Lesson 2: “Signs of Divinity”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- There is no mention of Jesus inaugurating a new covenant in John 6 nor of “the work of God”.
- In the account of the blind man’s healing in John 9, Adventism’s blindness is revealed.
- In teaching Lazarus’ resurrection, soul sleep is affirmed and literal eternal life is explained away.
This week’s Sabbath School lesson breezes over three of John’s most revealing accounts of Jesus’ true identity and power. The implications of Jesus’ being the prophet like Moses to whom Israel was to listen and the fact that Jesus, like Moses, mediated the inauguration of a brand-new covenant is missed. Further, the lesson doesn’t even mention Jesus’ telling the Jews that the work of God is to “believe”.
The account of Jesus’ healing the blind man in chapter 9 ironically misses the significance of Jesus again healing on the Sabbath and instead warns the readers against being so blinded by their traditions that they miss “important truths right before our eyes”.
Finally, in chapter 11 where the account of Jesus raising Lazarus occurs, the implications of Jesus saying that He IS the resurrection and the life and that those who believe in Him will never die is glossed over. Instead, the Teachers Comments focus on soul sleep and the seeming immediacy of the eventual resurrection.
Consequently, instead of addressing the ways the lesson twists the biblical accounts, I will focus this week on what the writers omit—and the omissions reveal the bankrupt heart of Adventist doctrine.
The Prophet Like Moses
John 6 recounts Jesus’ feeding the 5,000. Jewish tradition held that when the prophet Moses foretold would come, He would feed Israel with bread from heaven in a manner reminiscent of Moses announcing the manna in the wilderness. When Jesus blessed a small lunch of five loaves and two fish, multiplying it to feed 5,000 men plus women and children and then gathering twelve baskets of leftovers, the people said,
“This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world.”—John 6:14 LSB
Jesus went into the mountains to pray by Himself after that event, and that night, as His disciples started across the Sea of Galilee toward Capernaum, a storm arose. Jesus waked on the water towards them and calmed the storm, got into the boat, “and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going” (v. 21).
The next day the people followed Him to Capernaum. Jesus called them out on their motive: they were looking for more miraculous bread—and then He told them:
“Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, set His seal.”—John 6:27 LSB
And then came an exchange between the people and Jesus which reveals the heart of salvation—a conversation which Adventism utterly ignores:
Therefore they said to Him, “What should we do, so that we may work the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”—John 6:28, 29 LSB
Jesus then taught the Jews that Moses gave them bread from heaven, but the Father is the One who gives the true bread from heave—the bread which gives “life to the world” (v. 33). Jesus went on to tell them that He IS the bread from heaven and that all who believe in Him have eternal life. Furthermore, He went on to say that He was the fulfillment of the prophecies of God:
They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop grumbling among yourselves.
“No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
“It is written in the prophets, ‘AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT BY GOD.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.
“Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.
“I am the bread of life.
“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
“This is the bread which comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”—John 6:42–51 LSB
Jesus clearly identified Himself as the one whom Moses had foretold, and He was introducing them to the heart of the covenant He came to inaugurate. He was Himself the “bread of life”, and all who ate of His flesh would live forever.
In other words, He was introducing them to the new covenant in His blood. Moses had come and had mediated the Sinai covenant with the nation of Israel. Moses had met the Lord and had delivered the stone tablets containing the words of the covenant. Moses had sprinkled the people of Israel with sacrificial blood to ratify their covenant with God. He had introduced the levitical priesthood to them and the sacrificial system which provided the nation with a means of atoning for their sin—animal sacrifices which foreshadowed the one perfect Sacrifice who was to come.
Now Jesus had come, and He was introducing Himself as the One to whom the Sinai covenant with its laws and sacrifices had pointed. Moses had mediated the old covenant, but Jesus was here, fulfilling Moses’ prophecy, and He was the mediator of a new covenant that would have at its heart not animal sacrifices but His own blood shed once for all! He was the reality toward which the shadows of Moses’ covenant pointed!
Furthermore, Jesus told the Jews that the only “work of God” was to believe in “the One whom He has sent”—in other words, their only work was to believe in the Lord Jesus Himself.
Even more, Jesus told them that no one would come to Him—no one would be able to believe in Him unless the Father Himself drew the person. The ability to recognize Jesus as the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy was the work of God. He had to open the eyes of each person, and the Father had to call each person to see Jesus and recognize that He Is the Bread of Life!
Jesus was now here; the Israelites in the wilderness had eaten the manna, but they had all died. Now, those who believe and “eat” the bread of life that Jesus was giving them would live—and that bread of life was His body!
The lesson, though, says nothing of the significance of this chapter from John. The authors pointed out that Jesus identified Himself using the name of God—”I Am”—as He said He was the bread of life, the light of the world, the door, the good Shepherd, and the resurrection and the life, but it did not explain the significance of this event where Jesus revealed that He was bringing eternal life to them in fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy—and that He was giving His own body to give them eternal life.
Furthermore, the lesson says nothing of the fact that the one thing identified as “the work of God” is BELIEF in the Lord Jesus!
This revelation exposes and condemns the Adventist gospel requiring Sabbath-keeping, the health message, and meticulous obedience to the law so that the Adventist has a chance of passing the supposed investigative judgment.
Blinded by Traditions
Wednesday and Thursday’s lessons address John 9 where we read of Jesus’ healing the man who was born blind. The first 12 verses of the chapter tell the account of the healing; the last 29 verses record the conflict that arose over the identity of the Healer: the Lord Jesus. In these 29 verses we see the blind man himself becoming increasingly convicted that the Lord Jesus was the Son of Man. Verses 36–38 tell us:
He answered and said, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?”
Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you.”
And he said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped Him.—John 9:36–38 LSB
The healed blind man finally recognized Jesus’ true identity as God, and he worshiped Him. No Jew would have worshiped anyone but the One God of the Jews, and only God would receive worship. Jesus’ identity was clear. The chapter ends with this exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees:
And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.”
Some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things and said to Him, “Are we blind too?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now [that] you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”—John 9:39–41 LSB
Jesus was stating that His revelation of Himself separated people into two groups: those who believe, and those who don’t. Even though the Pharisees had the prophecies and knew what the Old Testament said that Messiah would do, they looked at Jesus and refused to believe. They could no longer claim ignorance; no blind person in the Old Testament had ever received sight. This type of healing was prophesied as the work of the Messiah when He would come.
The Pharisees were eyewitness of the fulfillment of the prophecies they knew—yet they remained blind themselves.
The consummate irony of the lesson’s treatment of this account is revealed in the thought question at the end of Tuesday’s lesson:
What should this story tell us about the dangers of being so blinded by our own beliefs and traditions that we can miss important truths right before our own eyes?
Adventism says that Jesus is the Messiah. They say He is “divine”, the “Son of God”, the “second person of the Godhead”. Adventism says that Jesus came to die for our sins and to defeat Satan. Yet they teach their members that Jesus limited Himself. They teach that He could have sinned and failed in His mission. They teach that the cross did not complete the atonement but that the atonement continues in heaven in the supposed investigative judgment. They teach that Jesus gave up His omnipresence by becoming incarnate in a body, saying that because He has a body, He can no longer be everywhere at once.
Yet without the attribute of omnipresence—that lack alone would disqualify Him as God.
Saying He is “divine” does not declare that He is of the same substance as God. It does not mean that the entire substance of deity dwells in Him; in fact, Adventists generally believe that Jesus may be “all God”, but they don’t understand that all of God is within Him. Rather they see Him as “all God” a bit like one third of a pie is “all pie”. They fail to see that every detail of the whole of God is within Him and within the Father and within the Holy Spirit.
Because of Ellen White’s great controversy paradigm, Adventists live with a worldview shaped entirely by her physicalist interpretations. They do not believe that humans have literal human spirits that are born dead and must be born again through believing in Jesus. They do not believe that Jesus was unable to sin, that as God the Son dwelling in a human body, He was still upholding the universe by the word of His power. They do not understand that He did not cease to exist when He died, and they do not believe that when He died He went into the presence of His Father as He told the thief on the cross He would.
Adventists may use the right words to describe Jesus, but they do not believe that He is impeccable, unable to have sinned, the One who fully completed the atonement for human sin when He died and who broke the curse of death when He rose because His blood was sufficient.
Adventism tips its hand in that thought question: because of its own traditions and beliefs, they have missed the important truths right before their own eyes!
The Resurrection and the Life—and Soul Sleep?
Finally, the lesson “covers” John 11 in Thursday’s short study. In this chapter we read about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and we read of His revelation of His true identity to Martha, Lazarus’s sister. It amazes me that Jesus revealed this central truth about Himself to a woman—and one who is described as the one concerned about many things regarding food preparation and household matters as opposed to her sister Mary who chose instead to sit at Jesus’s feet.
Here is what John tells us:
Martha then said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.
“But even now I know that whatever You ask from God, God will give You.”
Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die—ever. Do you believe this?”
She said to Him, “Yes, Lord; I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God, the One who comes into the world.”—John 11:21–27
We see here that Martha believed that Jesus was the promised One, the Christ—the Messiah—and that He was the Son of God. Martha had the faith in Jesus that the Pharisees did not have.
Furthermore, Jesus here reveals that He IS the resurrection and the life. In other words, He is not merely a conduit through whom Life will flow. Rather, His own person is defined by having eternal life within Himself. His identity is LIFE, and He is the One who will bring life to the dead.
Adventists see this identification as a physical reality. They say that Jesus calls the dead to life—meaning the physically dead—and to the Adventist mind, this life is the only kind of life the Adventist believes exists.
Yet, as we discussed in last week’s lesson, Jesus brings us to life in two ways: first He gives our dead-in-sin spirits eternal life when we believe in Him. As Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–18 explain, we are born utterly unable to seek, to please, or to honor God. We are literally spiritually dead, and we must have the life of Jesus, the eternal life of God Himself granted to us through our belief and trust in His finished work.
Jesus will not only bring bodies back to life and then “download” our personalities and memories into them; rather, He gives our immaterial spirits—our identities—eternal life when we believe! As Jesus Himself said in John 5:24:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”—John 5:24 LSB
This eternal life is what Jesus was explaining to Martha in the passage above. Yet Adventism sees Jesus saying, “He who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die—ever” as being a purely physical reality!
Jesus was NOT speaking purely physically. He was saying that those who believe in Him literally will not die—they will not cease to exist when their bodies cease to breathe. They will go into His presence upon death, and they will NEVER die!
Yet the Teachers Comments say this:
Jesus said to Martha, “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live’ ” (John 11:25, NKJV). Notice, again, that Jesus uses the divine “I AM” to highlight that He does not merely give life, but He is life itself. This promise guarantees its fulfillment when Jesus returns to take His loved ones home. Those who sleep in Christ will be awakened in a split second at the resurrection, as if no time has passed.
Those who rest in Jesus rest as if already raised from the dead, for they already share in Christ’s eternal life and destiny. Jesus affirmed this glorious reality by assuring His disciples, “ ‘Because I live, you will live also’ ” (John 14:19, NKJV). Jesus is life itself and the Life and the Life-Giver. Believing in these Bible truths, we really should have no fear of death.
And then, to emphasize the reality of the Adventist worldview and their typical lack of understanding of the new birth because their Jesus is not the almighty Lord Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture, the last thought question in the Teachers Comments asks:
Although it is abundantly clear from John 14:19 and 1 John 5:11, 12 that we have the assurance of salvation in Christ, why, then, is it a challenge to actualize this assurance in our lives? How do we explain a believer’s fear of death?
And in this statement we see the sad truth revealed: true believers do not have a fear of death. To be sure, believers do not wish to die, but they do not fear death. They KNOW they are with the Lord, that they cannot be separated from Him, and that He will receive them to Himself when they die. In fact, Hebrews 2:14, 15 explain how Jesus freed us from the fear of death:
Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.—Hebrews 2:14, 15
No, true believers do not fear death because they KNOW they will not cease to exist when they die, and they know they will be consciously in the presence of the Lord. The Lord Jesus has freed believers from slavery to the fear of death—but Adventism does not teach its members the true biblical gospel or the true Lord Jesus who became sin for us, endured the wrath of God against our sin as He hung on the cross, died, and was raised on the third day—shattering the curse of death that is the prison into which we all are born!
In Jesus our natural death is swallowed up by life, and when we believe and trust Him, we pass from death to life. Death cannot claim us even when our bodies die, and our eternity is secure. We know Him and are in Him, and He never leaves us—not even in our death.
If you have not trusted the real Lord Jesus who reveals Himself as eternal, almighty God and who brings us to life when we trust Him, bring your sin and doubt to Him. Repent as you see Him paying for your sin on His cross, and ask Him to give you His life. When you believe and trust in His finished atonement, you will be made alive. You will no longer live in fear.
Believe Him today and know what it means that you will never die! †
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.
- October 5–11, 2024 - October 3, 2024
- We Got Mail - October 3, 2024
- September 28–October 4, 2024 - September 26, 2024