Lesson 9: “Jerusalem Controversies”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson misses Jesus’ provocation of the Jews in His triumphal entry to Jerusalem.
- The lesson de-emphasizes Jesus’ authority as He cleansed the temple, making it a moral lesson.
- The author missed Jesus’ declaration of the patriarchs being living and taught soul-sleep instead.
More and more these lessons reveal Adventism’s downplaying of the eternal, divine authority of the Lord Jesus and their emphasis of their physicalist worldview. The insipid nature of the lessons’ moral instructions consistently rises from the underlying assumption of Adventism’s soulless nature of man and their tritheistic god.
In the process of reducing the accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry to moral instructions, Adventism’s view of a limited, fallible Jesus who came to be our example of obedience and goodness becomes increasingly clear.
This week’s lesson covers Mark 11 through Mark 12:37, and it opens with Mark’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of His passion week.
Jesus’ ride from the Mount of Olives to the temple in Jerusalem is called the “triumphal entry” because of the similarity of its purpose to a Roman triumph awarding a Roman military hero.
A Roman triumph was a public celebration of a Roman commander who had led his forces to victory in a war. The general would ride in a chariot dressed in royal clothes that identified him as being nearly as important as a king or a god. The people would line the streets as the general and his war captives and army followed him while the masses cheered. Triumphs were huge public festival events with public games, entertainment, and great publicity for the conquering hero. All eyes were on him on that day.
Jesus’ triumphal entry was not exactly the same as a Roman triumph, but its purpose was to present Jesus as the Messiah all Israel had expected. He intentionally presented Himself to the nation publicly.
Until this moment, Jesus had conducted His ministry among the people by consistently teaching and fulfilling prophecies in front of the leaders and the common people alike. He had opened the Scriptures to the people; He had consistently delivered the principles of kingdom living and called people to believe in Him—but He had not publicly presented Himself as the Messiah.
The text notes in the NASB95 addressing Mark 11:1–11 say this about this event:
The Triumphal Entry, which inaugurates Passion Week, is a deliberate Messianic action, and the clue to its understanding is found in Zech 9:9 (quoted in Matt 21:5; John 12:15). Jesus purposefully offers Himself as the Messiah, knowing that this will provoke Jewish leaders to take action against him.
The lesson downplays the significance and the public stir caused by Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as the people spread their coats on the ground for Him to ride on as they waved palm branches and shouted,
And those who went in front and those who followed were shouting: “Hosanna! BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD; Blessed [is] the coming kingdom of our father David; Hosanna in the highest!”—Mark 11:9, 10 LSB
The lesson doesn’t actually say anything wrong about the Triumphal Entry—it just downplays and obscures the significance and impact of this moment. Jesus came fulfilling the prophesy I Zechariah 9:9:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Make a loud shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is righteous and endowed with salvation, Lowly and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a pack animal.—Zechariah 9:9 LSB
Jesus picked this moment, at the beginning of the week that would culminate in His arrest and crucifixion, to present Himself in a public celebration of honor, fulfilling the Messianic prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 and publicly claiming to be the Messiah. He was offering Himself to the Jewish leaders as their Promised One—and He knew He was putting Himself into their hands for His death on a cross.
At the same time His public presentation of Himself was an appeal to all to believe Him.
The lesson, however, states details including the elevation of Jerusalem, the size of the city and the temple mount, and the meaning of “Hosasnna”—originally “save now” but eventually “praise to God”. The emotion, the publicity, the significance of this event is obscured in banal details, and Sunday’s lesson ends with this discussion question:
The idea of riding on the donkey invokes the idea of humility. Why is that such an important trait, especially for Christians? What have we, in light of the Cross, to be proud about?
The discussion questions manipulates this turning point in Jesus’ ministry into an introspective question for the reader. Am I humble? How humble should I be, and why? Do I actually have any reason to be proud when I think about the cross?
These ideas have nothing at all to do with the account of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey in a public, sensational entry presenting Himself as the One fulfilling the Messianic prophecy they all knew!
This lesson is a clear example of how Adventism uses Scripture to find themselves in its pages. But the Bible is NOT about us! It is the revelation of God carrying out His purposes to glorify Himself and to reconcile us to Himself through the death and resurrection of His Son. The Triumphal Entry is NOT a moral lesson to guilt readers into introspective self-flagellation over their secret pride.
Jesus is NOT an example of “humility” in His Messianic entrance into Jerusalem. He was singularly showing all mankind that God had kept His promise: the Messiah had come—and the Messiah HAS come! Further, He was revealing Himself as God, the anointed one, the promised King in the line of David! We are not to try to read ourselves into that story in any sense; rather, our proper response is to bow before the sovereign God of all creation and thank Him for sending His Son and for keeping His promises.
Temple Cleansing and a Cursed Tree
Monday’s lesson deals with Mark 11:12–26 which describes Jesus cursing the fig tree which bore no fruit and also His cleansing the temple of the money changers and merchants who had made the temple court into a chaotic market place.
Monday’s lesson covers these two events, rightly pointing out that the cleansing of the temple occurred between Jesus’ cursing the fig tree and the disciples discovering that it had, overnight, withered from the roots up. Yet even here Jesus’ authority and His divine right to judge are ignored. Here is what the lesson says:
He found no fruit and said to the tree, “ ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again’ ” (Mark 11:14, ESV). It was a very strange and atypical action for Jesus, but what follows right after becomes even more striking.
What happens next likely occurs in the Court of the Gentiles, where selling of sacrifices took place (recently begun by Caiaphas). Jesus clears away the sellers from the courts so that quiet worship may return. His action is a direct affront to those in charge of the temple system.
Jesus links two Old Testament passages as a scathing rebuke of the unholy traffic. He insists the temple is to be a house of prayer for all people (Isa. 56:7), emphatically including the Gentiles. Then He says the leaders have made the temple a den of robbers (Jer. 7:11). Then, at the end of this amazing day, Jesus leaves the city with His disciples (Mark 11:19).
Then, as if this insipid account of the cleansing of the temple isn’t bad enough, the day’s lesson ends with these questions:
What things in your life do you need Jesus to clean? How does this happen?
When Jesus entered the temple the day after His triumphal entry, He exercised His Messianic authority. Jesus had clearly been in the temple other times without doing anything this dramatic. All three synoptic gospels record Jesus cleansing the temple at the end of His ministry; John records a cleansing at the beginning of His ministry.
This event was not quiet. He didn’t merely go in an clear away the merchants, as if He directed them to leave and they obliged by scurrying away “so that quiet worship” could return. Here is what Mark actually records:
Then they came to Jerusalem. And He entered the temple and began to drive out those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves; and He was not permitting anyone to carry merchandise through the temple. And He [began to] teach and say to them, “Is it not written, ‘MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED A HOUSE OF PRAYER FOR ALL THE NATIONS”? But you have made it a ROBBERS’ DEN.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard [this], and [began] seeking how to destroy Him; for they were afraid of Him, for the whole crowd was astonished at His teaching.—Mark 11:15–18
Jesus descended on those merchants and by implication the priests and leaders of the temple with the fury of God’s judgment. He physically overturned tables and chairs, and He stopped the use of the temple court as a shortcut between the city of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Jesus didn’t merely clear the court and restore peace and quiet. He executed God’s judgment, quoted the Scripture to them that they were breaking, and violently dislodged the merchants and leaders who were using the temple for their own gain and by so doing were preventing the gentiles from worshiping God!
Furthermore, He cursed the fig tree that looked green and lovely but bore no fruit, and by this act of symbolic judgment He represented God’s judgment on unbelieving Israel. As He moved toward His death, He showed the Jews God’s judgment on their nation. They had trampled the temple and had prevented true believers from worshiping. They had refused to recognize and believe Him, and He further knew that they were plotting to kill Him.
The nation’s future was about to change, and Jesus was demonstrating His authority and His right to execute judgment on sin. He was about to fulfill the shadows and the requirements of the law, and His death would mark the end of Judaism’s temple worship. True worshipers would believe in Him.
His temple cleansing was not a quiet, compassionate restoration of temple worship but an act of divine judgment on those who trampled God’s word and robbed the people not only of their money but of access to worship. It was not an event to cause us to figure out what we need Jesus to clean!
Furthermore, the only way for us to have our lives cleaned is by believing in Jesus alone as God’s Messiah and Substitute for us—the very thing the apostate Jews who defiled that temple refused to do!
God of the Living
Wednesday’s lesson slides over one of Jesus’s most profound revelations of the state of the dead. The passage is found in Mark 12:24–27. The Sadducees (who did not believe in the resurrection) came to Him with a theoretical question about a woman who had successively married seven brothers, each one of whom had died without giving her a child. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection, they asked?
The question was a trap, of course. They thought there couldn’t possibly be an answer to their clever question. But Jesus surprised them.
Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures nor the power of God?
“For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
“But regarding the fact that the dead are raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the [passage] about [the burning] bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I AM THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB’?
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken.”—Mark 12:24–27
An alternative translation of verse 27 say, “He is not the God of corpses”. Jesus was clearly teaching that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are NOT merely corpses (or decomposed dust) but are LIVING. Furthermore, He was telling the Sadducees that there would be a resurrection, and he stated that people would rise from the dead and be “like angels in heaven”.
Jesus said no more about that detail that what we read here, and we cannot explain how that will look fully, but we can know that the eternal, glorified state will be different from our situation on earth. Further, we also know from His statement that God identifies Himself—as He did to Moses in Exodus 3—that as the God of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Even more, Jesus said that they are not dead but living, because God is not the God of the dead!
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed God, and Genesis 15:6 tells us that Abraham’s belief in God was credited to him as righteousness. Those who believe are spiritually alive, and God is their God, even when their bodies have died. Yet they themselves are alive and with God. God is not the God of the dead—the spiritually dead who are forever away from His presence.
The lesson, however, completely reinterprets what Jesus said. On page 115 in Wednesday’s lesson we read this:
Seeking to discredit the doctrine of the resurrection, the Sadducees point to a moral dilemma of whose wife the woman would be in the resurrection. Jesus counters their argument in two steps, referring to the Scriptures and to the power of God. First, He describes the power of God in the resurrection and indicates that there will not be marriage in heaven. Then He defends the doctrine of the resurrection by appealing to Exodus 3:1–22, where God indicates that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus implies that this means that they will be raised; they cannot remain dead if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are, for now, dead.
This paragraph clearly contradicts what Jesus actually said: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ARE living! God is the One who said He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that is present tense: I Am. Jesus states that God is not the God of the dead; He is not the God of corpses. The patriarchs ARE LIVING, and we are to believe the plain meaning of Jesus’s words!
Adventism twists and rationalizes away the actual meanings of Scripture’s words in order to fit their own worldview. Adventism is built upon an unbiblical foundation, a false reality, that denies that humans have immaterial spirits. On the authority of its prophet, Adventism flagrantly denies that the words of Jesus mean literally what He says, and they close their eyes to the dreadful significance of living inside a lie.
This week’s lesson systematically eclipses Jesus’s true identity as God and His divine authority to judge and to teach eternal truth. They deny the significance of His Triumphal Entry, of His cleansing of the temple, and of His teaching that the believers who have been gathered to their fathers are not actually dead and gone. They exist, and God is their God, even when their bodies have died.
The Lord Jesus IS GOD, and once again Adventism has obscured His eternal power and divine nature as they have suppressed His revealed truth by their natural wickedness. Adventism is a religion with a false gospel and a false Jesus, and this lesson has perpetrated the fallible Jesus to its members worldwide.
The real Jesus, though, has completed the propitiation for our sin. He has died for our sins on the cross. His blood was sufficient to pay for the sins of the whole world, and we are asked to believe Him. We are asked to admit that we are by nature children of wrath and sinners who need a Savior.
If you have not trusted Him, bring your sins to Him. Lay them at the foot of His cross and admit that you need a Savior. When you trust His finished work of death, His burial, and His resurrection which broke our curse, you will pass from death to life. Believe Him today! †
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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