July 13–19, 2024

Lesson 3: “Controversies”

COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries

Problems with this lesson:

• The lesson downplays Jesus’s revelation of Himself as God.
• The parable of the wine and wineskins is not taught as a revelation of the coming new covenant.
• Jesus’ declaration that He is Lord of the Sabbath is twisted into an endorsement of the seventh day. 

This lesson covers Mark 2 through Mark 3:6, and we find some of the gospels’ most profound accounts that reveal Jesus’ true identity and His revelation of the new covenant He was introducing. Adventism, though, has always dealt with these accounts superficially, not allowing them to say what they are really revealing. 

The Lord Jesus came calling people to repent and to believe HIM, the One who was fulfilling prophecy right in front of them!

The lesson makes much of the controversies between Jesus and the Pharisees, and the Teachers Comments (p. 40) even quote Anthony J. Saldarini assessing Jesus’ ongoing struggles with the Jewish leaders this way:

Saldarini emphasizes that “the Pharisees’ knowledge of Jewish law and traditions, accepted by the people, [was] the basis of their social standing. Presumably, the scribes and priests also had influence with some of the people. . . . Jesus’ struggle with the Pharisees, scribes and chief priests can be explained most easily as a struggle for influence with the people.”—Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans/Dove, 2001), p. 33.

To be sure, the Pharisees were protecting their turf as the spiritual authorities in Israel. Jesus, however, came to fulfill prophecy and to be our Substitute, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The accounts in these chapters of Mark revealed Jesus as God. For sure the Pharisees were scrambling to keep their control, but the lesson doesn’t show what Jesus was really communicating. 

In Sunday’s lesson we find the story of the men who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus and let him down through the roof in order to set him down in front of Him. When Jesus saw their faith in Him, demonstrated by their not leaving without finding a way to get their friend in front of Him, He said, “Son, your sins are forgiven”. Immediately the Pharisees began speaking together, accusing Jesus of blasphemy and asking, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

The exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees is recorded in Mark 2:8–12:

Immediately Jesus, aware in His spirit that they were reasoning that way within themselves, said to them, “Why are you reasoning about these things in your hearts? 

“Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’’ or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your mat and walk’? 

“But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”-—He said to the paralytic, 

“I say to you, get up, pick up your mat, and go to your home.” 

And he got up and immediately picked up the mat and went out before everyone, so that they were all amazed and were glorifying God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this.”—Mark 2:8–12 LSB

The lesson analyzes this exchange like this:

Jesus meets the objectors on their own ground by using a typical rabbinic style of argumentation called “lesser to greater.” It is one thing to say that a person’s sins are forgiven; it is another thing to actually make a paralyzed man walk. If Jesus can make the man walk by the power of God, then His claim to forgive sins finds affirmation.

It then makes this point:

These religious leaders lost sight of what really mattered: justice, mercy, and walking humbly before God. So obsessed with defending their understanding of God, they were blinded to God’s working right before their eyes. Nothing indicated that the men changed their minds about Jesus even though He gave them more than enough evidence to know that He was from God, not only by letting them know that He could read their minds (no simple feat in and of itself) but also by healing the paralytic in their presence in a way that they could not deny.

The lesson minimizes that in this encounter, the Lord Jesus was revealing Himself as GOD. It analyzes his response to the Pharisees by seeing it as a form of rabbinic argumentation and concluding that the Pharisees were “blinded to God’s working” so that they couldn’t see that he was “from God”. 

In context, however, Jesus is not using rabbinic techniques to expose the Pharisees. Furthermore, His claim to forgive sins didn’t need an affirming miracle to validate it. Jesus had the authority to forgive sins whether or not He accompanied the forgiveness with a healing. In this account Jesus was equating healing with forgiveness as equally the work of God. He wasn’t merely saying that the man’s sins were forgiven, as the lesson says; rather, Jesus was declaring that they actually WERE forgiven. 

Even the Pharisees knew what He was saying. He wasn’t just getting their attention and making big claims. He literally made them look at the fact that only God can forgive sins, and only God can heal a paralytic. Neither of these deeds was less than the other. Jesus wasn’t arguing lesser to greater. He was literally equating healing the man with forgiving the man—both were done simultaneously, and each was an act only God could do.

The Pharisees knew what He was revealing, and that fact—that Jesus Is God—is what made them so angry!

Jesus wasn’t reminding them, by healing the man, that they had forgotten how to be just and merciful and humble. He was revealing His identity. The lesson reduces this story to a “teaching moment”—that Jesus was giving the Pharisees a moral lesson and shaming them for not seeing the paralytic’s suffering and need. But that is not the sense of the account in Mark.

In fact, in Mark 2:7 the Pharisees say: 

 “Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming; who can forgive sins but God alone?”

The Pharisees weren’t in a frenzy because Jesus was able to heal but because He claimed to forgive sins. By declaring sins forgiven, Jesus was proclaiming Himself to be God, with the authority to do what no mere prophet could do. Not even the miracle-working Old Testament prophets, Elijah and Elisha, had forgiven sins! 

Jesus was not validating his claim in this account; He was demonstrating that He had the authority to forgive and to heal because He Was God—and the Pharisees knew what He was saying.

What About New Wine?

Monday’s lesson just mentions Jesus’s two parables of putting new wine into old wineskins and of putting unshrunk patch of cloth on an old garment. The lesson doesn’t discuss these parables but merely says, 

Jesus continues with two illustrations that highlight the contrast between His teaching and that of the religious leaders—unshrunk cloth on an old garment and new wine in old wineskins. What an interesting way to contrast the teaching of Christ and the religious leaders. It shows just how corrupted the ways of the teachers had become. Even true religion can be turned into darkness if people are not careful.

First, Adventism really cannot discuss the parable of the new wine and the old wineskins without exposing its unscriptural foundation. Here is the parable:

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins [as well]; but [one puts] new wine into fresh wineskins.”—Mark 2: 22 LSB

Clearly Jesus is saying that if one puts new wine into old wineskins which have already been stretched by accommodating a previous batch of new wine, the fermentation process of the new wine as it sits in the wineskin will burst the skin because an old wineskin will have no more “give”, no more ability to stretch. 

Adventism, however, can’t actually deal with the obvious problem because they insist that the Bible does not teach that fermented wine is permitted. In fact, Adventism teaches that even at the wedding of Cana recorded in John 2, the wine Jesus created out of water was GRAPE JUICE. 

Adventism, like Mormonism, forbids the drinking of any alcoholic beverage, and they claim that Jesus would never drink wine, create wine, nor teach that wine was OK to drink. Thus they insist that this parable does not refer to fermentation, and they skim over the story in such a way that they don’t deal with the actual metaphor Jesus was using. Instead, they say that Jesus was contrasting His teaching with the Pharisees’ teaching to show how corrupt they had become! 

This was not Jesus’ point at all. In the text of all three synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—Jesus tells this parable in the context of His responding to the Pharisees when they ask why His disciples do not fast. He tells them that the attendants of a bridegroom will not fast while the bridegroom is with them—but the days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. Then they will fast. 

In His answer, Jesus alludes to His death, when He will be gone from His disciples, and they will mourn. Then he immediately says that no one puts unshrunk cloth on an old garment, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins because the new wine will expand and break the old skins. Rather, new wine requires fresh skins.

In the parable Jesus is illustrating that He is the One who is bringing something new—something that cannot be contained in the old forms of Jewish law and tradition. Jesus is foreshadowing the new covenant! He is fulfilling all the shadows of the old covenant; He is the spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and His death and resurrection will inaugurate a new covenant that will burst and ruin the old covenant for any future use. The gospel of Jesus’ finished atonement will expand like new wine aging in a wineskin. It will grow and change the whole world as people trust Him and take His flesh and blood as their propitiation for sins! 

Furthermore, the reality of the new covenant in Jesus’ blood cannot be contained in the old wineskin of the old covenant and its laws and ordinances. It FULFILLs all those laws and ordinances, but if one were to try to put the reality of the new covenant into the form of the old covenant law, both the purpose of the old covenant and the power of the new would be lost. The law would negate the power of Jesus’ blood and the reality of believers’ living by the Spirit, and in its attempt to contain the life and power of the new covenant, the law would shatter because it was structured to function with shadows of Jesus instead of in the living reality of the Lord Jesus Himself! 

Jesus was clearly revealing who He was and what He was bringing into the world, but the Pharisees were not willing to see—just as the Adventist organization is unwilling to see. Adventism cannot allow the words to say what Jesus was really telling the Jews!

Lord of the Sabbath

The week’s lesson finishes with two of Jesus’s Sabbath encounters: His responding to the Pharisees’ accusation that Jesus’s disciples were breaking the law by picking and eating grain on the Sabbath, and His healing a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath. 

We will focus on the grain field account because it contains one of Adventism’s most badly-twisted “proof-texts”. The account in Mark says:

And it happened that He was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads [of grain]. And the Pharisees were saying to Him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” 

And He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God around the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for [anyone] to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?” 

And Jesus was saying to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Consequently the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” —Mark 2:23-28 LSB 

Adventism has never addressed the actual details of this account. They say that Jesus was merely showing that the Sabbath is “for man”, and that as the “Lord of the Sabbath”, He was demonstrating proper Sabbath-keeping.

Further, Adventism claims that the law of God did not forbid the disciples to pick the grain and eat it; they teach that Jesus was showing that the Pharisees had added rabbinic rules to their Sabbath-keeping, and Jesus was showing that the Sabbath was for the benefit and even for the pleasure of man, and picking and eating grain was proper Sabbath activity. Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, declared it to be so.

The lesson says this:

Jesus responds with the story of David’s eating the sacred shewbread (1 Sam. 21:1–6). The shewbread was removed on the Sabbath; so, David’s journey may well have been an emergency escape on the Sabbath. Jesus argues that if David and his men were justified in eating the shewbread, then Jesus’ disciples are justified in plucking and eating grain.

Jesus further indicates that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of humanity, not the other way around, and that the basis for His claim is that He is the Lord of the Sabbath.

The reference to David’s eating the shewbread is not explored except to say that Jesus was using David as His historic excuse to eat the grain on Sabbath like David at the bread—suggesting that David might have had a Sabbath emergency. 

I have never heard any Adventist explanation of this account that actually deals with what Jesus says to the Pharisees here. First, let’s see why Jesus says the law forbade David from eating the shewbread:

“Then you shall take fine flour and bake twelve cakes with it; two-tenths [of an ephah] shall be [in] each cake. And you shall set them [in] two rows, six [to] a row, on the pure [gold] table before Yahweh. And you shall put pure frankincense on each row that it may be a memorial portion for the bread, [even] an offering by fire to Yahweh. 

“Every sabbath day he shall set it in order before Yahweh continually; it is an everlasting covenant for the sons of Israel. And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place; for it is most holy to him from the offerings to Yahweh by fire, [his] portion forever.” —Leviticus 24:5-9 LSB

The shewbread was “an offering to Yahweh”. It was sacred, never to be consumed by regular Israelites. Furthermore, the lesson says that the shewbread was REMOVED on the Sabbath, so the lesson made it seem that David’s eating it was an issue of finding food in a Sabbath emergency. Yet the text says that the shewbread was actually “set in order”—arranged in its display in the tabernacle—on the Sabbath. Setting out the new shewbread was one of the priests’ Sabbath duties—it was work the law MANDATED for priests on the Sabbath. 

Finally, only the priests could eat the shewbread. It was holy and was considered an offering to the Lord. Just as the priests were the only ones who ate the best portions of the burnt offerings offered to the Lord, so the priests were the only ones who ate the shewbread. 

Jesus was not justifying His disciples’ eating in the grain field because hunger trumped Sabbath rest, as the lesson suggests. Further, He was not justifying David’s eating the shewbread because the men had an emergency and needed food. The law never allowed for the law to be broken on the basis of a felt need. The things God called “sacred” in the law were always sacred; no one could break those laws because of an emergency unless God specifically mandated the exception. 

Just as Uzzah was struck dead when He tried to stabilize the ark of God as it began to topple off the ox cart as David was having it transported, so David and his men were breaking the law to eat the shewbread, and the disciples were also breaking the law stated in Exodus 34:21:

“You shall work six days, but on the seventh day you shall rest; [even] during plowing time and harvest you shall rest.” —Exodus 34:21 LSB 

This law of Sabbath rest echoed the pre-Sinai prohibition against the Israelites’ gathering manna on the Sabbath day. So what act of God declared that David and Jesus were without sin as they did what was not lawful?

When David ate the shewbread, he had already been anointed privately as the king of Israel. He was God’s anointed—the recipient of God’s unconditional promise that one in his line would always sit on the throne of Israel. Yet Saul was still on the throne. In fact, Saul was the reason David was fleeing and ate the shewbread! Not even the priest Abiathar knew that David had already been anointed. 

On that day the Jews accosted Jesus and His disciples in the grain field, they had no idea that He was also God’s anointed, the Messiah who was to sit on David’s throne. 

Jesus specifically compared David and his men to Himself and His disciples. Both David and Jesus broke the details of the law—because God had given them a higher authority than the law. Both David and Jesus were God’s anointed, and Jesus was making the point that God’s anointing fulfills the law. They were under God’s personal authority.

The shewbread, like the Sabbath, were UNDER God’s authority. Yet Adventism taught us that Jesus’s being Lord of the Sabbath meant that He came as God’s agent to show us how to honor the day—a bit like King Charles sits as the authority figure who manages the integrity of Great Britain. We were taught that even Jesus was UNDER the obligation of Sabbath-keeping.

But Jesus was saying the OPPOSITE of what we learned. He was saying that He was MORE IMPORTANT than the Sabbath. He was Lord OVER it; He was the One who had full authority to FULFILL it and to replace it with its eternal meaning in Himself. 

Jesus compared Himself to David to draw the Jews’ attention to the prophecies they knew: the throne of David was eternal, and one in the line of David would sit on David’s throne in the kingdom. He was that descendant of David, and just as God’s anointing of David trumped the law of the shewbread’s use, so God’s anointing of Jesus gave Jesus the authority to redefine and to fulfill the Sabbath. 

When Jesus “broke” the law and when David broke the law of the shewbread, they were without sin. David and his men foreshadowed Jesus and His men as they fulfilled the shadows of the law in full view of the Pharisees’ critical eyes. Jesus was the fulfillment of hundreds of years of prophecies and shadows. He was the LORD of the Sabbath. He didn’t bow to the Sabbath; the Sabbath bowed to Him. 

Jesus IS our Sabbath rest; He is the end of all our work to please God and to win His favor. When we trust Him and His finished work of atonement through His death on the cross, His burial, and His resurrection, we pass from death to life at that moment. We enter our spiritual rest eternally.

Have you trusted in Jesus alone? Have you confessed that you need a Savior? If not, come to Him today. He will save you, and will pass from death to life. You will enter Sabbath rest. †

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.