Quarter 2, Lesson 1: “The War Behind All Wars”
COLLEEN TINKER |
Problems with this lesson:
- This week introduces the great controversy as the interpretive grid of every Seventh-day Adventist doctrine.
- The Teachers Comments admit Adventism has no fundamental belief on the doctrine of sin, explaining it instead as a component of the great controversy
- This lesson reveals the Adventist teachings that man has no immaterial spirit and that the cross deals only with PAST sins while the power of sin is broken by Christ’s work in heaven.
This week launches a new Sabbath School quarterly for the second quarter of 2024 entitled The Great Controversy. The great controversy, as we have been saying for years, is the grid through which Adventism understands all of reality. In fact, we used Herbert Douglass’s 2010 book The Heartbeat Of Adventism: The Great Controversy Theme in the Writings of Ellen White as a source of Ellen White quotes catalogued according to every Adventist doctrine in our article published in Proclamation! in 2015, “What Is Seventh-day Adventism?”
This week’s lesson has only confirmed our insistence that the great controversy defines the Adventist worldview. Furthermore, we assert—and this lesson confirms—that the Adventist worldview is actually established even deeper than the meta-narrative called the great controversy. The actual bedrock of the Adventist worldview is an unbiblical view of the nature of man, of the nature of God, of the nature of sin, and of the nature of salvation. The great controversy became the marketing package for selling these false understandings of the actual nature of reality—and these false beliefs about who God is and who we are have kept Adventists in a prison of unbelief. Adventists have lived in an intellectual chimera—an illusion they have believed to be real—much like the characters in the 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix.
False Origin Story
Author Mark Finley opens the first lesson by using Revelation 12:7, 8 as the “proof” that the Ellen White-generated pre-history narrative known as the great controversy is biblical. Here is the quote taken from Saturday’s lesson:
Memory Text: “And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer” (Revelation 12:7, 8, NKJV).
The context of Revelation 12, though, is missing. These two verses occur after John’s vision of the woman about to give birth clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet, a crown of twelve stars on her head, with the red dragon in front of her waiting to eat her child. Clearly this woman is Israel. Immediately following these verses is the rest of John’s vision of the dragon’s fight with Michael, and the events of the ensuing battle describe events that are yet to come during the tribulation.
In context, this battle between Michael’s fight with the dragon occurs during the tribulation, not before the creation of the world. This is not remotely a proof-text for EGWs pre-history story supposedly explaining Satan’s defection.
Finley further refers to Ezekiel 28:12–15 and Isaiah 14:12–14 to explain “what went on in the mind of this angelic being called Lucifer that led to his rebellion” (p. 5), but again—context! The Ezekiel passage is addressing the evil King of Tyre, and the Isaiah passage is about the king of Babylon. Many people have speculated that these descriptions go beyond merely describing evil kings and may reflect qualities we apply to the fallen Lucifer, but even these verses do not place Lucifer in heaven nor describe his supposed rebellion which EGW has firmly established as Adventist doctrine.
We all know the pre-history story about Lucifer being jealous when the Father supposedly exalted Jesus to the position of His Son. We all know that EGW said Lucifer incited the rebellion of one-third of heaven’s angels and that he accused God of being unfair, saying His law was unfair and impossible for men or angels to keep. He was angry about Jesus’ exaltation and launched a controversy with him in which he and Jesus are still embroiled to this day as they fight for the souls of men. Ultimately, according to EGWs scenario, human obedience to God’s law will vindicate God’s reputation to the watching universe, demonstrating that His law IS fair, and that by emulating and drawing on power from the victorious Christ, they, too, can keep the law as Jesus did. But for now we will go on to more specifics from this lesson.
False nature of man and sin
Finley makes the case in Monday’s lesson that, like the angels in Lucifer’s heaven, “we, too, are to declare whose side we are on—Christ’s or Satan’s.”
Then Finley writes this:
When God created humanity, He embedded deep within our brains the ability to think, to reason, and to choose. The essence of our humanness is our ability to make moral choices. We are not mere robots. We were created in God’s image, distinct from the animal creation, in our ability to make moral choices and live by eternal spiritual principles. After Lucifer’s rebellion in heaven, and after the Fall, God has called His people to respond to His love and be obedient to His commands by choosing to serve Him.
Here Finley admits the Adventist belief that humanity’s spiritual experiences and choices are ultimately functions of the BRAIN. He even states that fallen man is called to “respond” to God’s love and to “be obedient” to His commands—and to an Adventist, those “commands” refer primarily to the Decalogue with special emphasis on the Sabbath commandment.
He makes no mention of the Bible’s declaration that just as God said they would Adam and Eve died the day they at the forbidden fruit (Genesis 2:17). He never hints at Paul’s list of Old Testament quotations in Romans 3:9–18 stating that man cannot seek, please, nor in any way honor God but is evil continually. Further, Finley ignores Ephesians 2:1–3 which says that by nature each of us hopelessly dead in sin:
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. —(Eph. 2:1-3 LSB)
This fact of our literal spiritual death—our immaterial spirits which are separate from our bodies and which are separated from the life of God—is what renders us sinners. Unlike the teaching of Adventism, we are not monists. We are body plus spirit—which Adventism, by fiat of EGW, identifies as “breath”—and our spirits separate from our bodies at death. (See Philippians 1:22, 23; 2 Corinthians 5:1–9.)
Adventism, though, denies this biblical fact and says that when a body ceases to breathe—and before it breathes upon its birth—it is not a living being. It ceases to exist. Yet we learn from Genesis 2 and 3 that when Adam and Eve sinned, they died that same day even though their bodies continued to live. That spiritual death is our natural condition. We are unable to choose to obey God! We have to be found and made alive by the Lord Himself—and that fact is what Ephesians 2:4–10 proclaims!
In Tuesday’s lesson Finley further reveals the great controversy view of sin and death. He never mentions God’s statement that they would die the day they ate the fruit, but he builds the situation this way:
There was no stain of sin or evil anywhere. But He gave Adam and Eve the same freedom of choice He had given to Lucifer. He didn’t want robots on earth any more than He wanted robots in heaven.
In fact, He went out of His way to make this freedom clear. He planted a tree in the Garden and called it the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He made a point of telling Adam and Eve about it because He wanted to make sure they knew they had a choice.
Finley camps on God’s giving them “freedom” and “choice”, but he never talks about spiritual death or about their lack of belief in His word to them. Further, is says that when Adam and Eve made their choice to eat the fruit, “they opened a door that God wanted to keep forever closed It was the doorway to sin—the doorway to suffering, heartache, sickness, and death.:
Finley has just established the Adventist belief that Satan, the fallen angel, tempted the humans to sin, and they excessed their freewill and opened a door to sin. An “open door” to sin is not spiritual death nor plunging all humanity into spiritual death.
Further, in Thursday’s lesson, Finley admits the subtle but central Adventist teaching that Jesus’s atonement was not completed on the cross. He says this:
In Christ there is no condemnation for the sins of our past. In Christ our guilt is gone, and through His mighty intercession, the grip of sin on our lives is broken.
This quote admits what every Adventist experiences: “accepting Jesus” means only that one’s PAST sins are forgiven; he must keep obeying and confessing endlessly to get future sins covered. Further, this quote reveals that it is Jesus’s “sanctuary work” in heaven, as He conducts the investigative judgment and pleads His blood for all confessed sins, that is the source of the Adventists’s ability to have victory over sin. It is never the cross of the Lord Jesus that cleanses an Adventist from sin; it is only the increasing ability to personally “be good” by accessing power from the heavenly High Priest doing His work in the heavenly sanctuary that they have any hope of obeying.
These Adventist beliefs taken right out of the great controversy paradigm reveal the fact that Adventism does not teach the biblical doctrine of sin or of salvation through belief in the finished atonement of Jesus at the cross nor of His breaking the curse of death by His resurrection. In fact, the Teachers Comments reveal a stunning admission.
No Fundamental Belief on the Doctrine of Sin
The Teachers Comments in this quarterly were written by Gheorghe Razmerita of the Seventh-day Adventist seminary in the Philippines. On page 14 he writes this:
Seventh-day Adventists have a unique understanding of the origin of sin and the solution thereof. Unlike other Christians, Adventists do not have a fundamental belief dedicated to the doctrine of sin. However, they integrate their understanding of sin within the framework of the great controversy. John M. Fowler correctly points out that “no doctrine of sin can be complete without an understanding of this great controversy theme between Christ and Satan, between good and evil. The sovereignty and character of God are at its center. When Lucifer caused the revolt in heaven against God. . . and when the revolt reached its climax, God had no alternative except to cast the fallen angelic host from heaven.”—John M. Fowler, “Sin,” in Handbook of Seventh-day Adventist Theology, ed. Raoul Dederen (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000), p. 241. (Emphasis mine.)
This paragraph alone reveals the fact that Adventists know they do not have a Christian view of the nature of sin or of salvation. This quote is in the official publication by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. This is not a “personal” viewpoint published without General Conference approval. Rather, this is the official publication distributed by the General Conference to every Sabbath School teacher the world over!
Adventists do not even HAVE a fundamental belief statement about the doctrine of sin because their unique doctrine is not biblical. The Adventist doctrine of sin is not that man is by nature depraved and unable to please God. Further, they do not teach that humans are responsible for their own sins.
Instead, Adventists say that SATAN is responsible for human sin. From the very beginning of their story of humanity, it has been SATAN, not Adam, who has been held responsible for human sin. Because of this fact, it is central to the Adventist worldview that SATAN, not the Lord Jesus, must be the scapegoat who is the final bearer of human sins into the lake of fire. EGW established that Satan will be punished in the lake of fire for the human sin he caused.
The blasphemy of making Satan the scapegoat when in fact it was the Lord Jesus who bore the sin of mankind and took the wrath of God for it is impossible to overstate. In Adventism, Satan is the reason mankind fell, and He is the final sin-bearer who will be punished for the humans sins he will carry into the second death.
In fact, Adam is blamed for human sin. It is because our first father sinned and plunged all humanity into human death that we needed another head of the human race. This is the reason that the Lord Jesus came, the Son of God incarnate, and became sin for us and died our death. As our substitute, He took the wrath of God for us, and every one of us who believes and trusts His finished work and the complete atonement His blood purchased for us is made alive at that moment!
Jesus is the scapegoat who carried our sins out of the camp and suffered God’s wrath, then died our death and broke the curse of our death sentence by rising on the third day!
Satan is not part of our story, but he is the central figure in the great controversy. EGW has bound her followers to spiritual death and imprisonment to a satanic doctrine of sin, the nature of man, and salvation. We are not embroiled in a battle with Satan helping Jesus vindicate God!
Jesus Himself has already taken the curse of our sin and broken our curse of death. We can thank Him that He has freed us from the one who held the fear of death—that is, the devil. When we see who Jesus is and trust His completed atonement for us, we pass from death to life. We are no longer bound to sin and death, and Satan is no longer powerful over us.
If you haven’t trusted the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement, please trust Him today. When you do, you will discover that you are freed from the fear of Satan. You will be free to see what is real and true and to turn away from the religion that bound you to doctrines of demons that even the Adventist leaders know are not Christian.
Trust Jesus today and know the freedom He has purchased for you! †
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.
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