Lesson 12: “Tried and Crucified”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson makes Jesus’ cry on the cross to be about Elijah instead of God’s wrath poured on Jesus.
- The lesson misdefines the torn curtain, ignoring the completed atonement and the fulfilled law.
- The stated theme of this lesson is the roles of the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and Joseph of Arimathea in the crucifixion of Jesus.
In this week’s lesson covering Mark 15 and the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, the Sabbath School lesson ignores the meaning of Jesus’ cry to His Father and denies the meaning of the torn curtain in the temple. Instead, it lies about substitution and teaches an incomplete atonement.
We’ll begin this week with the Teachers Comments. They set the stage and tell us what we are to see in this chapter that gives the account of the Lord Jesus’ crucifixion. On page 158, in the introduction to the Comments, we find this list of the lessons’ themes:
Lesson Themes: This week’s study is divided into three sections:
1. The Sanhedrin and the Condemnation of Jesus. In this section, we examine the attitude of the council and the high priest toward Jesus prior to His crucifixion.
2. The Approval of the Roman Authority in the Condemnation of Jesus. In this section, we explore the role of Pontius Pilate in Jesus’ trial.
3. Joseph of Arimathea and the Kingdom of God. Mark briefly highlights the actions of Joseph of Arimathea in the aftermath of Jesus’ death.
Mark 15 opens with the Sanhedrin delivering Jesus to the Roman centurion Pilate, apparently hoping the Romans would accuse Jesus of sedition by His admission that He was king of the Jews. The Jews could not deliver a civil death sentence, and they wanted Jesus dead. Rome would not kill for a Jewish claim of blasphemy, but they might kill for a claim that one was a king. Consequently, the Sanhedrin pivoted and sent Jesus to Pilate hoping for a verdict that would stick.
The chapter continues with the account of Pilate’s weak decision to appease the Jewish crowd instead of to act on his own sense of Jesus’s innocence. Pilate releases the prisoner Barabbas to the Jews and instead sends Jesus to be mocked, beaten, and crucified. The Teachers Comments spends three pages examining the minutia of both the Sanhedrin’s and Pilate’s words and motives, ending with a quote by EGW from The Desire of Ages explaining that instead of protecting his position, Pilate was demoted soon after Jesus’s crucifixion and he committed suicide.
Mark 15:42–47 details how Joseph of Arimathea took charge of Jesus’ body and placed it in a tomb before the Sabbath began.
So what’s wrong with these details?
Nothing—the problem is what is NOT considered the theme of this lesson. While the lesson superficially recounts Mark’s telling of Jesus’s crucifixion and death, the author only deals with this culmination of Jesus’ ministry by nodding towards it. Instead, it deliberately focusses the readers’ attention toward the introspective moralizing that has characterized this entire series on the gospel of Mark!
Mark 15 IS the story of the crucifixion. It includes Jesus’s cry to His Father and the covenant transfer marked by the temple curtain being torn from top to bottom. It includes the Roman centurion’s recognition that Jesus was the Son of God as he heard Jesus’ loud cry just before he breathed His last.
Yet the lesson does not discuss these details, and it elaborately eclipses their significance by yet another reference to Daniel 7:24–29 (a deliberate suggestion to the Adventist that they have to understand Adventist prophecy timelines in order to properly know and teach doctrine), and finally with an utterly wrong explanation of the torn curtain.
My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?
In Wednesday’s lesson, the author says this about Jesus’s cry:
The words of Jesus on the cross are called the “cry of dereliction” as He prays, crying out to God, asking why He has been forsaken. He is quoting from Psalm 22:1. Other references to the same psalm occur in Mark 15:24, 29, indicating that the Scriptures are being fulfilled in the death of Jesus. Even in the evil plotting of men, the will of God is being fulfilled.
Jesus’ words from the cross are reported in Aramaic along with translation. The words “my God, my God” are Eloi, Eloi in the verse (a transliteration of the Aramaic ’elahi). It would be easy to hear Jesus as calling for Elijah (Aramaic ’eliyyah, which means “My God is YHWH”). This is the mistake that some bystanders make.
Notice that the author does not actually quote Jesus’s words. Instead he asks the significance of Jesus’ asking His Father why He has forsaken Him and actually includes another chart forcing us to interpret Jesus’s baptism as parallel to the cross, thus bookending Jesus’s ministry “as prophesied in Daniel 9:24–27”. In fact, the day’s lesson ends with this paragraph:
What these parallels suggest is that as the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1 is the beginning of His ministry, as prophesied in Daniel 9:24–27, what occurs in Mark 15 at the cross is the culmination, or goal, of His ministry, as He dies as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). The death of Jesus on the cross also fulfills part of the prophecy of Daniel 9:24–27. The tearing of the temple veil (Mark 15:38) points to the fulfillment of the sacrificial system, as type meets antitype, and a new phase of salvation history begins.
That paragraph contains all of the lesson’s commentary on the tearing of the curtain with this exception tucked into the Teacher’s Notes:
The temple was now open. Thus, it no longer made any sense to continue offering animal sacrifices, for the Lamb of God had already been slaughtered. Anyone who accepted Jesus’ sacrifice could become part of His kingdom. The borders of the kingdom have been enlarged, and the invitation to join it has extended to all nations.
Yet as Jesus hung on the cross crying, “My God, My God Why have you forsaken Me?” He was quoting David’s cry of Psalm 22:1 as He endured the Father’s wrath against human sin. As He hung on the cross, Jesus had, as Paul said, “become sin for us”. Here’s what Paul says:
He made Him who knew no sin [to be] sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:21 LSB
Adventism did not teach us that Jesus “became sin for us”. In other words, just as we “become the righteousness of God in Him” when we place our faith and trust in Jesus’ completed atonement, our imputed righteousness is the consequence of Jesus becoming our imputed sin.
Adventism will say that Jesus “bore our sins”. In fact, at the end of Friday’s lesson is this thought question:
Look at how central the theology of substitution was to Ellen G. White and also to the Bible (see, for instance, Isaiah 53). Why is any theology that downplays the central role of substitution and Christ’s dying in our stead, paying in Himself the penalty for our sins, a false theology?
Yet there is no discussion about what this “substitution” actually was. In fact, there is one quotation from The Desire of Ages in Friday’s lesson in which EGW says that
“But now with the terrible weight of guilt He bears, He cannot see the Father’s reconciling face. The withdrawal of the divine countenance from the Saviour in this hour of supreme anguish pierced His heart with a sorrow that can never be fully understood by man. So great was this agony that His physical pain was hardly felt.” —The Desire of Ages, p. 753.
This quotation does not explain that Jesus actually BECAME, by imputation, our sin. Similarly, Adventism never teaches that our justification is actually our BECOMING the personal, alien-to-us righteousness of God by imputation.
The “great exchange” is that Jesus actually took into Himself our sin and credits to us His own personal righteousness. He BECAME what God hated and experienced God’s separation from us because of our sin.
What Jesus experienced as He hung on the cross was the suffering of hell. What Jesus endured as He experienced the Father’s withdrawal from him is what those who do not trust Jesus will experience for eternity if they do not believe.
Jesus literally experienced the wrath of God that is the natural condition each of us will experience if we do not believe and trust Jesus’s completed atonement for our sin.
When we read that Jesus is our Substitute and not just our Example, this very thing is what we mean. Jesus didn’t just die a representative death showing us the lengths to which He would go in order to demonstrate how much abuse He would take from our sinful human hands and hearts. He didn’t just die to show us how bad we are and to shame us into serving Him because He gave so much to demonstrate what our sin would cause Him to suffer.
Yet the lesson never explains what Jesus actually DID on the cross—and it can’t explain it because Adventist doctrine does not teach the biblical fact of substitutionary atonement: the fact that Jesus received our imputed sin and suffered the full, omnipotent wrath of God directed against our sin. And He didn’t do this because we left Him no option. He didn’t become sin for us because He wanted to teach us a lesson and drive home our obligation to obey and be good.
His death was not an example of how we “hurt” Jesus—much like my husband Richard’s mother would demonstrate how much his boyish sinning punished her as she would alternately strike him with a belt and herself on her own back saying, “This hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
Yet that model is what Adventism leads us to believe. Jesus suffered because we don’t care enough to obey. We “owe” Jesus perfect obedience to the law—after all, He perfectly obeyed the law and showed us that we, too, can do it. Therefore, because we just aren’t committed to Him enough to obey, He has to remind us that He took all that pain because we can’t manage to serve Him faithfully by obeying the law.
The lesson obscures the significance that Jesus was fulfilling prophecy by quoting from Psalm 22, and it utterly misses the fact that Jesus is not a pitiable victim of our sin. Rather, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, He literally became sin for us—He became, by imputation, what God hated and endured the full measure of God’s wrath against human sin as He hung between heaven and earth. He took the punishment we deserve so that, when we believe, we can pass from death to life without coming into condemnation. When we believe and trust Him, we become, by imputation, the actual righteousness of God as we are hidden in Him.
Adventism cannot teach this biblical version of substitution because Adventism teaches an incomplete atonement. This understanding now leads us to the heart of this week’s gospel-twisting avoidance of what Mark reveals about Jesus’ atonement.
What About That Torn Curtain?
We have already seen the sum total of how the lesson deals with the curtain that tore from the top to the bottom the moment Jesus died. In Wednesday’s lesson and also on page 160 of the Teachers Comments we read these two statements:
The tearing of the temple veil (Mark 15:38) points to the fulfillment of the sacrificial system, as type meets antitype, and a new phase of salvation history begins.—Page 154
The temple was now open. Thus, it no longer made any sense to continue offering animal sacrifices, for the Lamb of God had already been slaughtered. Anyone who accepted Jesus’ sacrifice could become part of His kingdom. The borders of the kingdom have been enlarged, and the invitation to join it has extended to all nations.—Page 160
The torn curtain was not about animal sacrifices being done! Think about what the curtain kept Israel from seeing: the shekinah glory of God’s personal presence! The Most Holy Place was curtained off so the glory of God would be shielded from the eyes of sinful Israelites. In fact, only the High Priest could enter the Most Holy Place, and that only once a year when he bore the blood of the Day of Atonement sacrifice! Never could a human enter that Most Holy Place without bringing blood. God’s glory would kill any person who dared to break that command.
When the curtain tore, God demonstrated that the new covenant in Jesus’s blood which Jesus Himself had instituted with His disciples at the Last Supper had finally begun. The one sufficient blood sacrifice had been offered. The presence of God was no longer shielded from mortal man. ANYONE could now come to God on the basis of the One Perfect Sacrifice—the blood of Jesus, the blood of the eternal covenant shed for the propitiation of human sin!
When the curtain tore, it symbolized that Jesus HAD ENTERED AT THAT MOMENT THE PRESENCE OF GOD! When He breathed His last, His spirit went to the Father just as He said it would. His blood opened a new and living way to the Father, and every single shadow of the temple service and the law that dictated it was fulfilled!
Adventism cannot teach this truth because it teaches that Jesus is currently in heaven performing the work of a levitical hight priest as He applies His blood to the confessed sins of the saved. In Adventism, Jesus’ death was a means to an end, not the end itself. It became a means of obtaining the blood needed to pardon sin IN HEAVEN. The Adventist Jesus did not shed His blood once for all; He continues applying it, sin-by-sin, person-by-person, as people profess to believe and remember to confess individual sins. Atonement was not completed at the cross in Adventism, and the lesson cannot teach what the Bible actually says!
Here is what the Bible says about that torn curtain and about Jesus going into the presence of God:
The Holy Spirit [is] indicating this, that the way into the holy places has not yet been manifested while that first part [of the] tabernacle is still standing, which [is] a symbol for the present time. Accordingly both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make the worshiper perfect in conscience, since they [relate] only to food and drink and various washings, requirements for the body imposed until a time of reformation. But when Christ appeared [as] a high priest of the good things to come, [He entered] through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation, and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy places once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.—Hebrews 9:8–12 LSB
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since [we have] a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.—Hebrews 10:19–22
Jesus’ body was represented by that curtain. In other words, it was always Jesus, even before His incarnation, that kept sinful man from being destroyed by the glory of our holy, righteous God. When Jesus died, when His blood was shed after He endured the wrath of God upon that cross, the entire temple service and its priesthood was made obsolete.
In fact, Hebrews 7 teaches us that the law was built on the foundation of the Levitical priesthood, and with a change in the priesthood, there must come a change of the law:
Now if perfection was through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the people received the Law), what further need [was there] for another priest to arise according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be designated according to the order of Aaron? For when the priesthood is changed, of necessity there takes place a change of law also.—Hebrews 7:11, 12 LSB
The reality of what Jesus’ crucifixion accomplished is that a completely NEW COVENANT was inaugurated! It would remain only for His resurrection on the third day to complete His ushering us into the eternal life we receive when we believe and are born again.
This week’s lesson suppresses the shocking truth that the Lord Jesus took our sin into Himself. He endured God’s wrath against our sin, and He fulfilled the law and all of its temple services including its hoy days and sabbaths. All the work required for our perfect rest of living within God’s finished work was completed for us that day when Jesus died and the curtain tore—letting everyone know for all time that His blood had fulfilled every shadow of the law and had satisfied God. His blood had propitiated for our sin, satisfying God’s demand that the consequence of sin was death, and His blood also expiated us, removing our sin from us as He took it into Himself and carried it as our Scapegoat far away from us, as far as east is from the west! Jesus entered into the presence of God with His eternal blood of the covenant when He died, and when He ascended bodily 40 days later, He was ushered into the presence of the Father and seated at His right hand where He reigns today!
If you haven’t understood what Jesus did when He died, pick up the gospel of Mark and begin reading it from the beginning straight through to the end. See who Jesus was and what He did. See how He revealed His identity as He fulfilled prophecy and showed that He was God in flesh. Read how He died and brought in the new covenant in His blood.
Believe what God’s word tells you about yourself: that you are by nature dead in sin and a child of wrath. Bring your helplessness and sin to the cross and trust Jesus’ complete atonement for your sin. Believe that He became sin for you, and that when He rose on the third day He broke your death sentence!
Trust Him. Place all your weight on Him, and He will give you life. He will make you a citizen of the kingdom of the Beloved Son, and you will know what it means to be born again and sealed with the Holy Spirit. Trust Him, and leave forever the anxiety of living with an incomplete atonement that depends on you for completion. Leave your works and trust Jesus alone. He will save you from your sins. †
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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