I Need Help Exiting This Mess
I’m in my 40s, a fourth-generation Adventist pastor’s kid. I just need some help trying to get out of this mess, and I need some advice from some people who have done this before. My wife is embedded in the Adventist church and sees no reason to leave. My children all go to Adventist schools.
Thanks for your prayers and your help.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: You are definitely on a journey that will change your life and bring you into peace and confidence ultimately, in spite of the difficulty of extricating yourself. Following Jesus is not easy, but it is always worth whatever it takes!
It is hard leaving when one’s spouse is still committed to Adventism. I can tell you, though, that I have watched many people over the years leave, one spouse at a time. Ultimately, if you follow the Lord Jesus and act on your convictions as He make you aware of the truth, your wife will respect you. Even though it is likely there will be some hard disagreements and arguments, a wife who knows her husband is acting with integrity because he knows what the Lord is leading him to do gives a wife a foundation of stability and strength that, even though she may be upset, she still respects and values.
I suggest that you ask the Lord to show you how to proceed, how to teach your family the gospel as you are learning it, and how to leave Adventism. Ask Him to open the doors you need to walk through and to give you the wisdom and courage to go when He says “Go!” Meanwhile, would your wife be willing to read the Bible with you? Ask her to read through Galatians with you, one chapter (or half chapter) at a time, using no commentaries: just read the words using the normal rules of grammar, context, and vocabulary, as you would read any ordinary book. Ask the Lord to teach you what He wants you to know from that book. The Bible is the source of knowing the Lord’s will; it is inerrant and sufficient, and it means what it says.
Your wife (and even you) will be tempted to “interpret” Galatians as you read, but you need to know that the words really mean what they say. When Paul says “law”, he means the entire Mosaic law, including the Ten. When he talks about circumcision, he refers to the entrance rite into Judaism that actually qualified a gentile to begin keeping the law. So in context, Paul, is warning against the Judaizing that was going on among the gentile Galatian converts.
This article by my cohost on Former Adventist Podcast may be helpful to you as you begin to read the Bible without an Adventist filter:
Ask the Lord to show you how to love your wife and your children for Him. Ask Him to show you how to be the spiritual leader of the family, even if they do not immediately follow you into a Christian church. But you need to act with integrity and consistency, trusting and obeying the Lord Jesus, regardless of what your wife may say. The Lord will enable you to have integrity and honesty before Him while also loving your wife and taking care of your kids.
I recommend that you watch Laurie Werk’s testimony here. It begins at minute 11:07. Her husband left ahead of her, and she struggled. She was so upset and scared—but she finally understood what was wrong with Adventism, and she is alive in Jesus and fully out now. I believe you would find it greatly encouraging and helpful:
And pray for your wife and kids to have eyes to see. Ask the Lord to soften and open their hearts to the Lord Jesus.
I also recommend that you listen to Former Adventist Podcast. We have a wealth of discussions on topics as well as Bible books during which we unpack our Adventist understandings and compere them with biblical truth. You also may enjoy our new video podcast Former Adventist Fact Check in which we go through the twisted teaching of the Sabbath School lessons and show how they obscure what the Bible really says as they teach the church week to week. You can find all our videos on our Former Adventist channel on YouTube.
Please feel free to email anytime. If you are interested, we have a weekly Former Adventist Bible Study every Friday evening at 7:00 Pacific Time. If you are interested in attending via Zoom, just email FormerAdventist@gmail.com and request a Zoom link.
Help Needed Regarding the Covenants
If you have time I would be interested in your thoughts on Romans 9:4 where Paul says that to all Israel, even unbelieving Israel for whom he could wish himself separated from Christ if they could be saved, belong specific things. This list contains the “Covenants.”
If all the covenants belong to Israel, then Gentile Believers do not have a covenant with God. They only have a promise of being transferred into the Kingdom and sharing with Israel in all these blessings. This is an individual relationship of gentile with Christ. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy Kingdom Come…” indicating that this is a request for the future when God’s will is done “on earth.” Isn’t this the sharing time of gentiles with believing Israel?
If Israel is “special” due to having the covenants, and so forth, isn’t it wrong to claim a covenant that says it is for Israel and apply it to gentiles?
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Here’s how I understand this situation with the covenants.
Beginning with His covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15—21) in which God made promises for Abraham’s offspring of promise, God made many covenants for and with Israel. After Sinai, He renewed the Sinai covenant in Deuteronomy (see 29:1–15), and He renewed his covenant promises again at Mts. Ebal and Gerazim (Josh 8:30–35), and at Shechem (Joshua 24). He made the levitical covenant for the priesthood in Numbers 25:12–13, Jeremiah 33:21, and Malachi 2:4-5. He made the Davidic covenant as well: (2 Sam 7; 23:5; Psalm 89:3–4, 28-29; 132:11-12). He also made the new covenant with Israel and Judah (Jeremiah 31:31–40).
God also made promises (not called covenants) to Abraham and also made many OT Messianic promises and kingdom promises.
The Mosaic covenant was conditional between God and Israel; the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant with the levites and David, and the new covenant were not conditional upon responses from the recipients. They were unilaterally given by God.
The Abrahamic covenant, while specifically promising God’s faithful blessings to Israel, also contained unconditional promises to the world and the nations who would be blessed by Abraham and his promised seed.
In the New Testament we see that Jesus fulfilled all the shadows of the Mosaic covenant, and as the Perfect Israel, the Lord Jesus brought God’s promised blessing into the world. We read in Hebrews 10:20, Ephesians 2, Colossians 2, Romans 5, and indeed throughout the New Testament, that as Jesus fulfilled the shadows of sacrifices and cleansing, as He became the Substitute who took human sin and paid its price, He opened a new, living way to the Father (Heb. 10:20). When the temple curtain ripped as Jesus died, the work of Israel and the priesthood and the law in protecting people from God’s wrath by mediating sacrifices and offerings and incense and prayers was finished. Jesus Himself satisfied the law of sin and death that was not only a law sentencing Israel; it revealed the condition of all mankind. In fact, this universal condemnation is the subject of Romans 1 through 3.
In the epistles we learn that the cross disarmed and humiliated Satan (Col 2:14). It removed the barrier between God’s people, the Jews, and the gentiles, and Jesus created in himself one new man (Ephesians 2:15). He even says that through the Lord Jesus, “we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18).
So, that ripped curtain which exposed the Holy of Holies showed that the Lord’s broken body had opened a new and living way to God, not just for Jews, but for all mankind (Heb. 10:20). God had decreed that Abraham’s and David’s descendant, a Jew, would be the One who would usher His redemption into the world. That redemption, as God had intimated to Abraham, would be for “the nations”, not just for Israel.
Now, on this side of the cross, we see more fully what God had promised Abraham: He created a NEW people for Himself IN THE SON. And yet—we live in this physical world, and Paul explains in Romans 9 through 11, that God hasn’t nullified Israel’s national identity NOR His specific promises to them. He has created a new people—the born again who place their trust in the Son, and through these born again believers, both Jews and gentiles, God is declaring the finished work of the Lord Jesus throughout the nations. The church has a new identity and “job”. The church is the new “organism” that is called the Body of Christ, and we are sent into the world as a new body—not as a nation but scattered throughout the nations.
And yet—Paul explains that the identity of Israel and God’s specific promises of a nation and a throne where the Son of David would rule over the nations are not null and void. In fact, Revelation reveals that our national identities and our ethnic uniqueness are not lost in eternity. We see this fact both in Revelation 11, where the great multitude is introduced who are from every nation, kindred, tongue and people, and in Revelation 21:24 where it says that “the nations” will walk by the light of the New Jerusalem in the new earth. God doesn’t forget national and ethnic identity; He redeems it. And He has not erased nor forgotten the identity of the Israelites to whom He made specific promises.
We learn in the New Testament (1 Corinthians, Revelation, Hebrews 12, and so on) that the church will reign with Christ and that we will have rewards (2 Corinthians 3:9–15) for what we do for the sake of Christ. But Paul explains in Romans that God’s calling and gifts are NOT irrevocable, and he further says that currently Israel is experiencing a partial hardening, but days will come with the fullness of the gentiles will come in, and Israel’s hardening will be past. Repeatedly both testaments say that God always has a remnant, and when Paul says “all Israel will be saved”, he is not speaking simply of ethnic Israel. He has established earlier in Romans that true Israelites are those who have circumcised hearts—and the “all Israel” who will be saved will be those Israelites who will finally look on the One whom they pierced in the day when God pours out “on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and of supplication” (Zech. 12:10).They will be saved exactly as all people have always been saved: by believing God and trusting His provision as He has revealed it. They will trust the Son!
All to say, the “grafting” which we believing gentiles experience, as described in Romans 11:17–24, is not specifically into Israel, but contextually it is apparent that the “olive tree” into which the wild gentile branches are grafted and into which the cut-off Israelites branches will be re-grafted one day when they come to faith—this tree is the olive tree of God’s purposes.
The root of this tree, as verse 16 explains, are the patriarchs. The “first piece of dough” was Abraham and then Isaac and Jacob—they were the fathers from whom Israel came, but they themselves PRECEDED Israel. So all believers are grafted into the olive tree which is nourished by the rich root of God’s unconditional, eternal promises to Abraham. Both believing Israel and the believing gentiles will be grafted into this tree and experience the blessings God has promised.
God chose Israel to carry His revelation into the world. He chose to use this one nation to carry His oracles, to preserve them, and to share them, and He chose to bring the Savior to the world from Israel. These facts remain and are eternal. Jesus is forever a Jew in the line of Judah. Yet God provided for people from every language and nation to be able to come before Him in faith and belief and become part of His inheritance.
The Bible repeatedly refers to or uses examples of first and second-born sons, emphasizing that God’s blessings go to whom He will by His choice. The fact that God keeps His promises and reveals the depth of them does not eliminate any of the people along the way. The special role of Israel will always be remembered in the Lord Jesus, and even in the kingdom: the Temple of the New Jerusalem bears the names of the 12 tribes on its gates and the 12 apostles on its foundation. The tribes represent Israel, and the apostles the church—and significantly, all 24 of them are ethnic Jews!
There are many details God hasn’t revealed, but when God reveals His will and His promises and shows that His promises have always included bringing gentiles into His body—but that His Body, the Bride, is a separate “thing” from the nation of Israel—we are also to understand that His promises to the nation of Israel will all be fulfilled ultimately. Even though we are in a different era now, an era not defined by a nation representing God but of an international body of individuals, still God’s promises made to the nation will happen.
Paul’s point in Romans 11 is that we can trust every detail of covenant promises He has made. In closing, I will quote Romans 11:25–32:
For I do not want you, brothers, to be uninformed of this mystery–so that you will not be wise in your own estimation–that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, “THE DELIVERER WILL COME FROM ZION, HE WILL REMOVE UNGODLINESS FROM JACOB.” “AND THIS IS MY COVENANT WITH THEM, WHEN I TAKE AWAY THEIR SINS.” From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of [God’s] choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you once were disobedient to God, but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience, so these also now have been disobedient, that because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all.—Romans 11:25–32, LSB
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