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 6: “Motivation and Preparation for Mission”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson attempts to motivate the reader to actively share Adventism to potential proselytes.
- This lesson betrays its lack of understanding of the new birth and the Holy Spirit.
- This lesson reveals Adventism’s three convictions that motivate Adventist proselytizing.
Once again, the week’s lessons have a repetitive “feeling” and a vague objective. While the author is clear that the reader is to actively try to share Adventism because he or she is so grateful to God, still the bottom line reasons for the urgency and for the contents of the sharing are not clearly stated.
The Teachers Comments, though, do reveal the doctrinal bottom line. The lesson itself exhorts the readers to pray hard and often while uniting with other Adventists to encourage one another while praying for the Holy Spirit. This paragraph is on page 75 of the lesson quarterly:
While we wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to help us complete the great mission of God, we must unite to encourage each other (Heb. 10:24, 25), praying for God’s Holy Spirit. Also, we should be aligning ourselves and our church with God’s priority—the saving of the lost.
This quote expresses the EGW-driven belief that there will be a “latter rain” of Holy Spirit power which true Adventist believers will receive just before the second coming. This power will enable them to boldly share their religion with people so there will be a great inflow of new Adventist members just before Jesus returns.
This belief reveals that Adventism does not teach nor understand the new birth. When a person repents of his or her sin, recognizing that he is by nature dead in trespasses and sins and by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:1–3), when he trusts in Jesus’ finished work of atonement, death, and resurrection, that person is born again. He passes from death to life (Jn. 5:24) and is sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13,14). When a person is sealed by the Holy Spirit, God Himself indwells that person, and He never leaves. He doesn’t get just a part of God or a portion of His power. He gets all of God and nothing is withheld from us.
What we must do as we grow in Christ is to learn to trust Him more and more with more and more of ourselves. We learn to give God “access” to our feelings and desires and impulses on an ongoing basis, and we become more and more like Him not because we get more of Him but because we learn to trust Him more.
This lesson, however, reveals that Adventism sees the Holy Spirit as power from God, power that He doles out incrementally. The latter rain is the ultimate outpouring of His power, and that won’t happen until the people pray for it, and they get that power just in time to share their faith before Jesus returns.
Three Adventist Convictions
So, while Adventist members are praying for the Holy Spirit and generating their motivation to serve God better and share their faith, the Teachers Comments reveal the essential points that sharing needs to convey. Pages 82 and 83 of the Quarterly explain these three points:
- Conviction 1: Jesus is coming back a second time—this coming is visible, literal, and imminent (soon). Before Adventism got started, most Christians either did not believe in a literal coming or de-emphasized it.…
- Conviction 2: God calls believers to loving obedience and serious discipleship. In light of Jesus’ coming, we need to make serious preparation.…
- Conviction 3: God restores in believers the wholeness of life in Christ. Christians do not go to heaven as disembodied souls.
These three innocuous-sounding convictions have detailed foundations of meaning and doctrine. For example, the first conviction—that Jesus is coming back a second time—includes a seven-point list about what Adventists believe about the second coming:
- Seventh-day Adventists accept and proclaim the promises of the Second Coming (John 14:1–3; Rev. 22:7, 12, 20).
- This coming is literal (Acts 1:11).
- The Second Coming is portrayed as visible (Matt. 24:30, Rev. 1:7).
- All signs point to a near, soon, imminent coming. Jesus, again and again, used the word “soon” (Rev. 22:7, 12, 20; Matt. 24:4–28; Luke 21:7–28).
- God’ s people will see Jesus (John 14:3) and will be with Him forever (1 Thess. 4:17).
- The dead will be raised (1 Thess. 4:13–16), and believers will receive immortality (1 Cor. 15:53).
- Tears, mourning, and death will be abolished (Rev. 21:3, 4).
These seven points reveal the underlying great controversy worldview which supports the Adventist view of the second coming which includes a denial of any possibility of a pre-tribulational rapture or an earthly millennium, and it also hints at Adventism’s doctrine of human physicality and “soul sleep” which denies that any part of a person survives the death of the body and goes to be with the Lord.
The second conviction innocuously calling people “to loving obedience and serious discipleship” is built upon three Adventist mandates articulated on page 83:
- Support the whole Ten Commandments, including the neglected Sabbath fourth commandment, believing that Jesus gave it at Creation (Gen. 2:2), reiterated it in the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:8–11), and reinforced it during His ministry (Mark 2:27).
- Believe the Sabbath is a powerful symbol of God’s creating power (Gen. 2:2, Exod. 20:8–11), saving grace (Exod. 20:2, Deut. 5:12–15), and the final rest of redemption in heaven (Heb. 4:1–11, especially verse 9).
- Accept the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life, including marriage and family, dress, recreation, diet, and so on (Eph. 5:21–6:4; Phil. 4:8, 9; 1 Cor. 6:19, 20; 1 Tim. 2:8–10).
Notice that the Christian-sounding call to “loving obedience and Christian discipleship” is actually, in Adventist-speak, the demand that Saturday-Sabbath be kept, that it is the symbol of God’s creating power (an extrapolation never made in Scripture), and that converts must accept Adventism’s definitions of “dress, recreation, diet, and so on” which includes their prohibitions of “unclean meats”, stimulants, and alcohol.
The unbiblical doctrines that define Adventism’s practices are hidden behind the innocent-sounding “Conviction 2”, but make no mistake: these expectations are part of Adventism’s obedience and discipleship.
Finally, their Conviction 3 is built on the foundational Adventist teaching that humans do not have immaterial spirits that separate from the body. In fact, this perversion that is never taught in Scripture is the foundational twisting of all the rest of Scripture’s doctrines in the Adventist worldview.
Their belief that humans are just bodies that breathe changes the biblical definition of “inherited sin” into a physical phenomenon that is transmitted via the gene pool from Adam down to every generation afterward. If sin is physically inherited tendencies to sin and not spiritual death, the natural depravity of which the Bible speaks, then salvation is also not simply being give spiritual life and transferred into the kingdom of the Beloved Son.
Adventist salvation includes IMPARTED, not imputed, righteousness. Adventism teaches that people have to turn to the law and, drawing on the power of the Holy Spirit which they can cajole Jesus into giving them, learn to obey the law more and more perfectly, so that even their unholy thoughts are ended. All of this is literal “work” done by prayer and accessing God’s power through Jesus. It is not imputed righteousness that is alien to them. Their righteousness is developed, not received.
In conclusion, this lesson betrays the Adventist reality that salvation depends upon each member’s personal efforts and commitment to Adventism’s worldview and then to one’s commitment to work hard for Jesus.
In fact, Adventism teaches a false, fallible Jesus and a salvation that requires each person’s keeping themselves in God’s favor by obedience.
Once again the lesson has burdened the reader with impossible requirements: to love the work of making Adventists so that Jesus will come back. In reality, though, this “formula” will only frustrate and deceive the readers.
Only trusting Jesus alone can satisfy the human heart. †
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