Lesson 10: “The Last Days”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson opens with a reminder to give generous offerings in spite of corrupt leaders.
- The author notes Adventism’s “inside track” on eschatology and connects it to the state of the dead.
- Eschatology is defined as the gospel about tomorrow with no mention of Jesus’ atonement.
This week’s lesson addresses Mark 12:41–44 through Mark 13:32. Here Mark recounts Jesus’s teaching about things to come and the return of Christ. Jesus quotes Daniel 9:27 and the prophecy of the abomination of desolation. He warns them to flee from Judea when Jerusalem is about to be destroyed; He warns them of false Christs and false prophets who will come and, if possible, deceive the elect.
Jesus tells them of the heavenly signs that will precede the coming of the Son of Man: the sun and moon will be darkened; the stars will fall, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. He tells them that angels will be sent to gather the elect “from the four winds”, and this prophecy echoes God’s promises to Israel from Deuteronomy 30:3–5 and Zechariah 2:6.
The lesson, however, veers from the text and goes to EGW to explain the Adventist version of coming events.
Before the lesson addresses eschatology, though, it looks at the end of Mark 12:41–44 which tells the story of the widow whose tiny offering Jesus commended. The passage says this:
And He sat down opposite the treasury, and [began] observing how the crowd was putting money into the treasury; and many rich people were putting in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two lepta, which amount to a quadrans. And calling His disciples to Him, He said to them, “Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all those putting [money] into the treasury; for they all put in out of their surplus, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on.”—Mark 12:41–44 LSB
The story is straightforward; the woman gave God everything she had—not because she felt obligated to give to the temple but because she honored God. Her love for God promoted her to give Him all she had, and Jesus commended her. The Jews around her were giving their surplus—and many of them had large sums of surplus and made sure others noticed their large gifts. But this woman gave all she had to God.
The lesson, though, drew a different message from this story. Here is what the author wrote on page 125:
This story contains a deep lesson about the management of resources. Giving to God’s cause does not depend on the actions of leaders to have validity. The religious leadership of the temple was corrupt, but Jesus did not thereby affirm withholding offerings. If ever there were corrupt religious leaders (Caiaphas? Annas?), those at this time were among the worst. And Jesus knew it too.
It is true that leaders have a sacred responsibility to use resources in accordance with the will of God, but even if they do not, those who give to the cause of God are still blessed in their giving, as this woman was.
On the other hand, withholding tithes or offerings when leaders do something displeasing means that the giving is tied to their actions instead of being made in thankfulness to God. However tempting it may be to do that, it’s wrong.
This quote is followed by this discussion question:
What should this story teach us about the importance of being faithful in what we give to the Lord’s work?
This is an example of the subtle way Adventism appropriates God’s word to benefit their own organization. In the first place, the woman wasn’t giving her money to support Judaism per se. She was giving an offering to God reflecting her own heart’s commitment to Him.
Secondly, Adventism assumes, illegitimately, that it as a religion is “the Lord’s work”. Adventism teaches its members that they are to tithe—and preferably to give a double-tithe—to the Seventh-day Adventist organization and also to give free-will offerings to support the expenses of the local church, the local Adventist school, the Adventist community outreach, the Adventist health system, and whatever other expenses one’s local church might have.
Because many Adventists know that there is corrupt leadership and management within their local churches, conferences, and even within the unions and divisions, they often withhold tithes and offerings, preferring to give to causes they personally trust. This self-designed giving is deadly for the Adventist organization. With admittedly declining membership in North America and even in Europe—the divisions with the most discretionary money—the loss of offerings is serious. When those who reman members cease to give sacrificially, the organization’s support is increasingly at risk.
Adventism never misses an opportunity to remind its members that they are to be faithfully giving generously—even beyond their means—to support “the Lord’s work”.
But Adventism is NOT the Lord’s work. It is a man-made religion with a false gospel, a false Jesus, and an unbiblical worldview that changes the nature of sin, of salvation, and of the nature of humanity and of God Himself. The crazy-making deception of convincing Adventists that their church is the Lord’s work and that the story of the poor, generous widow is their personal example is to misuse the woman’s belief in the real God of Scripture and to create guilt and confusion within Adventists.
Even if the corrupt priesthood of first-century Judaism were a concern to this poor widow, the system of temple worship and the offerings outlined in the law were God’s revelation to Israel. The widow was acting faithfully in accordance with God’s law. Adventism, however, is NOT God’s revelation but is a great deception. Adventists giving to the Adventist organization may be sincerely deceived, but their offerings are not in accordance with Scripture. They are emphatically not supporting the Lord’s work.
For the lesson to use this story to guilt Adventists to give sacrificially is to completely miss the point and to abuse the Adventist members by extracting as much money from them as possible by misusing the Bible.
Prophetic “Inside Track”
The bulk of the week’s lesson addresses eschatology and Adventism’s unique prophetic interpretations of Daniel 7 and Daniel 9.
Last quarter, in the lesson series on The Great Controversy, we addressed the confusion of Adventism’s day-for-a-year time prophecies. We showed that, on the authority of Ellen White, Adventism has conflated Daniel 7 and 9, has ignored the historical context clearly explained in Daniel 8, and has arbitrarily assigned a day-for-a-year method of figuring prophecy to arrive at Adventism’s spurious 1844 date for Jesus’ entry into the heavenly Most Holy Place to begin his supposed investigative judgment of all professed believers—a judgment which is still supposedly going on.
In this lesson we will not dive into the specific ways Adventism misuses the Old Testament to support their unique, gospel-denying doctrine of an incomplete atonement. What we will do is to show how Adventism tips its hand and reveals—ever so subtly—their pride in having “special knowledge” and a different gospel than regular Christians have.
Wednesday’s lesson reveals again Adventism’s diminutive Jesus. After skating over Jesus’ teaching on the abomination of desolation and the coming great tribulation, the lesson focusses on Jesus’ warning that false prophets will come. Ironically, Ellen White IS one of those false prophets of whom Jesus warned. She has deceived millions of people with her almost-biblical-sounding descriptions of Jesus, but she has anchored her followers to a Christ who is not God Almighty. She has given Adventism a Jesus who did not complete the atonement at the cross, and she taught that Jesus gave up His attributes of God while on earth. She taught a weak and fallible Jesus who could have sinned and failed, and she presented him as our example for how to keep the law and avoid sin.
Ellen White’s Jesus is still engaged in a controversy with Satan and is waiting for a people to perfectly reflect His character before coming again.
At the end of Wednesday’s lesson the discussion question reveals Adventism’s belief that Jesus was not the omnipotent God who is sovereign over time and creation. The question says this:
At the time Jesus warned about false christs, His movement had barely even begun, and yet, He was able to make such an amazing prediction, which has come true (even today people claim to be Jesus). How should this prediction increase our trust in the Word of God?
Notice the subtle ways this question confirms to the Adventist reader that Jesus is just a man, not God in flesh. First, the question states that Jesus’s “movement had barely even begun”. This assertion is false! Jesus came from heaven in the fulness of time to be the propitiation for human sin. Jesus didn’t have a movement; He came to fulfill God’s eternal plan to reconcile us to Himself. He didn’t build a movement! Everything He did was at the time it was prepared from before the creation of the world, and He inaugurated a new covenant in His blood .
Further, Jesus wasn’t a man with prophetic insight that amazes us. He wasn’t like Adventism presents Ellen White: a human being with prophetic insight ahead of her time. Yet this question presents Jesus as someone in the same category as Ellen—someone about whom we should be amazed and thus believe his book! NO!
Finally, Jesus’ warnings about false prophets are not designed to get us to believe the Bible. The point isn’t the Bible in this case: the point is Jesus Himself. This question has presented an argument to make Adventists think of Jesus the same way they are taught to think about Ellen and thus to trust her books.
The point is that Jesus is God the Son who never lost any of His omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, or eternality, even while on the earth. The fullness of deity dwelt in Him bodily, as Colossians 2:9 states. We believe Jesus because He is God the Son; He doesn’t have to “earn” our trust. God doesn’t earn our respect and obedience; He is sovereign over us, and the Lord Jesus is sovereign over us because He Is God!
Friday’s lesson actually admits the Adventist pride in their special knowledge, their gnostic beliefs that set them apart from Christianity. The first paragraph says this:
Many things are happening in the world that are very disturbing. People truly are frightened about what is unfolding. How can we, as Seventh-day Adventists, with a kind of “inside track” on events, use these things to point people to the hope we have in Jesus and the promise of His coming?
This quote is followed by an Ellen White quote from The Desire of Ages (p. 634) which includes these words:
Those who are watching for the Lord are purifying their souls by obedience to the truth. With vigilant watching they combine earnest working. Because they know that the Lord is at the door, their zeal is quickened to co-operate with the divine intelligences in working for the salvation of souls.
Adventism’s “inside track” is their special, convoluted prophetic timeline and their belief that the Sabbath will be the end-time test of faithfulness qualifying people to be saved. The Adventist belief is established by Ellen White’s great controversy vision, and it includes the belief that Adventists have to prove they are ready for heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments more and more perfectly.
In fact, the EGW quote above admits that “earnest working” is a required component of Adventist readiness for the second coming. Their vigilant watching requires that they co-operate with “divine intelligences” to make proselytes to Adventism!
Notice that Adventists are asked to co-operate with “divine intelligences”. That is PLURAL. The Adventist god is a tritheism, not a Trinity sharing substance. Rather the Adventist godhead is three separate beings who share a name, a purpose, and a will—but NOT substance.
Some Adventists will say, today, that the Godhead shares substance, but their underlying conception is that the three Persons are separate. In fact, they teach that Jesus gave up His omnipresence when He came to earth in a body, and that is the reasons the Holy Spirit had to come—to be omnipresent instead of Him.
The Adventist “inside track” is heresy. It teaches a completely different way of salvation than the Bible teaches, and Adventists are bound to the seventh-day Sabbath as their seal showing they are faithful to God. Nowhere is the gospel of belief in the Lord Jesus and His finished work taught as the means of salvation; Adventists have to keep the law and observe the Sabbath upon pain of torture and death in order to prove that Satan is a liar, that God’s law is fair, and that they are safe to save.
In fact, in the Teachers Notes we find an argument supporting Adventism’s central doctrine of eschatology. In Christianity eschatology is considered a secondary issue. The second coming is a fact all Christians affirm, but the timing and the way events will occur is secondary because Scripture is not explicit about the details.
Adventism, however, has created an explicit formula, and that end-time formula is the heart of their belief system. On page 133 we find this startling claim:
So, we can say that eschatology is the gospel, or “the good news,” about tomorrow.
Wrong. There is only ONE GOSPEL, one proclamation of Good News: the Lord Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture; He was buried, and He rose from the dead on the third day according to Scripture, as 1 Corinthians 15: 3,4 tells us.
Paul actually cursed anyone who would preach another gospel than the one he preached. He said this in Galatians 1:6–9:
I marvel that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is [really] not another, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to the gospel we have proclaimed to you, let him be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is proclaiming to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be accursed!—Galatians 1:6–9 LSB
Adventism, however, does not teach the biblical gospel as the singular Good News for all humanity. They use their eschatological beliefs as their gospel. In fact, they define the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14:6–12 as their “gospel in verity”, and they interpret this passage to include the seventh-day Sabbath, the investigative judgment, Sunday churches as Babylon and worship on Sunday as the mark of the beast!
Eschatology is NOT the gospel under any circumstances—and Adventism actually tips its hand in this lesson and reveals that it teaches a false gospel that is completely outside Christian orthodoxy.
Finally, in the discussion questions at the end of Friday’s lesson, the foundational belief that humans are merely physical bodies that cease to exist when they die is admitted:
Think about the state of the dead and the fact that the dead sleep until Christ returns. People close their eyes in death, and what is the very next thing they know? How does this idea help us see how, for each person individually, the second coming of Christ is always very near?
The Bible clearly teaches that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:1–9), but the Adventist belief in the merely physical nature of man is the foundation that supports the entire framework of Adventism’s great controversy worldview. Physicalism is the ground that underlies the Adventist belief that law-keeping and seventh-day observance are the means of being fit for heaven.
Adventism must continually remind its members that their worldview depends upon their own work: their sacrificial giving to the organization; their belief in 1844 and their Sabbath-centered eschatology. They have to continually be reminded of their gnostic special knowledge that Jesus was a model man, and they must imitate Him and make Adventists of their neighbors.
But Adventism is wrong. Being saved is not about the law at all but is about God the Son taking human flesh and literally dying for our sin. He fulfilled the law by taking our curse. He endured the wrath of God for our sin as He hung on the cross, and when He died, He was buried—and He rose on the third day breaking the curse of death because His blood was sufficient to pay for all our sin!
We are asked only to believe in Him. Have you admitted that you are a sinner and need a Savior? If you haven’t, ask the Lord to teach you the truth. Ask Him to make Scripture come alive for you, and ask Him to forgive you. Bring your sin and your anxiety to His cross and lay it down. Trust that He blood has fully paid for your sin, and believe.
When you do, you will be born again and indwelled by His Spirit. You will pass out of death into life, and you will know your Sabbath rest in Christ. Believe Jesus today, and live! †
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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