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 3: “The Lord Reigns”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- While trying to say God is sovereign, this lesson uses the creation to establish God’s rule. It presents God as within creation instead of separate from it.
- This lesson relies on a great controversy worldview to present God’s roles in reality.
- This lesson misuses the biblical covenants to establish the centrality of the law.
The clearest disclosure of the author’s intentions is found this week in the Teacher’s Comments. Even though the title of the lesson is “The Lord Reigns”, these words don’t mean what Christians think they mean. Within Adventism, God’s reign is limited by His supposed valuing of His creatures’ free will. They deny that God truly elects and predestines as Ephesians 1 and Romans 8 teach, and they also deny the natural depravity of humans.
Instead, Adventism teaches that all are born with free will to choose whether to follow God or not, and they go so far as to debate internally whether God really knows the future. In fact, there is a movement established by Richard Rice, formerly of the school of religion at Loma Linda University, that is called the “openness of God”—a theory that God learns along with His creatures because if He didn’t, His foreknowledge would be determinative.
This refusal to embrace the biblical mystery of God’s complete sovereignty over everything underlies the language of this lesson. An example of this deceptive but obfuscating wording is found at the beginning of the Teachers Comments in this week’s lesson. Here is the overview of the Teachers’ Comments from page 39:
This week, we shall examine five aspects of God’s sovereignty in the Psalter. We will see that the Psalms affirm the following:
- The foundation of God’s sovereignty is based in the Creation. The Lord is the Maker of the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1) and humanity (Gen. 1:26).
- On the basis of this Bible truth, the various psalmists proclaim that YHWH is the ruler over all the world and the nations.
- The sovereignty of the Lord is inseparably intertwined in His work as Judge.
- As Judge, God intercedes for His people because of His covenant with them.
- He is faithful to the rules of this treaty because the Law of His covenant is the foundation of His kingdom.
As we shall see, these five topics are closely intertwined.
That first statement reveals the inside-out view of reality that shapes this lesson’s dependence upon a great controversy worldview. God’s sovereignty is not based in the creation; reality is the opposite of that statement! Creation is based in God Himself. God, not creation, is the basis for all things.
Adventism, however, really makes God subject to His creation. In fact, this upside-down relationship is revealed throughout Adventist doctrines and is focussed especially on its view of the Sabbath. For example, Adventists love to say that “Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath” and “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”, so these texts are used to manipulate members to keep the Sabbath.
They see the Sabbath as an eternal reality, a sacred day forever, which even God honors and “keeps”. When they say Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath they mean that in the sense that Charles is king of England. The Sabbath, like England, is an entity bigger than its manager in the eyes of an Adventist. Jesus, then, is the one appointed to make sure that Sabbath is properly respected, that people honor it.
This model, though, is upside-down. Jesus is the one bigger than the Sabbath! Sabbath is not eternal; it is a created day. Jesus is the Creator of Sabbath. Jesus, not Sabbath, is the One we honor eternally.
By using this familiar understanding of the Sabbath as being somehow “bigger” than Jesus, of being something that even Jesus honors, we can understand what is wrong with the statement above: “the foundation of God’s sovereignty is based in the Creation.”
God is the foundation of creation! God is the ultimate value in the universe. All creation is subject to Him, and He has sovereign power and control over every aspect of creation. Although Adventists say that Jesus created everything, they nevertheless see Him as self-limiting. They see Him as perpetually honoring a day He created—and their view that God’s sovereignty is based in “the Creation” reveals that their view of God is closer to panentheism than to the biblical view that God is OUTSIDE and BEYOND creation.
Panentheism is the belief that although God has some existence outside the universe, still the universe is part of God. The Adventist view that God is subject to the Sabbath and that God’s sovereignty is founded in creation is completely inside-out from biblical reality! Creation is founded in God, not the other way around!
Great Controversy Worldview
Page 37 of the lesson ends the week with four discussion questions. The first one reveals the underlying paradigm that determines the wording of the entire study guide. It says,
Why is understanding the reality and prevalence of the great controversy crucial in helping us understand that despite God’s ultimate rulership and sovereignty, there is still much turmoil and suffering in our world? Why is the great controversy motif so helpful to us?
The great controversy worldview is built on the pre-history story of Lucifer becoming jealous of Jesus when God exalted Jesus to become His Son. This heresy is nowhere in Scripture but is at the heart of Ellen White’s great controversy vision and the entire structure of Adventism.
This idea is based on a different god than Scripture reveals. The One God of Scripture is expressed in three person who share substance: every attribute of God is equally present in each person. They are not separate beings but are One Being. The mystery of our triune God is inexplicable, yet Scripture reveals it to us clearly.
Ellen White’s “heavenly trio”, on the other hand, is not one being. Her Jesus did not share substance with the Father, and her Holy Spirit was not fully God, either. In fact, her writing frequently reflected her husband James’s view that the Holy Spirit was the power of God that would emanate from Him.
Today Adventism claims to believe in the Trinity and says that all three persons are “fully God”. Yet internally they teach that Jesus forever gave up His omnipresence by taking a body and thus had to send the Holy Spirit to be present for Him.
This teaching renders Jesus not God. God is not God if He is not omnipresent.
Further, Adventism teaches that Jesus could have sinned and failed in his mission, that God took a risk in sending Him. If he had failed, the universe would have been plunged into chaos.
Scripture, though, teaches that the mystery of Jesus being God the Son means that, as God, He could not sin. This mystery is not explained, but it is taught. Jesus was truly tempted—in far greater and more intense ways than any of us is ever tempted, yet because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit He was eternally alive spiritually, never dead in sin.
The great controversy worldview, however, demands a fallible Jesus who could have signed and failed but didn’t. It demands this model because it requires Jesus to be our example for how to keep the law perfectly through prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit.
These models are derived from Ellen White. Scripture does not teach this model. Jesus was our sacrifice and substitute; the only sense in which He is a model is that He is a model for the suffering of a true believer who has been born again. His example had nothing to do with law-keeping but everything to do with showing those who have already passed from death to life how to trust God when persecuted.
Unbiblical Use of Covenants
The quote above from the Teachers Comments reveals that Adventism teaches there’s only one covenant, and the Law is the foundation of His covenant. This model is also unbiblical.
Scripture teaches that God made a conditional covenant with Israel, and Hebrews 7 reveals that the law with the levitical priesthood was the foundation of the Mosaic covenant. The lesson fails to teach that Jesus fulfilled the law and established a completely new, unconditional covenant with His new creation, the church. This new covenant was established not on the law but on His blood!
The old covenant is now obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). Hebrews 7:11, 12 explains that when there is a new priesthood—the new priesthood of Jesus according to the order of Melchizedek—there must be, of necessity a change of the law!
Adventism never taught us that the law was changed when Jesus became our new high priest! Jesus is not a priest in the order of Levi; He is in the order of Melchizedek—a king-priest of Salem whom we first meeting in Genesis 14. Melchizedek served God BEFORE there was a law! His priesthood was separate from the law!
In other words, this lesson which uses a type of world salad throughout to attempt to prove that the Psalms teach God’s reign is a deception.
When we read the Psalms in context, of COURSE they reveal God’s sovereign reign! But Adventism uses these words deceptively. They do not mean what the words actually say. This lesson continues to present God as a ruler who is more concerned with the feelings of his subjects and with his own reputation than He is concerned to rule and reign over all things.
No, creation is not the foundation of God’s sovereignty. Rather, God’s sovereignty is the foundation for creation!
Our sovereign God created us, but He also eternally prepared to redeem us from our collective spiritual death bequeathed to us by our first father Adam. We are not the beneficiaries of a benevolent dictator; we are subject to a sovereign, all-powerful God who will judge unbelief in an eternal judgment, yet He took within Himself His own judgment against our sin so that we can be born again through faith in Him.
We are born condemned, and the wrath of God remains on us until we rust Him with our intractable sin.
We are not here to vindicate God or to answer Satan. God’s reputation is in no danger at all. We do not help Him by proving He’s good.
Quite the opposite. We are condemned sinners, but our sovereign God has opened a way out of our condemnation through His shed blood.
If you haven’t faced the fact that you are a sinner who cannot please God, choose God, or obey God, then you need to submit yourself to His word and see the truth about yourself.
Bring your sin to the cross of Jesus. Receive His payment for your sin and trust His finished atonement on your behalf. Ask Him to forgive you and to make you His.
When you trust Him, you will be born again, just as He promised, and the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus will be yours from that moment. You will cross from death to life.
When you truly trust the Lord Jesus, you will know first-hand that He is Lord, and He reigns over all creation, including you. He will be your Savior, and you will be His child. †
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