Lesson 10: “The Way, the Truth, and the Life”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson makes Jesus the Way-shower rather than the way, the truth, and the life personally.
- The author separates Jesus and the Father so that they are “close”, not One God revealing Himself.
- Foot-washing is reframed as a mark of Adventist obedience to Jesus’ example of humility.
The subtle heresy of this week’s lesson lies just out of sight. The words sound familiar and biblical, but their effect is to reinforce Adventism’s understanding of Jesus as an example, a means by which an Adventist might find a path to salvation.
As an Adventist I did not understand Jesus’ outrageous claims of literally being the way, the truth, the life, the light of the world, the bread of life, the door, the resurrection and the life, and the true vine. I firmly believed that the nature of reality was PHYSICAL. I believed that humans did not have immaterial spirits that could know Jesus or which were, otherwise, dead in sin. I believed that my own human spirit was literally my breath that kept my body alive.
When I read in the gospel of John that Jesus said, “I am the the way”, for example, I had no way to understand this claim except to think of it as a metaphor, a figure of speech. So in my own head, I translated His words to mean that He was “essential” as the only person who could show me how to be good, how to honor God, how to overcome sin. Only He could demonstrate to me and help me understand how to live so I would be on the right path.
Now, though, I see that we are not merely bodies that breathe, and I also understand from Jesus’ own words in John 4:24 that
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:24 LSB
Again, Jesus did not identify God as spirit because He was using a metaphor. He literally told the truth, and even more, He literally informed US that we have spirits also, and if we truly worship the God who is spirit, we have to worship Him in our own spirits—and in truth. In other words, we can’t redefine His words to fit our pre-existing worldview. We have to worship Him truthfully exactly as He reveals Himself, and that fact includes our own worship of God in our own immaterial spirits.
We cannot redefine Jesus’ words to say that we have to have an emotional or mental attitude that worships God according to the idea of “truth” our religion has given us.
No! We have to worship our real God who is spirit in our own real spirits, and we have to worship Him exactly as He has revealed we should—according to His own demands and revelation—not according to our own interpretation. Worshiping God “in truth” never, in the New Testament, includes worshiping Him by honoring the seventh-day Sabbath, for example.
The Way-Shower
This lesson illustrates its own internal understanding in the art that illustrates this lesson. At the head of Saturday’s introduction to the week is a picture of Jesus pointing ahead, showing the “way” to a group of young people whose gazes are fixed on the distance ahead. Jesus is standing beside them, not in front of them, and He and they are all looking at a destination in the distance. Further, Jesus is pointing. The clear message is that they are traveling with Jesus the Way-shower, the one who will guide them on the path they need to walk to get to their heavenly destination.
This image may not seem shocking to those with Adventist backgrounds. This is how we understood Jesus to be “the way”. In fact, this picture perfectly illustrates and cements into the Adventists’ deep picture of reality the idea that Jesus is their ever-present “friend” who points out the pitfalls and shows them the way around danger. He is their example and fellow-traveler; if they stick with his guidance, they’ll get where they’re going even when the going gets rough. He is the ever-present guide who makes sure they don’t get off track with ideas that differ from Adventism’s beliefs and practices.
The lesson reinforces this typical Adventist understanding of Jesus as the one who shows the way. In Tuesday’s lesson we find this paragraph and also the following thought question:
Philip asked to see the Father, something no sinful human can do and live (compare with Exod. 33:17–34:9, John 1:18). Jesus reproves the lack of understanding and points out that if you have seen Him, you have seen the Father (John 14:9). Consequently, it is clear that Jesus is the pathway to God. Without Him, the pathway grows dark and uncertain. He is the light that illuminates the way to God.
Why is it so comforting to realize that Jesus is the best revelation we will have here of what God the Father is like?
These words confirm the Adventist understanding that Jesus came to demonstrate the character of God. He came to reveal how merciful and compassionate the Father is, and if one looks to Jesus, he will find the way to live like Jesus lived and thereby please God. But this interpretation is NOT what Jesus meant. Even more, that thought question about Jesus being the best revelation we will have of the Father completely misses the point: Jesus revealed the Father’s mercy and love as He hung on the cross and died under the penalty of our sin, taking the Father’s wrath in Himself and breaking the curse of death into which we have been born.
The Teachers Comments further emphasized this interpretation of Jesus as the Way-shower instead of as the actual Way. On page 134 we read this:
We may observe an interesting progression in how Jesus describes Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). Consider the sequence of these three words. Jesus is the Way. As we walk, we learn the truth from Him, which eventually leads us to life abundant in this world and in the eternal world to come. Notice that this sequence was Christ’s response to Thomas’s question about the way to pursue, in John 14:5. We may wonder why Thomas made this query, considering Jesus’ clear explanation in the previous verse: “ ‘And where I go you know, and the way you know’ ” (John 14:4, NKJV).…
Jesus Is THE Way, not the Way-shower
These explanations reinforce Adventism’s teaching that Jesus reveals the way—the path, the road, the right way to live—the HOW of being saved. But this is NOT what Jesus claimed for Himself. He IS the Way. We do not walk beside Him and go where He leads; rather, we walk TO HIM, and we find that He has paid for our sin. We walk to His cross and see Him becoming sin for us in order to reconcile us to God. We see God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself as He poured out His wrath on Jesus instead of on those who entrust their sin and their lives to Him and His finished work. Paul put it this way:
Now all [these] things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that 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. … 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 5:18–19, 21 LSB
Jesus doesn’t show us HOW to be saved; He SAVES us and transforms us by giving us new birth: new hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone, new spirits, and He places His own Holy Spirit IN us permanently when we believe and trust Him. He Himself IS the way.
Nowhere does this lesson mention that the way Jesus opened our access to the Father is through His broken body and shed blood. Nowhere does the lesson mention Jesus’ blood as the source of forgiveness and life, nor His body as the living way opened to the Father for us. Instead, it reinforces Adventism’s teaching that following Jesus’ example of mercy and compassion and humility and good works is our model for how to walk to the kingdom: follow Jesus’ directions and example, and you will be saved.
Yet Jesus Himself said differently:
“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
Jesus Is One with the Father
The gospel of John uniquely reveals the Lord Jesus as being ONE with the Father, not merely being so close they seem to be one. Adventism has never accepted the classic Christian Trinity. Ellen White wrote throughout her life of the Heavenly Trio, the Three Worthies of Heaven who come to the aid of supplicants. This model of three “worthies” or three separate beings who work together as a unit sharing will, purpose, and a name is Not what Scripture tells us about God.
Yet this lesson perpetuates this “Godhead” composed of three individuals working together like a God-family. In Tuesday’s lesson, for example, we read the following:
In the Prologue (John 1:1–18), the intimate connection between the Word (logos), Jesus Christ, and the Father is emphasized.
John 1:18 says that the only begotten (better translated here as unique) God is the One who has made the Father known. To make known in this text is the Greek verb exēgeomai, meaning to explain, interpret, exposit. We get the word exegesis from this. It means to bring out the meaning. Thus, Jesus Christ is the link to the Father, the One who explains or interprets the Father to a fallen world. Consequently, He is the way or path to the Father. Without Him, we are limited in our understanding.
We see here that Jesus is being explained as “the link to the Father”. He explains the Father, and as the explainer of God, he is “the way or path to the Father”. Once again we see that the lesson avoids Jesus EQUATING Himself with the Way and also with the identity of God. Jesus didn’t explain God—He IS God. The fulness of deity dwells in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9), and He gave up none of His attributes as God when He took a human body. He wasn’t God’s representative; He was God’s personal presence and provision.
The Teachers’ Comments also reinforce this idea on page 134:
How comforting and reassuring that, in Jesus, we can draw close to the Father without fear or trepidation. The Father will treat us with the same mercy and compassion that Jesus showed to the people around Him, including the outcasts and sinners. Therefore, we are without excuse to refuse to come boldly before the throne of God, to receive His mercy and forgiveness.
Jesus Came To Be Our Sacrifice
Yet Jesus didn’t merely come to show us how kind God is. He came to BE the sacrifice that would save and reconcile mankind to Himself. He came in flesh in order to take human sin and die a human death, and the Father was never apart from Him. He was, as the text above from 2 Corinthians said, IN CHRIST reconciling the world to Himself!
Jesus and the Father were never separated, even when the Father was pouring out His wrath on Jesus and Jesus was crying out in anguish, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”—(Matthew 27:46)
Jesus was never a link to God, a representative or ambassador sent to inform us in terms we could understand who God is. Rather He came as God the Son to be our Sacrifice. That was His mission. He was not primarily a great moral teacher. He was the Lamb of God—God the Son incarnated in human flesh—who takes away the sin of the world!
The Foot-washing Cover-up
This lesson also covers the single account in Scripture of Jesus washing His disciples’ feet. This account is found in John 13:5–17. Interestingly, the account of Jesus instituting the Lord’s Supper as He celebrated Passover with His disciples and introducing the new covenant in His blood is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but these gospels do not include the story of the foot-washing. In John’s gospel we read the story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, but we do not read the story of the Last Supper. Instead, there is merely a mention of it in order to set the stage for the foot-washing. Here is what John says:
[Jesus,] knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He tied it around Himself. Then He poured water into the washbasin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel which He had tied around [Himself].—John 13:3–5
We see that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet AFTER the Lord’s Supper. The lesson emphasizes that Jesus set an example of humility so that His disciples would serve one another and not consider themselves better than others. To be sure this emphasis on humility is stressed in Adventism. Yet EGW and the Adventist organization requires foot washing before communion for the specific reason of repentance and cleansing before taking the elements of the Supper.
Here is only one of many quote from Ellen White:
The ordinance of humility is to clear our moral horizon of the rubbish that has been permitted to accumulate. We have assembled now to meet with Jesus Christ, to commune with him. Every heart is to be open to the bright beams of the Son of Righteousness. Our minds and hearts are to be fixed on Christ as the great center on whom our hopes of eternal life depend.—Review and Herald, June 22, 1897 Par 12
Notice that EGW has reversed the biblical order: she required that foot washing be done BEFORE the supper as a preparation to partake of the elements. Jesus washed His disciples’ feet AFTER the supper, and He said nothing about its being a ritual of cleansing in preparation for communion.
EGWs interpretation and requirement is eerily similar to the Catholic tradition of going to confession before taking Mass. Within Catholicism, the repentance of the confessional booth is required before communion so that one does not take the body and blood of Jesus with unconfessed sin in their hearts and thus bring condemnation onto themselves.
In the book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, the exposition of how to observe the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of Adventism, is this quote:
“The Lord’s Supper is to be a joyful season, not a time of sorrow. The preceding foot washing service provides an opportunity for self-examination, confession of sins, reconciliation of differences and forgiveness. Having received the assurance of being cleansed by the blood of the Savor, believers are ready to enter into special communion with their Lord. They turn to His table with joy, standing in the saving light, not the shadow, of the cross, ready to celebrate the redemptive victory of Christ.” (P. 235).
Only Jesus’ Blood Cleanses
In short, Adventism has taken the account of Jesus’ serving His disciples AFTER the Last Supper and just before His death and has changed its application, making it a prerequisite for taking communion in order to repent and cleanse one’s heart before taking the emblems of Jesus’ body and blood.
Yet foot washing is not required before communion, and it was never intended as a ritual of cleansing. Jesus Himself has atoned fully for our sins on the cross, and when we take communion, it is because we have ALEADY trusted His finished work and repented of our sin. When we believe in Him, He cleanses us from all our sins, past, present, and future, and we are born again and indwelled by God the Holy Spirit permanently. We pass at that moment from death to life!
When we take communion it is for the purpose of remembering what He has already done for us. We worship and praise Him, and we thank Him for dying for us and for transferring us from death to life. We also anticipate eating this supper with Him when we are united with Him in His kingdom.
If you have not trusted Jesus’ finished work and been born of God, indwelled by His Spirit, look to Him now. See that He Himself is the Living Way to the Father, and when you trust His finished work you will be eternally, spiritually united with Him in eternal life. You will never be separated from His love, even by death, and you will receive a glorified body when He returns at the time He has appointed.
Believe Him today; repent, and know the joy of being born again and eternally alive in Christ! †
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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