Lesson 13: “The Risen Lord”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson avoids the significance of Sunday and makes baptism the memorial of the resurrection.
- This lesson treats the resurrection as promise of physical resurrection and a call to evangelize.
- EGW misdefines how to be saved and reiterates that death is temporary sleep, not presence with God
This lesson covers the end of Mark 15:42–16:6 where Mark writes about Jesus’ resurrection. Yet although the author spends time outlining the common apologetic arguments for the resurrection and challenges the reader not to doubt, the lesson manages never to discuss the real significance of the fact that Jesus shattered death. Further, it creates new emphases to hide Adventism’s classic arguments mocking “Sunday sacredness” and tries to establish baptism as the memorial of the resurrection. Further, this lesson becomes an apologetic for Adventism’s “soul sleep” doctrine and uses the resurrection as the impetus for Adventists to double down on their commitment to evangelize the world to make Adventist proselytes.
Straw-Man Memorial
The central problem with this lesson is that, true to Adventist theology, the author never hints at the significance of the resurrection for the true believer. Even more, this lesson—no doubt in reaction to the comments of former Adventists over the past couple of decades—attempts to sidestep the organization’s mockery of “Sunday sacredness” and tries to say they “rejoice in the Sunday morning resurrection of Jesus”.
Of course, this lesson does not represent even an iota of a change of position regarding their seventh-day Sabbath! It just seeks to present a public acknowledgment that Jesus rose on Sunday while concurrently denying that the Bible endorses what they call “Sunday sacredness”. Instead, they establish baptism as the memorial of the resurrection! Here is what Sunday’s lesson says:
During the Sabbath, the Lord rested in the grave, and all of Jesus’ disciples rested, as well. “And they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56, NKJV), a rather strange action if, in fact, Jesus had lessened, at least in their minds, the obligation to keep the fourth commandment…
As early as the second century, Christians saw significance in the fact that Jesus rose on Sunday. This became the basis for Sunday sacredness. But is that what the New Testament teaches?…
Not a word in the Bible hints at Sunday sacredness as a memorial of the Resurrection. That memorial is baptism. “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4, NKJV).
Regardless of the false theology regarding Sunday worship, as Adventists we must rejoice in the Sunday morning resurrection of Jesus. Jesus has triumphed over death, and in His resurrection, we have the surety of ours.
In typical Adventist fashion, the author does not use the New Testament discussions about the law (as developed in Galatians, Ephesians, Romans, Acts 15, and so on) to deal with the subject of Sabbath and the law. Instead, it uses a mocking tone to explain why Jesus gave no command to change the day!
In reality, the Bible never gives instructions to change the Sabbath or to establish a new holy day. What it does do is explain that the Sabbath—indeed all the sabbaths—were merely shadows of the reality found in Christ (Colossians 2:16, 17). Hebrews 10:1 also calls the law a shadow of the good things to come.
The Sabbath was never changed. To be sure: we can find evidences that the first believers often met together on Sunday. We even see that God in His sovereignty ordained that not only would the Lord Jesus break death on the first day and usher in the New Covenant on that day, but He also fulfilled the shadow of Pentecost—which was always celebrated on the first day—on the first day of the week. All of God’s new work of His new creation was inaugurated on the first day of the week!
Yet never in the New Testament was there any command—not from the Lord Jesus nor from any of His disciples—that sacredness would transfer from Sabbath to Sunday. Never were believers commanded to meet on the first day or to establish the first day as a prescribed day of worship or as a holy day to be observed in any way similarly to the Sabbath.
Never was Sunday introduced or explained as a “Christian Sabbath” or a day to be honored.
Quite the opposite. While Sunday clearly became the acknowledged day the church met together, it was never to a day to be regarded as somehow holy. Created entities are not holy in the new covenant.
Neither is Sunday a “memorial” of the resurrection! In fact, that argument is disingenuous. The lesson makes a point to discredit a claim that is not a real “thing”: that Sunday is a Christian “memorial” of the resurrection and instead the author says baptism is the “memorial” of the resurrection.
First, when people gather to celebrate and remember a person’s birthday, for example, that doesn’t make that day a “memorial” of the person’s birth. The day itself is not special; the person remembered is the special party. Trying to say people have called Sunday a “memorial” of the resurrection is a straw-man argument. Even Christians who say they meet on Sunday in honor of Jesus’ resurrection are not saying that the day has any special holiness. Instead, they are saying that the Lord’s shattering of the curse of death was so important that they will meet together on the day God brought Him back from death and on the day God established His church. They meet to honor the Lord alone—not because the day is itself a new sabbath.
Second, the author doesn’t miss his chance to throw out the words “false theology regarding Sunday worship”. Without honestly discussing Adventism’s teaching about Sunday, the lesson assumes the reader’s pre-existing misinformation about why Christians worship on Sunday and cements the Adventist in his false belief about the continuing requirement to worship on the seventh day and to see Christians as deceived and heretical.
What the lesson utterly misses is the Bible’s clear teaching that Sabbath rest, for the believer, is found in believing in the finished work of the Lord Jesus and being born again.
Third, baptism is not a memorial of the resurrection. Rather, baptism is the believer’s act of obedience to the Lord Jesus that acknowledges one’s belief in Him alone. It is a public statement that a person is saying good-bye to his past life of unbelief and is following Jesus alone, trusting in His death for sin, His burial, and His resurrection. It declares the person’s new life in Christ.
Missing the Point of the Resurrection
We need to take a closer look at the final paragraph from Sunday’s lesson quoted above:
Regardless of the false theology regarding Sunday worship, as Adventists we must rejoice in the Sunday morning resurrection of Jesus. Jesus has triumphed over death, and in His resurrection, we have the surety of ours.
Here we see the extent of Adventism’s ability to explain the resurrection. For them, Jesus’ rising from the tomb is simply a promise that one day they will be resurrected. They do not see the resurrection as the evidence that Jesus’ blood had fully atoned for sin, that He broke the curse of death because the one sufficient sacrifice had finally been offered.
In fact, Adventists teach, on EG’s authority, that Jesus rose from death and then had to appear before the Father to see if His sacrifice had been accepted. In fact, she created an entire scenario that contradicts the reality of the biblical account. Here is what EGW wrote in Early Writings, 187.1:
Jesus spoke to her with His own heavenly voice, saying, “Mary!” She was acquainted with the tones of that dear voice, and quickly answered, “Master!” and in her joy was about to embrace Him; but Jesus said, “Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father: but go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God.” Joyfully she hastened to the disciples with the good news. Jesus quickly ascended to His Father to hear from His lips that He accepted the sacrifice, and to receive all power in heaven and upon earth. Angels like a cloud surrounded the Son of God and bade the everlasting gates be lifted up, that the King of glory might come in. I saw that while Jesus was with that bright heavenly host, in the presence of God, and surrounded by His glory, He did not forget His disciples upon the earth, but received power from His Father, that He might return and impart power to them. The same day He returned and showed Himself to His disciples. He suffered them then to touch Him; for He had ascended to His Father and had received power.—Early Writings 187.1,2
Yet Jesus said that He would be with the thief in Paradise the very day they died. Ellen overtly denied that Jesus went to the Father upon His death. Her view of “soul sleep” would not allow her to believe the plain words of Scripture.
Instead, she concocted an entire scenario that missed the point of Jesus’ death and especially of the resurrection.
Jesus did not rise from the dead because He could. The resurrection wasn’t a trick designed to prove God could do that. Rather, Jesus’ rising from the dead in a glorified, eternal body signified that His sacrifice HAD been sufficient to pay for human sin.
God had told Adam in the garden, before Eve was ever created, that if he at of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that he would die that day. They died spiritually that day, and eventually their bodies also died. Each of us is born in Adam, dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1–3). Each of us must believe in the Lord Jesus to be released from our natural death and given eternal life (John 5:24).
The law further articulated God’s judgment of human sin; if anyone broke even one law, he was guilty of breaking the whole law. The law provided for the Israelites to bring sacrifices to atone for their sin, and the yearly Day of Atonement sacrifices offered blood before Yahweh to atone for the nation’s sins. Yet those animal sacrifices could never make the Israelites truly clean. They could never remove sin from them.
When Jesus came and became sin for us, He offered the once-for-all sacrifice for human sin that eternally paid for all our sins, past, present, and future. If we believe in the Lord Jesus, our sins are cancelled and we are declared righteous because of the blood of Christ.
When Jesus rose from death, He broke the curse that had condemned humanity from Adam onward. He shattered the grave not just because He could, but because God had accepted His sacrifice as the sufficient payment for sin, and the curse was broken.
In Ellen’s scenario, Jesus rose BEFORE going to the Father to see if He passed the test. This idea is heretical. Jesus COULD NOT HAVE RISEN if there was any doubt about whether or not His sacrifice was sufficient. The resurrection wasn’t a clever parlor trick designed to wow everyone by God’s power. Rather, it was a singular moment of the reversal of His law of sin and death!
In Jesus, the requirements of the law had been fully met, and now believers entered a new covenant opened by Jesus’ blood. The old law was finished; believers now live under the law of Christ, indwelled by the Holy Spirit who teaches them to apply the entire opus of New Testament commands to their lives!
The lesson, however, misses all of the significance of Jesus’ resurrection and co-opts it to urge Adventists to do more proselytizing!
Soul Sleep Again
Of course, no Adventist lesson on the resurrection could miss the chance to reinforce soul sleep and the confusion of Adventist soteriology. Friday’s lesson ends the week with two paragraphs from Ellen White’s The Desire of Ages, pp. 786, 787, and a quotation from the Sabbath School lesson’s editor, Clifford Goldstein. In the EGW quote are these words:
“To the believer, death is but a small matter. Christ speaks of it as if it were of little moment. ‘If a man keep My saying, he shall never see death,’ ‘he shall never taste of death.’ To the Christian, death is but a sleep, a moment of silence and darkness.” —The Desire of Ages, p. 787
Notice that Ellen followed the profound words of Jesus from John 11 that if a man believes in Him he will not see death, and she insets “death is but a sleep” to twist the reader’s perception back to the Adventist teaching that in death, the person ceases to exist. Ellen taught the Adventists how to try to soften this devastating void by thinking of death as an unconscious moment from which one would awaken without an awareness of time passing, but this teaching is not biblical.
According to 2 Corinthians 5:1–9, no believer experiences “a moment of silence and darkness” when they die. Rather, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Here is what Paul says:
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord– for we walk by faith, not by sight– we are of good courage and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.—2 Corinthians 5:1–9 LSB
Adventism, however, must obscure the reality of the resurrection and of the eternal life Jesus’ rising from the grave ensures all believers. Jesus literally broke the power of sin on all who believe, and He opened the prison of death to release all who believe.
When we place our faith in the Lord Jesus, we pass at that moment from death to life (John 5:24). Our bodies will still die and be resurrected when He returns for us, but our spirits will truly never die.
This spiritual life we receive is the life of Jesus that is the same life that broke the curse of death!
Look at what Paul tells us:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath [of God] through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.—Romans 5:8–10
It is the resurrection life of Jesus which gives us our new spiritual life and which guarantees our eventual physical resurrections.
Jesus’ resurrection is the evidence that His sacrifice satisfied God’s demand of death for sin. His blood was sufficient for all human sin, and because His sacrifice was sufficient, He broke the curse of death. The key to unlock the prison of death was Jesus’s blood. His resurrection life is the power and guarantee of our new birth when we believe. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17,
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.—1 Corinthians 15:17
His resurrection wasn’t just a statement of His power; it was the evidence of His sufficient sacrifice and of our sins being forgiven.
Jesus’ resurrection is the source of our eternal life, the means of our passing from death to life when we believe.
If you haven’t believed in the finished work of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, if you haven’t place the full weight of your sin on Him and trusted Him to have paid for it in full, what better time than now, as we finish going through the gospel of Mark? Give up your attachment to the Adventist worldview and the fear of questioning it and instead throw yourself on the mercy of the Lord Jesus. Bring your sin and your need to Him and lay it at the foot of His cross. Believe that He has paid for it in full and that He has broken the curse of your death by His sufficient sacrifice.
Trust Jesus today, and pass from death to life. †
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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