t until I was working my way through the chapter that I saw what they were doing there. They talked about the fact that this was – trying to give the picture of the fact that we look to Christ in order to be saved, look to Christ, not look at Christ, look to Christ. And then they say that the serpent represents sin, and this has something to do with the incarnation.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s not about Christ becoming sin for us on the cross.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: It’s about Him becoming sinful human – not sinful human, because they speak out of both sides of their mouth, but having sinful flesh –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – the ability to sin.
Colleen: Yes. You’re absolutely right about that. I remember as an Adventist being completely confused by that bronze serpent image. And I had trouble understanding how you could look at the source of your death and be made well, as Israel was told to do, look at a representation of what’s killing you and live. As an Adventist, that made no sense to me. As you said, now I see it was representing that Jesus literally took our imputed sin, and we live when we look to Him for that. And that’s what the shadow was for Israel, but I did not see that as an Adventist.
Nikki: No, and the author here clearly doesn’t. They said that “looking to the serpent is akin to looking to incarnate Christ in sinful flesh.” That’s a quote from the chapter. That is not what this is talking about.
Colleen: This book is a treasure trove, as we have said, Seventh-day Adventists Believe, of explanations of these Fundamental Beliefs from an Adventist perspective. So we’re going to walk through some of these explanations and just show how this Fundamental Belief is describing something different from what the Bible describes. This book also said that Jesus’ coming was to bring us back to God and to provide deliverance from sin through the destruction of the works of the devil. Well, He did destroy the works of the devil. John tells us that in his epistles. But it’s not destroying the works of the devil that delivered us from sin. What delivered us from sin?
Nikki: He paid for our sins. It was the penal substitutionary atonement –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – completed.
Colleen: Yes! You know, it’s interesting to me how much Adventism focuses on Satan. Destroying Satan’s work wasn’t Jesus’ primary means of dealing with sin, it wasn’t His focus, it wasn’t what His sacrifice was about. His sacrifice was to save us, to pay the price that was ours, to take the debt of our sin and to pay it. Furthermore, we aren’t really told what He has done about Satan’s sin and Satan’s power. We’re told He’s broken his power and disarmed him and that Satan is a doomed foe. God doesn’t tell us the devil’s story. He tells us ours. Ellen White and Adventism try to tell us the devil’s story.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it’s amazing to me how often the devil comes out as the tragic hero whenever we talk about salvation and Jesus and what He did and what He suffered because bad Satan is trying to defame God, and Jesus is trying to defend God and defend the law, and we’re supposed to help Him do that. That’s not the Bible.
Nikki: No. And these quotes are working together to culminate in pushing forward the Great Controversy worldview. Their first sentence after their introduction was that “God’s plan to rescue those who strayed from His all-wise counsel convincingly demonstrates His love.” Well, why did God need to demonstrate His love, in their worldview? Because He’s trying to vindicate His character, which was slandered by Satan in their origins story. So we start there, and then she says that God provided deliverance through the destruction of the works of the devil, and then they move into the story of Adam and Eve.
Colleen: Um-hmm. And of course, this actually does come from Ellen White’s worldview.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This comes from her pre-history story, which as we said in our very first episode in this series, the origins story takes you to where the destination is going to end up, and the Adventist destination is not the biblical one. Ellen’s origins are underneath all of this.
Nikki: So they say, “Immediately after Adam and Eve sinned, God gave them hope by promising to introduce a supernatural enmity between the serpent and the woman, between his seed and hers. This statement was the first assurance that the controversy between good and evil would end in victory for God’s Son.” So you have to understand that origins story –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – in order to flesh this out. Why is it hopeful that God would put enmity between the serpent and the woman?
Colleen: Great question.
Nikki: And how is this assurance that the controversy between good and evil would end in victory? Well, if God puts enmity between God’s people and Satan’s people, then they’ve got a better chance –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – at overcoming sin.
Colleen: Right! The enmity is our hope.
Nikki: It’s like tipping the odds in our favor.
Colleen: Right. And do you see how none of this is actually wrong. It’s just not what Scripture tells us that God said and did. It’s not what Scripture says is our hope. The hope of Genesis 3:15 is that Eve’s seed would crush the serpent’s head. It’s not that there will be enmity so we have a better chance.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: You know what, Nikki? We came out of such a dark cult. I just thank God. I couldn’t have seen this if He hasn’t supernaturally lifted the veil from my eyes.
Nikki: Or placed us in a church where the Bible is faithfully taught.
Colleen: Exactly, and unpacked all of that worldview.
Nikki: And then the book also said that the sacrifices, because they started talking about, of course, the sacrificial system –
Colleen: Of course.
Nikki: – because they are setting the stage for His ministry in heaven.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: And they said that the sacrifices illustrate how Jesus would eradicate sin. But His death didn’t eradicate sin. It paid for it.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: His judgment will eradicate sin.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: There was a whole section where they talk about the prophecies about the Messiah and then how Jesus fulfilled those. It was fun to read because it was all Scripture.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But as I read it, I thought, this – like you said in the intro, this is more than a different Jesus. They are taking the Jesus of Scripture and kind of conscripting Him –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – to their efforts.
Colleen: Yeah. They appropriate Jesus –
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: – for Adventism.
Nikki: Yes. That was unsettling. That’s worse than just misunderstanding Him.
Colleen: I agree. Now, there’s a very interesting thing that happens in this chapter, on page 48, to be exact, that is inserted. I don’t think most Christians would have any idea why a statement like this or a section like this would be included in a doctrine of Jesus, but once again, you have to understand the Adventist worldview. It’s a whole section dedicated, including a small diagram of what is known as a time chart of the 49 weeks. And, Nikki, when we talked about this beforehand, you said, “Ah, do I have to understand this chart?” And I said, “Ah, no.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And here’s why. In Adventism, so much is made of the time prophecies out of Daniel: Daniel 7, Daniel 8, Daniel 9, the 2300 days, the 49 weeks, the 70 weeks, the 69 weeks, the 62 weeks. And as a junior high student in an Adventist elementary school, I had to learn that time chart and write it for a test with all the dates as Adventism interprets the dates, beginning with the decree to rebuild Jerusalem and ending with the second coming, and there in the middle is the timing of Jesus’ birth and 1844. So this time chart, while it’s true that the time prophecies of Daniel indicate the time that Jesus will come and the Messiah will be cut off, it does indicate that, and from history you can count back and see when some of these things happened and come up with a very good understanding of these prophecies foretold the coming of Jesus, and you’ll also see that there are prophecies that haven’t happened yet in the Book of Daniel. But Adventism, once again, appropriates these dates, uses even different dates than much of Christianity uses, to plug into this time chart, and it’s all for the purpose of getting us to 1844 on October 22. It’s a heresy. It has nothing to do with the identity of Jesus. It’s eschatological, and if we were talking about prophecy and doing a study on prophecy, we would have to deal with Daniel, but it’s not about the person of Christ. It’s wrong for this to be in here, but because Adventism’s picture of Jesus has to fit the Great Controversy model, it has to fit the Investigative Judgment and the 1844 date, they will use this time prophecy to make their point and to set the stage for the rest of their doctrines. I don’t think we need to look at this time chart any more than that except to notice it has nothing to do with Jesus’ identity.
Nikki: No. It’s ridiculous to use this for their doctrinal statement. And you know, we’ve talked about the doctrine of Scripture. Scripture is clear. You don’t go to prophecy to create clear doctrine –
Colleen: So true.
Nikki: – that’s taught so well in other parts of Scripture. It’s a poor hermeneutic –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and it is just evidence that this is an eschatological cult.
Colleen: Oh, that is so true. I think it’s also interesting, this particular chapter – now, when we did the doctrine on the Father, there were no footnotes. This chapter on the doctrine of the Son is filled with footnotes. Interestingly, this time chart has one of the longer footnotes, and the time chart footnote is from the Adventist Biblical Research Institute, which is like an apologetics arm of the Adventist organization to support and uphold its unique eschatological views and its doctrines. So even the footnotes are not drawn from Christian sources, they’re drawn from internal documents that most people wouldn’t even know, even inside Adventism. But it looks scholarly, it has quotes, it has page numbers, and of course, it’s like so many Adventists I’ve heard. They’ll say, “Well, you know, I really don’t understand it, but brighter minds than mine have figured it out, so I’ll just trust that.” And that’s kind of what these footnotes do.
Nikki: Um-hmm. It’s a different foundation.
Colleen: Totally. Well, then we come to the book’s discussion of the natures of Christ. Just as we figured out in the actual statement of the doctrine, even in the book’s discussion, there is never an admission that Jesus is truly sharing substance with the Father, that He’s not just, like you have said, a different guy, a separate person, a separate being in this union of three.
Nikki: One of the most horrifying things I saw on that page was related to Jesus giving up His omnipresence. It says on page 50, “Although His divinity has the natural ability of omnipresence, the incarnate Christ has voluntarily limited Himself in this respect. He has chosen to be omnipresent through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.” That is heresy.
Colleen: Yes, it is.
Nikki: Jesus is God.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: The Holy Spirit is God. The Father is God. They have all the same attributes all the time.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: You cannot separate them. So you take omnipresence away from Jesus or you say that He’s going through the Holy Spirit, I don’t know a lot about modalism, but it almost sounds like that to me, like the divinity moves through different people and does different things.
Colleen: Or certainly tritheism.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Like, “I’ll stand back; you go on and be my agent.”
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: “I’ll give up this; you take it over.” “I’ll give up this job; you take my job.” No. Jesus is always omnipresent, even in a body.
Nikki: This is another spot where they separate the Trinity, and then they also do it when they talk about Jesus being love. They say Christ is love, and their reason for saying Christ is love is that He laid down His life.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Well, the Bible tells us this is how we know what love is, that Jesus Christ laid down His life. But Jesus is love because Jesus is God, and God is love, and divine simplicity demands that Jesus is love –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – because He’s God.
Colleen: Because He’s God. Yeah. He doesn’t just display love. [Laughter.]
Nikki: And He’s not just lovely.
Colleen: Yeah, the lovely Jesus, as Ellen would say. I also notice that the book says, “Christ reconciled humanity to God. People needed a perfect revelation of God’s character in order to develop a personal relationship with Him. Christ filled this need by displaying God’s glory.” No! This is not how we have a “personal relationship with God.” We only are reconciled to God – and you know, by the way, the Bible never uses that phrase, “personal relationship with God.” But we’re only reconciled to God when we trust Him in repentance for our sin and acceptance of His payment for our sin. The blood of Jesus is the only thing that does this. He does not come and demonstrate God’s character so we can have a personal relationship. This is back to the Great Controversy model –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – where, as our friend Martin often says, “The Adventist God has a PR problem.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: He’s trying to convince everybody that He’s the good guy and Satan’s the bad guy, and we’re supposed to help Him. This is just supporting that idea: Jesus came to show us how good God is so we would trust Him. No!
Nikki: Yeah, this is building to show us that God is worthy of our absolute, perfect obedience, and by the way, you can obey perfectly. I mean, that’s really where they’re going.
Colleen: They state that, actually. He came to show us that the law can be kept. It also says, on page 53, that “As the Son of Man, He [Jesus] gave us an example of obedience. As the Son of God, He gives us power to obey.” Well, that’s not Jesus at all. This is the Adventist teaching that Jesus came to be our example to keep the law and that if we trust Him enough and lean on Him and pray enough, He grants us this external power to help us overcome our sin. That’s what this quote is saying. That’s not what Jesus did. Jesus came to pay for our sin, to give us new spiritual life when we trust Him, and that new life comes with the sealing of His Spirit, and we have literally God dwelling in us. That’s not what this is describing in this book about Jesus.
Nikki: No, but they word it in such a way that a Christian could read this and say, “Well, yeah, when we are born again we have the Holy Spirit and we for the first time have the opportunity to choose not to sin.” But again, it’s that origins story. It’s what is this really about?
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: What’s the endgame?
Colleen: It also says that Jesus experienced death. He was resurrected, not as a spirit, but with a body. Once again, the words are true. But when you understand Adventism, when you understand the Great Controversy and the origins stories, this is a very carefully crafted sentence. It’s passive. It doesn’t say Jesus rose from death, as the Bible tells us. It doesn’t say, as the Bible tells us, that the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus Himself took life back to Himself. He said He had the power to lay down His life and the power to take it up, but this sentence makes Him passive. It doesn’t suggest His innate power to take His own life back.
Nikki: So then they go on to talk about the different natures of Christ. And when they begin to discuss Him as a human, they start to build their argument for His ability to have sinned while He was here.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And the writer said, “His human nature was created and did not possess superhuman powers.” And I thought, “Okay, here we go.” And they begin to talk about the fact that He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh. And it takes you back to that serpent on the cross; right?
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: They say this means He was in sinful flesh in His incarnation rather than that He was made to be sin on the cross. That’s on page 54, “In taking the ‘form of a servant’ He laid aside divine prerogatives. He became His Father’s servant, to carry out the Father’s will. He clothed His divinity with humanity, He was made in the ‘likeness of sinful flesh,'” – and I’m going to interrupt here and say, yes, Romans 8 does say that, but look at how they redefine that: “‘He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh,’ or ‘sinful human nature,’ or ‘fallen human nature.'”
Colleen: Yeah, they add all that in.
Nikki: Um-hmm. And then they begin to talk about Adam –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – [laughter] and how Jesus is the second Adam. And when I read this, I’m so sorry, but I was actually laughing. It’s a horrible thing –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – but it made me laugh.
Colleen: Because it’s so ridiculous.
Nikki: So this is taken from Ellen White, and it says, “Adam had the advantage over Christ.”
Colleen: See that? There you go.
Nikki: “At the Fall he lived in paradise. He had a perfect humanity possessing full vigor of body and mind. Not so with Jesus. When He took on human nature the race had already deteriorated through 4,000 years of sin on a sin-cursed planet. In order that He could save those in the utter depths of degradation, Christ took a human nature that, compared with Adam’s undefiled nature, had decreased in physical and mental strength – though He did so without sinning.”
Colleen: Of course. Do you see how much trouble people get into when they don’t understand that humans have spirits?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: All you have is a body, so how on earth do you define sin? It’s all about how healthy your body is, how strong your mind is, how obedient your actions are. This is ridiculous.
Nikki: Didn’t Ellen White say that before sin and even shortly after –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – humanity was taller?
Colleen: Oh, yes. She said Adam was 15 feet tall, and Eve was 12, and I want to say, “What? You think they were Nephilim? [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] What I was thinking as I read this is, well of course, you have to have Jesus at a disadvantage to Adam because He’s here to say that even in our degraded state –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – we can keep God’s law.
Colleen: Exactly!
Nikki: Adam should have.
Colleen: He should have.
Nikki: He should have known better.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: He didn’t. He had all these advantages, but even us sinners –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – can do this.
Colleen: Yes. This book even said what I learned, that Jesus exercised no power that we cannot exercise.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He came in a mortal, degraded, sin-degraded body. And they really trip over themselves because they learned that they can’t teach that Jesus had a sinful nature or they can’t be seen as Christian.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They learned that, but they still can’t quite give up what Ellen White said about His nature.
Nikki: Well, they even say here that the “Temptation and the possibility of sinning were real to Christ. If He could not sin He would not have been either human or our example. Christ took human nature with all its liabilities, including the possibility of yielding to temptation.”
Colleen: Yes. Their Jesus could have sinned. The Jesus of Scripture cannot sin. And it’s a mystery that God does not explain to us. It’s a mystery. But Jesus is fully man and fully God, and God cannot be tempted, God cannot sin. The Lord Jesus came spiritually alive. It wasn’t just that He had a body that inherited 4,000 years of sin, like we were taught. He came alive, conceived of the Holy Spirit. We’re born spiritually dead. That’s what it means to be a sinner, not that our bodies are degraded. He came alive, never a sinner. He did not sin because He was not a sinner. But Adventists don’t understand that. They have to make this somehow about His body and His advantage or His disadvantage.
Nikki: Well, they needed Him to have the opportunity to sin in order for God to be fair, because remember Satan said, “Of course He can do it, He’s God, He’s perfect.”
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: You know, you need somebody who’s capable of sinning. Get someone who’s capable of sinning and then ask them to keep the law.
Colleen: Absolutely. In fact, I was taught, again, in Adventist school – I remember sitting in my classroom pondering this when I was taught it at the age of, like, 12 – that Jesus could not have been our Savior if He had not been able to sin. He could only be our Savior by showing us that He could avoid and overcome sin and temptation and show us how we too could so we too can please God. That’s what qualified Him to be our Savior in Adventism. It’s so inside out. It’s so perverse.
Nikki: Well, and remember they said that when Christ died on the cross He upheld the eternal law, which they mean as Decalogue. So all of this is about upholding the law, start to finish. So you have to have someone that is upholding the law in their life, in their death, and in their ministry in heaven, and when they bring us back to heaven.
Colleen: And in case anybody thinks that we’re interpreting too freely, I have a quote here. I was working on the commentary for the Sabbath school lesson, which goes out every week in our Proclamation! email. This is a quotation from the Sabbath school lesson beginning on April 24, 2021. This is from the Teacher’s Helps. “In Genesis 3:15, the preincarnate Christ predicted the Messianic advent, which was to provide atonement for the human race, to prove to sinless realms that there was no excuse for Adam’s failure and to valid” – get this – “the immortal blending of the law and the gospel by means of Calvary.” It’s just what you said, Nikki. This is the Great Controversy model, this is what Adventism believes, and this is why they believe Jesus died, to uphold the law, to blend perfect law-keeping with Calvary. Somehow Jesus’ blood makes it possible for us to access His power if we trust Him so we too can keep the law. It’s so confusing, and it’s so heretical.
Nikki: Their entire gospel is an answer to Satan.
Colleen: It answers Satan. This quote goes on. “The Adamic fall produced in humankind a new paradigm of evil. Adam’s posterity became diseased, with a natural mental proclivity to rebel against divine sovereignty. Hence, since sin cannot be mere wrongdoing, it should be described as a spiritual psychotic condition that rages against divine sovereignty. In Matthew 1:21 the promise was given of a coming Christ who would heal us from the disease of spiritual schizophrenia. Born outside of Christ, the human race is in a condition of spiritual psychopathology. Christ came that we might become healed through a blood transfusion on the basis of His death at Calvary.” And then it ends again with the statement comparing Him to Adam. “Thus Christ became the Monogenes, or Only Begotten Son, in that Christ entered the cosmos as the only one of His kind, without any competition. In Nazareth, the second Adam started His humble ministry in a fallen, corrupt world, in contrast to the perfection of paradise, wherein the original Adam failed. This God-Man, who was tempted in all things, successfully evaded the hellhounds of sin.” That’s current. That’s not even Ellen White. But it’s still what she said.
Nikki: And it’s the official quarterly that goes out to every church around the world.
Colleen: In the whole world. Every Sabbath school in every Adventist church in every church in the world is supposed to study the same Sabbath school lesson, learning the same doctrines on the same Sabbath every month of the year, and this goes on in perpetuity. The Sabbath school lesson indoctrinates Adventists around the world in the same things.
Nikki: You know, I didn’t know very many people in my peer group who actually did the Sabbath school quarterly, and yet we all had the same fundamental worldview –
Colleen: You’re right.
Nikki: – the same origins, the same Great Controversy, the same purpose for all of it.
Colleen: It’s in the society; it’s in the Adventist culture. I wanted to read a couple of Ellen White quotes to show what she said about Jesus’ nature because this is underlying everything, and the Adventist organization has had to figure out how to deal with these quotes in order not to appear heretical to Christians. So before we talk about the process that they went through to kind of do that deception, I want to read these two quotes because they very clearly state what Ellen said, and by the way, just remembering what we talked about in our first episode, Ellen White is the secret door. When you open the door of Ellen White, you find everything she wrote, and everything she wrote is still current truth for Adventism. In fact, she said, in the quote that I read a couple weeks ago in the podcast, that her words are eternal, essentially, that they’re kept in the file, and even if she dies, they will continue, they have life, and they will instruct the people. So here’s what she said, “‘My sheep hear my voice,’ Christ said, ‘and they follow me away from the byways of sin.’ As Christ worked, so you are to work, in tenderness and love seeking to lead the erring to the right way. This will call for great patience and forbearance and for the constant manifestation of the forgiving love of Christ. Daily the Savior’s compassion must be revealed. The example He has left must be followed. He took upon His sinless nature our sinful nature that He might know how to succor those that are tempted.” That is from her book Medical Ministry, page 181.
Nikki: This is a liberal view of the ministry of Christ.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: This is a social gospel.
Colleen: Yes, it is. Absolutely, written years before we have an official social gospel. But she also made it very clear that He took our sinful nature. And here’s another: “Christ is the ladder that Jacob saw, the base resting on the earth and the topmost round reaching to the gate of heaven, to the very threshold of glory. If that ladder had failed by a single step of reaching the earth, we should have been lost, but Christ reaches us where we are. He took our nature and overcame.” Now, that presupposes He was tempted with a nature that wanted to sin. That’s what she teaches. “He had to overcome sin, overcome temptation that we, through taking His nature, might overcome. Made in the likeness of sinful flesh (Romans 8:3), He lived a sinless life. Now by His divinity, He lays hold upon the throne of heaven while by His humanity He touches us, He reaches us. He bids us by faith in Him attain to the glory of the character of God.” Get that? “By faith in Him, attain to the character of God!” It’s our job. “Therefore are we to be perfect even as our Father which is in Heaven is perfect.” No wonder this passage, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven,” is such a trigger of PTSD and frantic fear for Adventists and formers.
Nikki: That was our only hope.
Colleen: Right. And it was our job to attain to the character of God. Well, Adventism hid its true belief in the nature of Christ, and I think this is a story that a lot of Adventists don’t know anymore, but it’s worth repeating because it’s really significant. Ellen White clearly said He took our sinful nature so we could learn to overcome as He did. And historically, Adventism taught that if Jesus couldn’t have sinned, as you have said, Nikki, He couldn’t have been our Savior, and He had to have a sinful nature in order to show us that we don’t have to sin, just like He didn’t. This betrays, like we’ve already talked about, that they don’t understand that humans are born with a spirit that is dead in sin that must be made alive. But here’s where this became a problem. In 1955 Walter Martin, who was 26 years old at the time, a brilliant apologist for Christianity, visited with the leaders of Adventism to determine what their true beliefs were because He was writing his book, The Kingdom of the Cults, and he wanted to know whether Adventism should be in the book, The Kingdom of the Cults, like he had already placed Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had meetings with Adventist leaders, and it’s an interesting fact, in this year 1955, when this started, he met with three men that the Adventist church handpicked because they said, “These men know how to talk to outsiders so outsiders will understand Adventism through Christian words.” They carefully handpicked these men he talked to. So in the course of these conversations, Walter Martin had four big questions: The atonement of Christ within Adventism. As he understood it, it was not completed upon the cross. Salvation is the result of grace plus the works of the law, especially Sabbath, we might add. The Lord Jesus Christ was a created being to and from all eternity. And finally, that Jesus partook of man’s sinful, fallen nature at the incarnation. Well, the Adventists had to do some damage control. They didn’t have too much trouble dealing with the business of salvation as grace plus works. They just had to take a few books out of circulation that said Sabbath-keeping was a basis for salvation. And we know that Ellen White does say Sabbath is the final divider between the saved and the unsaved. But Adventists were able to quickly deal with that on a superficial level, hide the books that were implicating. What the group of Adventist leaders didn’t necessarily fully understand, which Adventist leaders today do admit, was the extent of Adventism’s Arianism from its inception, its antitrinitarianism. So they had to revise their statements to be Trinitarian in order to convince Walter Martin that this religion should not be in the book The Kingdom of the Cults. This resulted in quite a bit of surprise and shock within Adventism. The Adventists talking to Martin amended Ellen White’s language, and they amended their own official explanations of the nature of Christ and of the atonement by saying the atonement was accomplished on the cross and that it was currently being applied in the heavenly sanctuary. Now, we all know that’s what Adventists believe. But in the book Questions on Doctrine, which was published in 1957, they reworded these doctrines. And it’s interesting because that book – and we’ll say a little bit more about this as we go on – that book fell out of print after one publication. It was so shocking to the Adventist organization that the church had a schism over it. It never went away. There is still a division within the church about these things. In the year 2003 there was a special heritage edition of that book reprinted, kind of like a collector’s item, with annotations by the still-living Adventist historian, George Knight, and what’s so interesting is that in this book, in the annotations, George Knight admits that the Adventist leaders lied to Walter Martin to appear Christian. You can read it yourself. You can get the book and find it in the annotations in the preface. So Adventists amended EGW’s language and their own official explanation. They could safely say to these Christians that Jesus offered a complete sacrifice. They knew that if they said that, the Christians, Walter Martin and his friend Barnhouse, would understand that to mean the atonement was complete. They didn’t understand that Adventism divided between the atonement and the sacrifice of Jesus. They rationalized that Jesus’ death on the cross was complete as a sacrifice of atonement, but it was not a completed atonement. So when they rewrote this in the book, the Adventists were shocked because they always knew that the death never represented a completed atonement, but these men worded it so that the Christians would think it was. “He offered a complete sacrifice of atonement,” cross your fingers behind your back, whisper under your breath, “but the atonement continues in heaven.” And then, the most difficult thing, was how they explained the nature of Christ. And this is where they lied. They told Walter Martin – and this is a quote by George Knight. They told Walter Martin that “The majority of the denomination has always held the human nature of Christ to be sinless, holy, and perfect despite the fact that certain of their writers have occasionally gotten into print with contrary views completely repugnant to the church at large.” And they even stated that they have “certain members of their lunatic fringe who held to a different view of Christ.” Well, they convinced Walter Martin that Adventism was not a cult, that it was Christian, but they shook up the Adventist membership because they had always believed what Ellen White said, and they blatantly lied to Walter Martin. And Knight admits they were not straightforward. They did their traditional doublespeak, and that doublespeak about Jesus’ nature is reflected still in this book, Seventh-day Adventist’s Believe.
Nikki: I wish that Walter Martin had pushed back and asked them, “What do you do with the people on the lunatic fringe?” Because in the true church, in a healthy church, we have accountability, we have church discipline. If you have someone teaching heresies about Christ, we deal with it. In the Body of Christ we have the creeds. We have all the councils that dealt with these –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – heretical teachings. But the Adventists are like, “Oh, no, those are just – they’re just a part of our group.” You know, the John Ankerberg Show really helped me a lot –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – when I was coming out of Adventism. They did a show with Walter Martin and William Johnsson, having a conversation. Walter Martin was realizing they had deceived him.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And he’s confronting William Johnsson, and for those of you listening, you can view that by searching for it on YouTube. I really recommend it.
Colleen: I agree. You’ll see that Walter Martin was getting angry and that William Johnsson would not answer his questions, and at that interview Walter Martin even said that if the Adventists could not answer the questions properly and come up with a reprinted version of Questions on Doctrine stating their doctrines as they had to him in 1957, he didn’t see how the term “cult” could avoid being applied to Adventists, if indeed it should ever have been removed. It’s a fascinating set of five videos.
Nikki: Um-hmm. So in the book when they’re talking about whether or not Christ could sin – and this does have direct implications on what you say about who Christ is –
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: – the author of this chapter says that “Christians differ on the question of whether Christ could sin. We agree with Philip Schaff, who said, ‘Had He [Christ] been endowed from the start with absolutely impeccability, or with the impossibility of sinning, He could not be a true man, nor our model for imitation: His holiness, instead of being His own self-acquired act and inherent merit, would be an accidental or outward gift and His temptations an unreal show.’ Karl Ullmann adds, ‘The history of the temptation, however it may be explained, would have been no significancy, and the expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “He was tempted in all points as we,” would be without meaning.'” So this is where we see them mocking the true Christ of Scripture. They’re mocking Him.
Colleen: Yes, they are. In fact, the book also says that “Christ’s experience in victorious living is not His exclusive privilege. He exercised no power that humanity cannot exercise. He offers the same power by which He overcame so that all may faithfully obey and have a victorious life.” That’s just not what Jesus did, that’s not who He is, that’s not what we can do. He came to die and pay for our sins so we can be made alive, not made good. God changes us.
Nikki: Another thing that really clarified the Great Controversy paradigm for me was this quote where they say, “He [Jesus] dispelled the myth that humans cannot obey God’s law and have victory over sin. He demonstrated that it is possible for humanity to be faithful to God’s will.” So we have this setting the stage now where we too have the power to keep God’s law in our human fallen state with the same kind of help that Jesus got from God.
Colleen: Right. Well, we can see, from our walk through this chapter, and we have by no means exhausted the depths of the deviations, perversions, and twists that this chapter presents, but for this podcast, we can conclude some really important things. Adventism’s Jesus is not the Jesus of Scripture. They say, first of all, that He is God, but they also say He gave up His omniscience. You can’t give up a divine attribute. God is one, God is indivisible, God is – His characteristics are what we call simple, in that you can’t tear them apart. They are a unit, indivisible. He is not God if He gave up His omnipresence. Right there we know that the Adventist Jesus is not the God of Scripture. Number two: They say Jesus is equal with the Father in nature, dignity, and glory, but they will not affirm He is one in substance. They also say He in some sense became the Son when He was born as a human. Scripture is clear that the Son is eternal. God the Son is eternally God the Son. He did not become the Son when He was incarnated. Number three: They say two things out of both sides of their mouth about His sinful nature. On the one hand, they affirm Ellen White in saying He took a sinful human nature, but they also say He took a human nature with degraded flesh but without sin. It’s such confusion. Ellen White declared He took a sinful nature. The leaders lied to Walter Martin and rewrote their doctrine into Questions on Doctrine, and that book fell out of print. He did not have Adam’s advantage, they declare. They say He came with degenerated flesh, and from an Adventist perspective, where a human does not have a spirit, that’s pretty much equivalent to having sin. If you have degraded flesh and a degraded mind, you can’t avoid your sin unless you depend on outside help. Number four: They claim that Jesus came as our example. They say, “He showed us how to overcome sin so we can do what He did.” They say, “We needed a perfect revelation of God’s character to know Him, so Jesus displayed God’s glory.” They say, “He gave us an example of obedience and gave us power to obey, just like He did. He exercised no power we cannot exercise,” and that, “We can use His power to overcome and faithfully obey and have a victorious life.” No. Jesus did not come to be an example of how to be saved. He came to be a sacrifice. The example of His life is only for those who have been born again and sealed with the Holy Spirit. He shows us how to trust our Father once we have been adopted by God our Father. Five: “His sacrifice was complete,” they say, “but His atonement was not.” They say He continues His atonement in heaven, and they have to say this in order to keep supporting the Investigative Judgment and the Great Controversy worldview. Adventism says He could have sinned and failed. They say His ability to sin is necessary for Him to be our Savior, and they also say that following the judgment – and you have to understand that, from an Adventist perspective, that judgment means the Investigative Judgment that’s going on in heaven – His mediatorial work will end, and then God will bestow on Him all glory and honor and a kingdom. But these are anti-Biblical things. The truth is Jesus is I AM. He’s fully God, with all divine attributes. He is the eternal Son. Jesus was born spiritually alive. He could not sin. God cannot be tempted by evil or sin. He was God. He was man. He could not sin. He couldn’t fail. His atonement was completed at the cross. He came to die for our sin, not to be our example of how to be saved or sinless. He came to do what we couldn’t, to pay for sin and break its curse. He came to give us eternal life, new spirits and hearts, sealed with His Spirit. He lives forever to make intercession for us. Even in the eternal kingdom, we will be there because of Jesus’ blood. And if you do not know the Jesus of Scripture, if the only Jesus you know is the weak, insipid, fallible, pathetic Jesus of Adventism, we urge you to go to the Bible. Read the Gospel of John, read the Book of Galatians, ask God to reveal who Jesus actually is, and trust Him.
Nikki: So if you have any questions or comments for us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com, where you can sign up for our weekly emails and also find links to our FAF YouTube channel and to this podcast, as well as podcast transcripts and other online magazine articles. 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 #5 on God the Holy Spirit.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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