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. 13: “The End of God’s Mission”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
• This lesson reveals Adventism’s tritheistic godhead and their assumed “mission”.
• This lesson assumes the great controversy definition of the Three Angels’ Messages.
• The Adventist physicalist worldview eclipses God’s sovereignty over history and eternity.
Sunday’s lesson reveals Adventism’s non-orthodox “godhead” which is comprised of three separate beings who do not share substance. The first paragraph of the lesson says this:
After revealing in the first verses that Jesus is the source and focus of Revelation, Revelation 1:4, 5 alludes to all Three Members of the Godhead, who are working unitedly to save human beings. The Father is the eternal one who was and is and is to come. The Holy Spirit, who is working powerfully among the first-century churches, is named. Then John recalls the status of Jesus Christ—the “faithful witness,” “the firstborn of the dead” (Rev. 1:5, NRSV), who possesses legal ownership of this planet. Satan’s attempt to use this earth to establish his kingdom is ruined.
This paragraph reveals the Adventist view, based on Ellen White’s identification of the Trinity as “the heavenly Trio” and “the Three Worthies of Heaven”, of a trio of beings who together comprise “God”. Significantly, the biblical picture of the Trinity is that God is One.
Jesus, God the Son incarnate in human flesh, confirmed the historic cry of Israel, “Yahweh is One!” When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6:4,5:
“The foremost is, ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.’ “The second is this, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mar 12:29-31).
God Is One. The three Persons of the Trinity are not separate beings but all equally share substance. As Adventists we believed that the “trinity” was three separate beings, like a family, who shared a name (God) and shared purpose and will. We believed that they did NOT share substance. For example, we believed that Jesus gave up His omnipresence when He took a body; this idea alone renders their Jesus NOT God. Being omnipresent is part of the definition of God; it is one of the divine attributes.
Sharing substance means that all of the attributes of God, including His incommunicable qualities of eternality, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience must all be equally present in all three persons.
We cannot explain this three-in-one reality of our One God, but we can know that the Lord Jesus has every single attribute the Father has, and the Holy Spirit also has every single attribute the Father and the Son have.
The persons of the Trinity have different roles, but they are absolutely equal; they are all fully God.
This fact of the Adventist tritheism grows out of the Adventist physicalist worldview—the belief that humans have no immaterial spirits but are bodies that breathe—and redefines all of reality. Even their god is perceived more “physically” than spiritually; EGW even said that Jesus told her that His Father has a form like His.
If we get God wrong, we get everything else wrong: sin, salvation, death, eternity, the nature of man—a false understanding of God gives us a false view of reality.
This Adventist physicalism supports the lesson’s central mandate: get busy and evangelize! Instead of understanding that the Bible is a revelation of our sovereign God whose identity as Love includes the attributes of justice, mercy, wrath, and grace, Adventism teaches that we humans determine our own destinies because God honors our free will above all.
Three Angels’ Messages and Mission
Monday’s lesson introduces the Three Angels’ Messages and Mission. The opening paragraph says,
The book of Revelation gives us a powerful and graphic representation of the great controversy theme, perhaps most dramatically depicted in Revelation 12:12: “ ‘Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time’ ” (NKJV). It’s hard to imagine how anyone can understand anything in Scripture apart from the great controversy motif, which will climax in the last days.
This quote reveals the underlying assumption behind all Adventist interpretations of Scripture: the great controversy model. Adventism’s physicalism neatly supports Ellen White’s great controversy worldview and its idolization of free will.
The Great Controversy worldview begins in pre-history with God exalting Jesus to the position of His Son. Lucifer became jealous and thus launched the war in heaven: the great controversy. This unresolved controversy is still raging in the universe, and every human on earth is part of it. Satan and Jesus are embattled over the souls of men and women, and humanity’s decision to “follow Jesus” and keep His commandments are the key to the outcome of this controversy. Whenever a person commits to keeping the Ten Commandments, especially the fourth, he helps prove that the law is not too difficult to keep just like Jesus did.
Humanity’s law-keeping, then, is their way of becoming more like Christ, as they follow His example, pray a lot, and suffer in silence as they are persecuted for their obedience, especially to the Sabbath.
People are therefore proven to be safe to save by their commitment to the law and their dependence upon Jesus’s help and power to keep the law just as He did.
Monday’s lesson presents Revelation 14:6–12—the Three Angel’s messages, as the central message and mission of Adventism. Because the lesson has already admitted that they read all of Scripture through the lens of the great controversy, we can thus understand how they come up with their unique interpretation of these angels’ messages.
First, here is Revelation 14:6–12:
Then I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who inhabit the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; worship Him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and springs of waters.” And another angel, a second one, followed, saying, “FALLEN, FALLEN IS BABYLON THE GREAT, she who has made all the nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.” Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, and he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His rage, and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.” Here is the perseverance of the saints who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus (Rev 14:6-12).
Adventism interprets this first angel’s message as a call to the world to remember that God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh, so the call to worship Him is a call to keep the seventh day holy. The announcement of the hour of His judgment is actually the announcement that the Investigative Judgment has begun.
The second message is that Babylon has fallen—and according to Ellen White, Babylon is papal Rome, and the daughters of Babylon are all the Protestant churches who worship on Sunday. The second angel, in Adventist parlance, is a warning that apostate Protestantism has fallen, and people must leave the Sunday churches.
Finally, the Adventists interpret the third angel’s message as a warning that the mark of the beast will be Sunday-worship, or going to church on Sunday. Those who do this will be marked either on their foreheads or hands: the forehead, Ellen White said, symbolized belief or conviction, and the hand symbolized practicing the deed. Thus Sunday-worshipers will have the mark of the beast either as a mental conviction that it is the true Sabbath, or they will be practitioners of Sunday-worship—with or without the mental conviction. Either way, those who believe Sunday is the new holy day receive the mark of the beast.
In context, however, this understanding is nowhere in the text. Ellen said no one will hear these angels; the messages will be given to individuals by individual Adventists. Yet the text says the angels fly in the midst of heaven with a message for the whole world. This means that everyone WILL hear them and see them somehow. They are not secret; they have no private interpretation. God’s ultimate judgment on His enemies is about to fall on the earth, and even in the midst of the tribulation, God is warning the world to believe!
Babylon is not defined by Sunday worship. Babylon is a religious and world system that will fall at the end of the world’s events!
And the third angel’s message about the mark of the beast has NOTHING to do with Sunday! We don’t know what that mark will be, but it will not be about a DAY.
Gospel Is Missed
What the lesson—and Adventism’s great controversy misses—is that the gospel—which is never defined in the lesson except to say that the Three Angels’ Messages are both the mission and the message of Adventism—is all about believing in Jesus ALONE.
The Adventist gospel does not teach that humanity is born literally spiritually dead in sin and must be made alive through belief in the Lord Jesus.
The Adventist gospel does not teach that Jesus completed the atonement at the cross. They teach that He is in heaven now, and, since 1844, He has been continuing to “apply His blood” to the sins of professed believers, checking to see if each has been confessed and overcome. This view is blasphemous; there is no investigative judgment. Jesus’ blood did all of its propitiatory work on the cross! Everything necessary for our forgiveness and salvation was completed in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.
And the Adventist gospel does not teach that the mark of salvation is NOT obedience to the law but being born again through faith in the Lord Jesus who FULFILLED THE LAW by His death, burial, and resurrection.
Sabbath has nothing to do with the gospel.
Furthermore, God is not on a mission to win souls. God is sovereign and is not waiting for anyone to make it possible for Him to return.
We are not on earth to win souls and influence people to become members of a church. We are here to glorify God.
We are not saved through obedience but by faith, by believing God. The lesson says that “all human beings from ages past will be judged based on how they cooperated with God and how they lived—regardless of how much they did or didn’t understand” (Rom. 2:11–16).
This is wrong.
Everyone has been saved the same way: by believing God as Abraham did (Ten 15:6). We are not judged by our sincerity or knowledge. We are not saved or lost on the basis of cooperation with God! Scripture never calls us to cooperate with God except to repent—to agree with Him—about our sin!
When we believe Him and do what He asks us to do—to believe the One whom He sent and to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, at that moment we pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24) and are indwelled by the Holy Spirit and born again (Eph. 1:13–14)!
This lesson, like the whole quarter, has made the readers believe that God is asking them to participate in Adventist evangelism as a means of pleasing God and demonstrating sincerity.
The Truth, though, is that God is sovereign, and He calls us to trust Him.
Believe His word; believe that you are born dead in sin and need to be made alive. Trust Him and His finished work, and you will know that you are saved. †
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024
- We Got Mail - April 25, 2024
- April 20–26, 2024 - April 18, 2024