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 1: “Paul and the Ephesians”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson states that the epistle’s purpose is “to awaken the believers in Ephesus to their full identity and privileges as followers of Christ.”
- The real purpose of Ephesians is to explain the role of the church in God’s eternal purposes to bring all things together in Christ.
- The lesson misses the significance of Paul’s assignment from God to make known the “administration of the mystery”—the actual working of the new covenant—to all believers (Eph. 3:9).
This first week’s lesson gives an overview of Paul’s relationship with the church at Ephesus and gives a bit of background about the people. Drawing from Acts 19, the author reminds us that Ephesus was dominated by Artemis worship, and the advance of the gospel threatened the income of Demetrius the silversmith and his craftsmen. As the Ephesians learned the gospel and trusted Jesus, they renounced their worship of the false god, and the purchases of the silver memorabilia and idols of Artemis dropped precipitously. A riot broke out against Paul and the Christians, and after it was quelled, Paul met with the believers there and finally left the city and continued his missionary journey.
Paul spent three years—a long time compared to most of the places he ministered—in Ephesus, and a few details about this time are recorded in Acts 19—20:1.
One event mentioned in Acts 19 that is addressed in Friday’s lesson was the memorable time the Ephesian converts gathered and burned their personal collections of books of magic which were collectively worth 50,000 pieces of silver—or 50,000 days’ wages.
The Teachers Comments give nearly a page and a half to addressing this book burning in order to explain such a counter-cultural, iconoclastic act. The author quotes commentators and concludes that this book-burning was different from Emperor Diocleitan’s ordering Christian books to be burned in order to avoid being burned at the stake because the Ephesians were burning their own private collections voluntarily out of conviction. Diocletian was persecuting the Christians and not allowing them to possess their religious books on pain of death,
Ironically, the Teachers Comments make this point:
God calls His people to categorically refuse and reject any trace of idolatry and witchcraft in their homes and properties (see Gen. 35:2–4).
Adventist material, especially the works of the false prophet Ellen White, represent exactly such works of witchcraft. She taught a false Jesus—one who inherited Mary’s propensities to sin, one who could have failed and who could have plunged the Trinity into destruction had He failed to rise from the dead. Such a Jesus is a false Jesus who has NO power to save.
She taught that Jesus gave up His omnipresence when He took a body, and this inability to be everywhere at once is why He had to send the Holy Spirit after He ascended.
These teachings present a false Jesus who is not fully God. The Adventist Jesus did not complete the atonement at the cross but continues it in heaven in the supposed investigative judgment, and the Adventist Jesus eventually places the sins of the saved on Satan who, she says, will carry those sins out of heaven into the Lake of Fire.
Ellen White teaches a false Jesus and a false gospel, and her worldview and her twisting of Scripture blind her followers in a religion that is a counterfeit, a clever deception. It cannot save.
This lesson focusses on teaching readers that Ephesians shows Christians how to live realizing their full potential as Christ-followers. When the book is actually read, though, we see that it is the consummate gem of the description of salvation and of the new covenant’s administration. Yes, the book does describe the role of believers as they live in the church, but the focus is the significance of the CHURCH in the plan of God rather than a how-to for individuals.
Adventism, which itself is a counterfeit version of Christianity, does not teach the true nature of man nor the reality of the new birth. The best Adventism can do is to use Scripture as a tool for perfecting members’ behavior.
Ephesians, however, was not written for this purpose.
The details for godly living contained in Ephesians are only for true believers. Only those who have place their faith in Jesus and His finished work and have been born of God, as John says in John 1:12, are even able to embrace the commands contained in Ephesians. People who do not understand who they are, as Ephesians 2:1–3 explains—born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath—who must be made spiritually alive and sealed with the Holy Spirit of Promise (Ephesians 1:13,14), need to admit their own depravity and their need for a Savior, their own need for alien-to-them righteousness, and trust the Lord Jesus.
Only THEN will Ephesians mean to them what it actually says.
Furthermore, Ephesians 3:9 has Paul telling us that He was chosen to reveal to everyone the administration of the mystery of the new covenant. This reality, that the new covenant is completely different from the old and is centered on the the living Lord and His finished work instead of the law, is not taught in Adventism
In other words, the final sentence in Saturday’s introduction to this quarter’s lesson misses the entire point of Ephesians: “Paul writes to awaken the believers in Ephesus to their full identity and privileges as followers of Christ.”
While this effect may be realized by believers who study Ephesians, this is not the primary focus of the book for unbelievers. Further, realizing our “identity and privileges as followers of Christ” is a fruit of Ephesians, not the primary purpose of Ephesians.
In Ephesians we learn of God’s sovereign election and eternal plan to reconcile all things to Himself in Christ. Ephesians shatters the Adventist worldview, and the approach of the very Adventist author who interprets this book for this lesson, is to make the members the object of the book. If the reader puts himself into the book to discover what the book means to him, he will utterly miss the glory and revelation contained in this epistle.
Ephesians is a majestic revelation of God’s eternal, singular plan that places the true church in a place of significance for revealing “the manifold wisdom of God” to “the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10). The lesson, however, reduces Ephesians to a manual for how individuals can experience their full potential.
The focal point of Ephesians is the Lord Jesus and His lordship of His own body, the church. The lesson makes the focal point the readers themselves. This inside-out way to read Ephesians eviscerates it. †
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