COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Adventism uniquely marks all of us who have lived inside that worldview. Everything we thought we knew was tainted, just “a quarter of a turn” off. Our words sounded Christian—even evangelical—but underneath the surface, the meanings of our words were not the same as Christians understood them.
This past week we received an email that put words to the desperate confusion so many of us felt—or even feel currently—as we realize that Adventism is wrong, but we can’t figure out how to experience that new birth which changes us eternally.
I will share the letter to present the problem, and then I will share my answer. I know that the letter writer is not alone in having these questions.
Dear Colleen,
My journey out of Adventism feels like it is taking forever, but I know it is something where I need to trust God and know that He is feeding me as much information as I can handle. I watch your Former Adventist Fact Check podcast every week and really enjoy the information that you provide in that, as well as your Former Adventist Podcastwith Nikki Stevenson. Your podcasts about the 28 Fundamental Beliefs are eye-opening, and I long to meet the real Jesus and discover the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
One of my struggles is with belief that I am saved. I’m still holding onto the Adventist uncertainty of salvation, even though I know that if I believe in Jesus I am saved. The simplicity of that is hard for me. I’ve repented and asked Jesus to be my Savior countless times when I am in the lower points of life. Death and even heaven are scary ideas to me. Recently I had an epiphany about this, and I want to check it with you to see if I’m on the right track here.
In one of your earlier podcast episodes, you and Nikki discussed your prayers before and after Adventism. The two of you said that during Adventism, your prayers were pleading with God for salvation, but after being saved and coming to know the true Jesus, you prayed from a place of already being saved. That was an action that you took in your prayers, not just a “mental checkbox” of “I believe that I am saved”. It’s hard to describe, but it sounds like belief is an action, not just a mental checkbox.
Is that the same with believing that I have been saved by Jesus? It’s a one-time thing: I choose to believe in Jesus and accept Him as my savior because I want to be reconciled to God, and now I act like I am a believer, I follow the New Testament advice on Christian living, and I pray like I have been saved? I’ve heard that sometimes faith is an action that you take even if you don’t feel faith (kind of like how the definition of “courage” is being scared but taking action anyway).
If I don’t “feel” like I have been saved, does that mean I haven’t been? Before being “truly saved”, do I need to have an “encounter” with Jesus, like I’ve heard from some people’s testimonies? If so, does that mean I have to wait for Him to reach out to me? I have such a strong desire to know Him, but there’s something blocking me. What role does the Holy Spirit play in all of this? Does He come onto me immediately after being saved or is there a delay? When do I become a new creation?
I have James 4:8 on a sticky note on my desk: “Come near to God, and He will come near to you.” But prayer is hard and hollow; reading the Bible is like reading a different language, there is fogginess in my soul.
I feel like these are questions I should ask a local pastor in our area. We are having a hard time finding a good Bible church in our area, since we live in the country and everything is pretty far from us.
I’m sorry that this is kind of a bummer of an email, but I really appreciate your guidance as my family are all still Adventist and my husband is a never-been and doesn’t quite understand the mental strongholds that this demonic religion still has on me.
—VIA EMAIL
My Response
Thank you for your email; you are describing a frustration that is all-too-common among those of us who begin to see that Adventism is wrong, but we aren’t sure how to proceed.
I want to start by addressing what it means to trust Jesus. This sometimes seems vague and hard to define. We learned in Adventism that we had to accept Jesus as our Savior, but actually this language is never used in the Bible. I know it’s very common in many Christian circles, but the Bible tells us to “Believe”. The Greek word underlying “believe” has the implication of “trust” as a component of it. If you’re following Nikki and me through the book of Romans, you’ll have heard us talking about Abraham and his faith. Romans 4 is a very rich and reassuring chapter!
Belief Credited As Righteousness
I’m going to use Abraham as an illustration of “belief”. He was a rank pagan from Ur; he and his family worshiped “other gods” (Josh 24:2)—unlike what EGW said. She said that God kept Abraham from worshipping pagans gods, and her implication was that Abraham was already predisposed to believe God because he wasn’t worshipping idols. But Scripture says he was. He was a pagan.
Yet God called him, and he followed. God made promises to him that He would give him seed, land, and blessing, and these promises did not depend upon Abraham’s doing anything for God, thus qualifying him for blessings. God’s promises were unilateral, and Abraham did not have to do anything for God to ensure that God would keep His promises—even the promise of many descendants. This was the impossible promise because Abraham and Sarah had no children, and Sarah was barren. Furthermore, God said that the promised seed would come through Sarah, not through another wife or concubine. God said He would make these things happen, and His faithfulness did not depend upon Abraham’s promises back to God or on his behavior.
In Genesis 15:6 we learn that in spite of all improbability, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness. Now how did Abraham muster up the faith to believe God? We learn in the New Testament that all humanity is born literally dead in sin, “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1–3). We cannot rise above our natures, and we are unable to seek, please, or know God in our natural state (Romans 3:9–18). So God has to give us the faith to believe (Ephesians 2:8–10), and that is what we can know about Abraham. God gave Abraham the certainty and confidence that He was Lord, and Abraham believed Him. It was his belief that God credited to his account as “righteousness”.
Adventism Didn’t Tell Us the Truth About Ourselves
I believe that for many of us, the idea that we have to somehow figure out the magic formula and get our hearts and behaviors to match so we can know God—this belief feels like a fence we can’t break through. I know I used to feel that way, and I felt frustrated and anxious because I couldn’t get it right.
What I have experienced is that I have had to give up what I thought I knew about Jesus and salvation and my own behavior. Adventism taught us that God gave us standards for behavior that showed we loved Him, and He gave us the Sabbath to show that we worshiped Him because He was the Creator. Our honoring of Sabbath was a way to worship the one true God. Yet at the same time, Adventism did not teach us that we actually cannot honor and worship God by deciding that we will do all He asked of us. Adventism did not teach us that we are born spiritually dead.
I also learned that I was born into sin, but I did not understand what that meant. I thought being born into sin meant I inherited sinful tendencies from my gene pool, and in order to escape being a sinner, I had to accept Jesus and believe in Him. I had no idea exactly what that meant or how it would or should “look”. In fact, this idea that people could actually do what God asked them to do was the problem with the nation of Israel. When God told them He would bless them for obedience but disobedience would be their death sentence, they responded, “All that you have said, we will do.” (See Exodus 24:7, for example.) They made promises they simply could not keep; they were born dead in sin, and sinners cannot keep their promises to God. Their good intentions were not sufficient to keep them obedient, and they kept failing to keep the covenant.
Law Never Intended to Stop Sin
We learn in Galatians 3:19–23 and in Romans 7:7–12, for example, that God gave the law NOT to help Israel “be good” but to actually increase their sin and lead them to Christ, their Substitute. The law defined to Israel their true condition: unable to please God and unable to overcome sin. It also gave them the shadows of blood atonement that was required for them to actually be reconciled to God. In many ways, the Mosaic covenant was impossible for Israel to keep because they were dead in sin, but through it all, God kept reminding Israel that He was their God, and if they believed Him and trusted Him, He would bless them. If they trusted that He was caring for them as they offered Him their sacrifices and honored His sabbaths, they would experience His blessings as a nation.
Even for Israel the issue was whether or not the people would believe God. It was never about whether or not they would manage to keep the laws and sabbaths perfectly; rather it was about their trusting Him. If they believed that He would bless them as they agreed with Him about their sin, their need to sacrifice, and their need to observe the sabbaths He gave, If they agreed to refuse to worship the pagan gods of the surrounding nations and trust Yahweh, He would bless them.
Yet even if they did not believe Him—and we know that in the end Israel apostatized and was exiled for their apostasy—still God would keep the promises He made to Abraham and would not forever reject His people.
Yet even if they did not believe Him—and we know that in the end Israel apostatized and was exiled for their apostasy—still God would keep the promises He made to Abraham and would not forever reject His people. He would still bring the promised Seed.
When the Lord Jesus finally came, He revealed that He was the Perfect Israel who did all that the nation had failed to do. He perfectly fulfilled ALL the shadows of the law and kept the covenant with the Father. He even fulfilled all the sabbaths, being the literal reality they all foreshadowed. He was the One who had, for example, created the Sabbath, and He was the One who was in charge of the day. He had authority OVER the Sabbath because He was the reality to which it pointed (Col 2:16 17). He was the One who fulfilled all the prophecies about what the Messiah would do when He came. He was the One who was the embodiment of all the sacrifices foreshadowed.
When He died on the cross, shedding sinless human blood for human sin, He took the Father’s wrath against sin IN HIMSELF. And the Father was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us because He was counting them against the Son (2 Corinthians 5:19–21). God did for us what we could not do: atone for our own sin.
Jesus, not We, Keeps the Covenant With the Father
The Son kept all the requirements of the law on our behalf on the cross. Jesus became our Substitute, taking the death penalty the law demanded for sins—and taking God’s own penalty of death in Himself—the penalty God declared when He told Adam that if he ate the fruit, he would die that day. Adam did die spiritually the day he ate that fruit, and spiritual death is Adam’s legacy to us. We have no way to escape that death—except through the Lord Jesus who took that penalty for us.
So what Jesus did was to keep the old covenant as the Perfect Israel—the covenant the nation failed to keep—perfecting even the sacrifices by being the one true Sacrifice that all of them represented. And as the One in whom all the conditions of the covenant were kept, He revealed that He is the One who actually atoned for all human sin on behalf of everyone who would believe Him and trust Him and His work on our behalf. His atonement goes backwards throughout all history and forwards into the future, so that all people who BELIEVE and trust Him, as Abraham did, are covered by His atoning blood, and their sins are forgiven. (See Romans 3:20–31.)
His blood is the guarantee of all the new covenant blessings God promised He would give His people: new hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone; new spirits—their dead-in-sin spirits would be born again, born of God—and the Holy Spirit would indwell them permanently (Eph. 1:13,14), guaranteeing to all believers that they are children of God and co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:14–17)!
In the new covenant, we do not make promises to God as Israel did at Sinai. Jesus, our Substitute and representative to God, made and keeps ALL the promises. He fulfilled the Old Covenant, and He gave His own blood as the basis for the benefits of the new covenant: forgiveness, new life, and eternal security. Now, in order to be God’s person, we do not have to join a nation, taking an external sign like circumcision to show that we are legitimate Israelites and under the law God gave them. Now all we are asked to do is to BELIEVE that God sent the Son to keep the covenant terms IN OUR PLACE. We are asked to believe the Son and trust His finished work.When we believe, we receive the circumcision of the heart done without hands (Col. 2:11).
This believing means that we agree with God about our sin: we are hopelessly unable to please God. Only the Lord Jesus can please God on our behalf. When we admit and own our guilt and cringing shame and throw ourselves and our sin and shame upon His mercy at the cross and ask Him forgive us on the basis of His perfect, sufficient blood sacrifice on our account, He forgives us!
Belief is not merely a mental action; it is an admission of our guilt and an acknowledgment that we can’t keep ourselves in the grace of God nor even make an act of will or a decision that will secure our salvation. Rather, we see who we are: by nature children of wrath and condemned from the time of our conception (Jn. 3:18, 36) apart from our believing that Jesus keeps the covenant with the Father on our behalf. When we see that Jesus took our imputed guilt into Himself and offered the only perfect and sufficient sacrifice that God would accept—and that He did this to reconcile US to Himself and to forever atone for our sin and put our sin far away from us, when we see and believe Him, we lay down our own attempts to please Him. Instead we trust Him, the One who did everything that we cannot do to give us what we cannot otherwise attain.
He literally purchased us from sin and death by propitiating for us to God.
“Accepting Jesus” Doesn’t Apply
The Son as our Substitute keeps all the terms of the covenant with the Father on our behalf, and when we believe and trust His covenant work on our behalf, we are placed in Christ. We receive His resurrection life—the life that is now ours because His blood satisfied God’s demands and broke the curse of death. Jesus’ resurrection revealed life and immortality (see 2 Tim. 1:10), and when we trust Jesus, we pass at that moment from death to life (Jn. 5:24). The Father literally transfers us from the domain of darkness and places us into the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col 1:13). We become citizens of a new kingdom. We become alive together with Christ, seated at the right hand of God in Him (Ephesians 2:4–10). All the new covenant promises are applied to us immediately when we believe, and this new birth is eternal. It is Jesus’ eternal resurrection life that we receive, and God credits Christ’s personal righteousness to our account (Phil 3:9).
So, as we see who Jesus is and what He did—the God-Man who is the One Mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5,6)—the only One who has in Himself the Person who has been offended (God) and the people who have offended Him (humans), we see that “accepting Jesus” is a term that just doesn’t apply to recognizing and believing what He actually did. When we see Jesus for who He is and what He did and what He continues to do as He intercedes eternally for us on the basis of His atoning blood (Heb. 7:23–25), we are confronted with the command to believe Hm.
Will we acknowledge our sins—even the ones we committed while trying to be good, the ones we try to rationalize because they are so shameful and embarrassing that we feel a need to ask God to understand that we didn’t know better, or that we were doing our best, or that we felt trapped? Will we acknowledge even the sins we committed that resulted from others’ sins against us? Will we acknowledge to Him our shame and grief and guilt and believe that He suffered on our account and shed atoning blood specifically to forgive us?
Will we humble ourselves before Him and acknowledge that we need to be covered by His blood? Will we thank Him for seeing us and taking our sin into Himself and suffering God’s wrath so we do not?
When we see Jesus and believe and trust in His death for our sins, His burial, and His resurrection on the third day—all according to Scripture—we are made alive in Christ, and we are never the same.
When we see Jesus and believe and trust in His death for our sins, His burial, and His resurrection on the third day—all according to Scripture—we are made alive in Christ, and we are never the same.
We cannot be “un-born-again” any more than a baby can be physically unborn after it is delivered. We are born of God, as John said (John 1:12), and His life is eternal and unconditional. When we trust the Son, He, as our Substitute, is eternally pleasing to the Father. He hides us in Himself, indwells us with His Holy Spirit, and we are hidden with Christ in God our Father (Col 3:3)! We are counted righteous when we believe because God credits us with the actual righteousness of the Lord Jesus. He doesn’t impart righteousness to us, making us able to do good and please Him; rather, He credits us with Christ’s alien-to-us righteousness!
When we have been born again, God continues to complete His work in us. In fact, He has promised to do this (Phil 1:6). But this ongoing growth in Christ is done by God’s grace working in us through our faith in Jesus—it is not by our work to try to stay in God’s good favor. He teaches us to trust Him when we are tempted. Yes, we will still sin (see Romans 7), but the Lord Jesus is our advocate, and “there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). He shows us our sin and convicts us to confess it and to trust Jesus’ blood as the sufficient payment for our sin. He teaches us to trust Him and to say “No” to our flesh as we are tempted. He works in our now-living spirits and shows us how to trust and lean on Him instead of allowing temptation to overwhelm us.
Repent of our Adventism
You have raised an important point: our feelings are not the measure of our reality. They are data indicating to us things that are going on in our life, but the Lord Jesus is unfailing, and when we have trusted Him and have passed from death to life, even the most discouraging and depressing times cannot take us out of Him and His life. They cannot cause us to lose our salvation.
The Bible really is the source of understanding how God works on our behalf. It reveals how to live as a true believer, and it reveals God’s faithfulness to Himself and to us.
I have an assignment for you in three parts. First, I have to ask: have you truly brought all your sin to Jesus? Have you laid your shame and guilt and helplessness before Him and believed that He has fully atoned for your sin with His blood? Have you thrown yourself on His mercy and asked Him to give you life? If not, do that—and thank Him for being your Substitute and for taking your sin and making you clean.
Second, I believe that we as former Adventists have to realize and admit that Adventism was not merely a well-meaning misinterpretation of Scripture. Adventism is a religion shaped by doctrines of demons. It is dark; it twists who Jesus is and who we are; it teaches a gospel never found in Scripture and demands that our Sabbath observance be seen as a component of our “salvation package” (or Adventism’s “plan of salvation”).
Now, we who were Adventist did not choose to believe in a false Jesus and a false gospel; we did not choose to be deceived—but we were. Yet being Adventist is one of those sins in our lives of which we were guilty even though we meant well and did not know it was sin. We have to repent of our Adventism when we see who Jesus is. In fact, the spiritual hold of Adventism on its members is intense and hard to break. It is hard to see, at first, that the Sabbath was an idol as surely as were those golden calves Jeroboam gave Israel to worship at Dan and Bethel.
We have to renounce and repent of our Adventism. As you see Jesus shedding His blood and breaking the curse of sin and death for you, ask Him to remove the spirit of Adventism from your heart and to place His Spirit in the place that Adventism occupied. Adventism was our identity, and when we are in Christ, we have a completely new identity: son or daughter of God! We cannot nurse two identities. Jesus makes us completely new, and we have to repent and let go of that all-defining identity that was our Adventism.
Turning our backs on a spiritual deception requires acknowledging that we were deceived by evil, and we must ask the Lord Jesus to free us from that evil and to keep us only for Himself.
Finally, get a notebook. Begin copying the book of Galatians, a few verses at a time, and ask the Lord to teach you what He wants you to understand. When you have finished Galatians, go on to Hebrews and to the gospel of John; do Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, and so on! The Bible is alive, and it literally changes us. Pray that God will plant you deeply in truth and reality; He will use His living word to shape your walk of faith as you live your new life in Christ. †
Here is a video that may help you to better understand our natural spiritual death and how we are made alive through the blood of Jesus:
- We Got Mail - December 19, 2024
- Jesus—God Born a Baby - December 19, 2024
- December 21–27, 2024 - December 19, 2024