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: “Worshiping the Creator”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson
- The three angels’ messages are removed from their context to teach Adventism’s cultic doctrine.
- The assumption that worshiping God as Creator means keeping the Sabbath is not in Scripture.
- The illogical effort to defend creation betrays Adventism’s theological liberalism and its internal trouble with keeping their biology departments from teaching evolution.
This lesson reveals Adventism’s trouble with the theory of evolution creeping into its collegiate environment, and it also betrays the organization’s self-importance and unique insistence that people are to keep the seventh-day Sabbath as the sign that they are worshiping the true creator God. Ironically, these teachings are tethered to the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14:6–10, but read in context, these Adventist applications are simply NOT THERE.
Because the first angel’s message says, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water,” (Revelation 14:7), the Adventists say that this angel announces the beginning of the investigative judgment and the reminder that Sabbath is the way to properly worship God.
The lesson reveals some interesting viewpoints. For example, in Part I of the Teachers Comments are these two paragraphs:
This week’s lesson explores the significance of Creation itself. After all, what can anything else we believe, as Christians, mean, or even become sensible, apart from us as beings created by God? Notice the opening lines of the Bible, the opening chapter, Genesis 1. They don’t talk about justification by faith alone, do they? They say nothing about the life, the death, resurrection and high priestly ministry of Jesus, either. Not a word about the Second Coming. Total silence on the Ten Commandments and the eternal perpetuity of God’s law. Nothing about the state of the dead.
Why? The answer is, really, simple. These doctrines, however important, become meaningless dribble, pure and utter nonsense apart from the doctrine of Creation itself, apart from the opening line—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The twisted logic and straw-man assumptions in these paragraphs are confusing and disorienting. Aside from the fact that the author used the wrong word in the second paragraph when he says “these doctrines…become meaningless dribble…” (the real word that should follow “meaningless” is the word “drivel”), these paragraphs miss the reality of our existence and purpose in God’s creation.
To be sure, apart from the doctrine of creation, the doctrines of salvation are illogical, but the lesson does not explain this reality. It sets up confusing, straw-man arguments and leads one to the assumption that creation has to be true without any explanation of why the work of Jesus depends upon creation.
In Scripture, however, the reason the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus (not, by the way, the “life, death, and resurrection”) are not mentioned in Genesis 1 and 2 is that man had not yet sinned.
The reason creation is necessary in order for Jesus’ incarnation to be meaningful is not a matter of logic. It is a matter of ownership. If God did not create humanity and love us, there is no thread of responsibility or attachment to our race that would move God to become one with us—incarnate in a human body—to take our imputed sin, to pay its price, and to break the curse we brought onto ourselves in order to restore us to Himself and to give us His imputed righteousness.
Creation explains the rest of our story because we belong to God. We are His possessions and creations, made in His image, and His life gives us life. When we sinned in Adam and died spiritually, it was God’s life in us that went out from us and left us dead in sin, condemned, by nature objects of wrath, under the curse of God (Eph. 2:1–3; John 3:18, 36; Col 1:13). God made us and reveals Himself to us, and He loves us. Evolution would eliminate the personal connection of God to humanity; creation makes us HIS. We are not our own; we depend upon Him for our existence. Therefore, His decision to save us makes sense because there is personal investment.
Context
We have written before about the problem of context in relationship to the three angels’ messages. Again, though, we have to say: these messages are in the context of the tribulation which will come upon the world. It follows the second description of the 144,000 Jews who are in heaven, having been “purchased from among men as first fruits to God and to the Lamb” (Rev. 14:4). Immediately after John sees these Jews praising God in heaven, he sees the vision of the angel bearing the gospel. This angel calls the world to worship God who made heaven and earth.
In the context of Revelation, this angel appears calling the whole earth to worship God, the only true God—the sovereign God who made the earth—and he makes this appeal to the world during the dreadful events of the tribulation and right before John sees another vision, this one of the imminent judgment of God when He reaps the earth.
The teachers comments again make a revealing assertion:
The three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 proclaim with a “loud voice” the message of Creation and of an omniscient God. God is never caught by surprise. He sees events yet to unfold before they ever occur. The message of the three angels is specifically designed by God to meet the humanistic, postmodern challenges of this generation. It is no accident that, at the same time that the theory of evolution was developed, God sent a message to the world to worship the Creator.
In this quotation we see the Adventist belief that the message of the first angel was sent from heaven to earth at the time of the great disappointment. The author is explaining the fallacies of evolution and claims that this first angel’s message was given during the same time frame as Darwin published his Origin of the Species, and its influence spread throughout the scientific community.
Therefore, the Adventist belief is that the Adventist organization is the embodiment of the three angels’ messages. Because the first angel announces that “the hour of His judgment has come”, Adventism conscripts this message and says this angel is announcing the beginning of the investigative judgment in 1844. God, they say, brought the Adventist organization into existence to bring this particular message of the investigative judgment and the message of the Sabbath to the world at the time of the great disappointment, right during the time the message of evolution was beginning to become popular. Thus Adventists are the antidote to the teaching of evolution and the harbingers of “the judgment”, the supposed investigation of believers’ sins.
The hubris, the arrogance of this claim is obvious. The Adventist position is that these three angels of Revelation 14 describe and announce the arrival of Seventh-day Adventism in the world! Adventists, with the clarification of Ellen White, have presented to the world the “truths” which have been supposedly lost: keep the Sabbath holy, Jesus is coming again, and Jesus has begun reviewing the records of your sins, so you’d better confess, obey, mind your p’s and q’s, and get ready for the coming of Jesus!
A plain reading of Revelation 14, however, would reveal that the doctrine of the investigative judgment and the doctrine of the seventh-day Sabbath are simply NOT HERE.
Further, this lesson assumes that “Sunday Christians” do not have the truths of this message and are being called out into Adventism. Ironically, however, most evangelical Christians absolutely believe in creation. Moreover, a great many of them are literal six-day creationists. Adventists do not have a corner on this belief!
Christians believe Jesus created all things—and they further believe that all things hold together in Him (Col 1:17). They believe that human value is determined by our Creator, and that He willingly identified with us for the purpose of paying for our sin and restoring us to life in Himself. In fact, Christians have a much better understanding of this biblical reality than Adventists have!
Adventist liberalism peeks through
This lesson is a not-so-hidden attempt to push back against the tendency among some of Adventism’s biology departments to teach evolution—or at least to teach some modification of evolution.
Unlike conservative evangelicalism, Adventism does not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. While they teach the Bible is infallible, they deny that it is inerrant because, they teach, EGW was inspired exactly the same way the Bible writers were inspired. They all know she was not inerrant, and because they know they have to edit her and reinterpret her to fit what we now know to be biblically and scientifically true, they reserve the right to reinterpret the Bible to fit their worldview as well.
This lesson demonstrates this fact. The reality that many Adventist scientists and religion teachers believe in an “old earth” and even in evolution reveals that a literal reading of Scripture does not underlie the Adventist worldview. Adventists can hold their Adventist worldview and alter their understanding of Scripture at will.
In fact, Adventism’s primary “need” to teach a literal six-day creation is to support their central doctrine of the seventh-day Sabbath. They insist on making the day God ceased from His work the day He “created” the Sabbath and declared it to be a holy thing that is the one true MARK of proper worship.
Adventism has made the seventh-day Sabbath the “golden calf” that carries their god. A person, therefore, who worships God on a day other than the seventh—who worships on the first day, for example—is worshiping falsely.
It is this belief that Adventists fight by inserting their unique worldview into the “three angels’ messages”. They use these angels to find biblical support for the investigative judgment and for Sabbath-keeping, but in reality they are adding to Scripture. They are practicing eisegesis, not exegesis. They are conscripting three angels who remind the world of the one true God and redefining their messages and their appearance to be their private messengers of Adventism!
Adventists’ liberal view of Scripture—their “low view” of its reliability and inerrancy, shows through profoundly in this Sabbath School lesson.
The Bible is not their sandbox, a tool to use to convince the unsuspecting that their doctrines of demons are from God. They have misused God’s unfailing, living word and hidden its meaning from its members. This is an egregious sin against our holy, eternal, sovereign God.
I encourage the reader to read Genesis 1 through 3 in context, asking God to reveal what He wants you to know. Do the same with the whole chapter of Revelation 14.
Our God is bigger than the Sabbath. He is bigger than Adventists understand. He is bigger than our “free will”!
Let our Creator God teach you what His word says, and let it change your heart and mind. †
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