Lesson 1: “God’s Mission to Us: Part 1”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This quarter’s focus is encouraging individual proselytizing.
- The lesson is based on the paradigm of God longing for His creatures, of human free will, and of the need for Satan to be defeated.
- The assumption of the lesson is that God is a “missionary God”.
Author Clifford Goldstein sets the stage in the quarter’s introduction with these words:
This quarter’s Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide is designed to focus attention on getting out there and doing something. We will examine many wonderful Bible stories. We will read about exciting experiences and illustrations. We will learn about available resources to assist us in reaching out to our neighbors (especially to those who have no Christian background). But those will just be ways of illustrating and motivating us. The real focus, the real heart of each lesson, is what will be shared on Thursday each week—a challenge to get out and, actually, do something.
In keeping with his stated goal, the lesson for Thursday gives the week’s core goal for the reader: an assignment designed to reach out to someone with the goal of helping them learn Adventism. The assignment for this week is:
Learn the name of someone in your life you don’t already know—a neighbor, coworker, shopkeeper, bus driver, janitor, etc. Begin praying for him or her each day.
While the assignment seems innocuous, context is everything. This lesson is not a discussion of Christian behavior in applying Scripture. The assumption behind the assignments every Thursday and the lessons each day is that the readers and the worldview of all involved is Adventism. These instruction are given assuming the readers’ acceptance of the great controversy worldview that changes the nature of man into merely a physical being, the nature of Christ into one who could have sinned and failed, the nature of sin from spiritual death into “inherited” propensities to sin, and salvation as learning to keep the law by the enablement of power from Jesus.
Under this worldview is the Adventist belief that Scripture is NOT inerrant but merely infallible. The worldview also assumes that individual Adventists will help Jesus to defeat Satan by their own choice to obey the law, and as Adventists embrace the law, the Sabbath, and the Ellen White worldview, they will ultimately prove Satan to be a liar and Jesus will thus be the winner over the devil.
Goldstein repeatedly stresses that God is a missionary God and came looking for Adam. His question to Adam, “Where are you?” After Adam sinned, Goldstein say, was a missional statement. He came looking for Adam.
He also states that God loved His created beings, and at the center of this love is the “precious gift: free will—the freedom to choose which way to follow.”
This sentence, which appears harmless, contains the essence of deviation from the Bible. When Adam and Eve sinned, they literally died spiritually that day. It is that literal spiritual death we inherit, not merely a tendency to sin. In fact, according to Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9-18, we are born UNABLE to choose, seek, or please God. We are born DEAD, and dead people cannot make decisions.
God Himself has to intervene, and this fact of human nature is the reason the Lord sent Jesus to become incarnate and to die by taking our imputed sins into Himself and breaking the curse of death.
God is not a missionary God, a freewill agent looking for other freewill agents to offer a better idea.
God is our sovereign Creator and Lord, and He came to us in human flesh in order to die for human sin because human sin required human death. None of us, however, could ever qualify as the perfect sacrifice required for sin’s payment. Only our SINLESS Savior Jesus who was born spiritually alive, conceived by the Holy Spirit, was able to die for our sins because He could NOT sin! He could not fail; He is GOD.
The lesson paints the picture of free will humans being begged to accept Jesus; the Bible, however, reveals our true nature and presents God as the One who intervenes with us because we CANNOT choose Him or obey Him.
The assumed paradigm that says people have free will and God comes looking for us presents an inside-out picture of reality. God does not come to us to help us; He is SOVEREIGN over us. He came to us in the incarnate Jesus in order to do what we could not do: pay for our sin completely and to offer us a way to become spiritually alive so that we can be brought into HIS story.
Adventism teaches us that God is a “gentleman”, a missionary who looks for us because He “longs” for us. This is not the biblical model. The Bible tells us that we are spiritually dead, born into rebellion and death. God would be justified to destroy all of us. But, as Romans 3:26, 27 say, He sent Jesus to propitiate for our sins so that He might be Just and the Justifier of all who believe.
We do not have “free will” in the sense Adventism teaches. We are by nature dead in sin, unable to make choices for God. He has to come to us to reveal Himself and to offer His blood.
The lesson says that Jesus came to reveal how loving God is, but the way He did that was to DIE. His purpose was not to show us how missionary-minded and gracious God is by demonstrating His willingness to do miracles and be kind. No, His grace was revealed on the cross.
Adventism does not like the cross of Jesus and eclipses it by saying the atonement was not completed there, that Jesus has had to complete the atonement in heaven. This idea is heresy and has no biblical support.
In short, the assumed worldview underlying the lesson twists all the messages into a man-centered paradigm that makes God our benefactor and us the beloved that God seeks.
On the contrary. Jesus is the Beloved Son, and He came to open a way through His blood for us to move from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col. 1:13).
God, not we humans, is the sovereign of all creation, and His glory, not our salvation or our prosperity, is the ultimate value of the universe. Everything God has done for us is for the purpose of bringing glory to Himself.
It’s all about Him, not about us! He is worthy. †
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