Lesson 9: “The Source of Life”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson teaches that all people are born having faith from God, not being dead in sin.
- Jesus is reinforced as Example instead of as Substitute who conquered, not fought, sin and death.
- This lesson emphasizes eternal salvation instead of life, thus eclipsing the new birth.
The confusion of Adventism attempting to teach Jesus as the Source of life in the context of Adventism’s physicalism comes to a head in this lesson. Adventists reading this lesson will not be alarmed—although they may be a bit confused and frustrated—because nothing here represents the biblical view of the nature of man: that each human has an immaterial spirit that is born dead and must be made alive through faith in Jesus.
Instead, this lesson is built upon the Adventist (and Jehovah’s Witness, I have to say) belief that man is purely physical. Adventists use the words “spiritual” and “spirit”, but they do not mean a literal human spirit apart from his or her breath. Instead, they mean a mental attitude, an emotional and mental response to events or truths presented to them.
In short, Adventists do not trust their emotions as credible source of information, and they believe that intellectual understanding and acceptance is at the heart of true belief and practice. They do not teach or believe that God communicates to us by means of our spirits nor that our immaterial spirits interact with our minds in such a way that we come to a knowledge of the truth.
Adventism teaches that humans do NOT have spirits that are separate from and survive the death of our bodies. This refusal to believe the biblical teaching about the nature of man results in their refusal to believe that humans are literally born dead in sin without any implanted or innate ability to know, please, or pursue God. They deny that our salvation is one hundred percent dependent upon the work of God and that we have no part in our own salvation.
Adventists do not understand that we are born dead in sin and unable to rise above our natures. We have to be brought to life by our Creator.
Wrong definitions of sin and Jesus
Furthermore, this physicalism leads Adventism to have wrong definitions of sin and of the nature of Christ Himself. They see sin as wrong choices resulting in disobedient behaviors, and they see Jesus as becoming a physicalist human just as they imagine themselves to be. They believe He came just as they believe they are: with genetically inherited propensities to sin and with no immaterial human spirit that survives death. They believe Jesus came to demonstrate that humans CAN overcome sin and can become more and more obedient and righteous.
They do not understand that salvation is not about decisions and changes of behaviors but about believing and being literally spiritually reborn by the Spirit of God.
To demonstrate how this lesson perpetuates this Adventist heresy about the nature of man and the nature and work of Christ, we will begin this week by looking at the Teachers Comments.
Born with faith?
On page 121 of the Teachers Comments we find these words:
Faith is not a commodity to be hoarded by a select few to the exclusion of others. It is evident that faith is a universal gift from God to everyone born into this world. Human existence begins with faith that is embedded in our hearts by our Creator, and it is to be built upon by accepting and believing in the One who gave it. This conviction is then reinforced by our asking God to take full control of our lives. John affirms this fact by saying, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name” (John 1:12, NKJV).
Simply put, faith is a pure gift from God.…Even repentance is a gift from God, for it is a response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit to submit to Him. Many make the mistake of waiting first to have both faith to believe and the repentance to come to God; but these twin gifts are already there, awaiting our reception and application.
I am grateful that this Adventist disbelief in our natural human depravity and our being born with the ability to freely make choices is so clearly revealed in these paragraphs. It is much easier to demonstrate how wrong the Adventist position is when they say clearly what they believe. The Sabbath School lessons are often vague and imprecise because they are written to reinforce Adventists’ worldview without overtly stating controversial beliefs. The above quote, though, is clear. Adventism teaches that humans are born already equipped with FAITH from God—that both faith and repentance are available to every person from the time they are conceived.
In fact, the author above states that faith is “embedded in our hearts by our Creator” from the first moment of human existence. Everyone born is designed in utero with faith embedded in their hearts.
Bible Contradicts Adventism
What does Scripture say?
What then? Are we better? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME WORTHLESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.” … “THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES.”—Romans 3:9–12, 18 LSB
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.—Psalm 51:5 LSB
“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 3:18 LSB
These and many other passages in Scripture teach that every human ever born since Adam (with the exception of the Lord Jesus) was born spiritually dead in sin. We are by nature unable to do good or to seek or please God. We are unable to believe God on our own.
Furthermore, we are born under the wrath of God, condemned from the time of our conception by our own spiritual death. We are born into the domain of darkness and by nature children of God’s wrath, living “according to the ruler of the power of the air”. We are by nature depraved, spiritually dead, deserving of and under the wrath of God. We inherit Adam’s spiritual death, and only a miracle can bring us out of our natural condition.
Because of our natural condition of being spiritually dead, we need a complete rescue, not merely re-education and a good teacher.
Jesus Didn’t Fight Sin
Consistent with Adventism’s teaching that man is without a dead immaterial spirit but with the ability to choose to exercise faith, this lesson further explains Jesus’s mission on earth as one of fighting and overcoming sin and death. Here is what the Teachers Comments explain:
Some, however, fallaciously argue that there was no real need for Christ to come to this world. But who else could have taken our sins away and clothed us with the robe of God’s righteousness? Who else could have given us life in the place of our death? No one but the all-righteous and life-giving Christ. He valiantly fought our two most deadly enemies, sin and death, and conquered both. His victory becomes ours when we truly believe in Him.
This quote tells us that Jesus came as a man to fight sin and to fight death—and He conquered both. This claim is untrue.
Jesus did not fight sin and death. He came as a sinless man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and never dead in sin. He came without any pre-existing tendency to sin because His human spirit was living. He was born of God by nature.
We, however, are born in the image of Adam and are by nature dead in sin and objects of wrath. We must be born again—born of God.
Jesus came to pay for sin
Jesus came to reconcile us to God. He came to pay the penalty of sin, not to fight it and win. He came to free us from sin and death by literally taking our sin upon Himself and enduring the wrath of God that we deserve, thus atoning for our sin and redeeming us from death.
Jesus didn’t FIGHT sin and death. He broke the curse of sin and death because He alone had the power to take responsibility for sin and death on our behalf.
Jesus did not FIGHT sin: Paul tells us that He BECAME sin for us:
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
Jesus literally became sin for us—our sin was imputed to Him—and became by imputation what God hated. He became the thing from which God had to withdraw and upon which God had to pour out His wrath.
Jesus became sin and took God’s wrath for it—so that, if we trust Him in repentance and faith, we will become the righteousness of God IN HIM.
Notice that: Jesus BECAME sin for us, and we BECOME God’s own righteousness when we are placed in Christ. This transaction is not taught in Adventism. Adventism teaches that we become personally more and more righteous when we “accept Jesus” and “believe in Him”, but the Jesus we are asked to believe as Adventists is a Jesus who showed us how to keep the law and overcome sin.
Jesus did not fight sin and death. He literally became sin—He took our imputed sin into His spiritually alive, sinless self—and paid the penalty for our sin. Only Jesus could have done this because only the man Christ Jesus never sinned and never was spiritually dead!
Sinless Jesus qualified as substitute
Jesus qualified to be our Substitute because He had no sin in Himself. As God the Son in sinless human flesh, only He could be the sufficient sacrifice for our sin.
Romans tells us that Jesus acted as both the judge and the debtor when He died for us:
[F]or all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith, for a demonstration of His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.—Romans 3:23–26 LSB
Jesus demonstrated God’s justice in fulfilling God’s demand that death is the price of sin. Jesus Himself demanded death for sin, because He Is God. Further, He showed us that He Himself is the one who justifies sinners who repents because He literally took the wrath of God for our sin!
Jesus Is Not Satan’s Opposite
The Teachers Notes further articulated the Adventist teaching that Jesus came to expose Satan’s evil character and purpose. Here is what the author says:
Christ is the only Source of life. If we desire life, we must cling to Him alone and to no other creature. Even angels, holy or fallen, cannot give us life, for their life is derived from God. Not only can they not give life, the greatest of the fallen angels, Satan, is the direct opposite of the Giver of life. Satan is the wily merchant of death, whose obsession is to rob us of the life that Jesus provides. Jesus exposes Satan’s destructive agenda in contrast to His own salvific mission when He declares, “ ‘The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly’ ” (John 10:10, NKJV).
Satan has absolutely NOTHING to do in the story of our salvation! Jesus did not come as a contrast to reveal Satan’s evil character. There has never been a doubt about Satan’s true identity, he is NOT the opposite of Jesus! Adventism on EGW’s authority teaches that the great controversy is raging between Christ and Satan for the souls of men, but this idea is false. Satan was never in a position to claim that Jesus was unfairly exalted, as EGW taught. Satan and Jesus were never in a situation in which God exalted Jesus OVER Satan.
Rather the Lord Jesus, eternal almighty God, is Satan’s creator. He has never been in doubt of this fact, and we are not the pawns in a cosmic battle between Satan and his Creator!
Our salvation is an issue directly between God and us. Satan is not a player. It is God who said death was the consequence for sin, and He was the One who provided the rescue for all of us who have been born dead in Adam. Satan is not struggling to convince us not to choose Jesus—we are born unwilling and unable to choose Jesus!
Our struggle is directly with God who reveals Himself to every man through creation and through His word. Satan is simply not a player—but Adventism is a religion built around Satan.
Eternal Life or Eternal Salvation?
Monday’s lesson drives home the Adventist belief that salvation is about eternal life as a physical being, not eternal life as a spiritual reality that we can enter now. Adventism denies that we can be literally born again and that our identities, our immaterial spirits, will never die when we trust Jesus. In fact, Monday’s lesson is a subtle twisting of John’s words to make them fit Adventist physicalism:
Peter’s words about “eternal life” tap into a theme that runs through out the Gospel of John. A concentration of phraseology about eternal life appears in John 6, in the context of the feeding of the 5,000 (John 6:27, 40, 47, 54, 68). Jesus says that He is the Bread of Life (John 6:35), meaning that His life, His death, and His resurrection are the source of eternal salvation.
The phrase everlasting life or its equivalent occurs at least 17 times in the Gospel of John. This term does not refer to a spirit existence, or to becoming part of an eternal being, or to some other ethereal concept. Rather, it refers to that life-giving power that brings salvation and meaning to our existence now and to life without end when our Lord returns. Just as Jesus became flesh, so the resurrection that Jesus talks about takes place in time and space and in a physical body. It is a resurrection from the dead, a renewal of the life that we once had in Eden.
Immediately following these paragraphs, the reader is asked to read John 5:24 (among other texts) to answer the question, “How do we receive eternal life?” Here is 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
John specifically says that when a person BELIEVES Jesus’ word and the Father who sent Him, he HAS (present tense) eternal life and “has passed out of death into life”. These promises are in the present tense, not future. This statement means that immediately when a person believes, he or she receives eternal life, and that life never stops even for a moment. Even in death the person who has received eternal life does not cease to exist.
Eternal life, not “eternal salvation”
Eternal life is not the same thing as “eternal salvation”. The lesson subtly changed the phrase to “eternal salvation” in order to avoid dealing with the plain meaning of the texts: believers HAVE eternal life and never die.
Their bodies will die, but their immaterial spirits are in Jesus and will never die. In fact, not even death can separate us from the love of God, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:28, 29.
Yet the lesson hides from the reader the fact that we can KNOW Jesus and be born again spiritually now. When we trust and believe that the Lord Jesus completed the atonement for our sin on the cross and that He broke our curse of death when He rose on the third day, we immediately pass from death to life. Our identities will never be apart from the Lord, and we will not come into judgment.
God is not waiting for Jesus to complete and investigative judgment to evaluate our sins and confessions; instead, when we trust Jesus, God sees His sufficient sacrifice and His breaking of our death sentence and He credits us with Jesus’ personal righteousness. We are instantly born again with the literal resurrection life of Jesus, and we pass from death to life.
We don’t merely get the promise that we will one day get “eternal salvation”; we literally receive eternal life at that moment. At the moment we believe, God transfers us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col 1:13).
This lesson has obscured the power of the gospel and the reality of our true need for a Savior. It has diminished our Lord Jesus into an Example whose perfection is a constant reminder that we do not measure up.
Pass from death to life
What John tells us, however, is that the Lord Jesus came to take our sin away, and when we trust and believe Him, we pass immediately from death to life—and our lives here on earth are immediately changed as well. We know when we have been given Jesus’ resurrection life. We know that we have been born again.
Adventism, though, hides this reality from its members and keeps them enslaved in spiritual death and the fear of Satan.
I challenge you, whether you are Adventist, former Adventist, or never been Adventist, to get a notebook and begin copying the book of John, a few verses at a time, into it. Ask the Lord to show you your true need and to reveal the Lord Jesus as the sufficient Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Repent before Him that you have believed in the wrong Jesus and ask Him to receive you, to be your Lord and to give you His life. Thank Him for paying for your sin with His blood, for taking God’s wrath in your place, and for breaking your curse of death.
Believe in the Lord Jesus today, and you will 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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