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 8: “Mission To the Needy”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- Again, this lesson primarily is stirring up Adventists to make proselytes.
- The author of this lesson is misusing biblical accounts to make a point about Adventist evangelism.
- This lesson misunderstands Jesus’ miracles as trust-building exercise to make believers instead of as demonstrations of His identity as God.
This week’s lesson focusses directly on the issue of finding the needy and meeting their needs to the end that they will learn to trust their benefactor and be willing to learn about their religion. As the lesson for Monday states:
The fourth step is winning their confidence. When we minister to people, when we help them, they will learn to trust us and what we say to them. So, when we talk to them about Jesus, they would be more open to listen. Jesus didn’t want just to heal them physically; He wanted them to have eternal life in Him (see John 10:10). (P. 100).
The point in this fourth of Ellen White’s “five-step process of Jesus’ method in how to minister, especially to those in need,” is that meeting people’s felt needs teaches them to trust those who meet them. This trust, then, becomes the connection that causes them to listen when we teach them about Jesus.
There are at least a couple of problems with this assumption. First, using Jesus as the example of healing people to win their trust and thus be ready to hear how to “be saved” is misreading the biblical accounts. Jesus healed people NOT because he was building bridges for salvation but because He was demonstrating that He Is GOD!
The prophecies had foretold that the Messiah would do miracles over nature, that He would cause the lame to walk, the blind to see, the dumb to speak, and the dead to live. These are things no human can do, and they demonstrated unmistakably that He was God!
Importantly, Jesus did His years of ministry in Israel. He did not come to minister primarily to gentiles but to “the lost sheep of Israel” (Mt. 10:6; 15:24). The Jews knew what the prophecies said the Messiah would do, and Jesus came doing those things publicly before His own kinsmen.
Secondly, Jesus did not heal the people in order to open the way for them to hear “the gospel”. He did not separate the gospel from His self-revelation. In fact, the Jews knew the Messiah would come to save them, and as He revealed Himself to them through His miracles, He called them to repent and believe. It was not a bait-and-switch campaign, nor a loss-leader marketing method that would get people’s attention so they would discover His REAL purpose.
In fact, His healing was inseparable from His own person and power and salvation. His healings were not marketing ploys.
In fact, His healing was inseparable from His own person and power and salvation. His healings were not marketing ploys.
For example, the lesson uses Jesus’ miracle of healing the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:1–18 as an example of how to win the confidence and trust in a person, meet his needs, and call him to faith. The author completely misses the point.
The healing at Bethesda was a revelation of Jesus’ identity as God and as His identity as the One to whom the shadow of the Sabbath pointed. I suggest everyone read the account in the Bible. Jesus directed the man to do an unlawful thing: pick up his pallet and walk. He didn’t even do it on a week day; He specifically went ON THE SABATH to do what the law said was unlawful in order to reveal His authority over the day because He was GOD.
The Pharisees new exactly what He was doing. It says in verses 16–18:
For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. But He answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.” For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.(John 5:16-18).
Jesus was not giving an example of doing good in order to win over converts! In fact, to suggest such a thing is an insult to the biblical account and a complete diminishment of the Lord Jesus!
Adventism teaches a different Jesus than the Bible reveals. It teaches a Jesus who gave up His “God powers” and took sinful flesh. They teach a Jesus who could have sinned and failed in His mission but who, by dint of prayer and persistence, kept the law and managed to suffer silently through crucifixion.
The Bible reveals God the Son who never gave up any of His God-power but in whom the fulness of deity dwelt bodily (Col 1:19, 2:9).
The real Jesus was never our example—except as an example to those who believe and are already saved to show us how to trust God in suffering. Jesus did not come to show us how to please God and be saved! He came to take our sin onto Himself and save us!
This lesson, like all the others in this quarterly, reads the Bible inside-out and upside-down. It makes the Biblical accounts about US, about what we can and should do, and about how we can please God and fulfill His expectations.
In contrast, the Bible reveals our sovereign God who sent His Son to be our Substitute. He reveals that all we need to do to be saved is to BELIEVE and trust Jesus and His finished atonement and His resurrection. When we believe, we pass at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24), and we are permanently sealed with the Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13,14).
Because of Ellen White’s explanations of Scripture and her invented “gospel” which includes food, drink, and Sabbath-keeping, Adventism misreads the Bible.
Because of Ellen White’s explanations of Scripture and her invented “gospel” which includes food, drink, and Sabbath-keeping (in opposition to the Bible’s clear statements that salvation is by faith in the Lord Jesus and by the grace of God alone), Adventism misreads the Bible. It has a private interpretation and a private lexicon of meanings, and neither Adventists nor the Christians around them know they are using a different vocabulary from those Christians use.
My challenge is that the reader ask God to show him or her what the Bible says without an Ellen White filter, that God will reveal His will and His reality through His word, and that this revelation will transform the readers’ hearts and minds.
These lessons are nothing more than moral lessons teaching people to serve Adventism. Ask God to reveal through His word how to honor His alone. †
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