Lesson 8: “Free Will, Love, and Divine Providence”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- Adventism’s explanation of God’s providence rests on EGWs great controversy worldview.
- God is said to limit His power because He cannot interrupt free will with divine providence.
- Adventism’s god cannot prevent evil and suffers because things happen against his will.
This lesson builds a case for God’s limited providence for the purpose of protecting human free will using Ellen White’s great controversy worldview as a foundation. As we have previously discussed, she teaches that man is purely physical—bodies that breathe—and when people cease to breathe, they cease to exist. This physicalism changes the nature of sin and of salvation.
Instead of believing literally the biblical teaching that humans are born dead in sin and must be brought to spiritual life through belief in the Lord Jesus and His finished atonement, Adventism, on the authority of Ellen White, believes that humans are born with genetic predisposition to sin and weakness but that we have free will to choose to obey God or to follow Satan.
Furthermore, the great controversy worldview teaches that Satan is responsible for sin and that human sin was brought about by Satan deceiving Adam and Eve. The pre-creation history of EGWs great controversy scenario makes Satan the villain of the universe, the cause of human sin, the perpetrator of human sin, and the ultimate bearer of human sin as the scapegoat who carries the sins of the saved into the lake of fire where he is punished for our sin.
This great controversy worldview is the lens through which Adventism interprets what the Bible says about God’s sovereignty, His foreknowledge and predestination and election. The biblical picture of a totally sovereign God and our condition as spiritually dead humans who must be brought to life through faith in the finished work of Christ is dismissed. Instead, God is humanized and explained according to human logic.
Free Will Trumps God’s Sovereignty
Saturday’s lesson says this:
[S]trong biblical evidence shows that God does not determine everything that happens. Instead, He grants humans free will, even to the point where they (and angels) can choose to act directly against His will. The history of the Fall, of sin, and of evil is a dramatic and tragic expression of the results of abusing this free will. The plan of salvation was instituted in order to remedy the tragedy caused by the misuse of free will.
This paragraphs reflects the belief that humans’ free will is the ultimate value in the universe, that even God must limit Himself in order to honor human freedom. Notice that this paragraph states that the “plan of salvation was instituted in order to remedy the tragedy caused by the misuse of free will.”
In other words, God’s plan to save humans was devised to fix Satan’s and Adam and Eve’s misuse of free will—not a plan to rescue man from death.The focus here is on the bad choices of Satan and the first humans, choices that they were free to make but which required clean-up.
The Bible, however, does not pain this picture. First, Satan’s sin is not part of our story; it is never told in Scripture, and Satan is never held responsible for causing Adam and Eve to sin. Second, God clearly told Adam what the parameters were: if he ate the forbidden fruit, he would die that day. When Adam ate, he did die. There was no kerfuffle as God regretted Adam’s free choice to disobey. There was no scramble to put a “plan of salvation” into place to remedy this misuse of free will.
Adam disobeyed God with his eyes wide open, knowing what God had said would happen. He alone is held responsible for sin, and the eventual coming of the incarnate Lord Jesus was God’s rescue as He took responsibility for Adam and Eve and all of us. He was the new human head of the new race of God’s people, and He was the only way our sin could be atoned so we could be rescued from the death into which we all are born. Sin did not surprise God, and those who would trust the Lord’s death and resurrection were known to Him from the foundation of the world. In Revelation John speaks of all the unbelieving world eventually worshiping the Lamb in contrast with those who know the Lord:
And all who dwell on the earth will worship him, [everyone] whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain.—Revelation 13:8 LSB
EGW Establishes Satan’s Blame
Friday’s lesson quotes Ellen White from The Desire of Ages, further establishing that Satan is at the foundation of human sin and confirming that God was helpless to intervene but that He stepped in with a plan to counter the mess:
“The plan for our redemption was not an afterthought, a plan formulated after the fall of Adam. It was a revelation of ‘the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal.’ Rom. 16:25, R. V. It was an unfolding of the principles that from eternal ages have been the foundation of God’s throne. From the beginning, God and Christ knew of the apostasy of Satan, and of the fall of man through the deceptive power of the apostate. God did not ordain that sin should exist, but He foresaw its existence, and made provision to meet the terrible emergency. So great was His love for the world, that He covenanted to give His only-begotten Son, ‘that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ John 3:16.”—Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 22.
Notice in this quote that Ellen establishes the separate identities of “God and Christ”. The Bible never speaks of God and His dealing in the world as the shared knowledge of “God and Christ”. This designation reveals that EGW and Adventism do not believe that the Trinity shares substance among the three persons. Rather Adventism teaches that the “Godhead” is comprised of three co-eternal persons who share purpose, will, work, and a name, but they deny that the persons share substance. Instead, EGW refers to “the heavenly trio” and the “three worthies of heaven”. This tritheistic view of God is reflected in the passage above as she clearly separates God and Christ as two beings who “knew of the apostasy of Satan” and of “the fall of man”.
This paragraph is not describing the biblical sovereign God who gave Adam a command which Adam broke because he did not act on God’s word. Instead, even this one small paragraph reveals the great controversy view that Satan, not Adam, was ultimately responsible for sin, and all the mess on earth was the consequence of Satan.
With this false foundation, it is impossible for Adventists to correctly understand what the Bible says about God and His purposes and sovereignty. They have misdefined the source and the nature of sin by adding an entire extra-biblical scenario to explain that Satan, not Adam, is responsible for sin—and by creating this scenario, she has placed humanity in a completely different economy than the Bible teaches.
The great controversy makes humanity Satan’s victims instead of personally responsible for their own sin. She has removed the need and power of our needing a new human head of the race and instead has created a means of salvation which requires humans to become increasingly obedient to the law in order to qualify for salvation.
Instead of man being completely dependent upon their Human rescuer who takes responsibility for us and does for us what we cannot do—dying to atone for all our sin—EGWs worldview makes man responsible for pursuing his own salvation by imitating and following Christ and learning to keep the law like He did.
Logic Cannot Explain God
Because Adventism must have creatures with completely free will—not wills bound by spiritual death which must be brought to life through faith in the Lord Jesus and His cross—they have to have a limited God who Himself is a victim of the mess Satan and humans have made because of their free choices to rebel.
Tuesday’s lesson opens with these words:
That God is all-powerful does not mean that He can do the logically impossible. Accordingly, God cannot causally determine that someone freely love Him. If freely doing something means to do something without being determined to do it, then by definition it is impossible to make someone freely do something. In short, as we have seen, and must re-emphasize—God cannot force anyone to love Him, for the moment it’s forced, it is no longer love.
Here we see the pitfall of needing to explain what we know from Scripture about God’s sovereignty in the light of the great controversy and its explanation of Satan and the freely-chosen sin of Adam and Eve.
God cannot be explained by logic. Here again we see the humanization of God, the explanation of how and why He does what He does based on a human perception of human reasoning. In fact, Adventism’s argument always revolves around the idea that God wants humans to love and trust Him, but if He “forces” them to love Him or intervenes in their lives in any way they do not choose, then their responses to Him are manipulated.
Scripture Reveals Sovereignty
Yet this reasoning never shows up in Scripture. Man is not born with a free will that can surmount his own spiritual death. Each one of us is dead in sin, unable to seek, please, or know God—as Romans 3 explains—and we have to be made alive by faith in Christ before we can honor God. The Adventist worldview does not include humans being by nature dead in sin and unable to rise above their nature.
Tuesday’s lesson further says,
If God has committed Himself to granting creatures free will, humans possess the ability to exercise their freedom in ways that go against God’s ideal desires. Tragically, many people do exercise their freedom in this way, and accordingly, there are many things that occur that God wishes did not, but that are not, strictly speaking, up to God.
Yet Scripture tells us that God ultimately takes responsibility for all things on earth: both good and evil. In fact, His taking responsibility is ultimately seen in His taking responsibility for us, coming as a man, taking our sin, and suffering God’s wrath for our sin In Himself.
Here are some things Scripture says about God’s sovereign power and responsibility:
I am Yahweh, and there is no other, The One forming light and creating darkness, Producing peace and creating calamity; I am Yahweh who does all these.—Isaiah 45:6b–7 LSB
I know, O Yahweh, that a man’s way is not in himself, Nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps.—Jeremiah 10:23 LSB
My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, [And] intricately woven in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unshaped substance; And in Your book all of them were written The days that were formed [for me], When as yet there was not one of them.—Psalm 139:15, 16 LSB
So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.—Romans 9:18 LSB
…and He made from one [man] every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined [their] appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,—Acts 17:26 LSB
“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 6:44 LSB
Concurrently, Scripture commands us to believe, to kiss the Son:
Serve Yahweh with fear And rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish [in] the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!—Psalm 2:11, 12 LSB
“If it is evil in your sight to serve Yahweh, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh.”—Joshua 24;15 LSB
And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your house.”—Acts 16:31
“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
We Believe It’s All True
What are we to do with these apparently conflicting ideas? How do we explain that God takes full responsibility for peace and chaos, for darkness and light, and for drawing all who believe in the Lord Jesus?
In his book Bible Doctrine, Wayne Grudem says this about the concurrence of God’s sovereign authority and responsibility and our need to believe and to make our own responsible choices:
Exactly how God combines his providential control with our willing and significant choices, Scripture simply does not explain to us. But rather than deny one aspect or the other (simply because we cannot explain how both can be true), we should accept both in an attempt to be faithful to the teaching of all Scripture.—Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine, Zondervan, 1999, p. 147.
In other words, our responsibility is to believe everything Scripture says, even if we cannot explain HOW these apparently contradictory ideas can both be true.
First, we have to know that the words of Scripture mean what they actually say. Context is everything, and words matter. We can’t read the Bible and redefine it or interpret it from our personal understanding. God who gave us His word reveals reality and truth to us in Scripture. If we decide it doesn’t make sense unless we redefine it, we are changing our definitions of truth, and we will begin believing heresies.
In order to accept what Scripture tells us about God’s sovereignty and about our own responsibility to believe and obey what He tells us, we have to start with a biblical understanding of who we are. We have to admit that we have been shaped by an extra-biblical prophet who defined reality in an unbiblical way.
In other words, Ellen White taught us heresy about our own nature and our own responsibility for our human sin. She taught us that we are in a situation in which Satan is a leading figure, and she puts humanity in the position of fighting Satan and needing to help God defend Himself against a powerful devil who is responsible for our sin.
This foundation of our Adventist worldview is heresy. Satan is not part of our story; God tells us the truth, and God Himself took responsibility for His disobedient creation after Adam sinned. God Himself took on human flesh and took our sin onto Himself by imputation. He Himself hung on the cross and suffered the full wrath of God against OUR sin—but He did all this in our place.
When we understand that our God is completely sovereign and that nothing happens without His permission, we see that even though we can’t explain HOW, we can believe both facts are true: God is sovereign; He elects foreknows, predestines, saves, and punishes. Concurrently, by means He does not explain to us, we are responsible to believe Him and to respond to His revelation of Himself. We are responsible to acknowledge Him as God and give thanks. We are responsible to believe that we need to be rescued, and we are responsible to repent and to trust the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement for our sin.
We do not have to understand how God does these things; we simply have to believe that everything He tells us is true. When we trust Him and believe that both His complete sovereignty and our personal responsibility are true, the unexplained details became less troublesome. We can see that both are true, and we can live in peace because we see that our sovereign God has called us and given us the ability to trust and have faith. We can trust Him to keep every promise He has made because He cannot lie, and we can trust Him to complete in us the work He has begun.
The lesson is just wrong. We are not born with free will but with spirits that are dead in sin. In our natural condition we are free to do whatever we think we wish to do, but we are not free to have believing faith because dead mean and women cannot believe.
God Himself must draw us to see our need and the rescue He has provided in the Lord Jesus. When we hear His voice and see our need, our only proper response is to believe.
The mystery of belief is just that—a mystery—yet we know that God reveals Himself, and we are responsible for our own response to Him.
He turns no one away who comes to Him, and His patience is for the purpose of leading people to salvation.
Adventism has placed the human mind and logic OVER the word of God, explaining it away in an effort to harmonize it with the great controversy model.
The two can never harmonize. The great controversy has created a counterfeit Christianity that has deceived millions of people, and we are asked to let go of our Adventist identities and beliefs and allow God’s word to inform us of what is true.
Everything God tells us is true: our eternal security is a gift from our sovereign, triune God who took responsibility for us and took our death sentence so we can be brought to life. Satan is not part of our story.
If you haven’t believed in the finished work of our Lord Jesus, this is a good time to do so. You are not in a battle with Satan; your sin is against God alone, and He has already taken the wrath of God for it.
Bring your guilt to Him and admit that you need a Savior. Trust Him and believe that He has died for you and has risen from the dead, breaking your death sentence.
Believe Him today, and you will know the wonder and joy of being cared for by a sovereign God who knew you from the foundation of the earth. You can trust this God who took responsibility for you! You will be forever His child when you place your faith and trust in Him and kiss the Son. Your eternal future is secure in Him. †
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