RICHARD FOSTER | Contributor
Our Lord Jesus gave two commands which He said summarize all of the law and the prophets. The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul. And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself.
If we were to consider Christ’s command about loving God with all of our heart, mind, and soul, how do you measure up? As an Adventist you might go to the Decalogue and say, well I didn’t worship any other gods this week. I didn’t carve myself any idols; I didn’t use God’s name in swearing. And I rested on the Sabbath from my regular labor.
Okay, leaving it at this, everything might seem pretty good. But is it possible there might be more to loving God with all of one’s heart, mind, and soul? Is it possible that the Decalogue runs deeper than just the surface understanding? After all, idols aren’t just carved from stone, but an idol is anything and everything that interferes in the least with our dedication to God. “Another god” is anything and everything that takes away from our devotion and time to God, our service to Him, our dedication to Him.
Did you serve Him in every way perfectly in the past week, or could you have done better? Besides just avoiding using God’s name as a curse word, did you literally avoid anything and everything that might possibly dishonor Him, or subtract from His glory in your life? Regarding the Sabbath, did you give the entire time to keeping it holy by devoting every second to God with the utmost of care?
Please think about these things. And remember, according to Jesus’ own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, it is possible to break each command not only by acts but also by thoughts, intentions, and speech. Remember, for example, that if the sixth commandment negatively prohibits murder, it positively implies a responsibility to do all you can to preserve the lives of others.
After careful consideration did you do pretty well? Or could you do better? Have you loved God with all your heart, mind, and soul, or is there still room for you to love Him more? Did you pray without ceasing as the Scripture says in 1 Thessalonians 5? Did you avoid even the slightest inclination to pride? We could go on and on, and we haven’t even yet discussed weather loving neighbor, and the fulfilling of that command in every single way, every second of every day, for 365 days a year.
So, dear Adventist friend, if you were to stand before God’s judgment seat today and be measured against God’s holy law, which is summed up in perfect love for God and perfect love for neighbor, how would you do? Can you honestly say that you would meet the standard and have God declare that you are not guilty? Would He say after a review of your life that you have kept His law perfectly in every way possible?
If God were to limit His evaluation period of your life to simply the last week, would He say that you have perfectly measured up to His standard? If you didn’t do it last week, do you think you could do it in the coming week?
If you answered yes, or are even tempted to answer yes, are you certain enough that you can do it that you would bet your eternal destiny on it?
Rationalizing
In light of the impossibility of keeping the law perfectly, some Adventists have suggested to me that while we may not be able to perfectly keep the law, we can keep it well enough that God can save us. But please remember that God is perfect, that He is perfectly just, holy, and righteous. If God’s standard is loving Him with all your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself, how much could He let you slide in coming up short? Would He maintain His justice, holiness, and righteousness if He let you off on the basis of your sincerity and best effort? Could a perfect judge remain perfect if He were to let anything slide? If God were to say that ninety percent obedience is good enough for you to be saved and the other ten percent can be overlooked, how could He possibly be just?
All of these things being the case, what chance do you possibly have of being saved? There is no keeping the law well enough that you give it your best and God does the rest. There’s no keeping the law well enough so that God can save you. God, who is perfect, does not grade on a curve. And you would agree that God does not have a system like, for example, in Roman Catholicism, in which you can make up for your deficiency in righteousness by getting what you need from a treasury of merit, or by going to purgatory to finish having your remaining sin purged. Such ideas are absent from Scripture.
You may be asking at this point, what chance then, do I ever have of being saved? God requires me to give perfect obedience, but you are saying l will never be able to do it. So how then can anyone be saved?
Miraculous Provision
Well, the answer is that in ourselves we can’t be saved. In and of ourselves there is absolutely nothing we can do to change our lost condition. But that being said, God has provided a way in which He can save us apart from our being able to perfectly keep the law. God has done what is necessary to be able to save sinful people without compromising His justice, righteousness, or holiness in any way in the least. And the way which God has provided for wretched, imperfect sinners to be saved is what we call the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.
The gospel is a term sometimes thrown around in Adventism, but with great confusion. However, the gospel is simpler than you might think. It is the good news that sinners can be eternally saved on the basis of what Jesus Christ has accomplished in His life, death, and resurrection.
If we were to ask many people what Jesus did on the cross, many would answer, “He died for our sins.” And as an Adventist, you would probably answer the same. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. But sometimes we haven’t thought through the full implications of what Christ’s death on the cross for our sins really means for us.
The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). God told Adam and Eve that in the day they ate of the fruit they would surely die. So the death that God says sinners are doomed to on account of their sins, Jesus Christ suffers in the place of His people, as their substitute. In other words, the wages which we have earned for our sins—death—has been dealt with by the death of Jesus Christ. His death substitutes for our death.
Practically speaking, what this means is that the eternal death which we must die as sinners has already been taken care of by Jesus.
So, if Jesus has already died the death His people deserve for their sins, will they die for their sins?
Since God is just and righteous, the answer is no. If you are in Christ there can be no condemnation, no punishment, and no eternal death for you, because Jesus has paid it all, just as the hymn says. Furthermore, God, who is just, will not demand payment for what has already been paid. The fact that Jesus has paid it all means that He has not only paid for all of the sins you have committed in the past, but all of the sins you will yet commit in the future. The wrath of God has come upon all our sins past, present, and future, in Jesus Christ who became sin for us, so that there is no condemnation left for us if we be in Christ.
So if a believer should sin tomorrow, God may correct His child by various means as a father corrects. But He has no wrath or punishment for those who are in Jesus, because Jesus has satisfied all of the justice due to their sins already. There is no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). This is pardon full and free from the penalty of your sins.
What Is Propitiation?
The Bible doesn’t teach the Adventist concept of believers being on probation until an investigative judgment is finished. That would be bad news, very bad news. But the Bible teaches full pardon from sin at the moment of faith, because of the objective work of Jesus on the cross.
There is a special word used in the New Testament in places such as Romans 3:25, or 1 John 2:2, that describes Christ’s work to deal with our sin. That special word is “propitiation”. As an Adventist I never heard propitiation mentioned from a pulpit or saw it in Adventist literature.
What is propitiation?
Consider this: the Bible that was used by the Apostle Paul was the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. The Greek word Paul used in Romans 3:25 that is translated “propitiation” in English is exactly the same word used in Leviticus 16 of the Greek Old Testament for mercy seat!
As an Adventist you have probably heard of the mercy seat in the sanctuary teaching. Once a year on the day of atonement the high priest would bring the blood of the sacrifice into the holy of holies of the earthly sanctuary and would sprinkle the blood before the mercy seat. The mercy seat was the covering over the ark of the covenant which contained the tablets of the Decalogue underneath. The mercy seat in the holy of holies is where the presence of God dwelt among ancient Israel. The blood of the sacrifice sprinkled before the presence of God symbolized that God’s wrath against sin had been atoned.
Now here’s Romans 3:25:
whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed,—Romans 3:25 NKJV
Think about this: God set forth Christ to be our mercy seat by His blood! The payment for Israel’s sin that was made every year on the day of atonement when the high priest brought the blood of sacrifice to the mercy seat in the holy of holies was a shadow of what happened when Christ shed His blood on the cross! When Jesus shed His blood for our sin, He made the one-time, eternal sacrifice for our sins. God’s wrath for the sins of His people was satisfied. Sin was fully atoned by Christ on the cross.
The investigative judgment, which would take the fulfillment of the day of atonement and move it to 1844, simply cannot work in light of the propitiation made for sin by the blood of Christ! Sin was already fully taken care of at the cross! The atonement is complete, and it has been for two thousand years so that we can be certain, if we are trusting in Jesus to save us from our sins, that we have peace with God right now on this day!
This is good news indeed! But you might say, what about obedience? God requires obedience to His law as well as death for any transgression of it! And while the death for sin is taken care of by Jesus, what about the obedience that God demands? Don’t we have to now resolve to get more and more obedient to God, so that we have the perfect obedience that God requires?
It is precisely at this point that many Adventists have started with great intentions, only to fall into one of two errors in their attempts to work up to perfect obedience. The first error is a nauseous one, even to most Adventists. And that one is when a person has really convinced themselves that they are getting to where they need to be. They fully believe that they are getting to fully perfected obedience (or that they already have attained), and that they will be able to achieve this perfection prior to the end of their life or the Adventist close of probation.
That anyone could entertain such a thought is symptomatic of a great ignorance in understanding human sinfulness and God’s holiness.
The more common trap that Adventists fall into, though, is eventually despairing and giving up hope. Or in more mild cases, they may just go through their entire lives never knowing if they are good enough.
Christ’s Righteousness Provided
But the fact of the matter is that the gospel not only provides full, one-hundred-percent forgiveness for sins because of the death of Jesus Christ, but it also provides the perfect righteousness that God requires. Christ lived a perfect life, never once committing any sin, because He is God incarnate. The sinless perfection of Christ is imputed to us at the moment we trust in Jesus to save us!
What is imputation?
It is a word used by the apostle Paul, and it conveys the idea of something being credited or accounted to someone. At the moment a sinner trusts in Jesus Christ to be their Savior, a double, two-way imputation takes place. Your sin is accounted to Christ, which He paid for in full for believers when He died a heinous death on the cross! But His sinless life, His perfect righteousness—that is accounted to you! So instead of seeing the sinner that you are, God now sees you as having died in Christ already for your sins, and not only that, He sees the perfect righteous life of His Son instead of your sinful life!
Scripture says:
For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:21 NKJV
Christ was made sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him! But how can this be a reality for you? How can you know that God will do this for you?
But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness,—Romans 4:5 NKJV
We have considered God’s standard in the law and the perfection it requires. We have realized it is far and away beyond the attainment of sinful people. In a nutshell, we have realized that we are ungodly. But this very bad news becomes good news in Romans 4:5, for it is ungodly people that God is looking to justify!
How does God do this? How can you ,an ungodly person, be justified? Not by any work you can possibly do. Rather, the Scripture says this justification is accounted to the person who does not work! Amazingly, justification is accounted to the person who believes in “Him who justifies the ungodly”!
In other words, the person who simply believes and trusts in Jesus’ full payment for their sins by His blood that was shed for them—to that person, their faith in Jesus’s finished atonement is accounted as righteousness!
So, are you tired of working? Adventism has taught all kinds of works that a person must do to “get ready”. But the Scripture says just the opposite. To him who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted as righteousness.
In this we truly learn what it means to fall on the rock Jesus Christ and be broken. We must be broken of thinking any works we do can earn anything with God or help us “get ready” for anything. Because only once we have been broken in this way can we cast ourselves solely and wholly on the mercies of God in Christ.
Are you willing to be broken? Are you willing to trust in Him, His finished work, His perfect righteousness, to the exclusion of anything you can do? If so, this may become your reality:
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.—Romans 5:1-2 NKJV
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