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 5: “Resurrections Before the Cross”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems With This Lesson:
- The lesson teaches that Jesus resurrected Moses on the basis of the account of Michael the Archangel in Jude 9.
- The author uses Jesus’ miracles of raising the dead to teach that death as “sleep” means there is no immaterial soul or spirit that survives the body.
- The author doesn’t know what Jesus meant when He said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
This lesson begins by using Ellen White’s commentary to prove that Moses was resurrected. After quoting her words from Patriarchs and Prophets, the author says that Moses’ appearance at the Mount of Transfiguration is the “clear evidence” that Moses was resurrected.
This teaching is necessary in order to maintain the Adventist position that living humans are only breathing bodies, not bodies and spirits which separate at death.
Here is the quote from Patriarchs and Prophets:
“Christ Himself, with the angels who had buried Moses, came down from heaven to call forth the sleeping saint. . . . For the first time Christ was about to give life to the dead. As the Prince of life and the shining ones approached the grave, Satan was alarmed for his supremacy. . . . Christ did not stoop to enter into controversy with Satan. . . . But Christ referred all to His Father, saying, ‘The Lord rebuke thee.’ Jude 9. . . . The resurrection was forever made certain. Satan was despoiled of his prey; the righteous dead would live again.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 478, 479.
This use of Jude 9 to “prove” Moses’ resurrection is an egregious twisting of Scripture. It not only forces the Bible to say that Moses was resurrected, but it also teaches that Michael the Archangel is Jesus.
Here is Jude 9:
But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you” (Jude 9).
That’s it. Without Ellen White’s commentary, it would be impossible to squeeze any notion of “resurrection” or of Michael being Jesus out of Jude 9!
First, if this were the only reference to Michael in Scripture, it would be sufficient to tell us that he cannot be Jesus. First, Jude tells us that Michael “did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment”. The word “presume” means to be audacious enough to dare to do something without the right or the permission to do it. It carries the sense of unwarranted boldness and impertinence, of being outside one’s sphere of authority.
This verse doesn’t merely say that Michael did not pronounce a judgment; it says he did not PRESUME to do so. That word alone reveals that Michael had no authority over Satan. He had no authority to pass judgment or to condemn him. Rather, he deferred to the LORD.
Jesus, however, absolutely had the authority to rebuke Satan. In Matthew 8:28–34 we read not only of Jesus’ authority over the demons but also of the demons’ knowledge of who He was and their fear of Him:
And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out,
“What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region (Matthew 8:28–34).
Also, remember how Jesus directly rebuked Satan when He was tested in the wilderness. After Satan’s three temptations in which he misused God’s own words in Scripture to tempt his own Creator, Jesus resisted him by using Scripture contextually. Then Jesus openly rebuked him:
Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”
Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him (Matthew 4:10–11).
Jesus had no fear rebuking Satan. He is Satan’s Creator, not an archangel with a similar identity as Satan. Jesus, in fact, is the LORD to whom Michael deferred. For Ellen White to argue that Michael is Jesus is to reveal her underlying belief that Jesus is not fully almighty God. Her teaching that Jesus is Michael the Archangel was her true belief—a belief that she never renounced and that is heretical.
Further, the Bible says nothing about Moses being raised from the dead. It describes his death in Deuteronomy 34, but there is NOTHING about being raised.
First Fruits
What we DO know is that no one could be resurrected before Jesus rose from the tomb. The Teachers Comments quotes 1 Corinthians 15:20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” but then the author says this: “Jesus defeated death on the cross. Consequently, He could resurrect others, even before His own sacrifice, because of the Cross.”
This conclusion, however, contradicts 1 Corinthians 15:23—a verse which the writer fails to mention: “But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.”
The fact is this: no one could be resurrected until after Jesus rose from death. Because the Bible is clear about this fact, we also know that those five instances in which people were brought to life before the cross—two in the Old Testament and three done by Jesus in the gospels—could not have been resurrections in the sense of the resurrection described in 1 Corinthians 15.
Those people were not raised to eternal life; they were resuscitated—they did have to die again. They couldn’t have been resurrected to eternal life because Jesus had not yet, in real time, paid the price for human sin and thus broken the curse of death—the curse into which every single person is born because of Adam (1 Cor. 15:20–28).
Scripture is clear that Jesus IS the firstfruits; after He rose, the rest of the believers will be resurrected at His coming. The order is fixed, and Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection had to precede anyone else being resurrected with a glorified, eternal body.
We know for sure that Moses was not resurrected, and Michael the Archangel (identified in Daniel 10 as the prince of Daniel’s people, the Jews) is not “another name for Jesus”. Jesus is LORD, and Michael is a created being, just like Satan.
Moses remains dead—yet the Mount of Transfiguration confirms to us that the “first death” is not annhilation. When people die, their spirits separate from their bodies, as we discussed last week. Their spirits go to God, and their bodies go into the earth.
When Moses appeared on that mountain, it was not a resurrected man who stood there. He could not precede his own Lord and Creator! No, the disciples saw a manifestation of Moses similar to the manifestations of the Angel of the LORD and of other angels in the Old Testament when God sent them to earth to do His bidding. (See, for example, Genesis 18:1–3.)
Moses’ spirit is alive and well in the presence of the Lord, and he, along with all other believing people, is awaiting his resurrection.
Jesus is the firstfruits, and no one could be resurrected before He was.
Death As Sleep
The lesson also goes to great lengths to say these stories of people coming back from death are evidence that there is no spirit or soul. Furthermore, they argue, there are no stories of what those people experienced. If they had truly gone to heaven, wouldn’t they have told people what they saw?
First, the lack of after-death accounts proves nothing. This argument is a straw-man argument. We already know that God determines what we are to know about the heavenly realm. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 12:2–4:
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.
In other words, God does not allow people to reveal things He has shown them that He does not yet want revealed. The fact that there is no record in Scripture of those raised people’s experiences does not mean that they did not HAVE experiences or that they did not tell those around them. The only thing we can know for sure is that God did not wish for those details to be recorded in His eternal word. He wants us to trust what He tells us, not the words of others’ experiences.
Another thing we know on the basis of Paul’s revelation is that, according to 2 Corinthians 5:1–9 and Philippians 1:22, 23, when we die, our identities—our spirits—leave our mortal bodies and are present with the Lord—and this condition is “very much better” than remaining here in our bodies.
Importantly, Paul wrote about this in the same letter, 2 Corinthians, in which he said he saw things he was not permitted to tell. He obviously WAS permitted to tell us that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. We know that Paul was not mistaken in this assertion because he admits he was taken to heaven and shown things. This was obviously one of those things—and he was permitted to assure us that death does NOT mean ceasing to exist!
If God did not allow the apostle Paul to tell some of the things he saw when taken to the third heaven, we should never trust the claims of those who say they’ve seen heaven or hell. Those are details God has not given us, and people with claims are not His chosen apostles and prophets through whom He gave His word. The only source of knowledge and information about God’s will and ways, life and death, is His word, the Bible.
Furthermore, the lesson argues that “sleep” is the metaphor Jesus used for death to “prove” that humans do not have souls/spirits. I want to say, “What…??”
Jesus used “sleep” as a metaphor for death because it reveals that death does NOT mean ceasing to exist! Those people Jesus raised had not ceased to exist. In fact, the authors of the lesson significantly used the account of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5. The account in Luke 8, however, includes a detail Mark did not mention. In verse 55 Luke tells us what happened when Jesus took the girl by the hand and said, “Child, arise!”
And her spirit returned, and she got up at once. And he directed that something should be given her to eat (Luke 8:55).
Her spirit returned. Adventists will attempt to argue that her spirit was her “breath”, but contextually, that is not the obvious meaning. Furthermore, this statement corresponds to 2 Corinthians 4:1–9 where Paul explains that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Jesus the Resurrection and the Life
Finally, when Jesus spoke to Martha before He raised Lazarus, He said to her:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live (Jn 11:25).
The lesson states that Jesus is the Author of Life—and that is true. Yet Jesus said something even more encompassing: He IS the resurrection and the life. In other words, the sinless Jesus who took into Himself the imputed sin of humanity died on the cross and fully paid for that sin. Jesus fully atoned for sin ON THE CROSS.
He is not applying His atonement in heaven. No! He fully atoned for sin as He hung there, between heaven and earth, and suffered the wrath of God for our sin. He experienced hell for us on that cross.
BECAUSE He shed His perfect, sinless blood and was the sufficient sacrifice for sin, that death broke the curse of death.
Now, when we trust Jesus, we pass out of death into life (Jn. 5:24). We are literally made spiritually alive and enter eternal life at that moment, and we truly will NEVER die. Oh, our bodies will die if Jesus is not yet returned, but our identities, our true selves will pass into the presence of the LORD because of Jesus!
Jesus IS the resurrection because He IS the atonement and the Substitute for all who believe. He IS our life! When we trust Him, we receive His resurrection life, and we lose our curse of death. Our spirits which are by nature dead in sin (Eph. 2:1–3) come to life ETERNALLY, and we are with the Lord from that moment onward for all eternity.
This lesson uses God’s living word out of context to prove one of the most insidious, demonic Adventist doctrines: that nothing of us survives the death of our bodies.
This teaching is heresy, and God asks us to look to Jesus and to believe. When we do, we will literally enter eternal life, and our true identities will be hidden with Christ in God. †
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