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.
Lesson 4: “The Old Testament Hope”
[COLLEEN TINKER]
Problems with this lesson:
- Because of Adventism’s worldview and its belief that humans have no immaterial spirit and that death equals ceasing to exist, the discussion of resurrection in the Old Testament leads to unbiblical conclusions.
- This lesson teaches that Michael the Archangel is Jesus.
- This lesson teaches re-creation, not biblical resurrection.
This lesson approaches the subject of Old Testament references to resurrection and life after death with a pre-existing belief: man is just a body that breathes—until it doesn’t. Because the authors have a pre-existing belief that people cease to exist when they die, that worldview colors the way they deal with the proof-texts in this lesson.
In fact, this lesson is one more example of the fact that Adventists can sound sophisticated and confident when they juxtapose texts to create an idea, but they are choosing and juxtaposing those texts in a way that causes those texts to appear to support the unbiblical idea of man’s physicality and of no personal identity surviving death.
In fact, this lesson uses Scripture illegitimately to endorse the Adventist view that man ceases to exist when he dies. This underlying belief, consequently, alters the reading of biblical texts. Look, look, for example, as this quote from page 46 of the lesson:
As stated by Job centuries earlier, “ ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart’ ” (Job 1:21, NIV; 1 Tim. 6:7). The psalmist points out that both the fool and the wise die, leaving “their wealth to others” (Ps. 49:10, NKJV).
But there is a radical contrast between them. On one side are the fools who perish, even though trying to find assurance in their own transient possessions and accomplishments. In contrast, the wise behold, beyond the human saga and the prison of the grave, the glorious reward that God has reserved for them (1 Pet. 1:4). With this perception in mind, the psalmist could say with confidence, “But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave, for He shall receive me” (Ps. 49:15, NKJV).
Consistent with the Old Testament hope, this statement is not suggesting that at the time of his death, the soul of the psalmist would fly immediately into heaven. The psalmist is simply saying that he would not remain forever in the grave. A time would come when God would redeem him from death and take him to the heavenly courts.
Read in context without the Adventist worldview filtering the texts, the texts from Psalm 49 do suggest that the psalmist believed the Lord would literally “receive” him when he died. The word “receive” is not synonymous with “resurrect” and “take to heaven”. It means the psalmist, at the time of writing, knew that the Lord accepted him and would receive him when his spirit left his body. It is not a statement about a resurrection by and by and the possible endowment of eternal life.
This sort of warping is present throughout the lesson which is intended to solidify the Adventist belief in annihilation and non-existence during death.
Much more could be said about this topic, but for further study see the previous commentaries we have posted for the first three weeks’ studies from this quarter’s study guide.
Michael the Archangel
The lesson says this:
Daniel 12:1 refers to Michael, “ ‘the great prince,’ ” whose identification has been much disputed. Because each of the great visions in the book of Daniel culminates with the manifestation of Christ and His kingdom, the same should be the case in regard to this specific passage. In the book of Daniel we find allusions to the same Divine Being as “the Prince of the host” (Dan. 8:11, NKJV), “ ‘the Prince of princes’ ” (Dan. 8:25, NKJV), “ ‘Messiah the Prince’ ” (Dan. 9:25, NKJV), and finally as “ ‘Michael, the great prince’ ” (Dan. 12:1, NASB). So, we should identify Michael also as Christ.
This paragraph uses illogical reasoning to arrive at its conclusion that “we should identify Michael also as Christ”. All the texts listed in the paragraph above identify Michael as one of the princes, as the prince of Daniel’s people, and so forth. Significantly, the paragraph omits the Michael references from Daniel 10 where it becomes even more obvious that Michael is one of several others categorized as “princes”.
Jesus is not one of several. He is completely unique, and He Is God.
Furthermore, the argument that the visions end with manifestations of Christ and His kingdom so Daniel 12:1 needs to refer to Christ is utterly unsupported contextually. It is an illogical argument that has no support from the context. Even more, Jude 9 identifies Michael the archangel as one who would not rebuke Satan but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” Yet Adventism, by EGW’s authority, says Jude 9 refers to Jesus.
This identification is unsupported by Scripture. Jesus very plainly directly rebuked Satan while He was on earth. He commanded the “Legion” of demons to leave the demoniac in Mark 5 and Luke 8. He directly rebuked Satan in the wilderness when He was tempted by the devil after his baptism (Mt. 4).
Yet Adventism is “married” to identifying Michael the Archangel as another name for Jesus in spite of the biblical context which clearly denies this designation.
What the Adventist identification does do, however, is to cement the internal view that Jesus is not almighty God, that He is somehow less than the Father, and that He was once exalted to the position of Son thus making Lucifer jealous. If Jesus is identified as an archangel, a created being, then Lucifer could claim God was unfair to exalt Jesus instead of him. Such an identity would put Jesus and Lucifer on nearly equal ground in the distant past.
Resurrection, Not Re-creation
The lesson equates resurrection with the re-creation of the person who has died. For example, Friday’s lesson says this:
Modern science teaches that all matter is composed of atoms, them- selves made up of two smaller particles, quarks and leptons, which are believed to be the building blocks of all physical reality. If, then, at the core the physical world is quarks and leptons, couldn’t the God who not only created and sustains that world also just reconfigure the quarks and leptons when the time comes to resurrect us? Mocking the resurrection, atheist Bertrand Russell asked what happens to those whom cannibals ate, because their bodies are now part of the cannibals’, and so who gets what in the resurrection? But suppose the Lord simply grabs quarks and leptons, the ultimate building blocks of existence, from wherever, and, based on the information that He possesses about each one of us, reconstructs us from those quarks and leptons on up? He doesn’t need our original ones; any will do. Or, in fact, He could just speak new quarks and leptons into existence and go from there. However He does it, the God who created the universe can re-create us, which He promises to do at the resurrection of the dead.
Resurrection, however, is not “re-creation”. Resurrection is defined as “the act of restoring a dead person, for example, to life,” or “the condition of having been restored to life” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition).
Re-creation, on the other hand, is defined as “the state or instance of creating again or anew: the re-creation of the Russian Empire” (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/re-creation).
Resurrection is a word that describes restoring a life. To restore means to bring back into existence or use or to return something to a normal condition. It does not imply creating a replacement.
Resurrection is the restoration of a person to a living condition; it is not a new creation or a replica of the original.
To use an inanimate example, to restore an antique chair which has gone through centuries of disuse and decay, a person would not simply make a replica of that chair but would work with the original piece and would remove the dirt and grime and repair broken parts and refinish it so it would reflect its original beauty and the purpose the original make had in mind. A replica of the chair, on the other hands, would be ontologically different. It would imitate but would not BE the original chair.
A restored chair would still have existed for hundreds of years and would still bear its own value. A replica, or a re-creation, might appear identical to an onlooker, but it would intrinsically be different. It would not bear the legacy of the years of the original’s existence or of the original maker’s personal design and care.
The Adventist explanations of “resurrection” inevitably go to the idea of God’s making a completely new person—a completely new body into which He places His memory of the person who ceased to exist at death. This understanding of “resurrection” is necessary for Adventists because they do not believe the person has an immaterial identity.
If we think about the implications of the Adventist view of God re-creating the dead, we have to acknowledge that the re-created person is not ontologically the SAME person. It is a replica, a clone, a “trick” to make everyone, including the re-created person, think it’s the same—but it cannot be the same. The “downloaded” memory of God into the re-created body is not the actual person who has been created, known, and loved by God. It is not a restoration of life to a real person; it is, rather, a clever imitation designed to pick up wherever the dead stopped existing, not functioning as itself but as a programmed replica.
In the Adventist view, the person himself—his personality and memories—are all contained in the brain. If the brain has decayed or been digested by sharks, it cannot continue the life of the person. Thus a “re-created” person is not the same person but a replica programmed with the same neural responses that the first person had.
This reality of the Adventist view of death and resurrection is part of the reason Adventists fear death so strongly. Intuitively they know that they will cease to exist when they die, and when they are re-created, they do not know what they will discover: will they be saved or lost? Will they even be the same person?
The answer is they will NOT be the same person—if their view is correct.
The Bible, however, describes something very different. Because Jesus took our imputed sin into Himself and took the wrath of God against our sin, when we trust Him, we pass from death to life at that moment (Jn. 5:24). Eternal life isn’t just a metaphor; when we receive eternal life upon trusting the Lord Jesus, we will never die, as Jesus told Martha in John 11:16. Those words are not metaphors; they are literal and real.
Oh, yes—our bodies may die, but WE, the essential US that knows and worships God, will NEVER DIE but will eventually be absent from the body and present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:1–9), a condition that is “very much better” than remaining here in our bodies (Phil 1:22, 23).
When Jesus said, “Into Thy hand I commit my spirit”, He was not referring to His breath. He was referring to His personal essence, His immaterial identity which was housed in His human body but which returns to the God who gave it upon the death of the body.
The part of a believer that actually IS a completely new creation is our new birth, our naturally dead-in-sin spirits being brought to life through belief and trust in Jesus’ shed blood and resurrection. Paul explains it this way:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10).
That word “created” is the word used in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Created is a word that describes bringing a brand-new “thing” into existence.
When we are born again and given new life—eternal life—we literally become brand-new creatures. We will never die; our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3), and we are different from those who are still dead in sin.
Believers are literally brand-new creations. We are not re-creations, nor are we resurrected creatures. Rather, our spirits, the core identity of US, is literally new with eternal life, the resurrection life of Jesus making us completely new. These NEW creations—our living spirits—are still housed in mortal flesh which will die. Our living spirits, however, will NOT die but will be present with the Lord while our bodies go into the grave.
We will not cease to exist; rather, we will wait in Christ for our resurrections when He brings us our glorified bodies and reunites US with our bodies. This two-part definition of humanity is the nature of man, and the resurrection is necessary in order for us to retain our humanity eternally. It is this identity that the Lord Jesus also has since His incarnation.
The wicked also have this two-part identity, but they are not new creations. They remain spiritually dead in sin—separated from the resurrection life of Jesus—until (or unless) they trust Him and are born again. When they die, however, they also die as humans, not as animals. Their spirits—even though they are dead in sin—go back to God who “knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment” (2 Peter 2:9).
This lesson, thankfully, reveals the reality that Adventism teaches a false view of death and resurrection. Seldom do we find written material that so clearly reveals the Adventist heresy of mere physicality.
We are body plus spirit, and when we know the Lord, we worship Him in spirit and in truth (Jn. 4:24). †
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