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.
THREE COSMIC MESSAGES
Lesson 1: “Jesus Wins—Satan Loses”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- Salvation is seen as a free-will choice to remain obedient to the Ten Commandments instead of taking the way of Satan’s deceptions.
- “Overcoming” is understood in terms of faithful obedience and evangelizing through the “merits” of Jesus.
- Revelation 12 is interpreted out of context to teach EGW’s view that the “remnant” protected in the wilderness were commandment-keepers during the middle ages of Catholic supremacy.
Lesson author Mark Finley uses much language that sounds “almost right”. He begins, however, with Revelation 12 as a means of leading into the quarter’s focus: the Three Angels’ Messages.
He assumes the Adventist understanding of the “great controversy” to be universal reality. While there is, indeed, spiritual warfare raging in our world, while there is a real Satan seeking whom he may devour, he is never an equal-but-opposite foe of the Lord Jesus.
He has always known he is a creation of God the Son; he has never been in doubt of who Jesus is. Furthermore, although Mark Finley states that Satan is a defeated foe and will lose in the end, he nevertheless describes an impending time of trouble in which everyone on earth will have to choose whether to serve Jesus or Satan, and he is clear that all humans, with their “free will”, are involved in the great controversy. At the end of Sunday’s lesson he states,
But here is the incredibly good news: Revelation 12 describes Christ’s triumph in the conflict, and all we have to do, using our free will, is choose to be on His side, the winning side. How great to be able to choose a side in a battle that you know, beforehand, it will win.
What Finley describes is not the biblical gospel. We are born spiritually dead, unable to choose to please or to seek God (Romans 3:9–18). We are born dead in sin, unable to rise about our natures, walking “according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2). We were all “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3).
We are not born with “free will” which we have to use to choose Jesus or Satan. NO! We are born already condemned (Jn. 3:18) with the wrath of God remaining on us (Jn. 3:26) until we come to trust and believe in the finished work of the Lord Jesus who died to propitiate for our sins and depravity. THEN we are born again, transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved So (Col 1:13), and sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. 1:13,14) who will never leave us—even if we lapse into indulging the law of sin in our flesh (as per Romans 7).
Our new birth is literal and real. We are brought to life spiritually, and we cannot be unborn. We cannot lose the Lord Jesus. Yes, we are sanctified AFTER being born again, but He gives us the will to do His will. He changes us from the inside out. Since Jesus fulfilled the law, we respond to HIM through the constant internal witness of the Holy Spirit applying God’s word to our lives. We serve Him more completely and fully than we ever could when we were focussed on the Ten Commandments.
This lesson reinforces the Adventist great controversy worldview and leaves the reader just as hopeless as when he started. There is no power in being told that our free choice determines our eternal outcome. Every person alive knows that his “free will” is never good enough to master the demands of the law!
Finley reveals that, in the final analysis, Adventist salvation depends upon each person’s decision. He says at the end of Thursday’s lesson:
Our world is headed for a major crisis. But in Jesus, by Jesus, through Jesus, and because of Jesus, our victory is assured—just as long as we stay connected to Him, which we do by faith, a faith that leads to obedience. It all comes down to our own choice.
And there it is. Our victory “is assured” IF we “stay connected to Him”.
But Adventism never tells us HOW to stay connected to Him except to stress that we must CHOOSE to remain obedient to the Ten Commandments. Translated into common Adventist-speak, that can be nearly summarized by saying, “Keep the Sabbath.”
The Bible, however, never tells us to stay loyal to the Sabbath. Instead, Ephesians 2:4–10 says this:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:4–10).
We are not saved through any observance of the law! Furthermore, our sanctification into godliness does not include learning to keep the Ten. We are saved entirely by grace through faith—and even our faith to believe is a gift from God because our dead-in-sin spirits cannot choose to trust Him.
The book of Galatians explains in detail how the law must be considered obsolete when we are in Christ. Paul explains in chapter 4 that the law, the covenant at Mt. Sinai, is equated with the slave Hagar, and the free woman and her children are NOT associated with Mt. Sinai and the law. The covenants reveal our heritage: we are either heirs of God with Christ, or we are slaves of the law.
Finally, Revelation 12 does not describe pre-history. Read in context with the rest of Revelation using the normal grammatical, historical rules of reading a normal book, Revelation 12 is describing a war in heaven with Michael and his angels (Michael is NOT Jesus but is the archangel of Daniel’s people Israel—see Daniel 10) fighting the dragon and his angels. This battle occurs in the context of Israel—not the church—being pursued by the dragon into the wilderness. This persecution of Israel (woman is not the church; the woman is Israel, and her child is Jesus, and she is protected for 1,260 days in the wilderness) results in the dragon being thrown down with no remaining access to heaven.
To be fair, there are varying interpretations of Revelation 12, but contextually it makes the best sense to see Israel here, not the church. Adventism, however, sees itself as “spiritual Israel” and writes itself into this prophecy. It further sees the war in heaven as describing the original fall of Satan that happened before the creation of the world. This interpretation, however, is not consistent with the context.
Furthermore, the teachers’ notes emphasize the EGW-inspired idea that this chapter describes the loyal Sabbath-keepers who were hidden from persecution during the middle ages. This idea is definitely not in view in Revelation 12 read in context!
Finally, the command-centric model of Adventist salvation is revealed in two EGW quotes in the teachers’ notes:
“All who will can be overcomers. Let us strive earnestly to reach the standard set before us. Christ knows our weakness, and to Him we can go daily for help. It is not necessary for us to gain strength a month ahead. We are to conquer from day to day (MS 28, 1886).”
“We become overcomers by helping others to overcome, by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. The keeping of the commandments of God will yield in us an obedient spirit, and the service that is the offspring of such a spirit, God can accept (Letter 236, 1908).”
EGW equates “overcoming” with striving to reach the standard set before us, with keeping the commandments of God (and to her, the commandments are the Ten). Ellen White actually had no idea of the new birth, of truly trusting Jesus and His finished work and living by His Spirit having been been made a completely new creation.
John said this:
For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:4–5)
The commandments which John mentions are not the Ten, either in his epistles, his gospel, or the book of Revelation. Whenever John uses the word “commandments”, he uses a form of the Greek word “entole”. Whenever he refers to the law, however, he uses the word “nomos”. “Entole” refers to teachings, sayings, commands—but NOT to Law. The commands of Jesus are what we are to obey—and He told His disciples He was giving them a new commandment: that they love one another as He had loved them. He was not referring to “law”.
Jesus even said that the work of God is to believe “in the One whom He has sent” (Jn. 6:29).
The commands for believers are not the law; rather, they are the commands of God to believe in the Lord Jesus, and then, having believed and having been born again, to walk by the Spirit (2 Cor. 3) in the New Testament commands for the church. The Sabbath is never in view.
In short, this lesson attempts to sound evangelical, but the reality is revealed in that the reader is continually reminded to obey the commandments, reminded that his free will can CHOOSE to obey the commandments or to follow Satan.
This scenario is backwards. We are all born UNABLE to obey or to seek Jesus. He has to reveal Himself, to give us the faith to believe and to let go of our worldview that makes satan our most powerful and feared force. Instead, we are to see Jesus as having completely finished the atonement at the cross.
When we see the true biblical Jesus and the true nature of our own sinful selves, we have no option but to trust Him—or to remain under the wrath of God.
God, not our free will, is sovereign over our salvation. Satan is not our most powerful foe; he is actually the one whose domain we inhabit until we trust the Jesus of the Bible.
Jesus has overcome the devil, and He has overcome death and sin. When we see the real Jesus and believe, the darkness flees from us as well. We are made alive—we overcome sin and death—through the One who called us and died for us and hides us in Himself! †
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