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 6: “He Died For Us”
[COLLEEN TINKER]
Problems with this lesson:
- This author does not understand that the resurrection is not only about the body.
- It asserts that the righteous and the wicked dead go to the same place “at first” and mocks Paul’s words that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
- This lesson teaches that Jesus came to “defeat Satan and refute his false claims” and “to prove that the first Adam could have obeyed God as Christ” did.
Saturday’s introduction to the lesson establishes the false view of humanity which makes the resurrection nothing more than a wish for a future re-created body that will house one’s memories. This introduction mocks the biblical teaching of death and asserts that there is essentially no difference between the saved and the lost until Jesus returns. Only then will He or they know who all will be saved and who won’t be.
Here is the introductory quote:
It has been said that we cannot avoid death and taxes. That’s not entirely true. People can avoid taxes—but not death. They might be able to put death off a few years, but sooner or later, death always comes. And because we know that the dead, both the righteous and the wicked, end up in the same place at first, our hope of the resurrection means everything to us. As Paul has said, without this hope, even “those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (1 Cor. 15:18, NKJV), which is a rather strange thing to say if those who “have fallen asleep in Christ” are buzzing about heaven in the presence of God.
Thus, Christ’s resurrection is central to our faith, because in His resurrection we have the surety of our own. But before Christ was resurrected from the dead, He, of course, had to die. This is why, amid the agony of Gethsemane, in anticipation of His death, He prayed: “ ‘Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? “Father, save Me from this hour”? But for this purpose I came to this hour’ ” (John 12:27, NKJV). And that purpose was to die.
This week we will focus on Christ’s death and what it means for the promise of eternal life (emphasis mine).
Scripture is clear that the righteous dead and the wicked dead do not “end up in the same place at first”. The author, of course, is referring to the Adventist doctrine that nothing of a person survives the death of the body, that the body goes into the ground, and the person’s breath goes to God. Thus no one who is dead exists anywhere. Only God retains their memories in His memory. He then essentially downloads those memories into the recreated body He makes at the “resurrection”. No ontological connection survives the death of a person and the appearance of their eventual recreated self.
By way of review, I will quote below the central passages that explain where the righteous and the wicked dead go upon death.
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him (2 Corinthians 5:1–9).
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account (Philippians 1:21–24).
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority (2 Peter 2:4–10).
From these passages alone we know that those who believe in the Lord Jesus and are made alive in Him never cease to be with Him. When they die, their bodies separate from their immaterial spirits, and the essence of who they are go consciously into the presence of the Lord where they can even please Him.
The wicked, on the other hand, do not go consciously into the presence of the Lord because they are spiritually dead and separated from Him, but the essence of who they are does not cease to exist. God holds their immaterial identities under punishment until the day of judgment.
These conditions—with the Lord if one is a believer and under punishment if one is not a believer—are the destinations people experience upon death. The lesson is simply wrong about this subject. Of course, it HAS to take the position it does in order to retain Adventist doctrine.
Adventism insists that man has no immaterial spirit that survives death. No part of man or of His identity survives the death of the body. This heresy shapes everything Adventism says about the Lord Jesus, about sin, about salvation, and about the resurrection.
They cannot teach biblical truth because they reject biblical truth about the nature of man.
Mocking
The author then takes Paul’s words about Jesus’ resurrection out of context and juxtaposes them with more out-of-context words from Paul to create an absurdity: “As Paul has said, without this hope, even ‘those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished’ (1 Cor. 15:18, NKJV), which is a rather strange thing to say if those who ‘have fallen asleep in Christ’ are buzzing about heaven in the presence of God.”
Adventism has no awareness at all of the connection between Jesus’ resurrection and believers’ new birth. When Jesus rose from death, His resurrection was the proof that His sacrifice was sufficient to satisfy God’s curse on human sin. His death wasn’t a representative death, nor was it an example. It was an eternal, infinite payment for sin that was adequate for all human sin.
Jesus atoned not just for our bad deeds but for our natural depravity, our spiritual death which is our legacy from Adam. He rose from death because God’s curse—that man would die because of Adam’s sin—had been atoned. His death literally paid the price for all our sin, and the curse of death cannot hold anyone who believes since Jesus rose from the tomb.
Romans 8 explains that His resurrection life—His life which paid for our mortality and spiritual death—is what we receive when we trust Him.
You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you (Romans 8:9–11).
The lesson extracts 1 Corinthians 15:18 out of context (see the quote at the beginning of this article) to make a foolish point about soul sleep. But the author twists Scripture and uses Paul’s words to say something he does not actually say. Here is 1 Corinthians 15:18 in context:
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:12–19).
Paul is actually saying that if Christ did not rise from death, those who have trusted in Jesus would STILL BE IN THEIR SINS. The lesson attempts to make this statement say that Jesus’ resurrection is the proof and the promise that people’s bodies will rise later. To be sure, this fact is true. But Paul’s bigger point is that Jesus’ resurrection was SUFFICIENT for atoning for human sin. His resurrection was the consequence of His infinite, sufficient sacrifice. Death was UNDONE because of His death. Death simply broke from the inside-out for those who trust Jesus.
If Jesus had not risen from the dead, people wouldn’t just be in the ground. They would be IN THEIR SINS. This fact means that if Jesus hadn’t risen, His death would not have been sufficient, and no human could be forgiven.
Furthermore, the lesson’s mocking quote at the beginning makes light of Paul’s words about the dead in Christ. For an Adventist, being “in Christ” is a theoretical construct. It is not a literal reality involving new life making us spiritually alive and eternally connected to Christ—a connection which not even death can break.
When Paul says that if Christ has not risen, those who are dead in Christ would still be perished and still in their sins, he is saying that there would be no new birth, no spiritual life, no being transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son. If Jesus had not risen, there would be no atonement, and the curse of death would still hold all humanity in eternal death.
Jesus’ death is not just a promise that new bodies will emerge one day. His resurrection is a universal statement that His death was sufficient for all human sin—it satisfied God and His justice, and the death sentence has been overturned because Jesus suffered the hell of His Father’s absence as He became sin for us and took our punishment.
When Paul says that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, he is affirming that because Jesus paid the sufficient price for our sin, we have been made spiritually alive the moment we believe, and not even death can remove our eternal life from our now-living spirits. We go to the Lord Jesus when we die
We do not go “buzzing around heaven”, but our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3). We are ALWAYS in Him. We are not embodied when we are dead, but we do not cease to exist, and we are with the Lord—a situation that is very much better than being in our mortal bodies.
Adventists utterly mock the clear words of Scripture on this matter, and their mockery and deliberate obfuscation of these core truths about our salvation is blasphemous.
Jesus did NOT come to refute Satan’s supposed claims. He did not come to demonstrate that the law could be kept. NO!
He came, as He Himself said to FUFILL the law. The law was a death decree: anyone who broke even one command was guilty of breaking the whole law, and anyone who sinned in the smallest way was worthy of death.
Jesus came and fulfilled that death sentence. He became sin for us so that in Him we could become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).
When Jesus fulfilled the law, He opened a new and living way to the Father (Heb. 10:20), and all who repent of their inescapable sin and trust Jesus’ atonement, are born again and filled with the Holy Spirit. We receive new life, and not even the death of our bodies can alter the fact of our ETERNAL life! We are forever with the Lord—even when we die.
This lesson reveals Adventism’s arrogance and sinister worldview that keeps its members blinded to the reality of Jesus and His full atonement and His complete fulfillment of the law.
Adventists keep themselves under the curse of the law, and they create a fiction for explaining human nature and eternal life in order to keep themselves from being born again—saved from the hopeless despair of a religion that teaches an incomplete atonement that continues in heaven and that teaches a weak, political god who puts our “free will” into the place of His universal authority.
No! God is sovereign, and when He says that His Son paid for sin and destroyed death for those who believe, that is not a metaphor. It is REALLY TRUE!! †
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How can we reconcile Jesus’ statement to the thief on the cross: “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43) with His statement to Mary days later: “touch me not for I have not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17)?