Lesson 1: “Some Principles of Prophecy”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Central Problem with This Lesson:
This lesson reveals Adventism is not Christian while reinforcing the great controversy worldview for understanding prophecy.
This quarter’s Sabbath School lessons are authored by Shawn Boonstra, the director/speaker for the Adventist ministry The Voice of Prophecy. The studies assume (without explanation) the great controversy worldview which shapes and directs the Seventh-day Adventist organization‚ and the Adventist readers find nothing amiss as they read Boonstra’s principles for approaching Bible prophecy.
Although Adventist individuals differ in the ways they understand “truth” and prophecy and even proper Adventism, they are united by an unquestioned, invisible-to-them matrix: a view of reality defined and shaped by Ellen White’s great controversy paradigm.
This invisible foundation functions like an inoculation against biblical truth in the lives of Adventists. Because Adventists use words that Christians use and because Adventism has morphed its phraseology over the decades to deceive Christians about their true beliefs and to make Adventism sound “Christian”, neither Adventists nor Christians perceive that they mean different things when they talk about “prophecy” or “salvation” or “atonement” or even “Jesus Christ”.
Because they use the same words, the invisible, defining foundation of the great controversy paradigm remains intact underneath Adventist teaching. This unacknowledged fact makes it difficult to expose the dark deception of Adventism and its profound twisting of biblical truth into something that continues to lead millions of people to destruction.
Yet before the end of this week’s lesson, Boonstra reveals that Adventism does not identify with “Christendom” and accuses Christians of practicing pagan darkness.
What are the “right tools” and the “right attitude”?
Sunday’s lesson leads the reader into the familiar Adventist mantra that Adventism has the correct “message of the Bible”. Notice these words from the last paragraph:
Without being surrendered to the Lord, and without a heart open to learning the truth, those who read the Bible will likely come away not only missing its message but misunderstanding the loving and holy character of the God revealed in its pages. This could be easier to do than many realize, which is why just reading the Bible without the right tools and (most important) the right attitude under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, can be hurtful.
Notice the coded warnings contained in that quotation. Boonstra warns that those studying prophecy must be “surrendered to the Lord” and have hearts “open to learning the truth”. Christians generally would not find problems with those warnings, but from an Adventist perspective, they mean something specific: the reader must be committed to Adventist “truth” and the Adventist version of “the Lord”.
This instruction to be committed to the Adventist version of their “godhead” is further emphasized in the warning that, unless they are committed to “the truth” (which Adventists understand to be Adventism and its three-angels’ messages of the seventh-day Sabbath, the investigative judgment, the health message, and avoiding the “mark of the beast” identified as worshiping on Sunday), they will misunderstand the “loving and holy character” of God.
The phrase “the character of God” is embedded within Adventism, and Adventists are taught that God’s character is transcribed in the Ten Commandments. Further, whenever Adventists think about or hear the “Ten Commandments” mentioned as God’s law that reveals His character, they automatically “know” that the heart of God’s “character” is expressed in the fourth commandment: keeping the seventh-day Sabbath.
In other words, an Adventist reading that quotation above would “know” the author was saying essentially this: “In order to understand prophecy, you must be committed to Adventist ‘truth’. You must approach the Bible knowing it will confirm the the Adventist worldview: that God has revealed Himself in the Ten Commandments, and your heart needs to be surrendered to this “truth”. You cannot read the Bible without the “right tools” of understanding the Adventist great controversy and the Adventist Jesus who is in heaven applying His blood in the second phase of an incomplete atonement. You must be committed to having a “right attitude” about the Adventist worldview and ask for the Holy Spirit to show you how the Adventist understanding is embedded in Scripture. To read the Bible from any other perspective is hurtful.”
Right from the start, this Sabbath School lesson illustrates the deception of Adventist language and assumptions. Boonstra know how Adventists will understand his language—that they will interpret his words from inside their matrix of Adventism. Christians, on the other hand, or new converts who have not yet been steeped in Adventist reasoning, will not perceive the deeply cultic meanings that underlie these words.
In fact, this lesson illustrates what Paul Carden, the Executive Director of The Centers for Apologetics Research, called Seventh-day Adventism: “counterfeit Christianity”. A “counterfeit” is especially dangerous because it so closely mimics the real thing. Unless one is trained to look for anomalies, the coded warnings and messages of just that quotation above would never be noticed by someone outside Adventism.
God wants to be understood?
Monday’s lesson reveals another core tenet of Adventism’s great controversy motif. The title of the study is, “God Wants To Be Understood”.
Scripture NEVER suggests that God “wants to be understood”! In fact, God is very clear throughout the Bible that we cannot understand Him! For example, when Job begged for God to come to his defense as his companions criticized his motives, God said to Job:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell [Me], if you know understanding, Who set its measurements? Since you know. Or who stretched the line on it?”—Job 38:4,5 LSB
And Paul says this:
So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? WILL THE THING MOLDED SAY TO THE MOLDER, WHY DID YOU MAKE ME LIKE THIS”?—Romans 9:18–20 LSB
God never asks us to understand Him nor tries to reveal His sovereign ways. Rather, He asks us to BELIEVE Him. As we read in Genesis 15:6:
Then he believed in Yahweh; and He counted it to him as righteousness.—Genesis 15:6 LSB
Our trust and belief in God as He reveals Himself is what He counts as our righteousness. It is never our “understanding” of Him that He desires or seeks. In fact, the idea that we can understand God was at the heart of the serpent’s temptation to Eve—that she could be like God and know good and evil if she ate. God asks us to trust Him and to give up trying to explain His motives and power. We are asked to BELIEVE.
Yet Adventism teaches that God is depending on us, along with Jesus, to vindicate His reputation and character to the watching universe because Satan has supposedly accused Him of being unfair. At the heart of Adventism is the belief that each Adventist is helping the universe to understand that God is love and not a tyrant—and this human witness of God’s goodness is necessary because Satan has supposedly caused the universe to doubt God.
Prophecy, according to Boonstra, “must ultimately, in one way or another, lead us to Jesus and the promise of salvation that He offers to all humanity.” (P. 7). He continues,
After all, the Lord, through whom all things were created (see Col. 1:16, John 1:1–3), comes down to this earth and then offers Himself as a sacrifice on the cross for the sins of every human being, even the most wretched. That is how much God loves all of us. Having done all that for us, the Lord would obviously want everyone, wretches included, to know what He offers us in Jesus. And prophecy can do just that.
And then Monday’s lesson ends with this question:
Though, yes, there is much that we don’t know, why is it crucial to focus now on what we do know and to follow what we know—as opposed to obsessing over what we don’t know?
Notice the focus of this question and the statement above that the prophecy is important because it helps even wretches to know how much God loves us: the call here is for the Adventist reader to be committed to “what we do know and to follow what we know”.
Adventism depends upon its members knowing and believing its unique great controversy worldview and its unique doctrine of the investigative judgment and the requirement of keeping the seventh-day Sabbath. In other words, Adventism is built upon teaching its members unique, gnostic knowledge that is special and necessary for salvation.
Scripture, however, asks us not to know and follow “what we know” but to know and follow and trust the Lord Jesus.
God Reveals Himself
God does not gives us information that He expects us to discover and follow. Rather, He reveals Himself to all people. Paul says it this way in Romans 1:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, both His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.—Romans 1:18–20 LSB
Furthermore, the Lord Jesus told us exactly how we may be assured of eternal life—and it has nothing to do with esoteric knowledge and unique doctrines requiring the prophetic messages of Ellen White! Jesus said this:
“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 are never asked to read prophecy and submit to Adventist “truth” in order to figure out what Daniel and Revelation mean. In fact, the way Adventism uses prophecy leads one to a completely different outcome than the prophetic words actually reveal.
The Heart of Darkness
Tuesday’s lesson reveals the core of Adventist deception implicit in this series of lessons addressing prophecy.
Notice the assumptions and condemnations of Christianity contained in these words from Tuesday’s lesson:
Understanding of Daniel increased rapidly, however, after the end of the 1,260–year prophecy, which ended in 1798, when multiple expositors around the globe started concluding that something spectacular was going to happen around 1843. The most notable of these, however, was William Miller, whose preaching launched the Great Advent Movement of the nineteenth century and began a chain of events that would give birth to the “remnant” church and a clear understanding of the three angels’ messages.
The birth of our global movement, in other words, is a fulfillment of Daniel’s prediction that “knowledge shall increase” at “the time of the end.”
In contrast, and without judging people’s salvation, think about the “darkness” that so much of Christendom exists in. Something as basic as the seventh-day Sabbath, established in Eden, is ignored, even dismissed, in favor of Sunday, a day rooted in Roman paganism. Or think of the utter ignorance about death, with the vast majority of Christians believing the pagan idea that the dead immediately go soaring off to another existence, which for some means an eternally burning hell.
In contrast, we should be thankful—and humbled—by the knowledge of the truth.
First, Boonstra mentions that the 1,620-year prophecy “ended in 1798, when multiple expositors around the globe started concluding that something spectacular was going to happen around 1843.”
No Christian expositors believed that 1843 was an important date. In fact, Christians understood that attempting to set dates for Christ’s return was a sin; Jesus Himself had said no one knows the day or the hour of His return. Yet this lesson applauds William Miller as being the visionary who set forth a “chain of events” that “gave birth to the ‘remnant’ church and a clear understanding of the three angels’ messages.”
This entire understanding of Miller’s date-setting and the subsequent unrepentance of the founders of Seventh-day Adventism who insisted that Miller’s date was right even though Jesus did not return—and manufactured a face-saving doctrine of called the investigative judgment—these ideas are implicit in this lesson. Boonstra knows his Adventist readers believe, as he does, that Adventism is the true last-day remnant church, and they believe that God raised up Adventism through Miller’s failed prophecy!
This is pure cultic teaching. Furthermore, no one except the Seventh-day Adventists have ever understood the three angels of Revelation 14:6–14 as meaning what Adventism says they mean!
Notice also that Boonstra states that “darkness” exists within Christendom because Christians reject the perpetual holiness of the seventh-day Sabbath and state that worship on Sunday is a practice “rooted in Roman paganism”!
The hubris, the arrogance of accusing Christianity of practicing “darkness”! Biblically, “darkness” represents evil. This lesson is accusing the Christian world of evil and calls their practice of corporate worship on Sunday in honor of the Lord’s resurrection and of the founding of His body, the church, evil—the practice of paganism!
Notice that Boonstra assumes, without explanation, that his readers will agree with him and find nothing wrong with this assertion. Notice also that Boonstra ends this day’s lesson with the reinforcement of the readers’s great controversy worldview by reminding them that they should be “thankful—and humbled—by the knowledge of the truth”!
God’s word condemns this crafty reversal of good and evil:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes And understanding in their own sight!—Isaiah 5:20, 21 LSB
Adventism, represented in this lesson quarterly by their celebrity evangelist Shawn Boonstra, has tipped its hand. It teaches its members that Christianity is not true religion. It teaches that worshiping on Sunday is a pagan practice, and it overtly states that “darkness”—evil—defines Christianity!
This alone is evidence that Adventism is not Christian. It teaches a different Jesus—one who could have sinned, one who gave up His full deity, one who came to show us how to keep the law instead of FULFILLING the law and becoming our righteousness!
Adventism condemns the body of Christ—the beloved bride for whom Jesus died—and accuses her of practicing paganism and darkness!
Adventism has identified itself as being OUTSIDE the body of Christ, outside Christianity, and it seeks to seduce Christians away from their life and confidence and rest in the finished work of the Lord Jesus to place them under the bondage of keeping a law that is obsolete in the resurrection life of Christ!
Furthermore, Adventism has placed itself under God’s condemnation of those who call light darkness and darkness light, who substitute the bitterness of condemnation for the sweetness of being alive in Christ.
Adventism is not Christian by its own admission. It does not identify with “Christendom”, and it condemns those who know Jesus as their Savior, who know they no longer are under the law!
I appeal to any Adventist who may hear or see this podcast: ask the Lord to open your eyes to truth and to show you what is real and true. Ask Him to reveal to you your own need and to show you that in Jesus you will find true forgiveness and rest. In Him you will be released from the law of sin and death, and you will be given eternal life NOW if you place your faith in the death of the Lord Jesus for your sins, in His burial, and in His resurrection on the third day according to Scripture.
Turn to Jesus and find freedom from the suffocating darkness of Adventism, from the counterfeit Christianity that only binds you deeper and deeper in helplessness and fear. Turn to Jesus and find freedom in Him, and you will know the joy of receiving eternal life 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.
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