KASPARS OZOLINS
The apostle Paul wrote the following words in 2 Corinthians, perhaps his most gut-wrenching letter of all his epistles: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
Have you ever wondered why non-Christians are called unbelievers in the New Testament? It’s not as though there were atheists hanging around in ancient Rome—modern atheism is by and large a product of the Enlightenment and perhaps even more so since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was formulated. It is very plainly possible to be a highly religious individual, and still fall under the category of “unbeliever” in the New Testament. The simple reason for this is that believing in the Lord Jesus Christ counts for everything, without which every other form of belief is both pointless and inimical to the gospel of God.
It’s instructive to hear how the apostle Paul initially described the Athenians in his address on Mars Hill: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22). Unfortunately, this religiosity did not do most of them any good, for Luke reports that the reaction of the majority to Paul’s gospel was negative: “Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’” (Acts 17:32). The verdict of the New Testament is the same whether religious individuals respond with mockery or indifference: to reject the gospel is to be classed as an unbeliever.
Other forms of unbelief
As paradoxical as it is to view non-Christian religions as “unbelief,” it is even more difficult to give the same diagnosis in cases where a religious movement presents itself as offering a version of Christianity, yet one that in the final analysis is not true Christianity. Throughout history (and already in New Testament times), there have been various movements which vigorously proclaim that they are Christian, yet turn out to be anything but. The difficulty lies when one asks particular belief-related questions:
“Do you believe in Jesus?”
“Do you believe in the Bible?”
“Do you believe in the gospel?”
No false religious movement would ever answer such questions in the negative, precisely because it is in the very nature of these organizations to portray themselves as truly believing movements, and especially as believing in the claims of Christianity. Thus it is that there have been people and groups since the very beginnings of Christianity who have emphatically proclaimed their belief in these things even as they were deceiving others (or themselves) about their underlying unbelief.
Deception, whether deliberate or self-inflicted, makes the evaluation of religious claims extremely difficult.
Deception, whether deliberate or self-inflicted, makes the evaluation of religious claims extremely difficult.
.When Paul wrote his second epistle to the Thessalonians, he was confronting, in part, a false and destructive claim being made by certain other professing believers, namely that the day of the Lord had already come. When Paul corrected this misunderstanding, he explained that a certain “man of lawlessness” will first come before the end of this age. Perhaps surprisingly, lawlessness will not express itself in blatant, explicit disobedience to God. Rather, as Paul describes: “The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception” (2 Thess 9–10). These deceptions are for individuals that Paul describes as “perishing.” “They refused to love the truth and so be saved” (2 Thess. 2:10).
We should therefore not expect the distinction between biblical belief and unbelief to be as clear as one might expect. We should not assume that “loving the truth” is a straightforward conclusion when examining the claims of deceptive religious movements. This is especially the case with Seventh-day Adventism, today largely accepted as a conservative denomination within Protestant Christianity.
The unbelief of Adventism
A prime example of Adventist unbelief is the propagation of their “Three Angels’ Messages,” deceptively clothed in the guise of Scripture. This is not an accessory to the gospel, though it is advertised as such. It is not an end-times contextualization of the gospel, despite Adventist claims: “The mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is to proclaim to all peoples the everlasting gospel in the context of the Three Angels’ messages of Revelation 14:6–12.”
The true reality of how the Adventist “Three Angels’ Messages” functions can easily be seen when examining the summary statements of SDA General Conference president Ted Wilson in a recent article for Adventist World:
Message #1: “Since October 22, 1844, we have been living in the period of time known as the pre-Advent judgment—the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary. The results of this investigative judgment will determine who will be taken to heaven when Jesus returns.”
Message #2: “Although the fall of Babylon began in the summer of 1844, it is a gradual process and will not be complete until (1) the churches reject the three messages of Revelation 14 and accept the strong delusions and lying wonders presented by Satan; (2) these apostate churches unite fully with the world, accepting and believing what the world accepts and believes.”
Message #3: “The mark of the beast, observance of a false day of worship, is an institution that clearly sets forth the authority of the beast. One church boldly boasts that it has changed the seventh-day Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Other churches indicate they worship on Sunday as a memorial of Christ’s resurrection. Neither assertion is biblical.”
Adventism has flatly rejected the righteousness that God offers in his Son, a righteousness that is alien to us, and substituted a manufactured, human-generated righteousness…
One sees immediately here that the “good news” of Seventh-day Adventism is diametrically opposed to the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Adventism has flatly rejected the righteousness that God offers in his Son, a righteousness that is alien to us, and substituted a manufactured, human-generated righteousness that supposedly will stand firm until the end on the truth of the Sabbath, aided by the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we were to repeat the same questions asked earlier to President Ted Wilson (“Do you believe in Jesus? Do you believe in the Bible? Do you believe in the gospel?”), there is no doubt in my mind that he would firmly assent to all of them. Yet he heads a movement whose claims are of such a nature that they reveal an underlying unbelief no different than that of the atheist or the Muslim, or the Hindu. They are all alike because, like the Jews Paul described in Romans 10, they are “ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.”
At the end of the day, whether they realize it or not, people reject the gospel of Jesus Christ because they do not believe what God has said in his Word, namely that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that none is righteous, and that one can only be justified by the grace of God which comes to us as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. They simply cannot believe that man is as wicked as the Bible portrays, or that God is as holy and just as he describes Himself, or that our only means of justification before our Creator is the vicarious death of the God-man on a lonely hill outside Jerusalem.
A prayer for discernment
John famously concludes his gospel by noting that “these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). When it comes to Adventism, our duty as Christians is to unmask the underlying unbelief of this movement in order to point Adventists to the Son of God, so that they too may have life in his name and believe. May God give us the grace and the wisdom to “discern the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect,” (Romans 12:2) and cut through the deception of false religious movements and their claims in order to bring people to the Lord Jesus Christ. †
- Adventism and Recent Developments in Evangelical Scholarship - December 12, 2024
- Gaslighting—By Adventists - October 17, 2024
- My Only Comfort in Life and Death - August 22, 2024
So what exactly is the “good news” of Jesus? Good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people?
“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for fall have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified hby his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Romans 3:21–26