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 2: “God’s Mission to Us: Part 2”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- Using “mission” to describe God’s salvation diminishes the sovereign purpose of God directed plan.
- The lesson sees God’s saving work as entering our story to help us instead of His bringing us into His eternal story. It’s upside-down.
- For Adventism to be telling its members to help God’s mission of making (Adventist) disciples betrays their misunderstanding of what a disciple is and what the church is.
This lesson is another frustrating piece that uses normal-sounding Christian words, such as “mission” and “disciples” and “church”, with private definitions warping the intended meaning of their text. Adventists reading this lesson will think they know the meanings of the words, but they are actually reading the instructions for a false religion’s proselytizing techniques.
True Christians will, of course, live to make disciples, but that process has nothing to do with bringing people into a false church to worship a fallible Jesus and keep the Sabbath while helping their non-Adventist neighbors think more highly of the Adventist Church.
True disciple-making is about people who have actually trusted Jesus and His finished work ALONE taking the good news of being made alive through trusting Him to people who need hope. Adventism’s “disciple-making” involves teaching people their Sabbath and about Jesus’ soon return, thus necessitating the Sabbath.
Upside-down paradigm
In Sunday’s lesson the author says this:
The mission of God in Scripture has Jesus at the front and center as the only way to salvation. Christ Himself declared: “ ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ ” (John 14:6, NKJV). But Jesus also helps us understand the centrality of the triune God to His mission.
Everything Christ did was either for or from His heavenly Father (see John 4:34, John 5:30, John 12:45). However, we must always remember that Jesus’ mission did not begin when He came into the world. He had received it from the Father even before the creation of our world (compare with Eph. 1:4, 1 Pet. 1:20).
Therefore, God planned His outreach to humanity even before He laid the foundations of our planet, and He intentionally entered into humanity’s history in order to accomplish this purpose.
First, a “mission” is generally a much more concise plan than God’s purpose to save humanity. The lesson describes God as having a “mission”, a designation that suggests someone gave God a project to fulfill. Merriam-Webster gives the following words as synonyms of “mission”: assignment, charge, operation, brief, detail, post, business, and job (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mission).
All of these synonyms suggest that someone with more authority or a higher power decided to give the assignment to someone will will do the work of accomplishing the cause.
God does not have a “mission”. God has a will to glorify Himself, and all that He does is to that end. His creatures may carry out “missions” for Him, but He Himself is not on a mission nor does He have a mission in the sense we normally use “mission”. Furthermore, Jesus was not on a mission when He became incarnate and died for our sins and rose from death. He was doing the eternal will of the Trinity. He Himself was carrying out the plan the Trinity had always had. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
This concern with whether or not God has a “mission” may seem trivial, but it reflects the profound upside-down Adventist view of reality. In Adventism, God limits Himself for the purpose of honoring His creatures’ free will. In a very real sense, the Adventist God is the servant of His creatures, being a gentleman and not going where they do not invite Him. Their God subjects Himself to their free will, allowing their obedience or disobedience to the law to determine even the time of His second coming. Their God is not truly sovereign but is open, learning along with them as they make free choices. He does nothing without an invitation.
Of course this kind of “submitted” God would have a mission; it would be in His best interest to get His creatures to do what He wanted so He could stop limiting Himself even when they chose to sin.
The God of Scripture, however, comes to us. He finds us and saves us. He opens our eyes to truth and shows us our depravity—a condition Adventism denies. He alone gives us the faith to believe, and when we do, He gives us new hearts and makes our dead spirits alive with His eternal life. He causes us to pass from death to life (Jn 5:24).
Our true God is not submitting or limiting Himself by our freewill. He is sovereign even over evil, and evil can do no more than He allows. Furthermore, His return is already set in time. Jesus will return to judge the earth and set up His kingdom on the day He has already set (Acts 17), and our obedience or disobedience has nothing at all to do with when He will come.
God comes to us and reveals Himself not so we can have a better life. He comes to us in power and strength, convicting us of sin and showing us His righteousness and mercy. Jesus’ death for sin was God’s coming to us in ultimate glory: the triune God became human and took our imputed sin, taking His own wrath for sin as He hung on the cross and the Father turned away from Him. His death was sufficient for all our sin, and thus He broke death, rising because His sacrifice broke the curse of sin that held humanity in a prison of death and darkness.
God saves us in order to bring us up into HIS story for HIS glory. He doesn’t humble Himself in order to make our lives here better. The paradigm is backwards in Adventism. We are for His glory. God’s glory trumps all other values in the universe. Even the saving of nations and the life of a child is less than God’s glory. In fact, even the saving of nations and the deaths of children are ultimately FOR HIS GLORY.
It is hard to begin to see reality through this biblical lens because we have been taught to think of ourselves as the object of God’s greatest love: He would sacrifice Himself for our good.
What gospel?
Finally, the Adventist “gospel” is what Paul calls “no gospel at all” in Galatians 1. The lesson refers to the gospel of the first angels’ message, but the first angel’s message of Revelation 14:6 is neither the statement of the biblical gospel nor is it contextually intended to STATE the gospel. Rather, the first angel cries out to the world the reminder to worship the One True God, the One who created all things.
Adventism says this angel is calling people to keep the Sabbath, but it is not.
Adventism has no authentic business claiming Jesus’ directives to “make disciples” for themselves. They are a false religion with a false prophet and an unbiblical, weak Jesus who did not finish the atonement at the cross. This religion cannot make true disciples according to Scripture.
In this lesson Adventism appropriates biblical commands to true, born again believers and uses them to create guilt and urgency among its members: “Go make Adventist disciples! Go help them think well of Adventism by friendship evangelism! Go present the beauty of the Sabbath!”
Of course, the lesson isn’t quite that direct, but it uses the words of Scripture to command its members to go make Adventist converts—and this is an egregious misuse of God’s eternal word.
In short, the lesson diminishes God and His sovereign will and eternal purpose by representing Him as having a “mission”—a “mission” to remind people that Jesus is coming soon, so they need to see the beauty of the Adventist message and get on board.
The REAL purpose we have as believers, however, is to recognize our true natures: our spiritual death, our depravity, and repent before the Lord Jesus and bow at the foot of His cross. We need to believe that Jesus’ blood completely paid for our sin and that He rose from death because His sacrifice was sufficient for all. When we believe and trust His finished work, our Father gives us new life and transfers us out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son. We literally pass from death to life at that moment—and THEN we have the permission and the power from the Lord to make disciples.
In conclusion I urge all who read this: Come to Jesus. Realize that Adventism has given you a worldview that is unbiblical. We are not the focus of reality; God and His glory are, and in His grace and mercy, He brings us to life and makes us part of His body, giving us His work to do and eternal life that no one can snatch away. †
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