Lesson 1: “God Loves Freely”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
- This lesson is based on the Adventist foundation that humans have free will by nature.
- The author says “Do you love me?” is God’s ultimate question—not do we trust Him.
- Christian theologian D.A. Carson is quoted out of context to disprove predestination.
The author of this quarter’s lessons, John C. Peckham, is, to quote Kaspars Ozolins’ recent article in Proclamation!, “Adventism and Recent Developments in Evangelical Scholarship”, “a rising star in the evangelical publishing world” and recently won the Christianity Today Book Award. Ozolins writes:
Among his many book projects, John Peckham is also currently collaborating with another young evangelical scholar, R. T. Mullins, to create a new monograph series Studies in the Doctrine of God, published by Cascade Books (an imprint of Wipf & Stock publishers). The series aims to explore alternative views of God that land somewhere between the classical doctrine of God and process theism (a radical departure from the historic biblical understanding of God). This school of thought is sometimes termed “Neoclassical theism” and it is the perfect home for classic Adventist teachings on the heavenly trio, the Great Controversy theme, and more.
I lead with this background about the author to demonstrate that the language and contents of the Sabbath School lesson series this quarter is specifically written by an Adventist scholar who is practiced in camouflaging the heretical nature of Adventist theology and the Adventist worldview that includes a physicalist view of man, a tritheistic understanding of God, a reverence for Ellen White, and a commitment to the investigative judgment with an ongoing, two-phased atonement in heaven. Even though these lesson do not specifically state these commitments, they nevertheless color the phrasing and the message of these lessons.
The quarter’s lesson series is entitled God’s Love and Justice, and the first lesson, “God Loves Freely”, sets the stage by confirming the Adventist view that man has by nature freedom of choice, and God loves completely freely on His own authority, whether or not a person deserves it.
Although the lesson does emphasize that Jesus gave up His life on the cross of His own accord, that no one took His life from Him, still the balance of power Adventists see between man’s freewill and God’s freedom to “love” is established in the Introduction to the lessons written by Adriani Rodrigues, an associate professor of systematic theology and Christian philosophy at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI, USA. On page 3 we find this quote:
Because God is love, He is deeply concerned about injustice and suffering in this world, and He identifies Himself with the oppressed and the suffering, willingly entering into the pain and grief that evil has wrought in creation—Himself suffering most of all, so much so that God Himself is the greatest victim of evil.
Jesus Was Not a Victim
We may argue that evil people did victimize the Lord Jesus as He was hung on a cross in utter shame, yet Scripture never defines Jesus’ suffering as a victimization in any way. Persecuted—yes. Victimized—no.
Even among humanity there is a stark difference between those who suffer unimaginable abuses and become understandably fearful and reactive, exhibiting classic victim responses, and others who endure similar abuses yet internally learn to lean on the Lord God, entrusting their tormenters to Him and their own souls to His care.
Those who do not live their lives through the grid of being a victim—of feeling they are owed a debt and entitled to demand restitution—cannot be properly called “victims”. Those who trust God and know that He is the One who is just and the justifier of all who believe can leave their tormentors in His hands and give up their rights to get even.
Jesus cannot be said, in any context, to be a “victim of evil”. He willingly took God’s wrath for our sin which was imputed to Him by God’s own decree, and He entrusted His crucifiers to the Father when He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”—Luke 23:34.
The fact that Jesus is actually called a “victim” sets the stage for the human-centric view of God that explains him through the grid of human experience rather than the scriptural picture of a sovereign God whose ways are not our ways.
“Do you love me?” is NOT the ultimate question
Saturday’s study set the stage for the week. The author reviewed the account of Jesus restoring Peter after his triple denial of Him by His asking three times: “Do you love me?” He summed up the day’s lesson this way:
Just as Peter had denied Jesus three times, Jesus—by way of the crucial question, “ ‘Do you love Me?’ ”—restored Peter three times. However different our circumstances may be from Peter’s, in many ways the principle is the same. That is, the question that Jesus had asked Peter is really the ultimate question that God poses to each of us in our time and place: Do you love Me?
Everything depends on our answer to that question.
Scripture never says that God’s ultimate question to us is whether or not we “love” Him. In fact, that questions cannot be our ultimate “test” because by nature we are dead in sin. The lesson assumes that we are able to choose whether or not to love and serve God, to respond to Him or not. Yet we are, by nature, dead in sin. In fact, Jesus sets His love on those whom He foreknows, and our own spiritual rebirth cannot happen apart from the Father’s drawing us to the Son. Here is what the Lord Jesus Himself said:
“No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.”—John 14:44 LSB
Paul tells us that God’s love is what caused the Son to die for us before we had any response to Him at all:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath [of God] through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.—Romans 5:8–10 LSB
Never does the Bible ask us if we love God as the marker of our usefulness or belonging to Him. Jesus said, when asked what the work of God is,
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”—John 5:29 LSB
He further said,
“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
The lesson’s statement that our ultimate question is whether or not we love God is backwards. God loves us first; we cannot even become His until His love causes us to know and love Him. The Father shows us His love by calling us His children—and by extension, the world does not know us because it did not know Him:
See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we would be called children of God; and we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.—1 John 3:1 LSB
Our great question is, do we believe? When we see our own sin and the atonement of the Lord Jesus as He bled on the cross to pay fully for our sin, do we believe that He has done everything necessary for our salvation? If we haven’t believed there is nothing for us to do except BELIEVE and trust Him, we are not able to love Him.
Jesus’s question to Peter was based on a long-term discipleship in which Peter lived and worked with the Lord during His ministry on earth. He was taught how to minister and to share the good news of the kingdom of God. He was taught how to minister not only to Jews according to the law but also to gentile crowds. He was given the job of carrying the gospel of the Lord Jesus into the first three people groups to receive the Holy Spirit: the Jews on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, the Samaritans (Acts 8), and the first group of gentiles in Cornelius’s household (Acts 10).
Jesus’s question to Peter as to whether or not he loved him was specific for Peter. He was already a believer in the Lord Jesus. He knew Him and repented of his sin.
Jesus comes to each of us and asks if we believe. Only if we have believed does the questions of our love become relevant. In our natural state of spiritual death, we are unable to love God or to seek Him or to please Him.
We must first recognize our intractable sin and repent, believing and trusting Jesus’ finished atonement for us.
What about free will?
The Teachers Comments contain one of the lesson’s most unfair and manipulative arguments for instilling the Adventist idea of free will.
The author has stressed throughout the lesson that God’s love is completely FREE, that “what divine love offers does not determine a loving reaction on the part of those who receive this offering.”
This argument about God’s love and its unfettered freedom and its non-dependence upon humans deserving it or earning it leads inevitably to a discussion of “predestination” and “election”. In fact, these subjects must be addressed because the Bible is clear about them. For example, here are two of the most powerful passages in the New Testament that tell us God foreknows and elects those He predestines to be conformed to His Son’s image:
Blessed [be] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly [places] in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love, by predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He graciously bestowed on us in the Beloved.—Ephesians 1:3–6 LSB
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to [His] purpose. Because those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [to become] conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers; and those whom He predestined, He also called; and those whom He called, He also justified; and those whom He justified, He also glorified.—Romans 8:28–30 LSB
God never explains to us HOW predestination and election “work”. He simply tells us that it is an eternal truth, a reality we are asked to believe as we trust the word of God. Concurrently, He tells us that when we hear the word of truth, gospel of our salvation, we are to believe.
These two realities appear to oppose each other, yet the Bible never resolves them—and we must not attempt to resolve them, either. We are to believe that both are true, and as we accept this apparent dichotomy and act with faith and trust on both of them, the confusion lessens, and the two things do not seem to be opposed. We live within the tension of not having these two realities explained—and if we try to explain them, we move towards creating a heresy.
Yet the lesson attempts to explain HOW election works and denies that predestination is actually a divine reality. Even more, the author of the Teachers Comments uses a quotation by the Christian theologian D. A. Carson to attempt to deny the doctrine of election—yet in context, Carson does not deny this biblical doctrine!
Here is what we read on page 16:
Another Bible example of resistance to divine love is found in the parable of the wedding banquet, to which many are called, but they reject the invitation (Matt. 22:3). Then the call is extended to others, who indeed come to the wed- ding (Matt. 22:9, 10). However, even among those who do come, there is some- one “ ‘who did not have on a wedding garment’ ” (Matt. 22:11, NKJV). The conclusion of the parable emphasizes that “ ‘many are called, but few are chosen’ ” (Matt. 22:14). In this parable about “ ‘the kingdom of heaven’ ” (Matt. 22:2), the language of being chosen does not convey the idea of a deterministic divine choice (predestination) but is related to the people’s acceptance or rejection of God’s invitation. In other words, “Many are invited; but some refuse to come, and others who do come refuse to submit to the norms of the kingdom and are therefore rejected. Those who remain are called ‘chosen.’ ”—D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), p. 457. Thus, our ability to choose is another indication of the freedom of God’s love, which is open to truly free reactions of acceptance or resistance. We are invited to freely accept it.
Misrepresenting D.A. Carson
As we look closely at this question of God’s election and predestination, we discover the persistent underlying heresy of Adventism: the belief that humans are not by nature dead in sin and condemned. Because Adventism believes that each person has at least a small ability to choose rightly and to follow God, they cannot understand God’s right and power to predestine and elect.
To understand this dynamic better, let’s take a look at a quote by D. A. Carson in his sermon “Chosen By God: Part 2” in which he exposits some of Paul’s most explicit “election language” found in Romans 8 and 9. In referring to Paul’s discussion of Jacob and Esau and God’s saying “Jacob I have loved, and Esau I have hated”, Carson says this:
If God chose Jacob over Esau only after it was disclosed that Esau was a right blighter and Jacob was a bit shifty but on the right track, then someone could say that God chose this chap, Jacob, because he was the lesser of two evils perhaps.…“No!” God says. Precisely so that the primacy of election might stand, God did it this way so that grace might be magnified.
Now the form of this is a Semitic contrast. In Semitic language, you can say, “this I love; this I hate” without necessarily meaning that you hate this implacably with horrible rage or the like. But what it does mean, very forcefully, is that when it comes down to a right choice, I choose this one and not that one. The choice is based on love. God chose this one and not that one. No matter how you look at it, this was God’s selecting love.…
To prove that God is not unjust, the Apostle quotes words from Exodus 33.
God says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” How does that prove that God is not unjust? You see, it proves that God is not unjust only under the assumption, which Paul certainly makes, that you’re talking about a guilty race.
First, I find it reprehensible that the author took two sentences by Carson out of context from a Bible commentary and used his words to make a case for “free will”—a concept which Scripture never teaches.
Second, Carson shows that election and predestination are God’s sovereign prerogatives. They exist, and they are JUST, not unjust—BECAUSE the entire human rase is guilty!
Again, Adventism does not teach or believe that the human race is by nature guilty and condemned to wrath, as Ephesians 2:1–3 states. Rather Adventism teaches that people have “sinful natures” based on inheriting Adam’s gene pool, but they are not guilty of sin by nature—they merely have the propensities to sin.
Humans: Guilty by nature
If the human race is NOT entirely guilty of sin by nature, election would be capricious. But every single human being is born under condemnation and wrath. God would be justified to utterly kill us all off!
Yet His grace chose a different way—a way where in His own Person God the Son took our imputed sin and bled perfect human blood to pay for our sin, enduring God’s wrath as He hung on the cross. His election and predestination were not based on a capricious decision to save some and not others because they seemed to promise a more favorable outcome. His decision is inscrutable to us, but we know that He reveals Himself to all people, and all are without an excuse. We also know that those who refuse to acknowledge Him and give Him thanks are suppressing their knowledge of God by their own wickedness.(Romans 1:18–20).
We cannot explain God’s predestination and election, but we know that it is just because He Himself took His own death sentence for human sin—a sentence into which each one of us born and must pay. Apart from the Lord Jesus’ substitutionary death and atonement, we all would be doomed to eternal hell because we are born in Adam.
Yet when we trust and believe the Lord Jesus, we pass at that moment from death to life!
When we see who we are by nature, we see that God’s love is far more inscrutable and powerful than we were led to believe as Adventists.
From this first lesson onward, we see that the teaching presented in these studies is skewed by the Adventist worldview, the physicalism that denies that we are born with immaterial spirits that are dead in sin. This denial of our nature and the concurrent denial that the Lord Jesus literally took our collective guilt and shed a sufficient blood sacrifice that would pay for the sins of us all, the discussions about God’s love cannot reveal what the Bible tells us.
As we start this quarter’s lessons discussing God’s love and justice, I ask you to take your Bibles and begin copying the book of Romans into a notebook. Ask the Lord to show you what He wants you to know.
I also recommend that you listen to the Former Adventist Podcast in which Nikki Stevenson and I walk through the book of Romans together. You will be amazed at how Paul corrects our Adventist worldview and rewires our synapses to see reality from a biblical perspective.
If you haven’t trusted and believed that the Lord Jesus has fully atoned for your sin, I appeal to you: repent. Admit that you are a sinner and need a Savior, and submit yourself to His love and grace poured out in His blood on the cross. See Him dying for you, being buried, and rising on the third day, shattering the curse of death into which you were born.
Trust and believe today—and pass forever into eternal life where you will never be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus! †
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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