Lesson 4: “God Is Passionate and Compassionate”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson does not explain who God’s people are nor how one becomes one of His people.
- God’s compassion is explained in human terms and almost equates His emotion with ours.
- God’s compassion is used as an example for our own good works.
The first thing I will address about this lesson is the basic idea of the nature of man—that underlying skew that distorts everything Adventism says about humanity’s responses to God. Throughout this lesson the author speaks of God’s passion and compassion for “His people”, but there is never any explanation of who God’s people are nor of how one may ensure that he or she is one of them.
Once again we will remind ourselves that Adventism does not believe in original sin. They do not teach that all humanity is born spiritually dead in sin and unable to seek for God, to please Him, or to know Him, as Paul explains in Romans 3:9–18. Further, Adventism does not teach the reality that we are born “by nature” children of wrath—of God’s wrath (as Ephesians 2:1–3 explains), and that the only way we can be freed from this position of natural condemnation in the domain of darkness is by believing in the Lord Jesus and His finished atonement for our sin. When we believe, we pass from death to life, as Jesus said in John 5:24, and God transfers us out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13).
This detail of who we are BY NATURE is necessary to understand what the Bible says about God’s love for His people. Yes, God loves the world and sent His Son to save all who would believe. But we become His children and His covenant people when we believe Him. We do not become His people by virtue of adopting a doctrinal statement that adheres to the Ten Commandments and the seventh-day Sabbath. We do not become His people by joining a church or movement.
We become His people on His terms according to His own word. In order to be called a child of God, we must be “born of God”, as John says in John 1:12. Notice these verses spoken by the Lord Jesus:
Therefore they said to Him, “What should we do, so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”—John 6:28, 29 LSB
“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
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
“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 3:16–18 LSB
There is only one way to become a child of God and to be regarded as one of God’s people: to believe in the Son and to be born again. When we trust the Son and His finished work, we are born of God and indwelled by the Holy Spirit. We receive Jesus’ own resurrection life that shattered the curse of death, and we pass at that moment from death to life. We enter eternal life at that very moment, and not even the death of our bodies can separate us from Him.
Attributing Physical, Visceral Emotions to God
Understanding that we humans are not neutral by nature, or blank slates at birth but that we are born naturally unable to come to God apart from God’s own drawing us to Himself—this reality is the groundwork that helps us understand the problems with the lesson’s description of God as having “visceral” passions and reactions to His people.
The Adventist picture of God is not of a sovereign God whose foreknowledge knows us before we are born. The Adventist god limits His own power for the sake of preserving our supposed free will, and we as Adventists are taught that we are born able to freely choose whether to follow and obey God or not. In fact, the entire great controversy worldview hangs on human and demonic free will which God will never interrupt out of His respect for us.
He allows us to self-destruct, if we choose, in order to demonstrate that He is not arbitrary and that He is “fair”. Yet this picture of God is not how the Bible reveals Him.
Look at the following quotations from the lesson and see how the author portrays God as deeply emotional, compassionate, and relatable with human-like responses:
According to Jeremiah 31:20 (NKJV), God views His covenant people as His “dear son” and “pleasant child,” despite the fact that they often rebelled against Him and grieved Him. Even so, God declares, “My heart yearns for him” and “I will surely have mercy on him.” The term translated “mercy” here is the term used above for divine compassion (raḥam). Further, the phrase “My heart yearns” can be translated literally as “My innards roar.” This description is the deeply visceral language of divine emotion, signifying the profound depth of God’s compassionate love for His people.—P. 45
Have you ever been so upset about something that your stomach churns? That is the kind of imagery used for the depth of God’s emotions over His people. The imagery of one’s heart turning over and compassions being kindled is idiomatic language of deep emotions, used of both God and humans.—P. 46
And in the Teachers Comments we find these statements:
Introduction: God is moved physically and emotionally with profound compassion for His people.
Our passionate and compassionate God is jealous in a good and righteous way. God seeks an intimate and exclusive covenantal relationship with us and requires faithfulness from His people. In this sense, God is described in Scripture as zealous and jealous. Instead of the negative connotation of being capricious, this language conveys the idea that God acts in our best interests to protect us from self-harm and broken promises.
EGWs Physical God
First, Jesus stated unequivocally that “God is spirit” in John 4:24 when He spoke to the woman at the well. God is not physical. Even though the lesson contains one sentence which says that the maternal, womb-like love of God for His people cannot be interpreted literally, still the statement in the Teachers Comments as well as the tone of the entire week’s studies describes God’s inner life as deeply passionate and emotional in a strikingly human way.
There is no good way to interpret the statement that “God is moved physically and emotionally” without imaging God to have a physical form that is similar to ours. In fact, this idea is what Ellen White taught, an idea that directly reflected what James White wrote in his pamphlet The Personality of God which denied the Trinity and proclaimed that God has a body and parts. Here is what EGW said:
I have often seen the lovely Jesus, that he is a person. I asked him if his Father was a person, and had a form like himself. Said Jesus, “I am in the express image of my Father’s Person.” I have often seen that the spiritual view took away the glory of heaven, and that in many minds the throne of David, and the lovely person of Jesus had been burned up in the fire of spiritualism.—Spiritual Gifts vol. 2, p. 74.7
Adventism’s god has a physical form, and most Adventists learn either explicitly or implicitly that being made in the image of God includes their physical features and form.
This heretical view of God perfectly supports the lesson’s descriptions of God’s emotions, passions, and visceral reactions to humanity.
A couple of weeks ago we pointed out that the author of this quarter’s Teachers Comments used a quotation from theologian D. A. Carson to attempt to support Adventism’s disbelief in the biblical doctrine of predestination. We showed in that lesson that they had taken Carson out of context and misused his words to literally contradict himself.
This week I want to share another quote from D. A. Carson to help explain what is wrong with the emotional, almost syrupy presentation of God’s feelings presented in this week’s lessons:
If the love of God is exclusively portrayed as an inviting, yearning, sinner-seeking, rather lovesick passion we may strengthen the hands of Arminians, semi-Pelagians, Pelagians, and those more interested in God’s inner emotional life than in his justice and glory, but the cost will be massive…Made absolute, however, it not only treats complementary texts as if they were not there, but it steals God’s sovereignty from him and our security from us. It espouses a theology of grace rather different from Paul’s theology of grace, and at its worst ends up with a God so insipid he can neither intervene to save us nor deploy his chastening rod against us. His love is too “unconditional” for that. This is a world far removed from the pages of Scripture.—D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, Crossway Books, 2000, p. 22
God’s Indivisible Attributes
When we consider God’s love, we have to understand it in the context of the whole of Scripture. God is not a man nor like a man; He is the CREATOR of humanity. Everything that we possess as human attributes has been gives to us by our sovereign, eternal God.
God is the Source of all reality. His attributes, or substance, cannot be divided. His eternality, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and all other attributes of God cannot be split apart from each other.
In other words, God’s love does not exist or express itself divorced from His justice and wrath, His mercy and grace. God’s love is not merely deep emotional compassion; it is inseparable from every attribute of God. There is no love of God apart from His eternal righteousness and wrath, apart from His hatred for sin. Every single thing we read about God in Scripture is always part of God’s expression.
Adventism, for instance, taught us that if we are lost and ultimately go into the lake of fire, that destruction is not God’s work. It is our own doing. Further, we were taught that Satan, not the Lord Jesus, is our Scapegoat who will receive the final punishment for human sin. God will punish Satan for causing man’s sin; the Adventist god does not hold Adam responsible for human sin in spite of the fact that Scripture explicitly teaches that he was.
Yet God’s justice demands that human sin be atoned by human blood. No other creature can atone for us—no lamb, bull, nor angel. Only a qualifying human can justly pay for human sin. And that fact is why our Lord Jesus became a man, took a human body, and as the Son of God who is eternal and omnipotent and also as the Son of Man who qualified as a human, He was able to take all of our sin into Himself and pay for it, satisfying God’s justice while being the justifier (Roman. 3:26).
We cannot look at God’s love as a quality that is separate from His justice, His wrath, His mercy, His righteousness, His graciousness. God’s love is the full expression of all of His attributes at the same time.
This week’s lessons do not describe this kind of all-encompassing, all-powerful God. God’s emotions flow not from stimuli from outside of Him caused by our deeds and misdeeds; rather God’s emotions are expressions of His perfect omniscient justice and foreknowledge. In the words of one more quote from D. A. Carson:
Our passions change our direction and priorities, domesticating our will, controlling our misery and our happiness, surprising and destroying or establishing our commitments. But God’s “passions,” like everything else in God, are displayed in conjunction with the fullness of all his other perfections. In that framework, God’s love is not so much a function of his will, as something that displays itself in perfect harmony with his will—and with his holiness, his purposes in redemption, his infinitely wise plans, and so forth.—Ibid., p. 60, 61.
God’s Emotions As Examples
As the lesson develops, it becomes clear that the author’s stress on the depth and intensity and commitment of God’s emotions are to be considered examples for how the Adventist reader should live.
For example, this Life Application occurs on page 52 in the Teachers Comments:
Life Application: In His passionate and compassionate love, God invites us to be like Him. In our compassion toward others, we need to be considerate of the people around us and be purposeful as a church about actively caring for others.—p. 52
Further, Thursday’s lesson contains this instruction:
By the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, in what practical ways might we respond to, and reflect, God’s profoundly emotional, but always perfectly righteous and rational, love? First, the only appropriate response is to worship the God who is love. Second, we should respond to God’s love by actively showing compassion and benevolent love to others. We should not simply be comforted in our Christian faith but should be motivated to comfort others. Finally, we should recognize that we cannot change our hearts, but that only God can.—p. 49
First of all, this lesson assumes that the readers are Seventh-day Adventists and that they are “Christians” and are God’s people. The author assumes that the Adventist Church is God’s true church carrying the last-day “gospel message” of the three angels into the world.
Yet Seventh-day Adventism is not part of the God’s church. The New Testament clearly identifies the church as those who have been born again through believing the gospel of their salvation: that Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture, that He was buried, and that He rose on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:1–4).
The gospel of God’s church does not include keeping the seventh-day Sabbath, nor the investigative judgment in which Jesus is supposedly carrying out a “second phase” of His atonement in heaven as He peruses the books of record. The gospel does not include the “health message” of clean and unclean meats, of asceticism and abstinence from foods and drink, nor does the true church embrace a last-day, extra-biblical prophet with a unique last-day message for the world!
Adventism assumes it is teaching truth and making “Christian” converts, but it denies the finished atonement and demands the keeping of the seventh-day Sabbath if one expects to be saved. Yet Adventism denies the true nature of man: that all humans are born spiritually dead in sin, that their literal immaterial spirits are born separated from the eternal life of God, and that we must be literally born of God through belief and trust in the finished work of Jesus.
Adventism does not teach that salvation is dependent upon one thing only: we must believe and be born again. Those who have believed pass out of death into life the moment they believe; those who have not believed are condemned already, and the wrath of God remains on them (Jn. 3:18, 36).
Adventism teaches a false gospel, and it cannot be rightly considered to be part of the biblical Christian church.
Further, God’s love for us is for the purpose of bringing us to repentance. Paul said it this way:
Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?—Romans 2:4 LSB
His love is not our example for how to treat people and to demonstrate that we are God’s people.
When we have believed and have been born again, the indwelling Holy Spirit teaches us to trust Him in our moments of temptation and struggle. He teaches us and gives us discernment as He applies His word to our hearts, and we begin to reflect Him and to bear fruit through His work in us. But we are never told to imitate God’s compassion for us as our means of becoming like Him.
We only become like Him when we repent and receive His eternal life on the basis of His perfect shed blood.
This lesson diminishes the sovereign power of God and the security of all who trust Him. We cannot reduce God’s infinite love into an emotional idea that generates guilt in us to get busy and start treating people better and proselytizing them into Adventism. For proselytizing is the bottom line in this lesson’s emphasis on using God’s passions and compassion as examples for our own good works.
The real bottom line is that God so loved the world, that He gave us His own Son. He sent the Lord Jesus, the incarnate God the Son, into the world to bring life back to the lost human race. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, because He took God’s wrath for sin and died and was buried, and He rose from the dead and broke the curse of death into which humanity was born.
Jesus’ blood broke open the way out of our condemnation and death into which we are born. We don’t ingratiate ourselves to God by trying to imitate His love; rather, we admit our need and believe that He has done everything necessary to bring us to life eternally!
If you haven’t trusted Jesus’ death, His burial, and His resurrection as the single source of your life, I ask you to trust Him now.
Take your Bible and begin reading through the book of Hebrews. See who Jesus is and what provision the Father’s love has given us for our eternal security. See the life that is available to you now as you trust the Son and receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who will keep your heart alive with hope.
Trust Jesus today—and you will know the love of God. It will forever change you, and you can know that you are eternally secure—saved by our sovereign God who knew you from the foundation of the earth! Believe Him today. †
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.
- January 18–24, 2025 - January 16, 2025
- We Got Mail - January 16, 2025
- January 11–17, 2025 - January 10, 2025