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 4: “The Lord Hears and Delivers”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson is built upon Adventism’s view of the heavenly sanctuary and human free will.
- Adventism’s “free will” interprets God’s sovereign knowledge metaphorically instead of literally.
- The author uses texts out of context to make a different point than the passages make.
This week’s lesson uses a plethora of psalm fragments to teach that God is near and will deliver His people. The passages are used superficially and analyzed poetically instead of as imagery revealing literal truths.
The author’s Adventist viewpoint is established at the end of Saturday’s introductory lesson:
We should remember that the proper response to the Lord’s nearness consists in a life of faith in Him and of obedience to His commandments. Nothing short of this faith and obedience will be acceptable to Him, as the history of Israel often revealed.
The biblical teaching about our proper relationship to God is not based on the idea that God is near us because He is so loving, therefore we should have faith and obey Him. Adventism, however, teaches a sort of “reciprocity” between us and God: if God is so loving that He stays near us and loves us and even sent His Son to die for us, then we owe Him our allegiance.
In fact, as an Adventist growing up, I was taught in Sabbath School that the least I could do for Jesus was to “give Him my heart” since He had given His life for me. There was a guilty mandate hidden inside the Adventist teaching of Jesus’s death for us. He gave me everything because I sinned; my sin cost His life. Therefore, I needed to respond to Him properly and give Him myself.
The Bible, however, does not teach this model. Rather, it teaches that the initiation for being right with God does not rest on me; rather the Father draws us (Jn. 6:44) because we are unable to seek, please, or know God apart from His intervention in our lives (Rom. 3:9–18). We are born dead in sin and are by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:1–3). We do not have the freedom to rise above our dead-in-sin natures to seek and find God. We must be enabled by the Father Himself to respond to Him. We can freely refuse to believe Him because our natural selves are dead to Him; but to respond to the Lord Jesus requires God’s power and life working in our dead spirits.
There is tension here, because our decisions are real and have eternal consequences, yet our Lord is sovereign and foreknows and calls us and gives us the faith to believe. We are asked not to try to resolve this tension but to accept that both “sides” of this tension are true and to trust the Lord with this mystery—which is not a mystery to Him!
Appropriation of the Sanctuary
In a confusing paragraph, the author summarized a lesson citing several psalms referring to the “sanctuary” and lassoed the Adventist readers’ thoughts to their own central pillar: the “sanctuary service in heaven”.
In context, the psalmists refer frequently to the “sanctuary” as the place where they would find God’s truth, power, reassurance, and anchoring in His holiness. However, in the context of Adventism, this paragraph takes the reader right to what they believe is the central fact of reality:
The holiness of God’s sanctuary prompts the psalmist to acknowledge that all people are sinful and completely undeserving of God’s favor, and he claims that deliverance is based on God’s faithfulness and grace alone (Ps. 143:2, 9–12). Nothing in us gives us any merit before God. It is only when people stand in a right relationship with God through repentance and acceptance of God’s grace and forgiveness that they can plead for God’s assurance of deliverance. The sanctuary service represented the salvation found in Jesus.
That last sentence removes the reader from the context of Psalms and takes him right back to what they are taught: the levitical “sanctuary service” was a prefiguring of Jesus’ blood transferring their sins into heaven where Jesus went in 1844 to begin deciding which professed believers had confessed all their sins and who was keeping the law. This Jesus would then “apply his blood” to the confessed sins and ultimately place them on Satan who would bear their ultimate punishment and thus cleanse heaven.
The Adventist “sanctuary service” is not biblical but is a heresy that denies Jesus’ completed atonement on the cross. Adventists who read this lesson may not think their way through all of the implications of the investigative judgment, but they will read this Adventist incomplete atonement idea into their sense of “salvation found in Jesus” being linked to His present supposed judgment in heaven.
The Teachers Comments once again provide this bottom line to the week’s understanding of the Psalms. Here is what these comments say on pp. 55–56, right before the end of the week’s discussion:
Our Defender and Deliverer hears from His holy hill and works in our behalf. For the most part, as Seventh-day Adventists, when we hear the expression “heavenly sanctuary,” we most often think of the Day ofAtonement and the pre-Advent judgment. Of course, that’s central to “present truth.” At the same time, we should strive to focus on the work of forgiveness, defense, care, and protection that our Lord offers us from the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary—even before the closing work of the Day of Atonement. Christ’s work of priestly intercession on our behalf is essential. All heaven is involved in the redemption of us sinners.
Even without dissecting the Adventist “heavenly sanctuary” doctrine, we can see at once that this quote is assuming at least three Adventist doctrines that destroy the biblical gospel and salvation. First is the reference to the “pre-Adventist judgment” which, all Adventists understand, is the unique doctrine that Jesus supposedly entered on October 22, 1844.
Second is the reference to “present truth”, the EGW-approved belief that truth is not “static”. Because her visions endorsed doctrines that are outside biblical Christianity and even outside Christian tradition, she called the unique Adventist beliefs “present truth” because they supposedly came from her contemporary visions which gave new light to the fledgling organization. “Present truth”, therefore, has been the argument used often to explain Ellen’s own internal contradictions and corrections. For example, Adventism has taught its members that as she aged, she grew and became more biblical in her doctrines. “Present Truth” explains that her earlier visions were “present truth” for that time, but as God gave her new insights, he understanding grew. Thus “present truth” may continue to present Adventists with “new light” and new understandings.
“Present Truth” can also explain situations such as Jesus eating fish after His resurrection when He appeared to His disciples in a glorified body (Lk. 24:42, 43). The explanation I received from my mother-in-law for this episode was this: “Jesus didn’t have the health message. It hadn’t been given yet.” Thus the idea of “present truth” justified even the blasphemous assumption that God the Son didn’t yet have “truth” which EGW eventually received.
Third, this paragraph says the Lord offers forgiveness, defense, care, and protection “even before the closing work of the Day of Atonement.”
The Day of Atonement was 100% completed on the day Jesus died! That was the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement! If the atonement were not yet completed, there would be no assurance of forgiveness or certainty of God’s certain care and protection. Adventism, in fact, keeps its members in the limbo of uncertainty: they cannot know or say they are saved; they have no certain atonement through Jesus’s blood; they believe they cease to exist when they die, and they do not know if they will be resurrected to eternal life or death.
Even the progressive, “evangelical” crowd still believes in the physical nature of man that denies existence after death. Even they do not embrace the new covenant in Jesus’s blood; they do not understand or teach the new covenant miracle of new birth because they deny the existence of their own naturally dead spirits, and they avoid the personal necessity of admitting their innate sinfulness to the Lord Jesus and accepting His shed blood as the payment for them. They do not see that they are not in need of better thinking or better behavior; their one great need is to be made alive! The new birth gives us new hearts and desires, new power and potential. These things do not come from having better paradigms and thought processes. These come as miraculous gifts from God when we place our faith in Jesus’ finished work of atonement!
Context, context, context…
Wednesday’s lesson particularly illustrated Adventism’s penchant for proof-texting. The author juxtaposed Psalm 114 with 1 Corinthians 10:1–4. Psalm 114 describes the exodus in a four-stanza poem. The first two recall God’s work during the exodus, the last two establish its significance through Israel’s ongoing existence. 1 Corinthians 10:1–4 also reminds readers of God’s work in the exodus.
The lesson says this about these two passages:
What a poetic depiction of God’s marvelous deliverance of His children from the bondage of Egypt is given in Psalm 114. All through the Old Testament, and even in the New, the deliverance from Egypt was seen as a symbol of God’s power to save His people. Paul in these verses in 1 Corinthians does just that, seeing the whole true story as a metaphor, a symbol of salvation in Jesus Christ.
In context, however, Paul makes a very different point. I will quote below 1 Corinthians 1–5. The lesson stops at verse 4, but verse 5 takes the reader into Paul’s point that Israel is given as “an example for us”:
For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased. For THEY WERE STRUCK DOWN IN THE WILDERNESS (1Co 10:1-5).
The point of Paul’s use of the Exodus story is not “salvation in Jesus Christ”. Rather, he is writing to people who are already Christians, and he uses the story of Israel as an example “so that we would not crave evil things as they also craved” (1 Cor. 10:6).
Paul is using the story Israel to remind his readers that God is faithful to His covenant promises. He promised Abraham that He would take his descendants out of slavery and bring them into the land He promised. God absolutely DID THAT! Yet that deliverance did not mean all were saved! Paul’s point is that in spite of God’s faithfulness and promise-keeping, His sustenance and protection, most of that first generation did not believe, and they died in the wilderness!
Therefore, he explains, the reader is to take heed and trust God. We can’t be superficially engaged with God’s people; we must be personally entrusted to and believing Him.
The lesson’s point about the Psalms revealing that God hears and delivers is accurate on the surface, but the way this idea is taught is through the lens of the Adventist physicalist worldview that places an imaginary sanctuary doctrine at the center of its paradigm. Thus the Adventist reader will simply see these references to Psalms as metaphors describing a poetic, sympathetic God who is waiting for them to love Him back. They will see this lesson reinforcing their idea that their free will is the ultimate determiner of their eternal future. They will miss the blood of Jesus that has once-for-all paid for sin, and that when they trust Him and admit their own sin and need of a Savior, they will then be born again and will KNOW the sovereign ruler who has no Plan B, who knows all things and is not limited by Satan’s or man’s choices.
The God of the Psalms is sovereign even over His enemies, and even His enemies are part of His glorifying Himself. His reputation is not in doubt; His sanctuary is actually where He IS.
We can trust that the words of the Psalms are not mere metaphors but are real descriptions of the real sovereign God of the universe. We are His creatures, not His vindicators.
If you haven’t admitted your own sin and spiritual death and trusted the blood of Jesus which cleanses us from all sin, this is the day to do so. Jesus completed the atonement at the cross and broke death because His blood was sufficient to pay for all our sin. Trust Him today and know Him. He is not the romanticized God of the Adventist worldview; He is the sovereign Lord who will rule the nations with a rod of iron (Psalm 2) and yet comfort those who trust Him with His shepherd’s rod (Ps. 23). Trust Him today. †
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