How to Help Adventists See Truth
I am a former Adventist and … I have a circle of Adventist friends whom the Holy Spirit is pouring out on, and yet they still don’t leave the church. They believe EGW is false, and they don’t agree to Sabbath or food laws being mandatory for salvation. However, they see the Adventist church as being not anymore lost than any other denomination. They think there are false things in all denominations, so how is Adventism any different?
However, I, on the other hand, had clear discernment to know that the doctrines were demonic and false, and I wanted to be free of any curse this placed on me or my children’s lives. Maybe it is just the grace of the Lord to give me the fear of the Lord. How can I show them that just because their church is “liberal” Adventism and not strict doesn’t negate the fact that it’s false?
I praise God for allowing me to minister to those still stuck in lies and deception. I’ve even prayed and asked if this is what He wants me doing, and the very next day He sat me next to a stranger at Starbucks who was raised Adventist. So I know the Lord has called me into this ministry, but I need guidance.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you so much for writing! I understand your confusion about these Adventists who stay when they know EGW is false and that Sabbath/food laws are not mandatory for salvation.
I am wondering what you mean when you say the Holy Spirit is pouring out onto them. There are actually many Adventists who are “dabbling” in seeking the Holy Spirit and pray to receive His power, yet they do not abandon the worldview of Adventism. I also understand your experience of the Lord continuing to bring people with Adventism in their background to you. He does that! He does not waste our experience but redeems it as He brings us the opportunities to help others who have a false view of reality and the gospel.
Many progressive Adventists will say they do not believe EGW and say the Sabbath is not necessary for their salvation, yet their underlying worldview continues to give “meaning” to those assertions. While many Adventists say they don’t believe the Sabbath is necessary (nor the food laws), yet internally they still believe that for THEM, giving up the Sabbath would be an act of disloyalty, and they might risk their own salvation if they gave it up. So while they don’t necessarily believe people have to keep the Sabbath to be saved, they themselves will not risk actually giving it up. In their minds, abandoning the Sabbath is different from not believing it from the beginning. They don’t understand that if keeping the Sabbath will not save them, giving it up will not cause them to be lost. If you can’t be saved by a work, neither can you be lost by a work.
And right there we see the window into the Adventist worldview. They do not understand that they can’t DO anything that will cause them to be lost because they do not understand that our lost condition is our natural identity, not something we choose by deciding to do sinful things.
The Former Adventist Podcast “Did One Sin Doom the World?”, addresses this Adventist belief from the passage Romans 5:12.
In a nutshell, Adventists share a worldview which skews the way they see sin, salvation, and the nature of man. Adventists believe humans are PHYSICAL and that they have no immaterial spirit which is separate from their bodies. They believe that when Adam and Eve sinned as recorded in Genesis 3, they “began to die” the day they ate, yet God told Adam that if he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would die THAT DAY.
He DID die that day; he died spiritually, and his and Eve’s physical deaths were consequences of that spiritual death. When Adam ate they immediately knew shame; they hid from God (as if they could), and they became defensive and blamed each other, the serpent, and God Himself. Neither of them owned his/her own sin.
Then we look at Romans 5:12–14, Ephesians 2:1–3, and Romans 3:9–18, and we see that no one is born innocent. We are all born spiritually dead in sin, unable to seek, please, or know God apart from His intervention. Jesus Himself said that those who have NOT believed in the Son are “condemned already” (Jn. 3:18), and until a person believes, the wrath of God remains on him (Jn. 3:36). We are literally born dead, condemned, and under God’s wrath.
No spirit but breath?
Adventism does not teach this fact. They insist we have no spirits separate from our literal breath, and they believe that we are born with genetically passed-on tendencies to sin. Thus people sin because they indulge their selfish tendencies, and salvation, then, becomes an issue of learning to make good choices, self-abnegate, and show God they love Him by keeping the law. They have no idea that they can do ALL THESE THINGS without gaining any “credit” with God because they are living in a state of spiritual death. They do not KNOW God!
Adventists have no understanding of the new birth because they have no idea they are dead in sin. Literally. They believe they have bodies that have to be taught to do right and brains that have to be properly trained for right understanding. They do not read those biblical passages literally. So, sometimes Adventists have experiences of the “Holy Sprit” being poured out…but those experiences are subjective reports that are not rooted in Scriptural authority.
The New Testament tells us that the Holy Spirit convicts the world (not believers!) of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Of sin because they have not believed in the Son, of righteousness because the Son has ascended to the Father, and of judgment because the prince of this world stands condemned (John 16:8–11). His role on this side of the cross is to reveal the truth about Jesus to those who do not believe, and His role for believers is a permanent indwelling (Ephesians 1:13, 14) that gives us His wisdom and discernment and “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16).
In other words, people who are seeking the Sprit without seeking Jesus and His completed atonement are opening themselves to further deception. There are all sorts of brands of mysticism and new age-y “spiritual power” and even spiritual manifestations within charismatic branches of Christianity that deviate from the biblical accounts and descriptions of who the Holy Spirit is and what He does. Just because people report having outpourings of the Holy Spirit, that report doesn’t validate what they say is happening. The Holy Spirit’s work, as told us in Scripture, is all about convicting US of our sin and of revealing the Lord Jesus and His finished work of atonement.
Adventists don’t know that they are, by nature, dead in sin and in need of being made alive—not merely made powerful or more full of faith. They need to know their true need and nature, and they need to understand the gospel: that Jesus died for their sins according to Scripture, that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor 15:1–4) BECAUSE His blood paid the full price of atonement for our sin!
Adventism doesn’t like the blood of Jesus. They don’t understand that they have no way to be saved without it, and they don’t understand that they cannot contribute to God’s pleasure in them. They have NO IDEA that belief in Jesus means leaving what they most love and trusting Jesus alone—and so they morph the Scriptures to fit their pre-existing physicalist, great controversy worldview. They make Jesus and Satan and even themselves fit into EGWs worldview—even when they think they don’t believe in her!
They have no idea that their entire worldview is shaped by EGW. They have her in their heads even when they think they don’t believe her. Furthermore, they mock the biblical truths that they believe are heresies: an immaterial spirit that is either dead in sin or alive in Christ; an immaterial spirit that survives death, as 2 Corinthians 5:1–9 and Philippians 1:20–23 make clear. They disbelieve that God is Spirit, and we must worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:24). They disbelieve that we are born condemned and under wrath.
Sabbath isn’t intrinsically holy
Further, Adventists believe that the Sabbath is intrinsically holy, that those literal hours are especially blessed by God and that our observing the day will give us a special blessing. Even if they deny it’s necessary for salvation, they believe the day is somehow special and is made for their sake. Yet Colossians 2:16, 17 clearly says that Jesus is the substance of the shadow of Sabbath. They do not believe Jesus is LITERALLY their Sabbath rest. They do not know Him because they do not seek Him or believe Him on His terms. They rationalize away what Scripture says about their true nature and their true need, and they do not see Him as the actual object of worship, as the literal WAY to the Father.
In short, I would say, YES! Absolutely it is the grace of the Lord that gave you the fear of the Lord. I don’t have a magic bullet that assures Adventists will understand and hear the truth about Jesus and about themselves, but I would definitely say that the Adventists you know need to understand the biblical nature of reality. They themselves are not merely physical. We have been made in God’s image, and “God is spirit”. Adventists believe that their physical form reflects the image of God, but this idea is not biblical. God is spirit. We are created in His image as spirit beings housed in physical bodies. We are spiritually in God’s image!
The Lord Jesus did not have a body until He came, incarnate, as a baby born of Mary. He has forever identified Himself in this way with us, His creations—but His identity as God did not have a body. He took a body and added it to His divinity, but He did not divest Himself of His attributes as God. He took a body, but he did not always have a body.
Not just another denomination
Your friends think of Adventism as just another denomination. It is not. To be a “denomination”, a group has to be truly Christian. Christians denominations all (at least historically) hold to the same gospel: the Lord Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose on the third day, breaking our curse of death. Adventism does NOT hold this as the gospel. Adventism masquerades as a church, but it has a different gospel. It has the Three Angels’ Messages which, they say, teach seventh-day Sabbath keeping, the investigative judgment, and Sunday as the mark of the beast. These things are Not the gospel!
No Christian church teaches these things as the gospel! Denominations differ, traditionally, on secondary issues such as eschatology and baptism, etc., but at the core, they would all agree (historically) on the centrality of the Trinity, the finished work of the Lord Jesus on the cross, and the inerrancy of Scripture. Adventism does not hold to any of these three essentials.
Adventism cannot be called a denomination. Rather, it is a false religion that has far more in common with Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses than it does with Christianity.
Adventism has learned to use Christian words to hide its true heresies, but the fact that Adventists do not know they are deceived by their own vocabulary doesn’t make them saved by sincerity. Never does Scripture say that God judges us by our sincerity. Rather, He says all of us are without excuse, because He reveals His divine nature and eternal attributes through what has been made (Rom. 1:18–20), and unbelievers suppress this knowledge of God by their wickedness. God reveals Himself, and He gives us the faith to believe when we see Him.
In short, Adventists need to know what is real and true. They need to know their true need and nature; they need to know that the Lord Jesus is truly God who took His own sentence of death in our place. †
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