Colleen and Nikki discuss Adventism’s doctrine “The Great Controversy”. This is the core doctrine of Adventism—it creates an un-Biblical world view through which all Adventists view the world and all reality. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: This week we are going to discuss the fundamental belief of Seventh-day Adventism that is entitled – wait for it – The Great Controversy. It is Fundamental Belief #8, and I think that maybe this one makes me the most mad of all so far.
Nikki: [Laughter.] You say that every week. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Well, it’s true this time. [Laughter.] So the great controversy is the framework for the Adventist worldview. All Adventist theology both supports and flows from the framework of the great controversy. It’s not found anywhere in the Bible. It comes entirely from Ellen White’s great controversy vision of March 14, 1858. As we’ve already said, Ellen White’s pre-history underlies every fundamental belief. The great controversy, which Ellen says is an ongoing controversy between Christ and Satan for control of this earth and control of humanity, is a paradigm which is anchored in her pre-history narrative, and this viewpoint depends upon her physical view of reality: God has a body, Jesus and the Father are separate beings, and the Holy Spirit is a force emanating from them, and we humans are just bodies as well, but we just happen to breathe. That’s what makes us alive. Their breath of life is like electricity, that when present turns on the television. Breath activates the person, and while he’s breathing he’s a living soul, but when he ceases to breathe, as we learned in last week’s Fundamental Belief #7, his soul dies and the person is dead like a dog is dead. No part of himself survives death. And for this reason, just by the way and by way of reminder, Adventists can justify their pro-choice statement on abortion and their practice of abortion. So we also see this physical doctrine, and we see the results of that in this great controversy paradigm, that Satan plays a starring role in the great controversy. In fact, in a classic sense, he is Adventism’s tragic hero. He’s the powerful and influential player who ultimately is destroyed by his own fatal flaw. Poor Satan. But before we go farther into this doctrine, I want to remind you that we love getting your emails at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can go to proclamationmagazine.com to find our online magazine and articles and to find links to this podcast as well as our FAF YouTube channel. You may donate there by using the donate button, and please follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and we would love for you to leave us a 5-star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to this podcast. But now, Nikki, I have a question.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: When you were an Adventist, what was the great controversy to you?
Nikki: It was reality.
Colleen: Well said. It was for me.
Nikki: It was reality. It helped me understand everything, everything that went on around me, everything I could count on in the future, and everything I was supposed to be doing. So, I had a lot of chaos in my life as a child, and I remember just certain points where the great controversy worldview really either helped me or scared me.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: I remember during moments when I was treated unjustly and abusively at times – I was under nine. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was pretty young, and I remember thinking, “You know what? Someday, someday we’re going to be in heaven and there’s going to be this movie playing” –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – “and it’s going to show everything you’re doing to me, and you will not get away with this.” And I counted on being vindicated when God proved to the watching universes –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – and to humans why He was going to annihilate some or why He did annihilate some and not others. You know, this is where He proves everything He did was right.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And so I counted on that. When I got a little older, I was living in a different household, and I was unable to keep the Sabbath because I was living with a parent who did not practice Adventism.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And that was stressful for me at times, until I got used to it.
Colleen: Oh, sure.
Nikki: Because I knew I was supposed to be keeping the Sabbath. That was a part of being a part of the remnant church.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But I also had the liberal Adventism in my head that said, “God knows your heart.”
Colleen: Oh, of course.
Nikki: And there was that movie again, and He was going to see why I wasn’t keeping the Sabbath, and so it really in a way stabilized me at times and terrified me at other times, but it was completely rooted in unreality.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: None of it’s real.
Colleen: Right. It’s not real. In a word, it’s like the Adventist Star Wars.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: I believed that the great controversy was reality as well, and I remember so clearly the day – as we had decided that we had to leave Adventism, Richard and I were taking a walk one day. I would go down and meet him for lunch when he was still working at Loma Linda, and we would go for a walk, and he said to me, “Well, you know, even though we’re leaving Adventism, there’s one thing we’ll take with us, and that’s the great controversy. That’s one thing we have that the Christian community doesn’t really have, and it explains everything, and we’ll take that with us.” And I remember saying, “Yeah, that’s true.” [Laughter.] And within weeks, as we thought through things and kept studying the Bible, as we were on our way out, we realized that the great controversy can’t be true. It’s premised on a super-powerful Satan and on a Jesus who’s engaged in an ongoing battle with an angel! Like, really? How did we miss that? [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] I love that you called it the Adventist Star Wars. Wasn’t there a picture on an Adventist magazine of Jesus and Satan with light sabers in battle?
Colleen: Yes! It was in the ’90s sometime, and it was on the Signs of the Times. Jay Leno even used that picture in his monologue on The Tonight Show once. Showed that picture, put it in the camera, and it had Jesus and Satan engaging in battle with light sabers.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: How ridiculous. But it was, it was the way the great controversy was portrayed.
Nikki: And I had absolutely no idea that the great controversy is not from Scripture.
Colleen: I didn’t either.
Nikki: I thought it was – all of it was from Scripture. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was told that none of it is, by an Adventist.
Colleen: And you know what? What you’ve just said is, the bottom line for me, what is the most upsetting thing about this chapter in this book that we’re looking at, Seventh-day Adventists Believe. This isn’t the longest description of a fundamental belief in the book. It’s not that many pages, like seven or eight, but in this entire description of the great controversy, it is presented as being from Scripture, and there is not one footnote to Ellen White. Now, these chapters are often heavily footnoted to support and bolster their arguments for their fundamental beliefs, but this one, which is the core of the Adventist view of reality, is not footnoted with her at even one time, not even one time, and it is entirely from her. So from this doctrine we’re seeing Adventism is deceptive. It’s intentionally deceiving the public. It wants to present itself as entirely scriptural so nobody really looks under the hood and sees this is a manmade, demon-inspired doctrine. But as we look at it, that’s all it can be.
Nikki: And isn’t it true that this doctrine was given to her during a funeral?
Colleen: Oh, yes. Tell your little story about that, Nikki. It’s quite funny.
Nikki: Well, we went with you guys to the Michigan FAF Conference, and while we were there we got to go and tour the little Adventist Village.
Colleen: At Battle Creek.
Nikki: Yes. That was quite enlightening for me and for my children.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And we were sitting in – it was a large church, I think. And the guy was very, very proud of Ellen White. Every building we were in he talked her up and was just enamored with her. And he stood there telling us about, “This is the very room that she had her great controversy vision. It was in the middle of the funeral of…” And I don’t remember what he said after that because I thought, “What?”
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Mid-funeral she stands up and has a vision?
Colleen: And it was hours long. She completely hijacked the funeral.
Nikki: Oh, I felt very uncomfortable after that. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] But that’s when and where she had the vision. It was March 14, 1858, in the middle of a funeral, and we got this Satan-centric doctrine that defines Adventist reality and pits Jesus in a continuing war against Satan for the souls of men, and it’s not done! He’s waiting for people to come alongside Him and help Him vindicate the good name of God and the perpetuity of the law by showing from their own lives that the law is not too hard to keep. So Satan and Jesus are in an ongoing battle. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So, Nikki, before we rant about this anymore –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: I know I’m the only one really ranting. [Laughter.] Would you mind reading the fundamental belief as it appears in this book?
Nikki: So again, this is Fundamental Belief #8, The Great Controversy: “All humanity is now involved in a great controversy between Christ and Satan regarding the character of God, His law, and His sovereignty over the universe. This conflict originated in heaven when a created being, endowed with freedom of choice, in self-exaltation became Satan, God’s adversary, and led into rebellion a portion of the angels. He introduced the spirit of rebellion into this world when he led Adam and Eve into sin. This human sin resulted in the distortion of the image of God in humanity, the disordering of the created world, and its eventual devastation at the time of the global flood, as presented in the historical account of Genesis 1 through 11. Observed by the whole creation, this world became the arena of the universal conflict, out of which the God of love will ultimately be vindicated. To assist His people in this controversy, Christ sends the Holy Spirit and the loyal angels to guide, protect, and sustain them in the way of salvation.”
Colleen: You know, number one, I just want to say, that’s just gobbledygook. If you’re coming at this from a Christian perspective, it’s hard even to understand what they’re saying.
Nikki: This is absolutely ridiculous.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: This is completely fictional.
Colleen: And sacrilegious.
Nikki: It’s sacrilegious. It’s – I think that’s been the hardest part about preparing for this episode for me. It’s just nonsense.
Colleen: Yes, I agree. I agree. There’s not one thing about this that is found in Scripture. There are a ton of proof texts in the context of this chapter, but the proof texts are all out of context from their position in Scripture, and they’re used to uphold something that denigrates Jesus and exalts Satan.
Nikki: They’re terribly out of context. And in fact, there’s one they use to prove God is under trial, taken from Romans 3:4, where it’s just in the middle of a thought.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: And it says, “May it never be! Rather let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, ‘That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.'” That’s their proof that God is on trial and that everybody –
Colleen: Unbelievable.
Nikki: Yes. And if you continue to read Romans chapter 3, which I recommend you do if you never have, that’s the chapter where we see that no one will be justified by the works of the law –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and that now righteousness apart from the law has been manifested in Christ.
Colleen: Yes. That’s never mentioned, of course. This chapter attempting to explain and validate this worldview – and I want to emphasize that this great controversy doctrine is the structure of the Adventist worldview. The Adventist worldview is not the same as a Christian worldview, and this is where probably most Christians misunderstand Adventism and don’t know what Adventists mean when they talk. Because this worldview – that Jesus is engaged in an ongoing battle with Satan, that He is a separate being from the Father, that we are material creatures that are needing His example to show us how to endure and keep the law in order to be saved – this entire worldview is what shapes Adventism. It’s not the Bible.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This is not just a faulty idea. This is a worldview that shapes all of reality. I often say it like this, as an Adventist I was essentially taught that the sky is green. Now, everybody else knows the sky is blue, and I could see that color, but I was taught that that color is green. That’s the effect that this great controversy paradigm has on Adventists. They learn that it describes reality. Everything from the Bible to church attendance to living in your family is defined and understood through the lens of the great controversy, not the other way around. And we have to unpack that so we see that the great controversy is invented. Scripture gives us something different.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I’ll just tell you, Nikki, that the first thing after reading this document, where it’s filled with things that are not scriptural, like “The God of love will ultimately be vindicated”? God has never needed to be vindicated. God is God. The idea that creatures are sitting on earth trying to decide if God is just and fair or not because Satan, an angel, accused Him of being unfair, like anything like that, number one, ever happened, or number two, had any effect on humanity. God’s character is never on trial. Aside from that, we get to a really interesting assumption in the third paragraph of this chapter. The writers of this chapter just throw this out there: “Angels, being of a higher order than humans (Psalm 8:5), were created to enjoy intimate fellowship with God.” You can almost glaze over and not grasp what that’s saying, but this sentence is asserting what I, as an Adventist, did believe, that angels are a higher order of creation than humans, and the Bible never says that. It was so interesting, because I asked our friend Steve Pitcher, who, of course, came into Adventism from Christianity, what he thought about the great controversy when he came in, and he said, “I never thought of angels as a higher order of creation than humanity, but I did see that the Adventists around me thought that.” And he said, “I didn’t understand it.”
Nikki: That’s interesting. I always thought that.
Colleen: I did too. Because they have power that we don’t have, so forth, but you know what, we are in sin, and God has limited us from having access to some of those other dimensions that apparently angels can function in, dimensions that we saw the risen Christ functioning in. He could appear in a room. Even before, as God, He could disappear from a crowd when they were trying to throw Him off a cliff.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The Lord has protected us from certain things for our own safety, I believe, as sinful people who wouldn’t be able to protect ourselves from the ultimate destruction of sin. But Satan is not a higher order.
Nikki: I think that’s one of the things that has surprised me to most coming out of Adventism. I think I say that every week. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: It’s the central stage that angels have.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There’s a lot of, really, angel worship. When you think about worship, it’s making much of something; right?
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And they make much of angels.
Colleen: That’s a really good point. We were taught we all have a guardian angel that, as you pointed out to me, what’s that guardian angel going to do if you go into a theater?
Nikki: Oh, he’s going to wait outside.
Colleen: Yeah. There we are, disobeying and hurting our angel.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: No. The Bible doesn’t talk about that. It does talk about angels being ministering spirits sent by God to do His will for us who are being saved (Hebrews 1:14), and there is a statement in Matthew about children’s angels always being before the face of God, so if you’re mistreating a child, don’t think that sin will go unpunished. I rather like that.
Nikki: Yeah, me too.
Colleen: But we’re never told about a personal guardian angel or how that functions. We just can’t draw these conclusions, but it’s interesting to me that it’s not only Adventism that has this angelology going.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Mormons have it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The New Age has it. But biblical Christianity doesn’t. We’re never commanded to ask God to send the angels to protect us, as I was taught to pray.
Nikki: Right. Yeah, I remember our pastor talking about this once years ago, and he – I can’t quote him, but he said something to the effect of, “Why would you call out for angels when you have God indwelling you?”
Colleen: It’s just an amazing contrast. And I just can’t miss this opportunity to say there’s one more way Adventists do an angelology thing. They identify Jesus as Michael the Archangel.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Jesus is not the eternal, almighty God the Son in Adventism. They say He’s all God, but He’s Michael the Archangel, and He’s not, in Scripture.
Nikki: You know, one of the things that jumped off the page to me was right in the very first sentence. They said, “Scripture portrays a cosmic battle between good and evil, God and Satan. Understanding this controversy, which has involved the entire universe, helps answer the question, Why did Jesus come to this planet?” That is, like, the exclamation mark of my response to Adventism. Their story of origins, their story of the great controversy, alters the person and the work of Christ, and that is why we say that Adventists have a different Jesus.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: And here they’re admitting that.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: What you understand about this pre-creation history, this controversy, that is going to color why Jesus came and what He did.
Colleen: It’s not the same gospel. It’s not the same Jesus. It’s not the same God. Adventists are not Christian. I should say it this way, Adventism is not Christian. Now, I do believe there are Adventists in the denomination, in the organization, who are Christian, some, like our friend Steve, who were Christian before they were converted into Adventism. But you know, the Holy Spirit never leaves His own inside the darkness. He leads them out.
Nikki: So then they attempt to link their great controversy worldview with Scripture, but like you said, there’s no reference here, but it all comes from Ellen White. And 1 Corinthians 4 tells us not to go beyond what is written.
Colleen: Absolutely!
Nikki: It’s something that really weighs heavy on my heart, when people go beyond Scripture. Sometimes Christians will do it for the sake of entertainment.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: They’ll watch movies that have Christian themes without even looking into who’s creating them.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And they fall prey to this emotionalism, and it creates a different picture –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – of who Christ is, and I’m not trying to say that all of them go wandering off into idols, but it’s playing with something, and that’s always very concerning to me, coming out of Adventism –
Colleen: I agree.
Nikki: – because our entire theological structure was based on people playing with details and emphasizing in fiction.
Colleen: Like this chapter on the great controversy, which is entirely from Ellen White’s vision, and there isn’t one footnote to tie this idea to her. That would just be too indicting.
Nikki: Um-hmm. One of the verses that they use to support their worldview comes out of Revelation, and I just have to remind listeners that Revelation says, “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book.” This is serious.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: This isn’t just playing with details. This is serious. And when we teach our kids the Adventist worldview, we’re implanting in them doctrines that go beyond the Word of God and that will curse them –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – if they believe them and they teach them and they propagate them. This is very serious.
Colleen: It is. It’s life and death. It’s eternal salvation versus eternal punishment, ultimately. One of the things that just shows the pre-history beginnings of the great controversy and the underlying assumptions within Adventism is the idea that they present in this chapter that Satan is blamed for human sin. Now, Ellen White says that. Of course, again, not footnoted in this chapter, but they make this statement: “In seducing our first parents to sin, Satan ingeniously wrested from them their dominion over the earth. Now claiming to be the ‘prince of this world,’ Satan challenged God, His government, and the peace of the whole universe from his new headquarters, Planet Earth.” Well, you know what? I will never say that that serpent wasn’t a representation of Satan. That serpent in the garden? Absolutely. But we can’t go beyond what Scripture says. Satan, in this great controversy scheme, is blamed for human sin. Adam is not blamed, Eve is not blamed. But the Bible says that as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 both declare that sin entered the human race through Adam. Satan is not blamed for our sin. Humans are blamed for human sin. Putting our sin on Satan has two effects I want to mention. One is it makes it logical that in the Adventist plan of salvation, Satan is ultimately the scapegoat who bears the sins of the saved into the Lake of Fire and is punished for them. Of course, if he caused human sin, then he’s the logical one to be punished. But this view changes the fact of why Jesus had to become human. Jesus had to become human because humans are responsible for human sin, and Jesus identified with us, forever became a man, and took human sin upon Himself, without ever being a sinner, and paid the price with human blood. Adventists don’t teach that detail.
Nikki: They have a completely different narrative. He had to show us that we could keep the law because Satan lied and said we couldn’t.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: You know, in that same section that you just read from, where they pose the question on how humans became involved in this great controversy, they say, “Tragically, the seeds of the controversy that had begun in heaven took root in Planet Earth.” It’s actually kind of helpful that they come right out and say this, because we have been trying to tell people listening in Fundamental Beliefs 1 through 7 that all of this is coming from Ellen White –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and her origins story and her visions and not from Scripture. All of it is colored by that, all of that is to uphold this, and they don’t explain that in any of those other fundamental beliefs.
Colleen: That’s true!
Nikki: But you can see the logical conclusion of that when you look at this, and they are saying that this controversy began before creation.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: It took root in earth after all of that conflict. Now, Colleen, I know you’re working on the Sabbath school commentary –
Colleen: I am.
Nikki: – and they’ve been talking about the covenant of grace, and it did come up in last week’s fundamental belief. I don’t think we had time to cover it. But it comes up here again when they talk about the impact on the human race, and they say that God offered the covenant of grace to Adam and Eve. They go on to say that everybody after Adam and Eve rejected the covenant of grace, so then He extended this same covenant to Abraham –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and then he accepted it, but then all of his offspring rejected it, all the way up to the cross of Christ. Can you tell them what the covenant of grace, to Adventists, is?
Colleen: Well, the argument goes that the covenant of grace that God offered was the promise that Eve’s offspring would crush the head of the serpent. The serpent would bruise His heel, but her offspring would crush the head of the serpent. So in some way they make that the covenant of grace, that God is mercifully going to send somebody who’s going to kill off Satan ultimately. Then they just assume that everybody rejects that, right up to the crucifixion of Christ. They have no Scripture to support that idea. The Bible does not call God’s promise in Genesis a covenant. Now, I’m not going to say it wasn’t a form of a covenant, but when we think of the biblical covenants, we cannot call God’s Evangelium, which He declares in Genesis 3:15, we can’t call that a covenant. It was a statement that God said this is what is going to happen. The first covenant that’s recorded in Scripture is the covenant with Noah after he left the ark. The second covenant recorded in Scripture is the covenant with Abraham, where He promised to give him seed, land, and blessing. Abraham never participated in that covenant, never made a promise. God unilaterally promised to do that. The third covenant in Scripture is the Mosaic covenant. Now, Adventists try to say that the Mosaic covenant is part of that covenant of grace, that it’s just an expansion, a deeper illustration of what’s involved in that covenant. That’s not true. The Mosaic covenant is its own unique thing. Galatians tells us that it came 430 years after Abraham until the Seed, and the law was given as the words of the covenant, but Adventists try to say the covenant of grace is something God has always offered humanity, and it has always included the Ten Commandments because, they say, Adam and Eve couldn’t have sinned if the law didn’t exist because 1 John 3 says that sin is the transgression of the law. So if that’s true, they argue, Adam and Eve couldn’t have sinned if that Ten Commandments wasn’t in place, and Lucifer couldn’t have sinned if the Ten Commandments weren’t in place. Can you see how many assumptions are being made here?
Nikki: Far too many. Yeah. And they said in last week’s chapter that Jesus covenanted with the Father and the Holy Spirit and said, if, “If humanity falls” –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – “then I will be their guarantor, and I will go to the cross and die for their sins.” And when Jesus said, “It is finished,” that meant He fulfilled that. It’s a different story.
Colleen: And when you have the Adventist worldview, the great controversy worldview, in your head, that Christ and Satan are out there sort of duking it out to see who will follow Jesus and who will follow Satan, you don’t see what the Bible actually says about our God being sovereign, about nothing being an accident or a surprise to Him. We were known to Him before we were created. This is not an unfolding story that God is learning as He goes.
Nikki: No. And they say right in their fundamental belief that His sovereignty is – it’s under judgment.
Colleen: That people are evaluating Him to see if He’s fair or not.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: They don’t understand what sovereignty really means.
Colleen: No, nor do they understand that a creature cannot judge the Creator.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that is the point of Romans 9. If you haven’t read that, read that.
Nikki: Yeah. What do you think about the subhead for the next section? “Earth, the Theater of the Universe.”
Colleen: [Laughter.] Well, I do know that years ago the Adventist organization produced a book and a series of I believe it was television programs or movies that was called “The Theater of the Universe.”
Nikki: Oh, really. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Oh, yes, which was the great controversy story.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And the Adventist plan of salvation. And when I read that title, I felt irritated.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Just in a word: irritated. Because I knew what it meant. It’s saying that, number one, this cosmic conflict supposedly existing between Jesus and Satan is playing out all over the universe in all kinds of planets and galaxies, they’re all watching us to see what we will do because Satan has made this claim that has reached to the farthest points of all the universe, even the points we don’t know about.
Nikki: Yeah. Didn’t Ellen White see people on Jupiter?
Colleen: Well, she didn’t necessarily name the planet, but her description of it led Joseph Bates to believe she was describing Jupiter. She saw good old Enoch walking on this planet.
Nikki: Hmm.
Colleen: I don’t know exactly how she explained that when she came to the idea that we don’t go to be with the Lord or go anywhere after we die. It was a very early vision. Later on her human picture was different, and we don’t exist after we die. It’s just very interesting she had so many self-contradictions. But what did you think about what this book says about Job being an illustration of the great controversy?
Nikki: Oh, that’s just nonsense. It’s absolutely nonsense. Read the Book of Job. If you believe their assertion, read the Book of Job. Job displays God’s sovereignty and His provision and His redemption. It is not about a great controversy, and one of the things that jumped out to me as I was reading this is that the author sounded an awful lot like that snake in the garden.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: He misquoted God. He says, “Then the Lord said, in effect, ‘Satan, look at Job. He faithfully obeys my law. He is perfect!'” That’s how they quoted God. Listen to what God said, “The Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil.'” First of all, God in His sovereignty brought Job to Satan’s attention. Satan did not come and ask for Job.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Nothing comes to us without first going through the Father’s hand.
Colleen: God never said, “Job faithfully obeys my law.”
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: He never said, “Job is perfect,” not even in effect. God was under no illusions with Job. Job lived before the law existed.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Job is a mortal man, like the rest of us. As the Word of God reveals throughout the Old Testament and the New, humans are born spiritually dead ever since Adam. God knew that about Job. What He was asking Satan to consider was Job’s trust in Him, not that he was perfect, not that he was keeping the law, but he trusted God. He was faithful because he believed God in a way –
Nikki: He feared God.
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – in a way similar to Abraham in Genesis 15.
Nikki: Yeah, and then the author says, “The cosmic perspective of the Book of Job provides powerful proof of the great controversy between Christ and Satan. This planet is the stage on which this dramatic struggle between right and wrong is being played out. As Paul states, ‘We have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.'” They yanked Paul’s words out of context, crammed it in with a false quote of God from Job –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – and then said, “This is powerful proof” of Ellen White’s vision that she had during a funeral.
Colleen: Exactly! And they don’t happen to mention that, do they?
Nikki: No, they don’t.
Colleen: This fundamental belief, did I mention that this one makes me especially mad? [Laughter.]
Nikki: Yeah, I think me too. [Laughter.]
Colleen: But this is the ground of so-called reality through which Adventists view everything that happens to them.
Nikki: And everything that will.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Which they don’t get into in this chapter, which I find interesting.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But it’s what holds Adventists inside of Adventism.
Colleen: It is. It’s the worldview. And if I’ve said that before, I need to say it again, the worldview is what keeps people in deception.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s not just that you learn a false fact, like if I learned that, for example, 4+4=9 and I find out later in my life that it actually equals 8, that’s false information. That’s not a worldview. But if I learn that Satan is a powerful being, freely roaming in the universe, that is opposed to God and fighting with Jesus in an ongoing battle, which my obedience will help to resolve, that’s a worldview that affects every decision I make in my life.
Nikki: It gives us our identity.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: It gives us a false need.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And it distracts us from reality and from our true need for a Savior. He ends this section with saying, “This larger view reveals to us the importance of our Savior’s atonement, which is bringing this universal controversy to an end.” So even what Christ did on the cross is related to the great controversy.
Colleen: Yes. And it’s not complete, “is bringing.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s not even saying, “He atoned for sin and He answered the claims of the law against us and God’s wrath against sin.” It doesn’t even mention that. It’s all about the controversy. Jesus’ death is about the controversy.
Nikki: So then they go on to talk about what the cosmic issue is, like what is this all about? And they say that it’s about God’s government and law. This is a political issue in Adventism.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: It’s all politics.
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: Who’s really going to rule when all is said and done?
Colleen: That’s a great point.
Nikki: Who gets the government? Who gets to set the terms of the law? And I just want to remind everybody, in Adventism the law is the central issue because it’s eternal. It existed before the earth was created. But we learn in Romans 5:13 that there was sin in the world before the law was given.
Colleen: And sin did not come from the law, as Ellen White repeatedly says. Sin came from Adam disobeying a single command: Don’t eat that fruit. And he didn’t guard his wife and protect her from being deceived by that serpent, and it’s interesting that the New Testament makes it clear that Eve is not held responsible for the sin of humanity. Adam is.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He was the one to whom God gave that command, and it wasn’t the Ten Commandments.
Nikki: So they cram this little paragraph in here, which summarizes what happened before the world was created, has no reference to Scripture or to Ellen, but it says, “Rather than admitting responsibility for the lawlessness in the world, Satan lays the blame on God.” So in this first sentence we see Adventists believe Satan is to blame.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “He says God’s law, which he alleges is arbitrary, infringes on individual freedom. Furthermore, he charges, since it is impossible to obey it, that law works against the best interests of created beings. Through this constant and insidious undermining of the law, Satan attempts to overthrow God’s government and even God Himself.” So here’s the problem: God’s law isn’t fair, and it can’t be kept.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But Jesus comes and says, “No, it is fair, and it can be.”
Colleen: And so He, as a man who inherited sinful flesh, as we talked about previously in the fundamental belief on God the Son, Jesus came with flesh modified by generations of sin and showed that that law can be kept, and that was the purpose of His coming. He would go to death on the cross without disobeying God, to show what it means to love God, to be kind, to suffer, and to keep the law. That’s the great controversy. That’s where Jesus fits into the great controversy.
Nikki: He shows us what we have to do.
Colleen: And that’s how we help Him win this battle with Satan. We vindicate God and the law: He is fair, the law can be kept. If anybody’s hearing us who’s never been Adventist, please don’t think we’re just extreme and taking the fringes of Adventism and making much of it. This is the core of all Adventist belief.
Nikki: This is their official book of 28 Fundamental Beliefs. This is what they teach in the universities. This is what you have to sign off, literally, before you’re baptized.
Colleen: Um-hmm. This is Adventism. This is the worldview.
Nikki: So in this section, they talk about the showdown at Calvary.
Colleen: [Laughter.] [Banjo music] Showdown at Calvary! [Laughter.]
Nikki: Enter banjo music. [Laughter.]
Colleen: I was so offended when I read that title, that the showdown at Calvary is the aspect of the cosmic issue where Jesus comes along and shows that that law can be kept, that Satan can’t have the last word over Him. And they end that section with this: “The cosmic controversy came to its climax at the cross.” Oh, there’s a lot of alliteration in that sentence. “The love and faithful obedience Christ demonstrated there in the face of Satan’s cruelty undermined Satan’s position, assuring his ultimate downfall.” Well, Nikki, think about the cross and about Jesus going to the cross and about what the Bible says about Jesus going to the cross. What’s missing from this sentence?
Nikki: Christ disarmed Satan on the cross.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: It was finished at the cross. They talk about it like it’s a climax –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and then we’re going to keep going with the story after – you know, it’s the ark.
Colleen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nikki: In Christianity, it was accomplished. It was done.
Colleen: The New Covenant came in with the shedding of Jesus blood, and that veil in the temple ripped, and access to God was made possible for all humanity on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice. There is nothing in this “showdown at Calvary” to suggest that Jesus paid for sin, that He took our sin, that He satisfied God’s wrath against sin, and that in fulfilling the condemnation of the law against humanity, He completely disarmed Satan, whose tool against God’s people has always been the law. “They aren’t good. They break the law. They have to be destroyed.” Jesus showed He had power over the law, He could take responsibility for human sin, and it disarmed Satan (Colossians 2:14 and 15).
Nikki: In Adventism they say that on the cross Jesus upheld the law.
Colleen: I have a little quote here from Ellen White: “It was not His [Jesus’] purpose to abolish by His death the law of God, but rather to show the immutability of its sacred claims. It was His purpose to magnify the law and make it honorable so that everyone who should look upon the cross of Calvary, with its uplifted victim, should see the unanswerable argument of the perfect truth of the law.” Well, in a sense, if you’re looking at this from a biblical perspective, you can say, yes, the law demanded death for sin. Jesus upheld that. But that’s not what she’s saying. She’s saying He went to the cross and showed that He could be obedient to God, even to death, and that’s upholding the law. He showed everybody that the law is how you experience the heart of God, and it comes back in my mind to the visual representation of this that we saw at Andrews University in the Garden of Grace –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – their prayer garden, where you enter the garden by the seven steps of creation, you land at the bottom of the steps in front of the cross, which behind it is a polished sheet of granite reflecting the Ten Commandments at the other end of the garden and the words “I will come again,” then you turn and walk from the cross into the law, where you experience and find the heart of God. That is backwards.
Nikki: And that law is the Decalogue.
Colleen: Yes. The law is the Decalogue.
Nikki: And it’s all over their art. The picture of Jesus with His arm around the man in heaven, and He’s pointing to the Ten Commandments. No, the Lord Jesus, in His work of salvation, was testified in the law and the prophets. They point to Him –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – not the other way around.
Colleen: Exactly! He doesn’t point to the law. The law points to Him. This one last quote from her, this is from the Review and Herald in 1886: “They may look upon Calvary, they may see the Son of God agonizing in the garden and dying upon the cross, and yet many for whom He has made this great sacrifice refuse to obey the law which He died to vindicate. It will indeed be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for the transgressors of God’s law.” There’s no place in her theology for salvation based on faith and trust in Jesus alone.
Nikki: And I want to say, for those of you who don’t have a very solid understanding of Adventism, this is all building, of course, to her doctrine on the Sabbath. Ultimately, that is the golden calf. It’s the fourth commandment, it’s the Jewish Sabbath. You know, I just want to throw something in there really quick about that showdown at Calvary. The author talks about Satan being especially successful in using the religious leaders in order to create enough chaos around Jesus that He had to end His public ministry.
Colleen: Oh, yes!
Nikki: There’s no sense of the fullness of time, the sovereignty of God –
Colleen: No.
Nikki: – the fact that He was completely sovereignly determining everything He did.
Colleen: There was no guesswork. People didn’t direct this, any more than people direct the timing of His second coming, and that also is something Adventists believe they do.
Nikki: Yeah. Satan doesn’t make Jesus do anything, and in Adventism they talk about Satan so much more than we do in Christianity. We do not talk about Satan.
Colleen: It was interesting to me that in a recent issue of Adventist Today the editor, Loren Seibold, wrote a rather long piece, but he made the statement in the middle of this article that I thought was so revealing and so true. He said, “Adventists have had a relationship with Satan.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Now, he was not endorsing that. He came to a conclusion that was equally unbiblical, actually, that just now we have to fight against sin. But the fact is, he’s right; Adventists do have a relationship with Satan. They’re always fighting him. “Are we going to line up with Satan or with Jesus? Get busy and make the right decision.”
Nikki: In Ellen White’s origins stories, if you go back to her original material and you read it, it’s full of the thoughts and the feelings and the understandings of Satan –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – his motives, what he was doing, what he was thinking. You hear very little about God the Father, very little about Jesus. It’s all about Satan.
Colleen: Well, the next section in this chapter had a heading that was really quite a little Adventist trigger to me: “Controversy About Truth as It Is in Jesus.” Now, I have heard that phrase off and on through my entire life. It is an Adventist phrase, yanked out of the Book of Ephesians, and it basically says, in an Adventist framework, the truth as it is in Jesus is Adventism. This belief about Satan being in a battle with Jesus, but truth as it is in Jesus is that He’s showing that the law can be kept, and we are to come alongside and help Him vindicate the good name of God before the accusations of this arch deceiver. And yet in context, this phrase “the truth as it is in Jesus,” says something completely different. Paul is writing to the Ephesians, and he’s saying, “You learned the gospel not as a pagan but as it is, as the truth is in Jesus,” meaning Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the answer to your sin. In context, this is a completely different meaning, not something to uphold Adventism.
Nikki: This section was particularly upsetting to me because this is where I saw the methods of Adventism at work, where they create a strawman argument, and they misrepresent to the people who are within their influence – they misrepresent the world. Actually, it makes me think of the example you gave last week about Korea and how they think that they have the best and everyone else is wrong. And so in this they say that they conflate a proper hermeneutic, people who have a specific way that they look at Scripture, a systematic theology, expositional teaching, they conflate those hermeneutical principles with liberal conclusions –
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: – the idea that if you are so – this is just my summary – if you are so uptight about how you read Scripture, then ultimately you’re going to debate the nature of Christ, the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection. So they undermine this commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture –
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: – which is irritating because they claim to be sola scriptura. They had a huge party for Martin Luther –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – during the big anniversary recently. They believe that they are the continuing reformation.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But this whole section undermines sola scriptura.
Colleen: As does this chapter, where they never quote Ellen White, and it’s all from her. Go ahead.
Nikki: Right. They say, “One of Satan’s strategies in the cosmic conflict is to convince people that they can understand truth apart from Jesus. So several centers of truth have been proposed, either individually or in combination: (1) humans, (2) nature, or the observable universe, (3) Scriptures, and (4) the church.” So they’re saying even on its own the Scriptures, being the only source of truth for people, is a problem –
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: – that it separates them from Jesus. And they say, “While all these have their part in revealing truth, Scripture presents Jesus as the Creator of each of the above, and transcending each. They all find real meaning only in the One from whom they come. It suits both the nature and purposes of the antichrist to suggest other centers of truth than Christ. By substituting some other center than Christ in the church’s faith and practice, Satan achieves his goal of directing attention away from the One who is the only hope of humanity.” So it all sounds very much like Jesus is number one.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But they’re saying that if you get your truth about Jesus from Scripture alone, then somehow you’re cutting Jesus out. And I kept thinking about Ellen White being in that room with all those men, reading Scripture, trying to understand it. They couldn’t understand it, and off she’d go into vision –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and Jesus would tell her what it meant, and she’d come back and she would write all of this crazy stuff.
Colleen: They are so convoluted, and they’re so deceptive, and if you don’t know Adventism, you will be deceived by this.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It sounds so good on the surface, and it’s so crooked. This chapter ends with a section called, “The Significance of this Doctrine.” Then it lists four things that make this doctrine significant, and I have to say, the first one was almost funny to me. “This Doctrine Produces a Constant State of Watchfulness,” and I thought, well, isn’t that the truth?
Nikki: Yeah. [Laughter.] Me too. PTSD anyone?
Colleen: No kidding! As an Adventist, I was in continual anxiety, always worrying that I had an unconfessed sin. Was I pleasing God? Was I getting the floor washed before sundown on Sabbath? Was I showing the world that Jesus was right, that His law could be kept? Or was I helping Satan by failing to keep the law? Yeah, I’d say that was a constant state of watchfulness. I was in such a mounting state of anxiety I was almost mentally ill for a while. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Well, you know what? That wasn’t just you. I remember watching a movie about a Seventh-day Adventist young man, which I would not recommend to people because it’s actually very accurately portraying a disturbed young man who grew up in Adventism. But he’s walking down the road at one point, and he’s narrating through the movie, and he says, “Sometimes I feel like I’m the star in a movie and that the whole world is watching me.” Well, what Adventist didn’t feel that way?
Colleen: I did. I was taught that’s what I was here for. The watching worlds were seeing if I would obey God or Satan.
Nikki: And we knew that everything we did would one day play on a movie screen.
Colleen: Yeah. Everybody would know all my secret thoughts. It was a horrifying way to live, and I have to say the end of that section on the watchfulness is almost ironic and funny. “What a privilege for true Christians to live a life characterized by patience and faithfulness and a readiness at all times for the conflict, manifesting a constant dependence upon One who has made us ‘more than conquerors.'” Indeed. Am I conquering? Am I conquering? Am I depending on God? Always, always watchful, anxious, and hypervigilant.
Nikki: In that section she uses “the armor of God,” and it was very frustrating to me, coming off of our study of Ephesians, where we actually discuss what all those pieces of the armor of God are.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: They don’t discuss that in this section –
Colleen: No.
Nikki: – because Adventism doesn’t understand it. But it’s just a metaphor, and it just means, “Stand up, stand up for Jesus.”
Colleen: Yes. [Laughter.]
Nikki: “Put that armor on.” You know, it makes me think of the Pathfinders.
Colleen: And it’s interesting also that they claim that this worldview of the great controversy explains the mystery of suffering, and the way they explain it is this: God is not responsible for anything bad that happens. Satan, a fallen angel, they say, is responsible for cruelty and suffering. “We can better understand robberies, murders, funerals, crimes, and accidents –
however heartbreaking – when we see them in the framework of the great controversy.” Well, that completely destroys what Scripture teaches about God’s sovereignty.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I was taught that it would be a cruel God who would allow things like this to happen, who would even know that they were going to happen and not stop them. Instead, I was taught as an Adventist that God limited His sovereign power so that Satan would be allowed to carry out the full measure of his evil and his deception so all that watching universe could really see how bad he was and could then know that God was the good guy and Satan was the bad guy. And we, down here, are just the recipients of Satan’s cruelty, and poor, weak God has to just let that happen to us, and He’ll work it out for our good if we somehow trust Him, but He doesn’t really have the power to stop it or to make it part of His will. Satan is in charge of his own cruelty.
Nikki: It makes me think of those cartoons where there’s a little red demon on the shoulder and a little white angel on the shoulder, and we have to decide what we’re going to do, but in Adventism if we do the wrong thing, then it’s the angel’s fault, it’s the devil’s fault.
Colleen: Right!
Nikki: There’s no original sin.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Again, it sounds really nice –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – but it pulls a veil over our true nature –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and our true need for a Savior. They say we better understand reality when we look at Satan and blame him for everything? No. You know what? I was shocked when I read in Matthew, right after I left Adventism and I was trying to understand the nature of humanity, and Jesus says to His disciples, people who are trusting Him, following Him, and learning from Him –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – He says, “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give these things to you.” The Lord God, who created them, called them evil.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: We are by nature children of wrath –
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: – until we are born again and made new in Christ.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: That is our nature. The new birth is our need.
Colleen: Oh, that’s so well said, Nikki. It reminds me also of Romans 8, where Paul says that the whole creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth because it has been bound to decay by the one who bound it. I was taught that creation is in agony because of Satan, that Satan was the one responsible for the thorns on the roses, but Romans tells us that God bound us, God bound creation to decay, not Satan. And God’s in charge of the reversal of that decay, and He’s in the business of making us new when we see who Jesus is, and when we trust Him, He gives us new life, He rescues us from this being bound to decay, even while we’re still in our mortal bodies. He transfers us out of that domain of darkness. The great controversy leaves no room for the new birth or for God’s sovereign intervention in our lives. It’s all about our decisions and are we going to vindicate God.
Nikki: So this book began with saying that the great controversy worldview answers the question, “Why did Jesus come”? And then they end it by saying the great controversy worldview reveals the cosmic significance of the cross. They say, “Christ’s life vindicated God’s justice and goodness and demonstrated that God’s law and government were fair. Christ revealed the groundlessness of Satan’s attack on God, showing that through total dependence on God’s power and grace repentant believers could rise above the daily temptations and live victorious over sin.” There is no mention whatsoever of justification, reconciliation, redemption, salvation, regeneration, adoption, or effectual propitiation, none of that, none of what the Bible tells us about the cross comes up here. It is all about vindicating God and letting us know that we too can keep the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: It has eviscerated the power out of the cross and the mission of Jesus and the identity of Jesus, and I just want to appeal to anybody listening who has been Adventist, if you have not understood that Jesus is the eternal God the Son who never gave up any of His attributes of God, even inside His mortal flesh He was fully God, that He took your sin and became a man so that He could justly die for human sin, that He paid the price, and as God He alone could do that. He had to be human in order to pay for human sin, and He had to be God in order to die a death that was sufficient for all humanity. And if you haven’t understood that Jesus did that for you and that the cross was about redeeming you from darkness, from sin, from anxiety, from constant watchfulness, from the fear that you will never be good enough, but He came to show you that He is the good one, and He asks you to trust Him, we ask that you do that. His death is sufficient. The great controversy is a lie. Jesus is alive and well and seated at the right hand of the Father, His atonement is complete, and when you trust Him you are seated with Him in heavenly places, and you will never die.
Nikki: If you have questions or comments for us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails containing online articles and other ministry news. Follow us and like us on Facebook and Instagram, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us next week as we look at Fundamental Belief #9 on the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ.
Colleen: See you then.
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