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 4: “‘Fear God and Give Glory to Him’”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The author assumes the word “commandments” refers to the Ten.
- The Adventist physicalism prevents proper understanding of “overcomers”.
- The Adventist health message mandate is a central focus of the teachers comments.
Once again, this lesson is built on the foundation of Adventist physicalism. For example, Monday’s lesson contains these paragraphs:
There are some people who have the strange idea that salvation by grace somehow negates the law of God or minimizes the necessity for obedience. They believe that any talk about obedience is legalism. They have declared, “All I want is Jesus.” The question is, which Jesus? A Jesus of our own making, or the Jesus of Scripture? The Christ of Scripture never leads us to downplay His law, which is the transcript of His character. The Christ of Scripture never leads us to minimize the doctrines of the Bible, which reveal more clearly who He is and His plan for this world. The Christ of Scripture never leads us to reduce His teaching to pious platitudes that are nonessential. Christ is the embodiment of all doctrinal truth. Jesus is truth incarnated. He is doctrine lived out.
Revelation’s final appeal calls us through faith in Jesus to accept the fullness of everything He offers. It calls us to “fear God,” which is expressed by faith in His redeeming power to empower us to live godly, obedient lives.
This core teaching of the Adventist worldview is built on the teaching that man has no “spirit” but breath. They mock the biblical gospel that says the Law is fulfilled in Christ and is not the rule of faith and practice for new covenant Christians. Instead, they insist that the law is the transcript of Jesus’ character, as EGW taught, and the instructions in Scripture are necessary for salvation.
First, the Bible never hints that the law is the “transcript of God’s character”. The Bible actually teaches, on the contrary, that Jesus is the exact imprint of God. The law was His provision for Israel, but Jesus is the provision for the world’s salvation. Paul explains it this way:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him (Colossians 1:15–16).
Jesus, not the law, is the image of the invisible God. In Jesus we find everything about God the Father, and we find the embodiment and fulfillment of everything inside the temple including the law. In fact, Jesus told the Pharisees this:
At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:1–8).
In other words, Jesus chided the Pharisees with what they should have understood. Everything associated with the temple from its furnishings to its rituals and ceremonies to its priesthood represented—foreshadowed—HIM. As the One who was greater than the temple, everything the temple contained was realized IN HIM. He was the light of the world, the bread of life, the sacrifice for sin, the atonement for God’s people, the city of refuge for the one condemned, the high priest, the Living Law. In Jesus IS the Sabbath rest foreshadowed by the fourth commandment.
One greater than the temple was among them, and they missed Him.
Adventism, however, teaches that the essence of a human is his mind. His mind, this lesson reminds us, is housed in his brain. Because they deny the literal immaterial spirit of a human that is one’s identity, they have to make all the gospel truths somehow apply to the body only.
They miss the new birth. They do not teach that we are all born terminally dead, by nature children of wrath and condemned to eternal death. They do not teach that when we believe in the Lord Jesus and His finished work, we pass literally at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24) and do not come into judgment.
It is a straw-man argument to argue that “The Christ of Scripture never leads us to reduce His teaching to pious platitudes that are nonessential. Christ is the embodiment of all doctrinal truth. Jesus is truth incarnated. He is doctrine lived out.”
The New Testament teaches that the commands of the epistles are the imperatives given to those who BELIEVE. They are written not to unbelievers but to believers. For example, the lesson states:
Think about how easy, in one sense, it is to control your thoughts, at least when you are conscious that you need to control them. Often, the problem is that unless we make a conscious effort to dwell on the right things, the “things above, not . . . things on the earth” (Col. 3:2, NKJV), our minds, fallen and sinful as they are, will naturally tend toward the base things, the things of the world. Hence, we need to, as Paul said, purposely and deliberately choose, using the sacred gift of free will, to dwell on the heavenly things.
In context, however, Colossians 3:1–3 says this:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory (Colossians 3:1–4).
In context, Paul is saying IF (meaning the same thing as “since”) you have been raised with Christ…
Paul is not making a hypothetical statement. He is saying to believers that, If (or since) they have been born again—not a maybe statement but the continuation of chapter 2 and the statement of their true condition—in THAT CONTEXT they are already seated with Christ and must now set their minds on things above because that is where they are!
Paul first states the INDICATIVE—the statement of fact, the declaration of what IS reality—and only after stating the reality that the readers are already born again, raised with Christ, and seated at the right hand of God—and then he gives the IMPERATIVE: the command for them.
Paul is not saying to fix one’s mind on things above so that they can be or remain seated with Christ. He is saying to actually live out what is already true. These readers are already believers, born again, spiritually alive and transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col 1:13). Because they are already IN CHRIST, now they can fix their minds on things above as a consequence of already being alive in Him and hidden with Him. The Holy Spirit is in them, and their own spirits are now alive, so spiritual reality is accessible to them.
Paul’s command is for BELIEVERS, not for unbelievers.
Adventism uses its physicalist worldview, however, to hold people prisoners of the law. Their “gospel” says Jesus did not complete the atonement at the cross but continues in heaven, and Adventists play a part in their ongoing salvation by borrowing power from Jesus to keep the law better and better.
The Adventist gospel does not acknowledge the spiritual death and life of people who believe. It does not acknowledge that only believers can live out the New Testament commands, and it never acknowledges that, as Galatians and Romans 7 explain, the law was given to increase sin, not to improve people’s behavior!
And as for the texts that say “overcomers” will inherit Paradise, the author of Revelation defines an overcomer in his first epistle. Overcoming has nothing to do with personally getting over sin and keeping the law. Here is how John explains it:
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)?
We are overcomes when we believe in Jesus’ finished atonement and are made spiritually alive. We are placed in Christ, and we are given His eternal resurrection life that means, even when our bodies die, the essence of our identities—our spirits—go immediately into the presence of the Lord.
When we are in Christ, His righteous perfection is imputed to us, and we overcome in Him. Overcoming has nothing to do with the law; it has everything to do with trusting Jesus and being alive in Him; His personal overcoming is credited to us, and in Him our eternal future is secure!
Health Message again…
The teachers notes this week make much of the need for Adventists to follow the health message so they can serve God by perceiving the Holy Spirit in their minds. The comments state:
This twofold meaning leads us to a few basic questions. Can we give God glory if we fail to care for our bodies? Is it possible to honor God when we are willfully violating His principles of health? What relation- ship do our physical lifestyle habits have to our spiritual health?…
There is another reason it is vitally important to God that we give Him glory in our health practices. Spirituality and health are closely aligned. The Holy Spirit communicates with us through the spiritual faculties of our brains. If the brain is nourished by a poor quality of blood because of poor health habits, we will be less capable of discerning the voice of the Holy Spirit. Our understanding of the plan of salvation and Bible truth will be obscured and compromised. If we are destroying our bodies because of our willful neglect of our health, our witness to the world certainly will not be one that gives God glory. This principle applies not only to our health habits but also to the things we watch on television and read in magazines and books, the content that occupies us on the internet, and a host of other lifestyle practices.
Here, in black and white in a current publication, we see the fact that the Adventist health message is NOT simply about “good health”. It’s not merely a lifestyle adjustment for the purpose of living longer. It’s a spiritual matter. In fact, the thing Adventism rarely admits to the “outside” is that, because of the legacy of EGW, they believe that one cannot truly be spiritual or perceive spiritual reality if they eat the wrong food. Of course, the wrong food includes the levitical unclean meats (and meat in general). Further, one is to practice tough self-discipline in order to manage what one sees, hears, thinks, watches, and otherwise takes in.
The guilt and responsibility on the individual Adventist to manage his own spirituality by his choices is a burden that has caused all too many to spiral into eating disorders and emotional illness and addictions.
It is not a surprise to me that this explicit instruction concerning the health message and the neurological access of the Holy Spirit is hidden in the teachers’ comments, not out in the general quarterly. This view would be considered extreme by most people, especially true Christians.
Yet in order to perpetuate their physicalist worldview, Adventists can take no other view. If they do not have immaterial spirits, then the way they nourish and manage their bodies is their only way to eternal life. They MUST practice extreme self-discipline, from Sabbath-keeping to vegetarian eating to drinking enough water and getting enough sunlight to sleeping enough to restraining themselves from marital relations to preserve their vital force. If an Adventist is truly going to observe Adventist teachings, these are the things that are still extant counsels in the writings of the woman who fulfills their understanding of biblical prophetic gifting: Ellen White.
Jesus, however, declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and Paul says no food is to be forbidden but is consecrated through thanksgiving and prayer by believers (1 Tim. 4:1–6). Of course, we also cannot forget that after the flood, God gave Noah “everything that moves” for food (Genesis 9). It was not attached to the shortening of the lifespan, either. God gave post-diluvian man what He knew they needed in order to live and be healthy in a completely new environment.
God would never trick us or give us things we have to have as a sly means of punishing us. He clearly states His terms. Meat was His provision, not His punishment, for mankind. And don’t forget the risen Christ ate fish in front of His disciples to prove He was not a spirit. Jesus ate meat in His glorified body.
This lesson teaches what every Adventist “knows” but cannot always explain: the Adventist health message IS part of the Adventist gospel. In fact, it has been called, in a tradition begun by the “prophetess”, the “right arm of the gospel”. Because of their physicalist worldview, Adventists have nothing except their mortal flesh and their abstract “characters” which are attached to their flesh.
They are responsible for keeping the body healthy so that they can somehow hope to find access to God.
I recommend that this week, you read this detailed article by Cheryl Granger: “The Adventist Health Message: From Where Did It Come?”
Here are two more related articles, the first by Kaspars Ozolins and the second by Richard K Foster:
- Disentangling the Adventist Health Message
- The Adventist Health Message: Is It a Doctrine of Demons?
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