What About the Trinity and the Lord’s Day?
My husband and I recently watched Colleen and Nikki being interviewed on the Cultish podcast exposing Seventh-day Adventism as a cult. They were talking about Christ’s divinity and said that Adventists believe He was Michael the Archangel. They stated that Adventists have a more tritheistic view of God which is at odds with the Christian view of the Trinity. Despite the reformed Adventism we were subjected to, both my husband and I thought that Adventists’ view of the Trinity was the same as mainstream Christianity in that God is three persons in one.
We did grow up believing that Jesus is essentially trapped in a human body, and therefore He is not able to be omnipresent. Could someone please help us to understand, in more detail, how Adventism differs in this area? Maybe we are either not understanding the Christian view, or maybe our long years of being separate from Adventism have caused us to take on the Christian view while attributing it to Adventism?
Next, we’re confused about the nature of Jesus. We were both raised believing that he had Adam’s nature and that He basically accomplished a “redo” of what Adam should have been able to do but failed. But it sounds like, from reading other doctrinal overviews, that He might have been God—with the inability to sin—in a human body. If that were the case, what was the point of Satan’s tempting Him? I’m sure you’ve heard this many times before, but it’s definitely confusing us. On the same topic, if we aren’t the guinea pigs for the “watching worlds,” what is the reason for the human “experiment” and the reason why we are still here?
Lastly, if we’re going to be keeping the Lord’s Day instead of Sabbath, what does that look like? As you can imagine/remember, we had so many rules for what we could and could not do on the Sabbath, and it would be easy to translate that over to Sunday. But we really don’t want to approach it that way, so any suggestions or guidance would be helpful.
Thanks in advance for bearing with this long email!
—VIA EMAIL
Response: First, the Bible clearly teaches that Michael is the prince of Daniel’s people. Daniel 10 identifies Michael to the prophet. In Jude 9, where Michael contends with the devil for the body of Moses, that person is not Jesus. EGW said it was Jesus and “needed” that identity to support her teaching that Moses was resurrected—a teaching she has to teach to support the Adventist doctrine of soul sleep, or the ceasing of a person’s existence at death. She couldn’t have Moses appearing on the Mt. of Transfiguration if he wasn’t resurrected, because Adventist doctrine says that Moses died and ceased to exist—and that he had to be resurrected in order to appear with Jesus. (Elijah had never died.) But Moses was NOT resurrected. That idea is never taught. Furthermore, Michael, in Jude 9, did not rebuke the devil but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
Jesus rebuked Satan and the devils directly throughout His ministry on earth. He rebuked the demons in the demoniac and had to permit them to enter the swine. He rebuked Satan in the wilderness during His temptation. Jesus always directly rebuked Satan. Yet Michael did not. Michael was never Jesus or another name for Jesus. Michael is an archangel, the prince of Daniel’s people, the Jews, and he has always and will still defend the nation when God gives him the command to do so. (Read Daniel 10.)
Adventism has adopted “trinitarian”-sounding language in recent decades after being founded by outright anti-trinitarians. Yet Adventism has never endorsed true trinitarianism. It still embraces EGW’s “trinity” whom who called “the Three Worthies of Heaven”, and “the Heavenly Trio”. The Adventist “godhead” is comprised of what they call three co-eternal persons who comprise “one God”. But this “god” shares only will, purpose, and name. The persons do NOT share SUBSTANCE. This is the great schism between the Adventist “trinity” and the biblical One God.
God, by nature, has a certain “divine nature” and “eternal power” (Rom. 1:18–20) . All three persons share EXACTLY the same substance, or attributes: eternity, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, love, etc. They also are all spirit, as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman in John 4:24.
For example, if God is represented by a pie, as an Adventist I pictured each of the three as represented by one third of the pie. Yet each of the thirds might have an anomaly: a piece of seed, a piece of core, a clump of brown sugar. Each piece of pie may have a different anomaly. Yet this understanding is NOT “shared substance”. The three pieces of the pie all must have the exact same seed, the same clump of sugar, the same piece of core. If any one of the three pieces does not share the same attributes, that piece is not “fully pie”.
All three persons must have all the attributes of God, or they are not God. If Jesus does not have the attribute of omnipresence, He is not God. He is not trapped in a human body—and in general, Christians do not believe that He is. This belief is distinctly cultic. Adventists hold this belief and teach it, and they teach the Holy Spirit had to be given because Jesus could no longer be everywhere. But Colossians 1:19 and 2:9 explain that the fulness of deity (that is the FULLNESS—every single tiny attribute of God) dwelt fully in Jesus’s body. His never stopped being alive, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent, even while in the womb and in the tomb. Colossians 1:17–19 explains that Jesus’ role, as Creator, is that all things hold together in Him. He never stopped being all God, and even as an unborn baby and as His body lay in the tomb, His identity as God never changed, altered, or limited itself. He was always fully God. He held creation together in Himself in every stage of His incarnation, death, and resurrection—and He still does.
The Adventists Jesus is not God. He is an edited version of the Lord Jesus. He had a limited deity, and He ceased to exist in the tomb. This idea is heresy. God never ceased to exist even when Jesus’ human identity lay in the tomb. Further, His human spirit did not cease to exist, either. He went to Paradise when He died, just as He told the thief that He would. Jesus always was and still is omnipresent as God the Son. That never altered.
Jesus was not “just like us” as Adventism teaches. Adventism teaches that Jesus had a sinful nature that could have sinned and could have failed in his mission. Doug Batchelor even says that God risked the universe going into chaos when He sent His Son. This is a heresy. Jesus, as God the Son, could not have failed. Jesus the Son of Man was not born dead in sin as every other human being is (see Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–18). We are literally spiritually dead by nature, under God’s wrath. But Jesus was not.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was never spiritually dead. His spirit (which every human has) was alive with the life of God. He did not inherit Adam’s spiritual death because He was not born in Adam. He was born of God. And He came to be a sinless human who was never spiritually dead and under God’s wrath and condemnation—the only human ever born who did not have to be born again—in order to be the perfect, sufficient human sacrifice for human sin. He did not come to show us how to live and how to keep the law. He came to FULFILL the law. He filled every tiniest part of the law full of its perfect meaning by being the substance to which every law pointed.
Satan’s tempting Him was an attempt to keep Jesus from fulfilling His purpose—to walk towards the cross and to die for human sin. Satan was trying to derail Jesus and His purpose. Concurrently, those temptations were also a means of identifying Jesus as the anointed one, the reality that the prophets foretold and that the law foreshadowed. Jesus was the “perfect Israel” who successfully carried out God’s will when the nation never did, and He revealed Himself as the promised Israelite who was the Seed God promised to Abraham. He was the true son of David who would rightfully gain the authority of the kingdom and ultimately of the world by His own merit.
He was not functioning as our example! He was doing what no mere human born in Adam could do: He was perfectly doing God’s will and was demonstrating that He was not being deceived and derailed by Satan but was truly God the Son incarnate, the true Messiah God had promised would come. He was fulfilling the law and the prophets. He was not showing us how to live. His temptations were not examples for us! They were demonstrations of His identity!
How Jesus could be truly tempted but also be God and unable to sin is not explained, but we know that God cannot be tempted by evil. In some mystery of the incarnation, Jesus was never at risk for being derailed by sin. He could not have been our Savior if He had been subject to sin. He could not have been our substitute Sacrifice if He had any attraction to deception or sin. He had to be utterly sinless—spiritually alive and fully united with the Father—and He could not have been that if He had any trace of sinful flesh. He was not spiritually dead, and He had no attraction to sin whatsoever.
Jesus did not come to demonstrate or vindicate God’s character. That is never even hinted at in the Bible. The Adventist great controversy paradigm has twisted the way Adventists interpret all Scripture. Our story begins in Genesis, not in prehistory. Satan did not originate our sin. Adam did. We are not victims of Satan, nor is our sin His ultimate fault. He is not the scapegoat who will be punished for our sin. Jesus is.
Our problem is that we are born spiritually dead because Adam, as the head of the human race, plunged the race into death. God told him that if he ate, he would die that day—and he did. All of us are dead because of Adam. Our problem is not learning to resist Satan nor learning to obey the law. The problem is that we are born under wrath and condemned already (Jn. 3:18, 36). We have NO WAY OUT of our dilemma!
Jesus came as our RESCUE. God sent us a new human head! Adam failed us, and we had to have a new head of the race. We had to have a new identity. God sent God the Son wrapped in a human body in order to die a human death—the sentence for sin which God ordained would be the consequence. We have no possible way to escape eternal death unless we have a RESCUE. Jesus came as our RESCUER. He took all of our sin into Himself and took God’s wrath for our sin, died our death, and broke out death sentence because His blood was sufficient to pay for all our sin. When we trust Him, we are literally born again. God Himself indwells us, and we are transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Col 1:13). We are given a new identity: child of God. We are literally born of God and receive eternal life in our spirits when we believe. We go from being in Adam to being in Christ. We have a new human head! Our Human Head is LIVNG, and we now are alive in Him.
None of this is for a demonstration to anyone. All of this is a rescue of a race that rebelled against God. We are not told the stories of any other creature: not the angels, not any supposed other worlds. Further, there is absolutely no hint that there are any other inhabited worlds. Jesus came to rescue humans. He came to die for us. He did not come to make us obedient or good.
Adventism teaches a paradigm that makes us responsible for our own salvation. We have to learn to trust and obey and do what Jesus did. We have to learn to walk the right path and do the right things and worship on Sabbath. But the Bible teaches that Jesus came to literally rescue us. He came to be our Substitute, and when we believe in His completed atonement, were are immediately justified and pass from death to life (Jn. 5:24).
Adventism teaches people they have to do the right thing and keep themselves worthy of heaven. The Bible teaches that we have been rescued, and when we believe, we literally receive eternal life at that moment because Jesus did what we could not do. He qualified to be our rescuer and our new head of a new race of spiritually living, born-again humans!
There is no requirement for keeping a day in the new covenant. The law is completely fulfilled in Jesus. He is the substance of every holy day listed in the law (Col 2:16, 17). There is no transfer or new holy day. Christians have traditionally met on the first day because that is the day Jesus rose from death, and that is the day that the church was born—but a day is NOT required ANYWHERE in the New Testament. Galatians is explicit that if Christians go back to observing days and months and seasons and years, they fall from grace. (See Galatians 3 through 5.) Jesus is the substance. The law is fulfilled. The reality is Jesus, and we embrace HIM.
The New Testament contains no instructions for keeping a day, nor does it contain any warnings of breaking a Sabbath.
I suggest reading the book of Galatians every day for a month, asking God to teach you what He wants you to understand. Then go on to the book of Hebrews.
It is crucial to understand the covenants, that the law had a beginning and an end, and after the Seed came, the reality is in the person of Jesus. When we are in Him, all of His righteousness and His death and resurrection are accounted to us.
Here is an article that walks through the transition from the old to the new covenant:
More Sabbath Questions
I have a dear friend who is leaving Adventism. Will you kindly add her to the email list for proclamation magazine?
Also, maybe you can help clarify the Sabbath question she had below. I screenshot it and pasted. I know I’ve read articles of yours on this too so even if you could point us in the right direction. Here it is:
“The law was kept perfectly by Christ. And all its penalties against God’s sinful people were poured out on Christ. Therefore, the law is now manifestly not the path to righteousness; Christ is. The ultimate goal of the law is that we would look to Christ, not law-keeping, for our righteousness. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.—Romans 10:4
“My understanding is that the word “Sabbaths” here refers to the holy days and festivals, not the seventh day as referred to in the 10 Commandants.
“Anyway, I will dig in—I completely agree with the ceremonial laws being gone, but the moral laws I thought were forever. The fourth commandment is so incredibly specific about the seventh day. But then I also need to dig in and understand “the Lord’s Day” (1st day, Sunday) and how that relates to the church after Christ’s resurrection to the gentiles. You following me?”
Thank you! We really appreciate your help and all you’re doing for former Adventists. You’re truly a blessing from God!
—VIA EMAIL
Response: First, Adventism did not teach us the actual function and terms of the biblical covenants. I want to suggest that your friend participate in our conference February 14–16. We will be live-streaming it, and the conference topic is Sabbath In Christ.
Understanding the covenants is key to understanding Sabbath. The covenants as they are described and named in the Bible are clear. The first is the Noahic covenant which God made with the earth and all flesh after the flood (Genesis 8, 9). That covenant is UNCONDITIONAL; God made promises which did not depend upon human responses. He will never destroy the earth again with a flood.
The second biblical covenant is the Abrahamic covenant which God ratified in Genesis 15. There we see that the promises God made to Abraham, promises of seed, land, and blessing, He unilaterally confirmed while Abraham slept. Abraham was not permitted to add his own promises to the covenant because his promises were human and not eternal. Only God could make promises which would never be broken. Again, the Abrahamic covenant was UNCONDITIONAL.
The next biblical covenant is the Mosaic covenant (Exodus 20 and onward). This covenant God made with Israel as a nation, and this covenant involved bilateral promises. God promised blessing for obedience and curses for disobedience, and Israel responded, “All that you have said, we will do.” In other words, this covenant was CONDITIONAL, because it hung on promises that humans could not keep.
The final covenant named in Scripture is the new covenant, first promised in Jeremiah 31:31–33 and also in Ezekiel 36. This is a covenant God made with Israel and Judah, and again He made the promises that He would erase their sin and put the law in their hearts. Israel did not make corresponding promises, but God again made UNCONDITIONAL promises. Paul in his epistles explains how this covenant was opened up to the gentiles after the cross, and those who believe Jesus and His completed atonement are born of the Spirit and ushered into Christ. In Christ, all of Jesus’ accomplishments of His death for sin, His burial, and His resurrection which breaks the curse of death become ours because we are IN Him. He knew us from the foundation of the earth, and when we believe, all He has done is ours.
Galatians explains that the Mosaic covenant was temporary: it came 430 years after the covenant with Abraham and lasted “until the Seed” came. The Seed, Jesus, FULFILLED all the requirements of the Mosaic law. He filled the entire law full of meaning, and the shadows of the yearly, monthly, and weekly Sabbaths (as per Colossians 2:16, 17) are realized and fulfilled in Christ. Sabbath was always a shadow of Christ, and never does Scripture say that the weekly Sabbath is in a different category because it’s listed in the fourth commandment. Instead, the fourth commandment was the SIGN of the Mosaic covenant (Ex. 31:13). It was Israel’s sign that they were trusting God for His work on their behalf. They were to stay in their tents every seventh day, and if their crops were threatened or their flocks were giving birth, Israel was NOT to go and help. Instead God would oversee their situation, and He would bless them beyond anything the Canaanites would experience even though they worked 24/7 to please their gods, even offering their first-borns to their gods.
Israel would prosper if they remembered the covenant sign because it meant they were trusting God. They were refusing to “help Him” by working on Sabbath; they rested in their tents, and God would prosper them—and neither they nor the Canaanites would ever be able to say Israel prospered because they worked harder and better. Everyone would know it was because of their God. Israel had the only God who blessed His people while they did NOTHING. Nothing, that is—except TRUST Him.
The Sabbath was never a test. It was always a sign. And that sign was fulfilled in the Lord Jesus who deliberately took charge of demonstrating His identity on that day, even stating that He was OVER the Sabbath, not under it. He wasn’t its caretaker; He was its LORD. He gave it to Israel, and He could fulfill it for Israel. Now they (and all of us who trust His blood) find rest from our efforts to do works to keep God happy. He Himself is the One in whom we find rest. The shadow of Sabbath is fulfilled.
The Sabbath had a specific role in the covenant with Israel. It was never given to gentiles. Further the New Testament gives no instructions for keeping any day except Romans 14 which says whatever a person does, it is to be according to his own conscience, and no one is ever to judge another for a day. In the new covenant, days are not holy. Time is a created thing, and time is not holy. The Lord Jesus is the One who has brought all reality and fulfillment to the Sabbath, and when we look for a day we turn our back, in some sense, on the Lord Jesus.
The first day is not a sabbath, either. There are branches of Christianity which say the law continues as a rule of faith and practice for the church, but in order to do that, they have to “invent” a new paradigm for handling Sabbath. John called the first day “the Lord’s Day” in Revelation 1, but he did not mean Sabbath, nor was he referring to a holy day. The first day has become a day when Christians meet and remember their risen Lord and the birthday of the church, but the day is never required.
For any doctrine to apply to us, it MUST be rooted in clear didactic scriptural passages. The NT contains absolutely nothing about keeping a Sabbath nor about how to keep a Sabbath. Further, Sabbath-breaking is never mentioned as a sin in any of the NT lists of sins.
Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians—Hebrews—these are explicit that Jesus has fulfilled and removed the law from applying to the church. The law that is written in our hearts is not the Ten. It is the Lord Himself who indwells us. The Author of the Law indwells us. He teaches us to apply all of Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s instructions to our lives. 1 Corinthians 9:21 and Galatians 6:2 tell us that the Law of Christ is not the law.
I will attach some links below, but I suggest that you get a notebook and literally begin copying the book of Galatians a few verses at a time, into that notebook, asking the Lord to teach you what He wants you to know. Scripture explains the supremacy of Jesus, and the law is obsolete now that Jesus has fulfilled it. It’s like a living trust: once the person dies and the provisions of the trust have been dispersed to the beneficiaries, the written trust is no longer a valid document. It has been fulfilled and superseded by the literal distribution of its benefits. Paul makes this comparison in Galatians.
I suggest that you listen to our series on the covenants on the Former Adventist Podcast. The covenants are discussed in episodes 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, and then beginning with 39, we start a series through Hebrews which unpacks Jesus’ fulfillment of the old covenant. Here is a link to the podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/former-adventist/id1482887969
Here is a link leading to our collection of “Sabbath articles” in Proclamation! magazine:
https://blog.lifeassuranceministries.org/category/adventist-doctrines/the-sabbath
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