COLLEEN TINKER
People ask me sometimes if Adventists celebrate Easter, and if not, why not. The answer to that question is layered. More and more, Adventists acknowledge Easter on the Sabbath before Resurrection Day.
They may decorate their churches with lilies, sing Easter hymns, and remind the parishioners that Jesus kept the Sabbath as He “rested” in the tomb. They will even acknowledge that He rose from the dead so they know they will one day rise from death as well.
Yet embracing Easter Sunday is not an Adventist “thing” for the most obvious reason: it occurs on the first day of the week. Adventists go to church on the seventh day.
The “pagan” symbols of Easter—the baskets with gifts and chocolate bunnies and the Easter egg hunts—show up in many Adventist homes.
The “pagan” symbols of Easter—the baskets with gifts and chocolate bunnies and the Easter egg hunts—show up in many Adventist homes. After all, why miss a great opportunity to have a holiday and to feel that one fits in with the culture?
Yet Easter dinner, unlike Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving, is usually not an Adventist tradition—most likely because Adventists nodded to Easter the day before, and after spending the whole seventh day as a religious observance—complete with Sabbath dinner—fixing a big Easter meal on Sunday is more work than one wants to spend, especially for a religious holiday that is connected to worship on Sunday. After all, Christmas is excusable; it’s not married to Sunday. Easter, however, cannot be divorced from the “day of the sun”.
It wasn’t until after I left Adventism that I began to see there is a deeper, even more profound layer to Adventists’ inability to embrace Easter. I got my first clue about this deeper root of Adventist Easter ambivalence when I was studying Romans 5 sometime in the late 2000’s. Specifically, it was Romans 5:9–11 that gave me pause:
Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath [of God] through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation (Rom 5:9-11).
This passage states that Jesus’ shed blood justifies us, but our actual salvation—our eternal life—comes to us through His life: His resurrection life!
In fact, in 1 Corinthians 15:12–19 Paul explains in detail that if Christ did not rise from death, then even though He died for us, we are still in our sins. If He didn’t rise, then we have no eternal hope and are “of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).
Why was this concept so obscure to me and so confusing for so long, one may ask?
Simply put, the significance of Jesus’ resurrection to me and to most Adventists was hidden behind Adventism’s view of the nature of man and of their belief in an incomplete atonement of Jesus.
This answer is also guarded carefully under the parsing of Adventist vocabulary. Simply put, the significance of Jesus’ resurrection to me and to most Adventists was hidden behind Adventism’s view of the nature of man and of their belief in an incomplete atonement of Jesus.
First, Adventism believes that humans do not have an immaterial spirit. This belief denies the literal reality that, as Ephesians 2:1–3 tells us, we are born spiritually dead in sin. In fact, this death is the condition every human ever born inherits from Adam—every human, that is, except the incarnate Lord Jesus.
He was never spiritually dead; He was born ALIVE, conceived by the Holy Spirit, never dead in sin. This sinless nature of Jesus made Him the spotless Lamb of God. Although He was tempted beyond anything we will ever experience, His sinless nature and His identity as God the Son and His trust in His Father kept Him from falling. His flesh did not desire evil as ours does because He had spiritual LIFE from conception.
We, on the other hand, are born in sin and under the influence of the spirit at work in the disobedient. Our flesh tempts us to sin, but Jesus did not have sinful flesh.
He did face unspeakably severe temptations, as we see in His wilderness test when He went head-to-head with the devil. But Jesus trusted the Father and knew who He Himself was. He defeated Satan with the word of God.
This spotless Lamb of God went to the cross and shed His spotless human blood to pay for our human sin. His blood, as Romans 5:9 explains, justified us with God because it completely paid the price God demanded for sin. He did not die a representative death; He died a substitutionary death for all of us who believe.
Once and Done, or Applying His Blood?
As an Adventist I learned that “Jesus died to pay for sin”, but that death was not the full atonement we needed. Adventist doctrine teaches that Jesus’ death is a necessary component of our salvation, but although His death was the complete “sacrifice” for sin, it was not the complete “atonement” for sin.
This teaching says that after His resurrection and ascension, Jesus continues atoning for our sins IN HEAVEN. He “applies His blood” to every sin we confess, and if we keep “overcoming” our sins by keeping the law more and more perfectly, perfecting our characters throughout our lifetimes, Jesus will make up for what we lack by His grace.
Thus, in Adventism, Jesus’ death was necessary if we were to have any hope of being saved. We had to “accept Jesus” and be grateful that His blood paid for our past sins, but we had to perfect our characters and obey more and more perfectly, confessing our sins so they would not be held against us, so Jesus could “apply His blood” to our ongoing sins and finally, if we were sincere and tried our best, He would fill up whatever we lacked before God when we finally died.
If we successfully overcame and passed the “probation” in which we lived during our lives as Adventists, we would one day be resurrected to spend eternity in heaven.
We knew we would be resurrected because Jesus was resurrected. His resurrection was, to us, the promise that our bodies would one day rise from death.
All we had were our bodies. Our minds, the battlefields where our obedience and disobedience were always at war, were parts of our bodies, and we had no understanding that we have an immaterial identity that was by nature dead in sin.
We had no idea that Jesus, unlike us, had intrinsic LIFE, that His perfection was a unique part of His identity. We were taught, on the contrary, that we could achieve perfect obedience just as He had done. All we had to do was to trust God enough, to pray enough, and to buck up and choose to obey.
Because we didn’t understand that Jesus had LIFE we don’t naturally have, we had no understanding that His death was able to pay for our sins NOT because He managed to overcome temptation but because He was without sin. Period! He was spiritually alive without inheriting Adam’s death.
Resurrection Means Jesus’ Death Was Sufficient
Jesus, as the Son of Man and God the Son, took our imputed sin upon Himself and paid the price God demanded. He was buried, and then the miracle happened: on the third day He rose from the dead!
Here is what I couldn’t understand as an Adventist. Jesus didn’t just rise from the dead because He was God and He could. He rose from the dead because His sacrifice of Himself was SUFFICIENT!!
If His death had not been sufficient to pay for the sin of every single human on earth, if His death hadn’t actually propitiated for the sins of every person who has ever believed and whoever will believe in the Lord Jesus, He wouldn’t have risen.
Jesus’s rising from death literally broke the curse of sin! If He hadn’t paid for sin fully, the curse wouldn’t have been broken. His resurrection is the way we KNOW that His death opened the way for us to be forgiven and to be given spiritual life eternally!
Jesus fulfilled the death penalty God said would be the consequence for Adam’s disobedience. He fulfilled the death penalty which the Law demanded for every person who ever broke even one of its commands.
At the center of the law was the death penalty for disobedience—and no one ever failed to earn that death penalty.
When Jesus said He came to fulfill the Law, He meant every single aspect of it. At the center of the law was the death penalty for disobedience—and no one ever failed to earn that death penalty.
Jesus took that penalty—and His sacrifice was sufficient for all of us. Because His death—unlike the deaths of countless animal sacrifices—was sufficient to satisfy God’s demand, the curse of death was broken.
Jesus rose from the tomb because God was satisfied with His death. Nothing more has to be done for any human being to be saved—except for each person to believe Jesus paid it all.
Now I understand Romans 5:9–11. Now I understand Romans 8:11:
But 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.
We celebrate the resurrection not just because it promises our bodies will rise; we celebrate it because Jesus’ resurrection life is the LIFE that we receive eternally when we place our trust and belief in Him! When we believe in the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus on our behalf, we pass at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24). Nothing can take that eternal life away from us, because our spirits have been transferred from the domain of darkness into which we are all born dead (Col 1:13) and placed into the kingdom of the beloved Son.
Death no longer has a claim on us; Jesus has opened a new, living way for us to enter the presence of God Himself (Heb. 10:20)!
This Easter we celebrate the One who loved us and gave Himself for us, who broke death because His death paid for us all. His resurrection isn’t just a promise that our bodies will rise one day; His death is the evidence that nothing more is needed for us to be reconciled to God. His death was sufficient, and we who believe can rejoice eternally because Jesus has purchased our eternal life.
He is risen! He is risen indeed! †
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