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 7: Christ’s Victory Over Death
[COLLEEN TINKER]
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson reveals Adventism’s lack of understanding of the resurrection by opening with a mockery of the dead being with the Lord.
- The author uses EGW’s statements about Satan guarding Jesus’ tomb and claiming His body.
- The lesson makes no connection between the sufficiency of Jesus’s sacrifice and breaking the curse of death.
Adventism’s teaching about the resurrection obscures the fact that Adventist doctrine is based on the heresy that Jesus’ atonement was not completed on the cross. In fact, this inconvenient detail was one of the biggest problems Adventist leaders faced in their 1955 conversations with Walter Martin and their subsequent publication of Questions on Doctrine in 1957.
Knowing that evangelicals believe that Jesus fully completed the atonement for human sin on the cross, the Adventists deceived Martin by using the phrases “sacrificial atonement provided” and “sacrificial atonement applied” (see Questions on Doctrine, 2003 annotated edition, p. 277). By using this phraseology, the Adventists knew they could hide the reality of the investigative judgment doctrine. The evangelicals (Martin and his colleague Donald Barnhouse) would not know that the phrase “sacrificial atonement supplied” does not mean that the atonement is complete in Adventism. By discussing a completed “sacrifice”, the evangelicals would assume the Adventists meant the same thing Christians mean: Jesus’ shed blood completed everything necessary for the atonement of human sin.
Furthermore, the evangelicals would not know that the phrase “sacrificial atonement applied” means, to the Adventists, that humans’ sin is NOT atoned when they “accept Jesus” but that, according to the investigative judgment, it is transferred from the person to the books of heaven where it is kept on record until the end of the IJ when, if it is specifically confessed, it is placed on Satan and carried out of heaven.
They knew the evangelicals would understand the “application” of the atonement to suggest the Hebrews 7 sense that Jesus lives forever to intercede for believers.
Yet to the Adventists, the idea of a completed atonement is utterly missing from Adventist theology.
Even today, while some Adventist theologians try to redefine the IJ to teach that the saved will vindicate the character of God while getting all their questions about His dealings with the lost answered, thus seeing that He is fair after all, still the fact remains that in Adventism, the cross does not resolve ALL the questions about sin and atonement and reconciliation. Adventism does not teach that atonement is something that humans do not help to accomplish or apply, and the truth about Jesus’ sacrifice is not taught in Adventist theology.
Heretical Worldview Revealed
Two of the kingpins of Adventist theology are revealed in Saturday’s lesson this sentence:
Thus, no matter all the emphasis Paul put on Christ’s death, and how important it was—“For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2, NKJV)—it really does us no good apart from His resurrection. That’s how crucial the resurrection of Jesus is to the entire Christian faith and the plan of salvation.
However, it’s hard to understand why the resurrection of Christ and with it our resurrection are so important if, as many believe, the dead in Christ are already enjoying the bliss of heaven as they have “gone home to be with the Lord.”
This quotation overtly mocks Paul’s clear teaching about the state of believers in 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 (Philippians 1:21–23).
Adventism denies that humans have an immaterial spirit, an identity that survives the death of the body and that goes to the Lord when a person dies. Yet this belief is the core definition of man that is necessary in order to understand the depravity for which Jesus’ death atoned and the reality of the new birth which is our gift when we trust Jesus’ finished work of atonement.
The week’s lessons quote all the central passages supporting the resurrection, but they are quoted out of context and interpreted according to the Adventist physicalist worldview instead of in a biblical context of mankind being BY NATURE dead in sin.
The second, more subtle Adventist kingpin revealed in this lesson is the idea that Jesus’ resurrection was simply an act of divine power that promises humans that they will be physically resurrected—or re-created, as they have explained it in some places. For Adventism, the resurrection is simply a promise that our bodies will come up from the grave and that God will restore His memory of us into those recreated bodies one day.
Utterly missing is the biblical teaching that the resurrection occurred BECAUSE Jesus offered the sufficient sacrifice to atone for all human sin. The law had delivered an unalterable curse of death: all who break even one law has broken the whole law, and any act of disobedience makes a person worthy of death.
In other words, the law sentenced every person who ever lived on earth—except for the Lord Jesus—to death, because ALL have sinned. All have transgressed God’s requirements! The curse of death was at the heart of the law.
The law was not a document explaining how people could be pleasing to God; rather, it was a document revealing in detail why they deserved to die—and it provided shadows of atonement and sacrifices for sin which were to awaken the Israelites to see that God alone could save them. They could not do anything for God that would lessen the curse of death under which they lived.
The significance of the resurrection, then, was that it revealed that the curse of death was BROKEN! Jesus had offered a perfect and sufficient sacrifice, and humanity no longer must live under an inevitable death sentence.
No more shadow sacrifices are needed. Jesus’ perfect, infinite, eternal sacrifice for sin has broken the death sentence at the heart of the law. Now anyone who recognizes his or her helpless sinfulness and spiritual death and trusts Jesus’ blood to pay for his or her sin—that person is AT THAT MOMENT released from the curse of death. At that moment that person literally passes from death to life (Jn. 5:24) and is born again. That person is sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit and, even if his body dies, he himself will NEVER die (John 11)!
Because of this reality, we can say with Paul that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord!
This lesson denies the literal spiritual death into which we are born. It denies the fact that Jesus’ literally fulfilled the law by offering the perfect, sufficient sacrifice for sin that UNDID the curse of death which was the heart of the law!
Ellen White’s Powerful Satan
This lesson also reveals one of the less-known but profound ways EGW teaches Adventists that Satan is a powerful opponent of Jesus who never stopped trying to win a controversy with him. This quotation from The Desire of Ages opens Monday’s lesson:
The victory of Christ over Satan and his evil powers was secured on the cross and confirmed by the empty tomb. “When Jesus was laid in the grave, Satan triumphed. He dared to hope that the Saviour would not take up His life again. He claimed the Lord’s body, and set his guard about the tomb, seeking to hold Christ a prisoner. He was bitterly angry when his angels fled at the approach of the heavenly messenger. When he saw Christ come forth in triumph, he knew that his kingdom would have an end, and that he must finally die.”—Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 782. And though Christ’s humanity died, His divinity did not die. In His divinity, Christ possessed the power to break the bonds of death.
In this passage Ellen goes FAR beyond Scripture. The Bible never hints that Satan lurked about Jesus’ tomb. It certainly never states nor suggests that Satan “claimed the Lord’s body” nor that he set evil angels to guard the tomb.
In fact, this quote reveals that Adventist theology does not understand nor teach the significance of Colossians 2:13–15:
And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him (Colossians 2:13–15).
This passage explains that it was the CROSS, not the resurrection, that spelled the defeat of Satan. When Jesus died, He nailed the record of our debt to the cross. Paul explains here that it was the LAW that was nailed to the cross in Jesus’ body. He was the Living Law—the Logos, the living Torah—and He took into Himself our imputed sin which was defined and cursed by the terms of the law.
Jesus took the curse of the law into Himself when He became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). The death sentence defined for all mankind in the law was what He experienced. It was when He died that He disarmed and humiliated Satan.
Jesus disarmed Satan by destroying his only true weapon: the law. Satan could accuse us by referring to the law and its curse.
“See??” he could say in essence. “This person deserves to die; they have broken THIS and THIS command!”
But when Jesus died, He took all that deserved death—the death every single human deserved for every single sin ever committed—plus the depravity which each person has inherited from Adam. Jesus PAID IN FULL for all our sin! His fulfillment of the law’s curse was what disarmed and humiliated Satan.
Yet EGW taught that it was the resurrection which convinced Satan he was defeated. Ellen had no understanding that the resurrection was a consequence of His sufficient death, not a stand-alone show of power that convinced Satan that Jesus was the stronger of the two.
Ellen would never risk hinting that Jesus’ death completed the purpose of the law and rendered it obsolete. Adventism, in fact, exists to put its adherents UNDER the law and its curse. It teaches a twisted doctrine that says we have to “accept Jesus” in order to get the power to keep the law.
In reality, Jesus’ atonement accomplished the exact opposite of this teaching. Jesus’ death has paid in full for the curse of death, and when we trust Him, we literally receive our new spiritual life then and never die. When our bodies die, we literally go consciously into the presence of the Lord!
Ellen and Adventism teach a powerful Satan that is always lurking in the shadows around Jesus and His people. In fact, the Adventist teaching of Jesus’ death even suggests that Jesus’ death and subsequent resurrection somehow answered SATAN’S accusations.
The Bible, however, teaches that Jesus’ death satisfied God’s demands, not Satan’s:
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:21–26).
In short, this week’s lesson emphasizes the Adventist teaching that Jesus’ resurrection is merely a promise of a future bodily resurrection for humans. It omits the reality that Jesus’ death on the cross was a COMPLETE atonement that does not continue in heaven. (There is no investigative judgment.)
This lesson also emphasizes the implicit Adventist worldview that Satan continues to be fighting Jesus for the win—as if they were on a somewhat equal footing, fighting to see which one was the most powerful. This belief denies that Jesus is almighty, eternal God, the creator of Lucifer, not an archangel who managed to be selected by God to be God’s son, as Ellen taught.
The Adventist worldview shapes the Adventist doctrine of the resurrection and obscures the sufficient atonement provided by our eternal Lord Jesus, God the Son, who took human flesh and died a human death for human sin.
The resurrection is not an assurance that our bodies will be recreated; it is, rather, the evidence that our sins are propitiated fully when we believe. The resurrection is the reversal of the death curse which opened the way for us to receive eternal life, spiritual life, the MOMENT we believe. The resurrection is the LIFE that we receive so that even when our bodies die, our now-living spirits go into the presence of the Lord and never die. Finally, the resurrection is the guarantee that when our Lord returns, He will grant immortal bodies to us and will restore us to our original state of bodies plus spirits, eternally alive with our Savior, our Lord Jesus. †
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