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 2: “Death In a Sinful World”
[COLLEEN TINKER]
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson opens with Lucifer being envious of Christ thus determining to cause grief in heaven by making Adam and Eve sin and moving God to defensive actions against Satan by warning Adam and Eve.
- The lesson denies the existence of a human spirit that died when Adam and Eve sinned and redefines our inherited sin.
- The lesson states that God puts enmity against Satan in every human heart, and this enmity allows us to accept His grace.
The heretical nature of Adventism’s view of man, of sin, and of salvation appears more clearly in this week’s lesson than it usually appears in Adventist literature. While all of us who grew up Adventist knew the physicalist nature of reality that shapes Adventism, we didn’t often see its diabolical swerve away from the biblical explanation of man’s natural condition of spiritual death and of God’s sovereign intervention in our death to make us alive in Christ. This lesson rewrites the truth about what happened when Adam and Eve sinned and who we are by nature: children of wrath (Eph. 2:3).
God Defends Himself
Saturday’s lesson introduces the week’s studies with a shocking rewrite of the Genesis story. Here is what the day’s lesson says:
Christ was the Divine Agent through whom God brought the universe and the world into existence (John 1:1–3, 10; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2). But when God the Father conferred special honor on Christ and announced that They together would create this world, “Lucifer was envious and jealous of Jesus Christ” (Ellen G. White, The Story of Redemption, p. 14) and plotted against Him.
Having been cast out of heaven, Satan decided “to destroy the happiness of Adam and Eve” on earth and thereby “cause grief in heaven.” He imagined that “if he could in any way beguile them [Adam and Eve] to disobedience, God would make some provision whereby they might be pardoned, and then himself and all the fallen angels would be in a fair way to share with them of God’s mercy.”—The Story of Redemption, p. 27. Fully aware of Satan’s strategy, God warned Adam and Eve not to expose themselves to temptation (Gen. 2:16, 17). This means that even when the world was still perfect and blameless, there were already clear restrictions for human beings to follow.
Notice what these paragraphs say. First, as per EGW, they identify Jesus as the “Divine Agent” who created the universe. Jesus was NOT a divine agent; He IS GOD. He wasn’t merely a delegated ambassador given the power to act for God.
Second, the lesson refers to EGW and her great controversy origins story. We see here her not-often-admitted-publicly foundational teaching that God exalted Jesus and gave Him special honor, thus triggering Satan’s jealousy and causing him to decide to destroy not only Adam and Eve’s happiness but to cause grief in heaven.
Let the record show that the Bible NEVER gives these ideas. Satan is not part of God’s story of Himself and creation. Satan plays a role, but he is not a causative agent or the one responsible for humanity’s fall. Neither is there even a hint in Scripture that Satan thought he could piggy-back on God’s love for humans and receive some form of His grace. That idea is all Ellen White. She is the one who tells Satan’s story and says God pled with him to repent and be saved. NO! We are never told Satan’s story, and furthermore, he is not even named in the Genesis account.
Finally, one of the most telling ideas occurs in the second paragraph quoted above: God knew that Satan supposedly intended to destroy humanity’s happiness and heaven’s joy, and God attempted to defend Himself and His humans from Satan’s wiles.
Scripture never puts the power into Satan’s hands. In fact, this idea flows from EGW’s teaching that Satan, like humans, has free will, and God must honor that free will in order to be “fair”. He must allow Satan to play out his evil ideas so all can see how dreadful he really is and conclude that God IS fair after all.
NO! God is sovereign, even over evil. Satan can only do what God allows, and God is NEVER in a defensive position against Satan. God is not holding back in order to let Satan play his hand; God’s plans are fixed, and Satan is under His authority. God, not Satan, is the strongest force and the greatest value in the universe. Satan is merely a subset of creation, not an equal-but-opposite evil force opposed to God’s power.
Denial of Death
This lesson teaches Ellen White’s interpretation of the fall as opposed to Scripture’s. Even though it refers to verses from Genesis, the lesson uses EGW’s Patriarchs and Prophets description of the serpent’s temptation of Eve.
The lesson states on page 19,
Sometime after this warning from God, Satan assumed the form of a serpent and entered Eden. Eve beheld the serpent joyfully eating the forbidden fruit without dying. “He himself had eaten of the forbidden fruit” (Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 54), and nothing had happened to him.
Genesis never names Satan. It only attributes the temptation to the serpent. We may infer that Satan was involved in this temptation, but significantly God did not give that detail in the story. The Genesis account clearly shows that Eve and Adam sinned through their refusal to believe and obey God’s word. There was not a personal tempter enticing them, just a serpent.
Furthermore, EGW adds that the serpent was joyfully eating the forbidden fruit and apparently experiencing no bad outcomes. Notice the cleverness of this addition.
Scripture says NOTHING of the serpent’s eating the fruit. By inserting this detail, EGW moved the focus away from God’s word and the way the serpent manipulated it and the way Adam (who was with her) and Eve refused to hold onto it, and places the attention subliminally on the created object: the fruit.
The issue was not the FRUIT. The issue was God’s word and whether or not Adam and Eve would trust it—trust God Himself—when it was questioned. But Ellen’s description, snake-like, moves our attention toward the lovely and delicious fruit and the logical argument that it apparently produced no ill-effect.
This is EXACTLY the same deception Adventism (through EGW’s visions) teaches Adventists. The issue is not God’s word and how God reveals His Son and His completed atonement on the cross and His breaking our curse of death because of His sufficient sacrifice. Instead, Adventism causes its victims to focus on a created day—the Sabbath—and to become confused about God’s word and His self-revelation to us in Christ. Thus Adventists become fixated upon the lovely Sabbath which they believe was made for them, and they cease to grapple with the reality of God’s own word!
Instead, they grasp their Sabbath proof-texts and ignore the full exposition of the new covenant. They stay locked onto a created day, and they miss the Creator and Savior who opened a NEW and living way to the Father.
The lesson moves from this perversion of the temptation story into dealing with God’s statement that they would die. Again the author blames Satan for blurring the issue and saying they would NOT die.
Ironically, this lesson accurately teaches Adventism’s core doctrine of the nature of man here. While blaming Satan for lying and saying they wouldn’t die, Adventism (through EGW’s visions) teaches a more subtle, more devious version of this same idea.
God said in Genesis 2:17 that if they ate the fruit, “in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
The lesson does not deal with this direct statement. Instead it dances all around what happened and explains Adam and Eve’s spiritual death in terms of theological, psychosocial, physical, and ecological perspectives (p. 22). It never suggests that if they didn’t die that day, then God didn’t exactly tell the truth.
Yet that is reality. If they did NOT die that day, then God lied—and God cannot lie. We must understand the words to mean what they say.
Tuesday’s lesson revisits the time-worn Adventist arguments that the idea of a spirit that is separate from the body is an ancient Greek heresy. Significantly, the primary Adventist proof-texts are mentioned in this lesson (including Ecclesiastes 9:5 that the living know that they will die but the dead know not anything), but the New Testament texts of hope and revelation that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:1–9) and that to die and be with the Lord is “very much better” than to stay on in the body (Phil. 1:22, 23) are never mentioned.
Further, the lesson introduces the straw-man argument of “the static theory of the natural immortality of the soul” and cuts it down. This lesson ignores and thus denies the biblical teaching that the death of Adam and Eve was SPIRITUAL death. Although their bodies remained alive, their spirits died, and this spiritual death is the legacy we all receive from Adam. In fact, this lesson leads the readers to its conclusion by Adventist wording such as this question in Tuesdays’ lesson: “In contrast to immortality of the soul, what do these verses teach, and how can they be used to counter this lie?”
To be sure, Paul tells us that only God has immortality, but when we trust Him, we are given immortality in Christ. Existence and life, however, are not the same thing. Death does not mean ceasing to exist; it means that the body goes into the ground, but the essence of our person remains in existence, either with the Lord or kept in punishment.
The existence of the human spirit that survives the body at death IS the biblical teaching of the nature of man—but this very spirit is either dead in sin or alive in Christ. Those who do not believe and trust in the Lord Jesus remain spiritually dead in sin, and when they die, their dead spirits go to God who gave them, but they are not “present with the Lord”. Rather, they are “kept under punishment for the day of judgment” (2 Peter 2:9).
Denial of Being Born Dead
The logical outgrowth of Adventist physicalism is revealed in Thursday’s lesson. The author refuses to admit that we are born dead in sin. Instead, he rewrites the biblical teaching of what it means to be born sinful. In order to get the full impact of this teaching, I will quote two paragraphs from Thursday’s lesson:
But in the midst of their frustration and despair, God gave them assurance for the present and hope for the future. First, He cursed the serpent with a word of Messianic hope. He declared, “ ‘And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel’ ” (Gen. 3:15, NKJV).
The word “enmity” (Hebrew ’eybah) implies not only a long-lasting cosmic controversy between good and evil, but also a personal repulsion to sin, which has been implanted by God’s grace in the human mind. By nature, we are completely fallen (Eph. 2:1, 5) and “slaves of sin” (Rom. 6:20, NKJV). However, the grace that Christ implants in every human life creates in us enmity against Satan. And it is this “enmity,” a divine gift from Eden, that allows us to accept His saving grace. Without this converting grace and renewing power, humanity would continue to be the captive of Satan, a servant ever ready to do his bidding.
First, notice how slyly the author developed this argument seemingly with Biblical support. Notice in the second paragraph that the author states “by nature, we are completely fallen” and then refers to Ephesians 2:1, 5. Here are these two texts:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1).
even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— (Ephesians 2:5).
When Adventists say humanity is “dead in sin” they use that term metaphorically. The do not even recognize that they have a spirit that is born literally dead, cut off from the life of Christ and under the wrath of God (see John 3:18, 36).
Now notice the context of the two quoted verses above and see how clearly they identify our true natures: utterly lost and spiritually dead:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:1–10).
The lesson leaves out that we are born “following the prince of the power of the air” and are “by nature children of wrath”! It further leaves out that God saved us by His grace through faith in Christ “when we were dead in our trespasses” and made us alive together with Christ!
Further, the lesson states that we are “slaves of sin:” and refers to Roans 6:20 in the NKJV specifically. Yet the author utterly misses Romans 3:9–18:
What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Romans 3:9–18).
I did not know, as an Adventist, that all humans are literally born DEAD and are BY NATURE children of wrath! We are born cursed by God and under His wrath until we believe (Jn. 3:18)! I didn’t know this fact. We are UNABLE to seek or to please Him.
This lesson hides this reality. It calls humans “completely fallen” whatever that means to an Adventist—it usually suggests that we are born with inherited prophesies to sin that we get through our gene pools—but this lesson explains something so foreign to biblical reality that I had to re-read it in order to believe they were being so clear to their audience.
In the quote from the lesson above, the author says that “However, the grace that Christ implants in every human life creates in us enmity against Satan. And it is this “enmity,” a divine gift from Eden, that allows us to accept His saving grace. Without this converting grace and renewing power, humanity would continue to be the captive of Satan, a servant ever ready to do his bidding.”
This idea is heresy.
This idea is NOWHERE found in Scripture! Furthermore, the idea that God would put “enmity” in the heart of every human as the means for us to “accept His saving grace” is really satanic.
Think about it. God told the serpent He would put enmity between the serpent and Eve’s Seed. If this enmity against Satan is what God’s places in each human and calls this “enmity” a divine gift from Eden (notice it’s from Eden) that allows us to accept God’s saving grace, then our salvation, our faith and trust in Jesus is not a sovereign act of God Himself. It is, rather, the work of a human will that draws on a supposed enmity against Satan.
This idea cannot be true because it utterly contradicts Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–18. Those verses tell us plainly that we are all born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath, and that we are under the influence and control of the spirit at work in the children of disobedience and that we have NO ability or desire to seek, to please, or to know God!
The Bible teaches absolutely depravity, that we are by nature condemned until we believe in the Son (Jn. 3:18), but this lesson tells us that we are born with a natural enmity toward Satan.
NO! We are born with an AFFINITY for Satan and are under his control and under God’s wrath!
What ACTUALLY causes us to accept the Lord Jesus is the Father Himself drawing us out of darkness into light. Jesus said,
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day (John 6:44).
Our salvation is secure because the Father draws us. It’s not left up to us to energize a supposed enmity toward Satan into resisting him and “accepting” Jesus. Our salvation is up to God, and He sees us and knows us and draws us to Himself out of our natural spiritual death, our original sin, our utter depravity!
We have NO internal energy to be good or seek God! We are born condemned, but we are loved by the Father and drawn to the Son and indwelled by the Holy Spirit when we believe!
There are many more problems with this lesson that we could unpack, but here we have addressed the foundational heresy that warps all of Adventism’s framework and worldview. Because of its denial of the human spirit, it gets everything wrong from sin, salvation, the nature of Christ, and even of death and eternity.
For more reading and research into the subject of the nature of man and of human death, here are some links:
Articles:
- Are Humans More Than Living Bodies?
- What Happens When We Die?
- In Death Are We Present With the Lord?
Video
- May 4–10, 2024 - May 2, 2024
- We Got Mail - May 2, 2024
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024