Lesson 4: “Witnesses of Christ as the Messiah”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson hints at but does not fully disclose Adventism’s claim that EGW is the parallel of John the Baptist for the last days.
- This lesson claims that John’s purpose was to change Israel’s understanding of Messiah rather than demonstrating that Jesus is God.
- The discussion of Nicodemus and Jesus ignores Jesus’s teaching that a person must be born again.
This quarter’s lessons are especially frustrating because they skate over the significance of John’s passages in the ways I remember from my days as an Adventist. The authors of the lessons and of the Teachers Comments say many objectively factual things about the gospel of John and about the people of whom John writes—the problem is that the Scripture’s truly revealing passages are either ignored or obscured.
Once again, the Adventist worldview which is formed from the interpretive writings of the Adventist prophet Ellen White is assumed. In fact, EGW’s influence is more than merely assumed; the week’s lessons include quotations from her to establish the writer’s statements, and Adventism’s dependence upon her authority is subtly but repeatedly cemented without using direct statements to do so. In other words, a casual Christian reader might not notice the theological skew of this lesson, and an Adventist will not be jolted awake from their Adventist stupor.
What will persist, though, is that familiar “gray-ness”, that sense of a boring repetition of old familiar themes without any real insight. Even as an Adventist I became so frustrated with the Sabbath School lessons that I eventually gave up reading them. They seemed to promise depth and insight, and inevitably they left me feeling like they were fragmented and without insight. I always felt there was more to the biblical passages than the lesson ever revealed—but the lessons always sewed up the discussion and tied them with the Adventist bow of “thought questions” which led the readers to self-examination and guilt about how they ought to up their game and proselytize more.
So again today we will begin by showing how the lesson subtly reminds the reader of the Adventist worldview. It keeps Ellen White’s unique and essential role within Adventism front and center without admitting that its entire understanding of reality depends upon her.
More Than a Prophet
Sunday’s lesson addresses John the Baptist. The gospel of John introduces John the Baptist and reveals His announcement of Jesus’ identity as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We can read the prophecy-fulfilling words in John 1:19–37. The lesson summarizes the Adventist view of John the Baptist by explaining the prophet’s relationship to the politics in Judea:
The religious leaders sent priests and Levites to ask John who he was. With Messianic expectations high in Judea, it was important for John the Baptist to clarify his relationship to those expectations. He was not the Light, but he was sent from God to bear witness to the Light and to prepare for the coming of the Messiah (John 1:6–8). That’s why he answered them as plainly as he could, saying: “I am not the Christ” (John 1:20)…Jesus was the Son of God, and John merely pointed to Him (John 1:34)…So, in fulfillment of prophecy, John came in order to prepare the hearts of the people for Jesus.
On the surface, this brief explanation of John the Baptist’s role in the story of Jesus is not “wrong”, but it presents him as a political figure, almost like a public relations advance team to get the people ready for Jesus’ appearance. But then the lesson tips its Adventist “hand” and ends the day’s study with these thought questions:
In what way should we, as Seventh-day Adventists, do the same kind of ministry as did John the Baptist? What are the parallels?
A person who doesn’t really know the insider secrets of Adventism would not know the assumptions underlying these questions—yet these questions would not even be asked apart from these unacknowledged Adventist beliefs.
Adventism teaches that Ellen G. White is the last-day equivalent to John the Baptist. John the Baptist, Adventism explains, was the prophet who preceded the first advent of Jesus; Ellen White is the prophet who precedes His second advents.
The reasoning is convoluted but penetrating. In Luke 7:26, 27 Jesus said to the Jews:
“But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and even more than a prophet. This is [the one] about whom it is written, ‘BEHOLD, I SEND MY MESSENGER AHEAD OF YOU, WHO WILL PREPARE YOUR WAY BEFORE YOU.’”—Luke 7:26, 27 LSB
Jesus Himself taught the Jews that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of Malchi’s prophecy that one would come ahead of the Messiah and prepare the way for Him. John was the last Old Covenant prophet, and his job was greater than merely foretelling a work of God. He was literally a contemporary of the Messiah, and he presented the Lord Jesus to the world as the Son of God as he baptized Jesus and the Father declared that Jesus was His beloved Son.
Ellen White, always an opportunist unafraid to bind people’s consciences with her prophecies, claimed the same title for herself that Jesus gave John the Baptist:
Why have I not claimed to be a prophet?—Because in these days many who boldly claim that they are prophets are a reproach to the cause of Christ; and because my work includes much more than the word “prophet” signifies.—Review and Herald, July 26, 1906, Par 7.
The work assigned to me embraces more than the ordinary work of a prophet. The gift of prophecy is included, but that alone does not cover the many lines of work to which I have been called as the Lord’s messenger.—21 LtMs, Lt 225c, 1906, par. 13.
She claimed for herself the designation of “more than a prophet”. More than that, Adventism claims this role as God’s assignment to Ellen White. In its book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, in the discussion of Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #18 which defends EGW as Adventism’s prophetic voice, we find this on page 256:
God gave the gift of prophecy to John the Baptist to announce Christ’s first advent. In a similar way we may expect Him to send the prophetic gift again to proclaim the Second Advent so that everyone will have the opportunity to prepare to meet the Savior…If there were to be no true prophets during the time of the end, Christ would have warned against anyone claiming that gift. His warning against false prophets implies that there would be true prophets as well.—Seventh-day Adventists Believe, third edition, 2018, Ministerial Association, Review and Herald Publishing Association, p. 256.
Adventists teach internally that Ellen G. White, the last-day John the Baptist who is more than a prophet, was sent to give Adventism a special last-day message to prepare the world for Jesus’ return: a call to keep the seventh-day Sabbath, a warning that the investigative judgment began in 1844, the “health message” calling people to a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, and a warning to leave the “Babylon” of Sunday-churches on pain of receiving the mark of the beast. Thus, all Adventists have been swept into Ellen White’s last-day message; they are to proselytize and bring more and more converts into Adventism.
All of this supposedly God-given authority and urgency underlies that innocent-sounding thought question about how the reader can participate in the ministry of John the Baptist—and all of this assumed importance is anti-gospel and leads the reader in a direction AWAY from the Lord Jesus instead of toward Him. His finished work is nowhere in sight.
Changing the Jews’ Understanding of Messiah?
Monday’s lesson leads with another subtle but backwards assertion. Again, this statement can be argued to make sense, but in the context of the gospel of John, it is a misleading claim. Here is how Monday’s lesson opens:
The Hebrew nation was looking for a Messiah who would deliver them from Rome. The goal of the Gospel of John was to change their understanding of the Messiah so that they could recognize in Jesus the fulfillment of the prophecies regarding the coming King. The Messiah would not be an earthly ruler. He came to fulfill all the Old Testament promises concerning Himself, which include His self-sacrifice in behalf of the world, and to renew the relationship between God and His people.
First, the point of John’s gospel was not to change the Jews “understanding of the Messiah”. To be sure, the Jews had developed the idea that there would be two figures who would fulfill prophecy: one a political liberator and one who would be a suffering servant. Neither of these understandings, though, included the idea that the Messiah would be God.
There were some Jews who did read the prophecies and understand that God was sending His Son to Israel to fulfill all righteousness, but those who believed were a minority. In fact, we meet a handful of those who believed in the story of Jesus’ earliest life: Elizabeth and Zacharias, Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna at the temple. We also learn that He had disciples who believed He was the Son of God. Overall, though, the Jews were not expecting the Jesus who came
The point of John’s gospel was not “education” to reframe the Jews’ expectations of who and what the Messiah would be. Rather the point of John’s gospel was to prove that Jesus Was God! The problem wasn’t that the Jews had been taught wrong and needed to be corrected in order to recognize Jesus; the problem was that they did not believe God. They believed their own interpretations of prophecy and had developed ideas of what the Messiah would look like. Instead of dealing with the prophecies in context and believing all they said, they had created a national expectation that included someone who would stomp on Rome and restore the kingdom to Israel.
In fact, one is tempted to see a strong parallel between what Israel had done and what Adventism is doing. Perhaps the fact that Adventism has interpreted prophecy and all of Scripture through the lens of a modern more-than-a-prophet is the reason they can’t see that John’s gospel was proving Jesus’ identity as God—not merely educating people so they don’t have a false concept of who the Messiah would be.
Furthermore, notice that the quote above said that Jesus’ fulfillment of the Old Testament promises would “include His self-sacrifice” and the renewal of “the relationship between God and His people”.
While Jesus did lay down His own life, His death on the cross is not merely a “self-sacrifice”. 2 Corinthians 5:19–21 reveals:
[T]hat God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.—2 Corinthians 5:19 LSB
Jesus’ death on the cross involved the Father who was IN HIM. As Jesus became sin for us, the Father was IN CHRIST reconciling the world to Himself. He was not counting our transgressions against us because He was counting them against Christ. Father and Son were both involved on that cross; Jesus bore our sins while the Father poured out His wrath on the Son as our Substitute. Yet this mutual suffering was for the purpose of RECONCILING the world to Himself. Jesus did not self-sacrifice on the cross to renew our relationship! There was no “renewal” even possible. Rather, our sins had to be paid for. We could not be in a relationship with God unless our sins were atoned—and Father and Son both suffered on the cross as the Father, in Christ, reconciled the world to Himself as the Lord Jesus bore and paid for our sin.
Once again we see, in one truncated, buried paragraph, the magnitude of Adventism’s perversion of Scripture and suppression of the true gospel. John was not correcting an understanding of the Messiah so the Jews could recognize Him. No—he was showing that Jesus was God. He was reminding them that Jesus was systematically doing all the things the prophecies said the Messiah would do—and the Jews knew only God could do those things. Their problem was not wrong understanding; their problem was unbelief!!
Yet once again, this eclipsing of the gospel truth contained in John reveals that Adventism itself holds to a false gospel and to a diminished Jesus who gave up His attribute of omnipresence and forfeited His “God-power” in order to identify with sinful man and to show us how to keep the law.
About Being Born Again
Thursday’s lesson addresses Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus recorded in John 3:1–21. This passage contains Jesus’ direct statement that Nicodemus must be born again of the Spirit, and He chastised him because as the teacher of Israel, he didn’t know what that meant. Further, John 3 contains a strong statement of humanity’s natural condition:
“For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”—John 3:17, 18 LSB
The lesson doesn’t even mention this passage revealing that all mankind is under the judgment of God UNTIL a person believes in the Lord Jesus. In other words, being lost is not a choice; it is a natural condition. All of us are born dead in sin.
We must believe when God draws us to Himself and shows us our true need of a Savior. He reveals to us that we are hopeless sinners, and as we see our sin and repent, as we believe in the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus, we literally pass from death to life (John 5:24). We move OUT of judgment into life. But if we have not believed, we are already judged. We are born condemned.
All of this Jesus told Nicodemus. Check out the passage; these are “red words”!
In John 3:3–6, Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be “born again” in order to see the kingdom of God:
Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which has been born of the Spirit is spirit.”—John 3:3–6 LSB
In John 3:9 we read that Nicodemus asked how these things could be, and Jesus responded: “Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things?”
I used to wonder what Jesus meant by that. How could Nicodemus have understood? It wasn’t until after I left Adventism that I realized Nicodemus would have known the prophecy in Ezekiel 36:25–27:
“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your uncleanness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to do My judgments.”—Ezekiel 36:25–27
God had clearly told Ezekiel what the new covenant would look like! Not only did God say He would bring Israel back from their dispersion, but He promised that He would cleanse them from all their uncleanness and idolatry. He would give them new hearts and new spirits. He would remove their hearts of stone and give them hearts of flesh. Even more, He would put His own Spirit in them!
Ezekiel had foretold the new birth which would be the miraculous gift of God when He inaugurated the new covenant! Not only would believers who trusted the Lord Jesus receive spiritual life and new hearts with new potential and power and preferences, but they would be indwelled by God the Holy Spirit!
This new covenant reality is what Jesus told Nicodemus he must experience if he were to see the kingdom of God—and this experience was possible for Nicodemus because he had a personal revelation of the Lord Jesus. Nicodemus, like Jesus’s disciples, could see who Jesus was and believe.
Yet the lesson does not discuss this reality because it cannot. Adventism does not believe humans are born with immaterial spirits that are literally dead in sin and must be brought to life by believing in the Lord Jesus. They have no way to teach the biblical new birth. To Adventists, the new birth is a figure of speech, a metaphor to describe a person’s change of mind and their being baptized as a sign that they accept Adventism’s unique doctrines.
In fact, Thursday’s lesson ends with this question:
What does it mean to be “born again,” and why would Jesus put such emphasis on it?
Nowhere—not in the lesson nor in the Teachers Comments—is there even an attempt at an answer to this question. “Born again” is a vague metaphor to an Adventist. The central reality of belief in the real Jesus and His finished work is unknowable within the framework of Adventist doctrine.
Instead, the week ends with Ellen White quotes from The Desire of Ages which attempts to expound on Nicodemus and how one’s–
…thoughts and desires are brought into obedience to the will of Christ. The heart, the mind, are created anew in the image of Him who works in us to subdue all things to Himself. Then the law of God is written in the mind and heart, and we can say with Christ, ‘I delight to do Thy will, O my God.’ Ps. 40:8.”—Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, pp. 175, 176.
The pious-sounding word salad of EGWs commentary seems to draw people to “Lay hold upon Christ, and appropriate His merits, the remedy for sin…” (see p. 50), but the reader never learns HOW to appropriate the merits of Christ. He never learns that he is a sinner, dead in sin, and cannot please God. He never learns that God must draw him, and as he sees who God is, his only appropriate response is to repent and believe.
Adventism serves up an EGW-shaped form of godliness but without the power of the gospel. Adventists are left anxious and afraid, guilt-ridden and unable to know how to have peace with God.
So I ask you: have you seen your sin? Have you looked at the real Jesus who took your sin to the cross where He took God’s wrath in your place? Have you seen the Father who was IN Christ Jesus as He suffered? Have you seen our One God who reconciled the world to Himself on the cross as Jesus shed human blood for human sin?
If not, begin reading the gospel of John—or copy it into a notebook. See who Jesus actually IS, and see that He Is God whose entire purpose in coming to earth was to die to reconcile us to God.
Bring your sin to the cross. Admit you are helpless and that you need a Savior. Trust the One who died for your sin according to Scripture; who was buried, and who rose on the third day according to Scripture to break your death sentence. Look to Jesus—trust His finished work on your behalf, and LIVE!
He who believes has passed out of judgment into life, and nothing can snatch the believer out of God’s hands!†
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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