This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
QUARTER FOUR—ON DEATH AND DYING AND THE FUTURE HOPE
Lesson 1: “Rebellion in the Universe”
[COLLEEN TINKER]
Problems with this lesson:
- The title of the quarterly is wrong, establishing a false foundation from the beginning: “On Death, Dying, and the Future Hope”
- This week’s lesson “establishes” the pre-creation story of the great controversy and Satan’s presumed central role in earth’s situation.
- Free will is presented as the core value of the universe which God must respect.
This new quarter’s lessons will teach the foundational doctrine of Adventism’s worldview, its grand theory of everything called the Great Controversy, as the explanation and validation of their physicalism. No single Adventist doctrine twists Scripture and the gospel more than does its physicalism—their belief that humans are physical bodies that breathe, devoid of an immaterial spirit that survives the death of the body.
This doctrine derived from James White’s firm belief in the physicality of God which he expounded in his 1861 paper called “The Personality of God”. Ellen White’s subsequent visions and teachings confirmed this physicalism and applied it to every aspect of belief: from a literal physical heavenly sanctuary defiled by literal records of sins and ultimately cleansed by Satan carrying the out of heaven and being punished for them in the lake of fire to the annihilation of humans, both when they die on earth and when the wicked are destroyed in the lake of fire.
Adventists cannot have their Adventism without believing that their spirits are merely their breath. Their physical identities are then applied to Jesus the Man as well; their belief that Jesus is just like them, that He had to overcome temptations and keep the law just as they must is the core of their soteriology.
Adventism insists that Jesus came to show man how to have victory over sin and how to keep the law—an authority which Adventism says is eternal. The Ten Commandments, they teach, existed in heaven before creation, and it was this law that Lucifer broke in heaven and plunged the universe into a great controversy which is still being played out.
Thus, the title of the quarterly accurately portrays Adventism’s central worldview, but it denies the Bibles clear teaching. We are not living for a “future hope”. We live either in a state of spiritual death which is ours by nature (Eph. 2:1–3; John 3:18, 36; Rom. 3:9–15), or in a state of having been made alive—born again—in Jesus and transferred out of this domain of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col 1:3).
We receive eternal life instantly when we trust Jesus, and His Spirit indwells us permanently (Eph. 1:13, 14). We are not waiting for a future hope; we realize our eternal life the moment we are born again, and we pass out of death into life (Jn. 5:24). We do not experience a hiatus when we die; believers are instantly absent from the body and present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:1–9), and unbelievers are kept under punishment until the day of judgment (2 Peter 2:9).
Adventism’s idea of a “future hope” reveals one of the core reasons its members feel despair and anxiety: they die without knowing whether they are saved or lost, and they believe they will not known until the resurrection their fate.
Blatant Extra-biblical Ideas
The pre-creation history this lesson teaches is entirely Mrs. White’s visionary additions to Scripture. While Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 contain passages that many believe double as curses for the kings of Tyre and Babylon and for Satan, these passages are brief enough that we cannot conclude any more than the actual words of the passage.
We know that Satan is a fallen angel, but the elaborate story of his supposed rebellion, his accusations against God’s supposed “unfairness”, and his animosity against Jesus are entirely from EGW. The backstory of pre-creation history Adventism gets from EGW is far more similar to Mormon ideas than to the Bible.
God has only told us our own story—not the angels’—and we cannot speculate about what happened in heaven or about how sin entered creation. We only know what God has revealed in the Bible, and EGW is not part of His revelation. Her books—by Adventism’s own public protestations—are not Scripture (although they treat her like Scripture).
Furthermore, Jesus is NOT Michael the archangel. Significantly, this lesson includes twisting Scriptures to teach this Adventist doctrine—a doctrine which many Adventists do not know and which the organization tries to hide from the public. If Jesus is Michael the Archangel, He is not God the Son, the Creator of the archangels and of Lucifer. This doctrine validates EGWs claims that Jesus was exalted to the position of Son of God and thus triggered Lucifer’s jealousy and the great controversy.
This idea is blasphemy. Lucifer was never in any doubt about Jesus’ identity. He, unlike Lucifer, is God the Son and Lucifer’s creator. There was no doubt about their differences; Jesus was Creator, Lucifer was creature. EGW, however, caused Adventism’s central worldview to hang on her Mormon-ish assertion that Jesus is Michael the Archangel, and somehow Lucifer felt he should have received the exaltation Jesus received. This idea is never hinted at in Scripture. It is utterly false—and there has never been a “great controversy” between Christ and Satan.
To be sure, Lucifer rebelled and has become known as Satan, but he has never been in a controversy with Jesus over God’s reputation, and Jesus is not struggling to win any controversy with Satan.
Free Will Central
Finally, this lesson established the Adventist perspective that God created creatures with free will to choose Him or not to choose Him. On the one hand, this idea sounds plausible because He did make humanity with the ability to make decisions.
The EGW-inspired view, though, breaks down first by the Adventist teaching that the angels and humans alike have this “free will”, and Lucifer freely chose to rebel. While he apparently did choose to rebel, we do not know the angels’ story, and we cannot decide that they and we humans are on a level playing field.
Furthermore, without a belief in a human spirit, the idea that Adam and Eve were spiritually alive and died the moment they ate the forbidden fruit means almost nothing to Adventists. In fact, however, just as God said in Genesis 2:17, they died that very day: their spirits died. They were separated from the life of God! This spiritual death is our legacy from Adam.
Ephesians 2:1–3 explains this fact explicitly, and we are thus born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath—God’s wrath. We are not born with “free will”; we are born DEAD, unable to seek God, please God, know God, or in any way honor God (Rom. 3:9–15). We have to be made alive by God Himself in order to have spiritual life and to know Him!
The emphasis on human free will makes human (and angels’) wills the superior, ultimate value in the universe. God, EGW tells us, will not force anyone against their wills, so we all are born with free will to choose Him or not.
Untrue.
We cannot rise above our natures, and our natures are dead in sin and under the power of the spirit at work in the children of disobedience (Eph. 2:2,3). Jesus said no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him (Jn. 6:44). We are not the highest value in the universe. Our sovereign God is the highest value.
God’s glory, His power and sovereign control over the nations and men, over good and evil—this is the ultimate value. Not humanity! Not angels!
Jesus’ coming as our Sacrifice was not about His coming to show us how to be good and how to keep the law. His coming was to bake on our imputed sin—to become sin for us—so that we can become the righteousness of God in Christ (2 Cor. 5:21).
He did not come to show us how to live and then end up dying as the ultimate demonstration of His patience and love. NO! Death was His reason for coming.
We are not bad people who need to become good. We are literally, according to Scripture, dead people who cannot choose God and must be made ALIVE. Jesus came to literally take the death each of our sins deserved.
He did not merely come to die a death representing God’s judgment on sin; He literally experienced God’s judgment—not just one the representative sin of a man, but on the imputed SIN of all!
The Adventist Great Controversy reduces God to a beleaguered and benign creator who patiently endures his naughty creatures’ playing out their wickedness so they and all the universe can see that disobedience ultimately destroys, and that God is actually FAIR.
NO! First, there is no watching universe, and second, God is not depending on us to demonstrate sin’s badness or His kindness. Rather, we are doomed dead sinners by nature, and the Lord Jesus took on our humanity in order to literally take God’s wrath instead of us.
We are given the faith to believe as a gift of God (Eph. 2:8,9). We are given God’s intervention in order to believe Jesus, but He is not waiting for us or depending on us to do anything for Him. He is on His own sovereign time-table, and He is overseeing the events of the history of the world so that we will believe the Son and be born again.
This first week’s lessons reveal that this quarter is an indoctrination into the unbiblical, EGW-inspired great controversy worldview. This quarter is teaching that man has no immaterial spirit that survives death, and it’s teaching that Jesus the Archangel Michael and Satan are struggling to gain the trust of the universe while the Father waits for this struggle to be played out so He can be vindicated.
The great controversy makes God the least powerful, most uninvolved Person in the whole scenario. The God of Scripture, however, is truly sovereign and all-powerful. He tells us how to be saved, how to believe and thus to obey, and how to please Him by believing in His Son.
We are not God’s ultimate value; His own glory is. He will not share His glory with another, but the great controversy steals God’s power and glory and distributes it to humanity as well as to the angels.
The great controversy describes reality inside-out. We are helpless, dead creatures needing God’s reconciliation and eternal life, and God has taken the initiative and has sent His Son to take His own wrath against human sin (not the angels’, by the way) and to break our curse by rising from the dead.
Jesus has already won! We are merely here learning that God, not Satan, is the dominant person in reality. We keep our eyes on Him and His word, and the life of God will change us. We do not determine or change the outcome of reality; the Lord Jesus has already accomplished that change! †
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