[STEPHEN PITCHER]
I was born into an agnostic, spiritualistic family. In spite of our ambivalence about the existence of God, though, I knew the spiritual world was as real as the physical world; it was just intangible.
I became a Christian at the age of 17 through the ministry of Young Life. As I studied with Young Life, I pondered the things they were teaching me, but my agnostic roots kept me questioning everything that claimed to be true. I was attracted to Jesus, but I just couldn’t be sure. One day Jesus came to me as I sat under a tree, and He told me all that I had read about Him in His book was true. All I had to do was to accept him as my Lord. I did, and he entered into my heart that moment and filled me with His Holy Spirit and has never left me.
I was completely new spiritually, but doctrinally I was totally ignorant, and I was not prepared for what was about to happen.
Five cults in two months
Within two months I had been approached by five groups; I had never even heard the names of these organizations before. Soon I was studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses using their New World Translation of the Bible. Concurrently, I was studying the Book of Mormon and learning how the gospel had been restored to earth through the prophet Joseph Smith. I was also studying the book Jesus Christ is Not God! by Victor Paul Wierwille, founder of The Way International. At the same time I was reading the pornographic Mo Letters from the Children of God, and I was also reading The Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, attempting to learn the message of Krishna. The Hare Krishna proselytizers explained to me that their message was like what Jesus had taught.
Within two months of accepting Christ, I went from being a blazing Christian to being a blazing mess. I ignorantly thought all these groups were trying to help me in my new relationship with Christ.
Meanwhile, I met a young woman, and we began to study the Book of Mormon verse-by-verse. Before long I was attending the Baptist church on Sunday mornings and the Latter Day Saints Ward in the afternoons. I kept up that crazy-making theological syncretism for two years, but I didn’t realize exactly what I was studying until God arranged for an intervention.
One morning my Baptist Sunday School teacher asked if I had heard of Walter Martin. I hadn’t. That morning the teacher loaned me some Martin tapes on Mormonism, and I was shocked at what I heard.
I approached my friend and said, “You believe in more than one God!” She immediately replied, “No we don’t! I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, but that is not true.”
I was dumbfounded. Whom do you trust when it seems there’s no one you can trust?
A few days later she came to me and said, “I owe you an apology. We do believe in more than one God. I asked my father, and he explained it to me.”
Authority
Her sudden change in belief concerning God impacted me. She didn’t study source material for herself; instead, she consulted her authority figure, a person in whom she placed implicit trust. When her father taught her something she had not previously believed, she accepted this new information because it came from her authority figure.
As a result of this startling exchange, two things happened. First, I began to distrust completely anyone’s opinions regarding religious matters until I checked the source material myself. Second, as I read and listened to Walter Martin, I looked up large amounts of the source material he cited. As I read his sources, I began to trust him as an authority figure.
My trust in Walter Martin shaped my response a few years later when an Adventist woman walked into my mom’s house as the caretaker for a family member. Between my poor Spanish and her poor English, we managed to understand each other when I asked her on a date to San Francisco. We attended each other’s churches. I was impressed with the passion of the Adventists and was invited to attend an upcoming Revelation Seminar.
Deception was the farthest thing from my mind. “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made” (Gen. 3:1a).
I was impressed with the speaker; he answered every question straight out of the Bible. In fact, I was so impressed that, after Norma and I became engaged, I joined the Adventist church because I believed that a family should attend church together. I felt completely confident that I was making a sound decision; after all, Walter Martin had investigated Seventh-day Adventists and had stated publicly that they are an evangelical Christian church and should not be treated like the numerous cults with whom he had dealt.
The trust I placed in Walter Martin was soon to be my undoing.
Discovering true Adventism
In 1987 my wife and I moved from the Silicon Valley in California to New Mexico. That was where I finally received my first true lesson on Adventism. I had told Norma that there was a good Seventh-day Baptist church nearby, but she refused to consider attending. That refusal was the first real hint I had that my marriage might have been based on something other than Christ and our mutual love.
The first Adventist church I attended in New Mexico began to open my eyes. The Sabbath School lesson was on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, but I was puzzled by the fact that everyone in the class seemed terrified.
After listening to a despairing litany of worry and fear, I spoke up. “1 John 2:1 says, ‘My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’” The instant response was an attack: “That was present truth for John’s day, but we have present truth for today. We must be prepared to stand before God without Jesus as our mediator.”
The elder leading the class sat and watched his students turn on me, much like Saul watching the stoning of Stephen, and my shock gave way to anger.
Nevertheless, I was committed to worshiping with my wife, and I still believed Walter Martin could not have been wrong. Consequently, in spite of my confusion as I learned what Adventists truly believed, we finally settled in the Albuquerque Central Seventh-day Adventist Church, and I became very active there for ten years. During those years I allowed myself to become indoctrinated.
After ten years we returned to California, and I was looking forward to finding an evangelical Adventist church—something I couldn’t find in Albuquerque. We finally settled at the La Sierra University Church, and as I listened to Sabbath School and the sermons each week, I realized I was hearing the same things I had heard in New Mexico, only they were dressed up in better language. I became depressed.
I looked for a website with Walter Martin’s teachings and found one, but I didn’t hear him say anything new or different about Adventism.
Within a few months I took an internet Bible Challenge. For the next few months I read only the New Testament: Matthew, John, Acts, and the epistles. In fact, I read Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians over and over for a few weeks. I was blown away. It was as though I had never read these things before. I did not, however, read Revelation. I became nauseous just thinking about that book; the effects of Adventist eschatology had completely shut down my interest in Revelation.
Nevertheless, the profound truths of the new covenant began to penetrate my Adventist mind and heart. I began to identify with 2 Corinthians 3:15 : “Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts.” I realized there had been a spiritual—and a quite literal—veil over my heart.
Understanding
Desperate for answers, I began looking online, and soon I found the Former Adventist Fellowship and the Trinity Church websites. One day, depressed and near despair, I got into my car and drove toward Redlands with no conscious destination in mind. As God directed my car into the parking lot of Trinity Church, I realized where I was.
I walked into the church and asked for a pastor. Within minutes the receptionist returned with the senior pastor, Gary Inrig, who invited me into his office.
We talked for an hour before we prayed. One thing he said surprised me: “We can thank God for heresies. Every time a heresy has arisen in the Christian church, the people of God have risen up and defended the faith by pointing out the truths contained in God’s word.”
Before I left, Gary introduced me to Kurt, a former Adventist on staff, and we spoke and prayed together. He brought me back to the front office just as another man, Richard Tinker, happened to walk in the door on an errand. Kurt introduced us, and Richard invited me to his home on Friday, New Year’s Eve, 1999. That was my first New Year’s Eve with other former Adventists, and it was the first time I rang in the new year with communion and prayer.
I began attending Former Adventist Fellowship Bible study on Friday and Trinity Church on Sunday—and my marriage began falling apart. My wife claimed that I now had the mark of the beast and said, both privately and in the presence of one of the Adventist pastors, that I was worshiping Satan. During the next three months, the tension at home mounted, and finally my home became so unstable that I stopped attending services at Trinity. I was rewarded by my life returning to normal for a while.
I wasn’t the same, though. At Trinity Church I had heard the same gospel, recognized the same Holy Spirit, and communed with the same Jesus with whom I fell in love 25 years earlier, and now I couldn’t get enough. I returned to the Bible study and to church on Sunday, but this time I also attended the Adventist church with my wife. This compromise, however, did not work. My marriage fell apart.
About this time someone gave me a video copy of the five-part John Ankerberg Show, “Who Is Telling the Truth About Seventh Day Adventism?”, which aired in 1985. In this series of programs, Walter Martin, my hero of Christian apologetics, appeared with William Johnsson, then editor of the Adventist Review. What I heard shocked me.
On the second program, Martin referred to the 27 Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists when he said to Johnsson, “I don’t care what the statement of faith in your hand says if the practice isn’t there.”
On the fifth program Ankerberg asked, “What would you have to change, Walter, to call them a cult? And we might go on to the next step, do you think it’s headed in that direction?”
Martin said, “I think that they are moving [in that direction] because of their view of Mrs. White, which is not changing, or not changed, or never changed—I shudder to think about that…” Then he said “…they [Evangelicals and Fundamentalists] will begin to re-evaluate and say, ‘… there never really was any change and that they have not told you the truth and they didn’t tell Barnhouse the truth, and that you were misled and you’ve got to set the record straight.’”
And finally, Martin said, “I fear that if they continue to progress at this rate, that the classification of a cult can’t possibly miss being reapplied to Seventh-day Adventism.”
I was shocked and overwhelmed. This admission that he might have made a mistake, that Adventism really was revealing itself to be cultic and not Christian, came right out of the mouth of the man who had the label “cult” removed from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the 1950’s.
Walter Martin had been my trusted authority. He was the expert on Christian apologetics and cults, but he had been wrong about Adventism. When he met with the Adventists in 1955 and 1956 to try and ascertain exactly what they believed, he had unwittingly been meeting with the most subtle of all the beasts of the field, and he had been deceived.
I realized that because I had trusted Martin instead of comparing Adventism to Scripture myself, I had allowed myself to be seduced by a false gospel that stole my joy in Jesus for over 15 years.
My membership in Adventism ended in 2003, and I joined Trinity Church [Redlands, California] in January, 2007. My church membership, however, is no longer my identity. Today, I claim only one label: Christian. I now put my trust only in Jesus Christ and in His verbally inspired written word.
I was blind, but now I see. I stand on the Rock, and I shall not be moved. †
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