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 5: “Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson approaches the Psalms without an understanding of original sin but of sin as an encroaching threat.
- The Teachers Comments reveal the Adventist foundation for successful living: moral imperatives are the basis for maintaining mental health and fitness.
- The lesson suggests that obedience—as opposed to belief—is the way to understand the Psalms.
This week’s lesson looks at Psalms that express the suffering and oppression of God’s people by sinners and by God’s own discipline of them. The entire framework of the power struggle the author sees between evil and God’s people is shaped by his great controversy worldview and by his belief in human free will.
If we don’t understand the Adventist worldview underlying the lesson, the words of the studies might seem technically correct. They fall apart, however, when we see the physicalist assumption underlying the lessons.
Saturday’s introduction to the lesson establishes the paradigm through which the psalmists’ laments are read. The first paragraph of the lesson says this:
We do not need to get deep into the book of Psalms in order to discover that the Psalms are uttered in an imperfect world, one of sin, evil, suffering, and death. The stable creation run by the Sovereign Lord and His righteous laws is constantly threatened by evil. As sin corrupts the world more and more, the earth has increasingly become “a strange land” to God’s people. This reality creates a problem for the psalmist: How does one live a life of faith in a strange land?
This paragraph assumes the great controversy to be true. Ellen White wrote that sin has become increasingly entrenched and has exerted an increasingly debilitating force on nature and on humanity. For example, this is a quotation from The Desire of Ages, p. 48, where she writes about Jesus inheriting the progressive weakening of sin so He could be our example for living a sinless life:
But Jesus accepted humanity when the race had been weakened by four thousand years of sin. Like every child of Adam He accepted the results of the working of the great law of heredity. What these results were is shown in the history of His earthly ancestors. He came with such a heredity to share our sorrows and temptations, and to give us the example of a sinless life.
Or look at this quote from Testimonies for the Church Vol. 3:492:
Sin Has Produced Pain—The continual transgression of man for six thousand years has brought sickness, pain, and death as its fruits. And as we near the close of time, Satan’s temptation to indulge appetite will be more powerful and more difficult to overcome.
We can see that the opening paragraph of the week’s studies reveals the Adventist belief established by Ellen White, that Adam’s sin caused increasingly weakened moral responses and physical resistance to sin as the generations passed. Even more to the point, Jesus Himself inherited the results of 4,000 years of human debasing caused by the degeneration of people committing sins.
Furthermore, Ellen established that Jesus had to come with this inherited tendency and weakness toward sin in order to be our Savior. He had to be our example of sinlessness as we live with the inherited weakness caused by the accumulated sins of our forebears.
The Bible’s Foundation
The Bible does not teach that the generations become increasingly wicked because of inherited sin. Rather, God’s word reveals that God bound creation to decay by His own decree, and all humans are born equally dead in sin. We are born under God’s wrath and condemned UNTIL we believe and trust in the Lord Jesus’ complete atonement for sin:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for [our] adoption as sons, the redemption of our body (Romans 8:20-23).
Here are a few more than describe human nature:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest (Ephesians 2:1-3)
“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. “… “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:18, 36).
The Bible clearly says that when Adam sinned, all humanity was bound to decay by the decree of God. Decay and thorns are not caused by Satan or by sin; rather, they are the decree of God who bound all creation to decay until the redeemed receive their glorified bodies.
Ellen had us believe that sin brought in the decay of nature and an increasing moral decay in humanity that is literally inherited genetically from our forebears.
The Bible, however, says the opposite. The decay of nature is God’s own act of judgment as a consequence of our sin. We are equally born without “free will” in the Adventist sense. We are born dead in sin, unable to rise above our natures or to seek or to please God. We must be drawn by the Father, and He reveals His eternal power and divine nature through what has been made so that all are without excuse (Romans 1:18–20).
Sinful people have refused to acknowledge God and His power and presence because they have suppressed Him by their sin. But as a person responds to God’s drawing, to His revelation of one’s own helplessness and sin and sees that God is bigger than man and trusts the grace of God given in the shed blood of God the Son, we then finally have freedom of the will to trust God at the moment of temptation instead of indulging the flesh.
Moral Imperatives Are Not Our Foundation
The Teachers’ Comments again reveal the Adventist worldview that is assumed when these lessons are studied. On page 58 of the Teacher’s Comments we find these words:
David introduces the topic under consideration by couching it in the following counsel: “Do not fret because of evildoers” (Ps. 37:1, NKJV). He summarizes the rationale for his advice—evildoers will perish (Ps. 37:2)—before moving on to his main concern, which is the believer. David encourages him or her with several principles for godly living (Ps. 37:3–9). These moral imperatives are the basis for maintaining one’s mental health and fitness in an unfair world.
Once again, the lesson’s assumption about a believer is built upon the Adventist worldview that people inherit progressive degeneracy and must look to Jesus for their example of how to overcome sin. Given this Adventist worldview, the author’s statement makes sense: “moral imperatives are the basis for maintaining one’s mental health and fitness in an unfair world.”
It’s safe to say that anyone who has tried to use morality as a means of managing one’s behavior and stability knows that it doesn’t work. People can be ever so moral and still have hateful, hard, depressed hearts.
As our pastor Gary Inrig once said, “There is no one so dangerous as a highly moral man who doesn’t ‘need’ Jesus.”
The late expositor S. Lewis Johnson has said, “Sin is unbelief; unbelief leads to rebellion, and rebellion yields immoral behavior.”
This quotation was in the context of explaining all sin from Eve’s to ours: the original sin, the essence of our spiritual death, is unbelief in what God has said. When we do not believe, we rebel against God’s word, and our rebellion yields immoral behavior.
The Sabbath School lesson assumes the reader is a “believer”, and from the author’s perspective, a “believer” is one who has accepted Adventist doctrines and its worldview. With the assumption of a great controversy, physicalist perspective, a person has no framework for understanding the word “believer” to mean that one must believe and trust what God has revealed in His inerrant word: He sent His Son to take human flesh in order to take our imputed sin into Himself and to pay our penalty: to endure the wrath of God as He hung on the cross and to die, thus being able to break the curse of death for all who trust in Jesus’ finished work of atonement.
When we believe, Jesus’ resurrection breaks our curse, and we are born again and given Jesus’ own resurrection life and sealed with His own Holy Spirit.
Only when we have believed can the Psalms of lament make sense. They were written by people who believed God, not by people who were trying to make moral decision to overcome their sin. They knew that God alone could cover their sin and not hold sin agains them. They believed that He was their Savior and they couldn’t earn His forgiveness.
They lamented because they knew Israel was suffering for her collective sin against the God who redeemed them. They knew that their own suffering was the consequence of their sin, and they cried out to God in repentance and trust.
The promises and the commands in the Psalms to delight in the Lord, to trust Him, to cease from anger, to cease fretting—these commands came from their hearts because they knew God. They knew He keeps His promises, that as He kept His promise to Abraham and led Israel out of Egypt, so He would deliver them from all their enemies, past, present, and future.
The psalmists’ laments flowed from their deep certainty that God was faithful, that even though they failed and sinned, God would keep His promises to His people, and they could trust Him.
The psalmists’s laments flowed from believing, repentant hearts, not from rightly guarded morality that tried to prop us the psalmists’ mental health.
If you haven’t trusted the Lord Jesus with all your moral oughts and should and given Him your sin in repentance, look at God’s central command: believe in the Son. See God’s grace poured out for you on a cross as His Son took your sin and died your death.
Give up your attempts to please Him by obedience and trust the Lord Jesus alone. When you do, even your laments will change; you will know that in spite of life’s pain and loss, you are safe, and nothing can ever snatch you from His love. †
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