Lesson 3: “Light Shines in the Darkness”
COLLEEN TINKER |
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson accuses Christianity of compromising biblical truth.
- The author claims the whole Bible must be accepted while ignoring EGW and her false gospel.
- The Teachers Comments say Christianity has accepted a false view of the soul, but the remnant church helps God spread the real truth.
This week’s lesson is based on chapter three of The Great Controversy by Ellen White. The author spends considerable words implicating Christianity—especially the Roman Church during the fourth and fifth centuries—with compromise regarding God’s law and the nature of man and sin.
In fact, this lesson illustrates our contention that Adventism’s deception grows out of its belief in a false nature of man and of sin. Further, this lesson also illustrates the central theme of the great controversy: Satan is the enemy, and every Adventist has to view his life as a battlefield for defeating the devil. Truly Adventism is Satan-centric and devoid of the truth about the Lord Jesus’s completed atonement.
In fact, Sunday’s lesson posits this discussion point at the end of the study: “Discuss ways that Satan attempts to distort or misinterpret God’s Word today.”
Monday’s lesson states:
Even in Paul’s day, there was a gradual departure from the truth of God’s Word regarding obedience to God’s law. This departure would flourish in the later centuries…To make Christianity more acceptable to heathens coming into the Christian church, pagan deities were renamed as so-called saints. Sunday, the day of worship for the sun god, was gradually adopted as the day of Christian worship in honor of the Resurrection. This false day, not sanctioned in Scripture, prevails even now.
Drawing from EGWs worldview, the lesson assumes her teaching that the church lost its knowledge of God’s law, especially of the fourth commandment, and spun into compromise with the world. While history confirms that the organized medieval churches (both Eastern and Western) departed significantly from apostolic Christianity, EGWs persistent focus on the supposed continuation of the Ten Commandments as the heart of true belief and obedience to them as the means of realizing salvation set up the Adventist conscience to believe that Catholicism is the antichrist power that has suppressed the true Sabbath.
This Sabbath-focus has given Adventism a false conviction that they alone have biblical truth, that the Catholics are to be most greatly feared, and that they themselves cannot please God unless they worship on the seventh day. Even more ironically, this believe, buttressed by Biblical proof-texts, is rooted not in the Bible but in EGWs writings. Yet Adventists do not even “see” Ellen when they proclaim that they alone believe the whole Bible. The great controversy, the paradigm “revealed” to Ellen White in a vision and recorded in the book carrying the same name, is not biblical, yet the lesson and Adventism assumes that it is. Its true source, EGW, is dismissed. For example, Tuesday’s lesson contains this quote:
The Bible clearly reveals God’s infinite love in the light of the great controversy. It also exposes satanic delusions and reveals the devil’s deceptions. Satan hates the Word of God and has done everything possible throughout the centuries to destroy its influence.…All these crucial truths are revealed, taught, and emphasized in the Word of God. It, and it alone, must be the final and ultimate standard for understanding all sacred truth.
How ironic! Reading the Bible in context reveals reality and truth. Its focus is never Satan and his delusions; it is God’s sovereign faithfulness and purpose. The Bible reveals that salvation is not related to the shadows of days and food but to belief in God’s own word and to His final word, the Lord Jesus. The Bible does not reveal an eternal seventh-day holiness. It does not teach an ongoing great controversy between Christ and Satan. Rather, Satan is a minor player in the revelation of God’s interactions with humanity. God the Son is not in a conflict with Satan! He is sovereign over him; Satan can’t make a move apart from God’s permission.
Yet this lesson is based upon a worldview that Satan is a central figure in the Adventist’s life, and the only way to gain a victory over him is to obey the Decalogue which they call “God’s Law”. This foundational assumption shapes the entire lesson, and the reader can’t see it because the great controversy is the worldview which defines Adventist reality.
This statement embedded near the end of Wednesday’s lesson emphasizes this Adventist blindness to its own unbiblical worldview:
“That which contradicts God and His Word is error, and error is always dangerous; that which is in harmony with God is truth and goodness. How important that we make God’s Word our final arbiter of truth and morality.”
This statement is true at face value; when read it inside the Adventist paradigm, however, it is used to endorse a complete departure from biblical truth including ignoring the influence of the Adventist prophet Ellen White. Neither an Adventist nor a non-Adventist can see the true deception of the great controversy with its sacred day and last-day prophet if they hear Adventists making Bible-affirming statements such as this. This assertion is itself a great deception, and it serves to numb and blind the Adventist reader. It lulls their persistent cognitive dissonance so that they suppress it further.
Sin and the “Immortal Soul”
The Teachers Comments this week help the teachers develop the foundational false view of the nature of man—the necessary heresy that provides the false foundation to support the great controversy.
The comments this week assert that Lucifer wanted to be seen as a god, and thus he attempted to seduce Adam and Eve into believing that God was manipulating them by using His role as Creator to control the human race. Embedded in this scenario is the insertion of the Adventist teaching man has no immaterial spirit, but it is phrased in a way that is itself a lie.
On page 41, for example, the author says this:
We are in a setting in which Satan and God explain their positions to us prior to the fall into sin. Satan claims that God lies to us, that we are autonomous, that we are gods, and that we are immortal. Furthermore, he asserts that we can reject God’s claims and will not die (Gen. 3:4) because we contain life, original and underived, within ourselves.
This statement is false. When Satan told Adam and Eve that they would surely not die if they ate the fruit, he was not insinuating that they had “original and underived” life! This is the deceptive idea that EGW and her teachings have introduced into the Adventist worldview. This is the idea Adventism teaches its members that Christianity believes!
Yet this is NOT what Christians believe. It is a lie of Adventism that misrepresents the biblical understanding that we have an immaterial part of ourselves that separates from the body when we die. This immaterial spirit is what died the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and this spiritual death is the natural state into which each one of us is born.
Adventism denies what it calls “original sin”, claiming this doctrine is “Catholic”. Original sin, or depravity, however, is our natural identity. Ephesians 2:3 states that we are “by nature children of wrath”.
The fact that we are spiritually dead is what makes us sinners. We are not born neutral, blank slates upon which we lay down sins from our earliest days. No! We sin because we are spiritually dead.
This fact is why the Lord Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again. Natural man cannot inherit eternal life. Only through belief and trust in the finished work of the Lord Jesus can anyone be saved.
Salvation is not about being obedient and good but about being made alive through faith in Jesus. In fact, Jesus said that when a person believes, he passes from death to life and does not come into condemnation (Jn. 5:24).
Adventism does not teach this core reality of the gospel. Because Adventism denies the biblical truth about the nature of man, it cannot understand or teach the completed atonement and the full necessity of Jesus’ blood alone as the way we are saved.
No, Satan did not claim that Adam and Eve had natural eternal life! He simply denied that they would die because he is a liar. They DID die! Their spirits died, and we inherit that death from Adam. That is why we need a new Head, the perfect Son of Man who took our sin and its penalty into Himself, died our death, was buried, and rose again because His sacrifice was sufficient to pay for all our sin!
The Teachers Comments, however, say this:
The choice of our first parents turned into a tragedy for them and for the entire human race. Moreover, this conclusion is not mere speculation but is based on historical and empirical evidence. Instead of feeling divine and living forever after disobeying God’s law, humanity felt empty, naked, full of shame, their hearts and relationships broken (Gen. 3:7, 8). Moreover, the human race began to suffer and die. However, Lucifer did not stop his speculations against God’s government; he proposed more compromise. We are immortal, he now claimed, because we have an immortal soul, which, after death, goes to a spiritual, ethereal sphere. Tragically, most people have fallen into the trap of believing that falsehood.
The quote above is Adventism. It overtly twists the evidence of spiritual death into “feelings” of shame and asserts that man “began to suffer and die”. The Adventists have invented a false belief about Lucifer’s supposed claims in order to make their physicalism seem like the more logical solution. In fact, Adventism lies about both positions: their assumption that Christians have believed humans have immortal souls that float in ethereal spheres when dead, and their own assertion that humans have no immaterial spirit.
The Teachers Comments end with this quote:
God’s true people do not compromise. True, traditional Christianity compromised the revelation of God’s truth in Scripture. However, God worked to restore His truth in order that He might save as many as possible. For this reason, His faithful remnant church happily collaborates with Him to help spread His truth by reflecting His light.
And there it is: the closing argument assuming the spiritual superiority of Adventism, claiming the self-identity of God’s “faithful remnant church” which “collaborates” with Him to spread His truth! In other words, they are saying that God’s truth is the great controversy deception which is built upon a heretical view of the nature of man and which further teaches a lie about what Christianity believes.
Indeed, Adventism is a well-fortified tangle of lies, each of which depends on the next one. There is no teaching of Adventism which is true if divorced from the others. The entire belief system is a unit, and the great controversy paradigm is the package which gives Adventists their “talking point” to make themselves sound moral and believable.
In closing I will quote one of the texts used to introduce this week’s lesson:
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus. For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.—(2 Corinthians 4:3-6 LSB)
The light of the true gospel of the Lord Jesus exposes the deception of Adventism. Allow the Bible to mean what it says, and read it in context. When we believe the completed gospel of the Lord Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, was pass from death to life. Satan has no more claim on us, and we are secure eternally in our triune God. †
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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