Lesson 6: “God’s Love of Justice”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- The discussion of God’s justice is built upon the great controversy worldview: Satan is responsible for sin, God limits His power, and man has free will and is not depraved.
- God’s death sentence for sin is ignored while human responses are credited with changing God’s mind.
- The lesson makes Jesus’ death the evidence of God’s goodness instead of evidence of His justice and sovereignty.
This lesson attempts to explain God’s justice from the perspective of the great controversy worldview. Thus all the defenses of God’s mercy and goodness informing His justice are describing a different god and a different humanity than the Bible reveals.
The great controversy teaches that sin arose in heaven before creation. Satan, according to EGW, was next to Christ in heaven:
Satan’s position in heaven had been next to the Son of God. He was first among the angels.—Selected Messages, bk. 1, 341.
The exaltation of the Son of God as equal with the Father was represented as an injustice to Lucifer, who, it was claimed, was also entitled to reverence and honor.—Patriarchs and Prophets, 35
Satan became jealous when God exalted Jesus to the position of His Son and took Him into His council to create the earth. Satan then began a whisper campaign impugning God’s character and the fairness of His Law, and he eventually led a rebellion in heaven that got him and 1/3 of the angels kicked out and sent to earth.
This rebellion launched what we know as “the great controversy”, and Adventism is based on the idea that Satan is still in a battle with Jesus for the souls of men. This idea requires the Adventist teaching that humans and angels are created with completely freewill. Each individual is free to choose to obey God or to buy into Satan’s accusations.
Jesus came to demonstrate that a human CAN keep God’s law, that it IS fair, and He came to show us how to keep it as He kept it.
Furthermore, if the creatures have freewill, then God must limit His own superhuman power in order to give each person freedom to choose Him willfully. Thus the freewill of humans and angels is the ultimate value in the universe. God cannot, therefore, have complete foreknowledge; He cannot predestine nor elect, as Scripture tells us. He must stand back, like a gentleman, and allow Satan and humans to play out their choices to the full extent, thereby demonstrating to the watching universe that Satan really is a deceiver, and God really is good.
The Adventist god has a giant reputation problem, and He depends on loyal humans to follow the example of Jesus, even suffering in silence to the point of death as Jesus did on the cross, to stay loyal and obedient. Loyal humans, in this model, can ask Jesus to help them resist Satan. They can pray like Jesus did and depend on the Holy Spirit as He did, and they, too, can overcome sin and obey God like Jesus.
Satan and Jesus Engaged In Combat
Therefore Jesus, who came to earth to be our example of loyal obedience and who came to demonstrate how merciful and good God is as He loved sinners and practiced mercy to the oppressed, is in personal combat with Satan as He seeks to help humans be good and obedient and to resist the wiles of Satan.
In the great controversy model, sin is the responsibility of Satan. He caused human sin, and he is roaming the earth deceiving people into more and deeper sin. Ultimately, in this model, Satan is the scapegoat on whom Jesus will lay the sin of the saved, and Satan will bear those sins out of heaven into the lake of fire where he will be punished for them.
Thus, at the beginning and the end, Satan is held responsible for causing human sin, and he is the responsible party who will pay the ultimate, eternal price for human sin.
This model removes the responsibility of sin from humanity in an ultimate sense. Yet Scripture reveals that Adam is held responsible for human sin. Because of Adam, we are all born dead in sin. Because human sin is the responsibility of the head of the human race, Adam, we needed a better Head of our race.
We are responsible for our own sin—Satan didn’t make us do it—but because humanity was intrinsically flawed because of Adam and because his sin and death were imputed to all his descendants, we had to have a new Human to take responsibility for us.
If a new Human Head of the race were not provided, we would all be doomed and dead.
Because God told Adam that if he ate the forbidden fruit he would die that day, Adam DID die the day he ate it.
Adventism does not teach this biblical doctrine. Instead they teach that Adam began to die, but we are not naturally dead in sin. They teach we did not inherit Adam’s spiritual death but that we choose to sin and thus become subject to death.
In the great controversy model, God is not sovereign over Satan but limits His own power to allow Satan to freely practice his evil. In this model, we hapless humans are continually struggling to avoid Satan, to protect ourselves from lurking temptation, and trying to imitate Christ and prove Satan wrong. God sees us struggling and has mercy on us when we reach out to Him, but He doesn’t step in and take responsibility for us. He allows us to flounder as we seek for Jesus and try to be good. After all, it’s up to our own free will to do the right thing.
God Is Sovereign Over Satan
Yet this model is wrong. Satan is not responsible for human sin. The Bible doesn’t tell us Satan’s story; it begins with our first human parents in the garden. Adam is credited with human sin and death, and each of us is held responsible for our own sin.
Satan is not the scapegoat who carries our sins away; the Lord Jesus is the only One who ever carries our sins, and He has already taken them to the cross as our new Human Head. He has paid the price for our sins—past, present, and future—and He has destroyed the death sentence given by God Himself to Adam in the garden.
God took responsibility for us and gave us God the Son incarnate—not to show us how to keep the law and to vindicate God’s reputation but to become the perfect Human Sacrifice who had the power and authority to redeem the entire world for God.
Jesus did not come to win a battle with Satan; He came to rescue us from His own eternal death sentence by taking that sentence Himself.
Moreover, He had the authority to buy us back from slavery and death because He Is God, and He is our Creator. Furthermore, He is also Satan’s creator. Satan was never in competition with Jesus, nor was Jesus ever exalted by the Father to the position of His Son. He was eternally God the Son.
In contrast to Adventism’s picture of a weak, self-limiting god who grants Satan free reign to do evil, God is OVER Satan. God is outside creation. Everything that is made is under God’s sovereign, sustaining control. Satan, being merely one creature, is a mere dot in the big picture. He is not freely roaming trying to win a controversy with God. He is a tiny subset of creation, and he does absolutely NOTHING that God does not allow him to do!
Lesson Reveals Great Controversy
Friday’s lesson reveals the great controversy lens through which the subject of God’s justice is discussed. Let’s look at this quote from Ellen White’s Steps to Christ:
“God has bound our hearts to Him by unnumbered tokens in heaven and in earth. Through the things of nature, and the deepest and tenderest earthly ties that human hearts can know, He has sought to reveal Himself to us. Yet these but imperfectly represent His love. Though all these evidences have been given, the enemy of good blinded the minds of men, so that they looked upon God with fear; they thought of Him as severe and unforgiving. Satan led men to conceive of God as a being whose chief attribute is stern justice,—one who is a severe judge, a harsh, exacting creditor. He pictured the Creator as a being who is watching with jealous eye to discern the errors and mistakes of men, that He may visit judgments upon them. It was to remove this dark shadow, by revealing to the world the infinite love of God, that Jesus came to live among men.”—EGW, Steps to Christ pp. 10, 11.
Here the Adventist prophet is teaching that SATAN is the one who accused God of being harsh and unfair, exacting and jealous. Scripture NEVER gives Satan this kind of power. He has not leveled accusations against God which have left the universe in doubt!
Furthermore, EGW says in the quote above that Jesus “came to live among men” in order to reveal “the infinite love of God”!
God’s infinite love and mercy have never been unknown or besmirched by Satan. Jesus did not come to live among men to vindicate God’s character. Rather, he came to be our new Human Head of the race, our new Adam.
He came to take responsibility for us, His fallen, spiritually dead creatures. He took all of our sin into Himself and paid the price our sin demanded—death.
Furthermore, Genesis 2 and 3 reveal that God DID exact an unswerving death sentence. If Adam ate the fruit, he would die. That meant Adam died, and all of us are dead in him. This death sentence was not a deception of Satan! Jesus didn’t come to set us straight about God’s love and goodness.
He came to take that death sentence so we wouldn’t have to. He came took God’s wrath so we can avoid it!
Jesus died our death because God took responsibility for us! He is not a weak god self-limiting His power so we can freely destroy ourselves! He came and RESCUED us! Furthermore, He makes it clear that He is destroying Satan, and that Satan will be eternally sentenced to the lake of fire at the great white throne judgment described in Revelation 10:20.
Meanwhile, when Jesus died, fulfilling the law and taking our sin to the cross, He disarmed Satan and humiliated him publicly, and he cancelled the death sentence contained in the heart of the law:
Having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us, He also has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them in Him.—Colossians 2:14, 15 LSB
Lesson Humanizes God
The lesson makes much of explaining that God sometimes changes His mind when He declares punishment for the wicked. For example, in Wednesday’s lesson we read this:
God always keeps His promises, and while He will change course in response to human repentance, He does so always in accordance with His goodness and His Word. God relents from judgment in response to repentance, precisely because His character is good, righteous, loving, and merciful.
What is the significance of the biblical depictions of divine “relenting”? What does this convey about the constancy of God’s character alongside the fact that God enters into genuine give-and-take relationships that actually make a difference to Him?
Adventism simply cannot talk about God’s justice and mercy from a biblical perspective because it denies what Scripture tells us about Him and about man.
This quote reveals Adventism’s belief: human decisions elicit RESPONSES from God. If people decide to have a relationship with God, God will relent from His position of justly punishing them for sin.
Yet this model is inaccurate because it does not acknowledge that obedience to God is not based on aligning one’s will with God. Rather, all men are born dead in sin, “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3).
Absolutely no one can seek, please, or know God on his own because we are all born spiritually dead. We cannot rise above our natures.
Thus if people repent, that repentance is the result of God working on their dead spirits to see and know and acknowledge God!
God relents when people are convicted that they are sinners and need God, and they BELIEVE Him and trust Him.
From an Adventist perspective, repentance is even defined wrong. Adventism calls it a change of mind, a decision to turn away from a current belief or practice and to embrace a different, better one. Yet from the biblical perspective, repentance is giving up one’s right to manage one’s behavior and trusting God instead.
Friday’s lesson included this thought question:
How does the reality of the great controversy help us understand all the evil that exists now?
This question alone reveals that the Adventist view of God’s justice and mercy are completely upside down. This lesson does not explain what Jesus’ death and resurrection actually did, nor why they were needed—and it does not explain these things because the great controversy doesn’t teach them.
Without understanding that God Himself took responsibility for human sin by sending God the Son incarnated as a human, to take our sin and to pay fully for it, taking God’s own wrath against sin in Himself, they cannot understand God’s justice.
God is not a nice guy who’s really not trying to kill sinners. Rather God is God, and we cannot characterize Him as we would a mere man.
When Jesus took our sin to the cross, He did more than die a representative death and elicit the sympathy of those who feel sorry for God’s reputation and want to stick it to that naughty Satan.
He literally reconciled the world to God as He hung on the cross. Consider these passages:
For in Him all the fullness [of God] was pleased to dwell, And through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross–through Him–whether things on earth or things in heaven.—Colossians 1:19, 20 LSB
Now all [these] things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.—2 Corinthians 5:18, 19 LSB
[W]hom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith, for a demonstration of His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.—Romans 3:25, 26 LSB
The Lord Jesus literally reconciled the entire world back to God IN HIMSELF. In fact, the Father was In Christ Jesus as He hung on the cross, not counting our sins against us because He was counting them against Christ!
The amazing consequence of Jesus coming and being our new Human Head of the Race, taking responsibility for us and paying for our sin, is that He has earned the right to be the only One in the universe who has the title deed to the earth!
Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to break its seals?” And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it.
Then I was crying greatly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.
And one of the elders said to me, “Stop crying! Behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
Then I saw in the midst of the throne and the four living creatures and in the midst of the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth.
And He came and took [the scroll] out of the right hand of Him who sits on the throne. …
And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are You to take the scroll and to open its seals, because You were slain and purchased for God with Your blood [people] from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And You made them [to be] a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign upon the earth.”— Revelation 5:2-7, 9-10 LSB
Jesus has already purchased the earth for God. He has already purchased people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation to be His kingdom, to be priests to our God. Already we know that we who are purchased will reign upon the earth! These things are already accomplished!
When we look at God’s justice in Scripture, we can’t even talk about it without talking about the cross of the Lord Jesus! He is not some self-limited superpower who condescends to us, as EGW keeps saying, trying to show us that He’s not a monster but that He’s compassionate and good.
Furthermore, Satan has not misrepresented God to us. God has fully revealed Himself to the whole world:
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
God is responsible for revealing Himself. He doesn’t leave His reputation in the hands of a disgruntled Satan or an insipid Jesus. Each person who lives is confronted with the reality of God’s divine nature and eternal power, and people either acknowledge Him and give thanks, or they suppress that knowledge by their own wickedness. Satan is never responsible for human unbelief!
Adventism has eclipsed our sovereign God and our victorious Lord Jesus with an arrogant, manipulative, and all-present Satan. In reality, Adventism has eclipsed God’s true justice. It has hidden the fact that God declares all people dead in sin and under the wrath of God. It has hidden the truth that God IS just, and He will ultimately destroy every person who does not believe Him and trust the Son.
But it has also hidden the way of escape. The Lord Jesus came and died our death on the cross, taking our sin and taking God’s wrath for sin in Himself. He has reconciled the world to God, and He is the only One who is worthy to open the scroll and to exercise authority over the earth! His victory has been won, and God’s justice is already on full display in the blood of Jesus!
If you haven’t trusted the finished atonement of our Lord Jesus and learned that you have been rescued from the wrath of God by His justice carried out in Christ in His death for sin, His burial, and His rising from death according to Scripture, look to the real Jesus today. You cannot be saved by mental decisions and good deeds. You can only be saved by trusting the One who died for you and who has purchased His people by the blood of His cross.
Bring your helpless, sinful self to Him and trust His death for you, and receive His resurrection life because His blood cancelled your death sentence! Believe Him today—and rejoice forever in the trust justice of God that reconciled you to Himself! †
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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