Colleen and Nikki talk about the radical change in their view of Scripture which turned their worlds upside down and established a new reality. Podcast was published December 4, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Former Adventist, where we talk about our life after Adventism. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: We have a fun show today. We’re going to be talking about the sufficiency of Scripture, but before we do, I just want to remind you, if you have any questions or comments, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can also write to that email address if you would like to be signed up for our weekly Proclamation! emails or if you would like to receive the magazine in the mail that we send out twice a year. Also, we still have some books, “The Sabbath and the Lord’s Day,” by H.M. Riggle that we would love to send you. If you’d like one, go ahead and write to formeradventist@gmail.com, and please remember to give us your mailing address. We did have someone ask for the book, and they forgot to give us that. If it was you, please write us. We want to send that to you. This podcast is brought to you by your generous donations. If you would like to donate to the ministry, you can go ahead and visit proclamationmagazine.com, and there’s a link there. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, and while you’re there, write a review, rate and share it so that we can go ahead and get this message out to people. And please, don’t forget your coffee.
Colleen: [Laughter.] Got your coffee, Nikki?
Nikki: I’ve got my coffee.
Colleen: We are drinking vanilla nut coffee from Costco, Jose’s brand.
Nikki: Oh, it’s so good.
Colleen: It’s kind of my go-to, but it’s the creamer that makes the difference. What’s your creamer, Nikki?
Nikki: My creamer is hazelnut creamer.
Colleen: Do you have a story with that? [Laughter.]
Nikki: I do have a story with that. [Laughter.] So I’d never had hazelnut creamer until I met you. When we started coming here on Sundays after church, for some reason, I don’t know if they had a sale or if it was just a new favorite, there was hazelnut all the time on Sunday, and so now whenever I have it, I just remember those early years of coming out and the Bible coming to life and that new fellowship. I just love it.
Colleen: How fun. Well, I have sweet cream creamer. Ah, nothing like coffee. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: So, Nikki, what did you understand about the Bible as an Adventist? What role did it hold in your life or how did you think of it?
Nikki: Well, that’s such an interesting question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and I don’t ever remember being taught about the Bible, and I don’t mean the contents in it, I mean the nature of it.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: For some reason, from a young age I believed that everything in it was true, that it was from God and it was all to be trusted. It wasn’t until I got into college that I started hearing, “Well, it’s not inerrant, it’s fallible.”
Colleen: This is Adventist college; right?
Nikki: Yes, it was, and it was actually in my New Testament Studies program that I started very briefly, and so I was hearing things about the Bible that I didn’t understand when I was younger.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: So when I was a kid, I had a lot of chaos in my life, and I was issued a Bible when I was 14, and I remember, hmm, kind of treating it almost like a magic book.
Colleen: Oh, I get that.
Nikki: I didn’t know how to read it, but I knew God spoke in the Bible to us.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And so if I felt like I really wanted to know something from God, I would randomly flip it open and [laughter] sometimes find stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with the moment.
Colleen: [Laughter.] Right.
Nikki: And other times, I really do believe that He showed me something that I needed to see. And I remember too – in my late teens, early 20s, I remember a family member really getting into something called the Bible Code –
Colleen: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Nikki: – so there were all of these, I don’t know, interesting –
Colleen: Mystical things.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I kind of had this mystical view of Scripture –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – combined with this idea that it really is God’s authoritative Word. I believed that absolutely everything Ellen White ever taught or said was in the Bible.
Colleen: Yes. We were taught that.
Nikki: Yeah. I was 26 when I was on a walk with my mother-in-law, and I told her I wanted to start reading the Old Testament, and I wanted to start reading all of this stuff, you know, about pre-creation history, you know, the War in Heaven and –
Colleen: Yes, Satan getting jealous.
Nikki: Yeah. Jesus being elevated to Sonship, just all that. And I asked her, you know, “Where is that? I’ve never read it. Is it Ezekiel? Where is it?” And she very quietly said, “It’s not in there. It’s not in the Bible.” I had no idea.
Colleen: Yeah. What a surprise.
Nikki: So it was a mysterious book, it was a magical book. It was an authoritative book –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and I think that about sums up what I thought.
Colleen: Interesting. And the interesting thing about that is that the things that you said – mysterious, magical, and authoritative – in a sense don’t go together from a logical perspective.
Nikki: [Laughter.] That’s interesting.
Colleen: But Adventism did not have a logical worldview, so we could do that. Now, I was taught that the Bible was infallible. I was very carefully taught that in Adventist grade school, but I was also very carefully taught specifically that it was not inerrant. In fact, the Adventists that I knew that taught me were almost mocking about those fundamentalist Christians who believed that the Bible was inerrant, because, I was taught, the Bible writers were inspired exactly like Ellen White was inspired, and they explained that to me this way: “God didn’t give them words. That would have been automatic writing. He didn’t give anybody automatic writing. He gave them thoughts –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and ideas, and He left it up to them to interpret those thoughts and ideas the best they could, given their station in life and education, and worldview.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So what was in the Bible was, yes, from God, but yes, that person’s opinion about what God said. So I was actually taught that it did have errors in it, just like Ellen White had errors in it. Because, of course, Adventists know she contradicts herself and has to be edited. So that’s how I understood the Bible to be, just like Ellen White. And yet, I was taught, in just probably even a more confusing way than what you were taught, that it was infallible. In other words, its purpose could not fail, whatever that purpose was. Whatever it taught could not fail, but it was not inerrant. So that’s a kind of crazy-making way to think about a book that’s supposed to be the rule of faith and practice for a life.
Nikki: It’s so interesting, because what you described there is what I was told in college, and I don’t know where my ideas about Scripture came from growing up.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: I wasn’t taught well –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – you know, because I didn’t go to Sunday – Sabbath school, sorry – [Laughter.]
Colleen: Right. [Laughter.]
Nikki: – very often.
Colleen: Kind of a nice mistake!
Nikki: But I do remember when I was at La Sierra and they were telling me what you just described. I remember feeling like, “Man, they’re deconstructing my faith.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I was disturbed.
Colleen: Interesting, interesting.
Nikki: So that’s interesting.
Colleen: Well, you know, it left me unsure of what to make of it.
Nikki: Sure.
Colleen: I found – and I say this with a certain amount of regret – but I found the Gospels boring; I found the book of Acts to be intolerably boring [laughter].
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: I would fall asleep. Acts made no sense. It was confusing; it was repetitive; the details of all of those journeys and places were just more than I could bear. I found myself as an Adventist focusing on the Psalms, because I understood them to be prayers and hymns. I had no clue, as an Adventist, that the Psalms were Messianic prophesies, many of them.
Nikki: No, me neither.
Colleen: Oh, my goodness! I had no idea!
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: Anyway, I would go to the Psalms, I would read Proverbs, and you know, now and then I’d foray into the book of Ecclesiastes because, after all, you know, we did have a proof text in there – “The living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything” – so I figured it was an important book, but that was about all I could understand, and the rest of the Bible was there for proof texting.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It wasn’t until I began to study and realize that Adventism, for all its claim to believe Scripture, didn’t actually have a basis in Scripture that I started understanding that I needed to understand the Bible. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: So how did you come around to figuring out something different about the Bible, Nikki?
Nikki: Probably that first time I read Galatians and saw it.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: Okay, when I left the New Testament program at La Sierra, I kind of left upset, had a rough experience and decided, “No, I’m not going this; this isn’t what I’m going to do with my life,” and I left. And so I didn’t retain everything that they said, because there was a lot said that was clearly bad, even as an Adventist, so I think I still believed that Scripture was more than they were teaching it was. I don’t even know how to articulate that –
Colleen: I understand that.
Nikki: – I don’t know that I would have known how to. I just had – I believed it more –
Colleen: Um-hmm. Yes.
Nikki: – than –
Colleen: – than they were believing it.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: They were excited by it. They loved the history; they loved, you know –
Colleen: Sure, it’s an intellectual project.
Nikki: – and they could generate some inspiring sermons from it. One of the teachers there, she was a gripping storyteller.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: I don’t know. I don’t even know how to explain it. It just – it had an authority. I didn’t feel like I had to undermine Scripture, even though I didn’t understand it. But when I read Galatians and the Lord opened my eyes –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – to see it, I understood, “This Book is saying something I’ve never seen before, and I need to know what it is.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s hard to explain.
Colleen: I understand exactly what you’re describing, because I had similar experiences, and what I’ve come to understand, I used to think talk describing the Bible was mostly metaphorical. I’d heard people talk about it being the living Word of God, but when I started to study it to try to figure out what it actually said, I began to realize the Bible claims that for itself and that it’s actually true, because it is God’s own Word. It really is alive.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So somehow that sense that you had of its authority was because the Holy Spirit was calling you to trust it and was helping you know it was trustworthy. It is not a normal, ordinary book. I remember, shortly after joining the first Christian church we went to, taking a class with Richard on Sundays after the sermon called “Walk Through the Old Testament,” taught by Elizabeth Inrig.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Now, you know, we joined that class because we had committed to do everything the church offered, to see what a Sunday church was really like.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Like, “We’ve got to try it all to see how it’s the same and how it’s different.” Well, this class we joined kind of thinking, “Well, humph, we’ve got this one down.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: We do Old Testament.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Well, imagine my shock when we got in there and discovered that, not only did we not know the Old Testament, we had no idea how it was constructed or how the stories were significant.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Everything is interrelated and purposeful. They were not stand-alone stories. And more than that, they were not stories of good people that God used because they were noble.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Quite the opposite.
Nikki: And not necessarily models of how we were supposed to behave.
Colleen: Absolutely!
Nikki: When I realized that some of them lied, some of them murdered, some of them did horrible things, they abandoned their wife to Pharaoh –
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: – I mean, the list goes on. I remember reading that as an Adventist and going, “Wait a minute, what kind of God am I serving?”
Colleen: Right. Um-hmm.
Nikki: “This is His guy?”
Colleen: Right. Exactly. It never dawned on us as Adventists that these people were God’s guys because He chose them and changed them, not because they were noble and trusted Him.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They were His because He chose them, and He changed them after He chose them. So I remember Elizabeth standing up in one of those very early classes and holding her Bible over her head and saying, “Everything you need for life and godliness is right here in this Book.” And I remember thinking, “Huh. Will it tell me what house to buy or whom to marry? I think not.” And feeling a little skeptical – intrigued, but really skeptical, and a little bit superior because I was sure I knew better.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: So between that and discovering that the Bible stories were actually connected, I started to understand that I had always seen the Bible from a sort of inside-out position, and that was related to my Adventist worldview – does this ring a bell, Nikki? – my Adventist worldview that God limited Himself to honor our free will. Does that sound familiar?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And when I started to understand that the Bible was not about a God limiting Himself to honor human free will, but that He was sovereign over me, everything about the Bible changed, and it was – what was interesting was that I didn’t feel demeaned, I felt safe –
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: – when I started to understand that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I had been taught, “No, God isn’t in charge of the bad things that happen. Those things are from Satan. It’s not God who sends devastating storms that kill people. God had nothing to do with that car accident where so-and-so died. That was Satan.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But when I understood that God is sovereign and that even evil happens only by His permission, I had to rethink everything.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But I began to realize that I could trust a God who’s bigger than life, death, tragedy, and that He has bigger purposes than I knew and that He had chosen me, I hadn’t just decided to choose Him.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: I remember one of the biggest shocks was starting to understand that Abraham was not just a random story, but that Abraham was a connecting individual that began – He’s first mentioned in Genesis 12, but the story of Abraham is a straight line, a connecting line, like a thread, woven through the entire rest of Scripture.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He wasn’t just an Old Testament man that explained something about what he did and what God did, but what went on with Abraham was like the prototype for everything that continues on through Scripture, even to today. That was shocking to me.
Nikki: Yep, me too.
Colleen: How has your view of Scripture changed, Nikki?
Nikki: It’s completely different. It’s authoritative; it is my only source for truth about God and reality.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It is something that I long to be in submission to. I have big feelings – I’m a feeling person – and Scripture corrects that for me.
Colleen: Yes. Yes!
Nikki: It gives me next steps. It gives me reality. It keeps me grounded. It’s my access to God, and I don’t mean to say it’s my only – I know we pray.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And we have – you know, God gave us that. But this is where I learn about Him. This is where I know my Creator, and I’m coming to understand in even new ways now that it’s in knowing God by His Word, through His Word, and the work of the Holy Spirit in that process that actually, that is where we’re sanctified.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s not just in, you know, stubborn obedience. It’s in knowing who He is, and He continues to change my affections, and He continues to change my desires through Scripture, through hearing it taught well and reading it on my own, and even just singing doctrinally rich songs –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – that come from the words of Scripture. It’s my life.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: And it’s the thing that everything else that comes to me is tested. It’s tested by Scripture.
Colleen: By Scripture.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Right. Well, I remember, you know, it’s not a new text to me, but a couple years ago it hit me with a new force. It was like something opened behind my eyelids when I read this. It’s Hebrews 4, and interestingly, if you all haven’t looked it up lately, you just really ought to read Hebrews 4, because it talks about Sabbath and the fact that God sets a new day called “today,” but we’re not going to get off on that now. Following that, however, are these two amazing verses in Hebrews 4, verses 12 and 13: “For the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: “And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” Now, when I really looked at that, I realized God’s Word is declaring this about itself, by the authority of God to the writer of Hebrews, that God’s Word is living. It’s not just words on a page. As deathless as Shakespeare may be, Shakespeare is not living. His words are not living; they don’t change us. God’s Word does. It’s living, it’s active, it’s so penetrating that it literally seeks out the truth about us that we don’t even know. It goes deeply into us. It pierces between our soul and spirit, our joints and marrow, judges our thoughts and intentions. We don’t even know our own hearts. We don’t even know why we think and do what we do a lot of times, but the Bible tells us the truth about ourselves. That was overwhelming to me.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it makes me feel like I’m not just floundering in a world of many voices. I have one clear source of authority, and in a postmodern world, where people are taught to deconstruct human thought and reason and even the Bible, the fact is that there is one thing in this world that is alive, never changing, and always able to judge the human heart, and that is God’s Word. And then notice how verse 13 dovetails with that. Verse 12 is what the Bible does, what God’s Word does, and then, without even an explanation, it says – it moves from the Bible to God.
Nikki: Oh, wow.
Colleen: So the Bible judges our thoughts and intentions, “and there is no creature hidden from His sight,” so it’s God Himself in His Word that pierces our soul, spirit, thoughts, intentions, reveals to us what is real about ourselves, reveals to us what is real in an existential sense, and we can’t hide from Him. We can’t hide from Him either in how His Word reveals us to ourselves or from His eyes watching us. Nothing is hidden from Him. We are open and laid bare to Him. We can’t separate God’s Word from Him. That is just amazing. And for me, it’s a huge relief.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah.
Colleen: Because my head is often confused.
Nikki: Mine too. We encounter God in Scripture.
Colleen: Absolutely. There’s a text that’s one of your favorites, Nikki, also in Hebrews.
Nikki: Well, yeah, this one was, I think, probably for a lot of formers –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – this is a big one. For a lot of Christians, but especially for those of us who had a prophet.
Colleen: Especially.
Nikki: So I first heard this verse – it’s crazy. I read some of these things in school. I mean, all the way through we would have to read the letters. I somehow missed it. The stuff wasn’t always in my Bible.
Colleen: [Laughter.] I know!
Nikki: But I remember at the Conference being taken to Hebrews 1:1-4, and this right here, this is where we see the sufficiency of Scripture –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – canonized, complete Scripture.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken” – that’s singular. Before, it was many different ways at many different times –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – this is singular: “But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature” – by the way, that helped me with the idea of Jesus not having a sinful nature.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: “And He upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on High.” He didn’t enter a sanctuary to judge.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: “Having become as much superior to the angels as the name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” And this section just – I mean, it destroys a lot of Adventist doctrine.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: But when talking about the sufficiency of Scripture, Jesus has spoken.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And the Great Commission is for us to go out into the world and make disciples, teaching them what He commanded. There’s nothing new.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: When Moses was ready to go, he told his people, “God will send another prophet like me.”
Colleen: He did.
Nikki: Jesus didn’t say that. He didn’t say another one’s coming. He said false teachers are coming.
Colleen: Yes, He did.
Nikki: He said all we needed to know. God spoke through Him.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And we don’t need anymore.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: And Revelation makes that really clear when it says, “Anyone who adds to this Book adds the plagues to themselves.” I mean, it’s done.
Colleen: Oh, yes. I’ve often thought, “Well, Ellen White knows the truth now.” But it’s a very frightening thing to claim to speak for God.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And to speak things that are not in Scripture. Oh, my goodness.
Nikki: Even Paul tells us that if even he –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – while he was still here doing ministry, if even he changed the gospel message that he ought to be accursed.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: Or if an angel from heaven, and he talks about another gospel, and he describes it as a distorted gospel.
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: When we think of distortions, you take a picture of something and you just tweak it a little, and now it’s distorted.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: Even that is another gospel.
Colleen: Absolutely. If you get in a boat and you are 1 degree off from where you are intending to go, you will end up far, far, far from your goal.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I’ve often thought of that in terms of Adventism, of Adventist doctrine. Sometimes it seems like it’s just a quarter of a turn off, but you’re going to end up not in the Kingdom that you think you’re studying, because it’s not going to go to the same place.
Nikki: I have been so convicted by Scripture that it is absolutely important for us to stay completely committed only to the teachings of the apostles.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: It’s all over the place. In Acts they committed themselves to the apostles’ teaching.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I was recently telling you about – I was enjoying reading Paul talk about Epaphras, who was a servant of Christ on behalf of the apostles. He had the apostolic gospel message.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s so important that your pastor, whatever church you’re going to, he needs to be preaching the message of the apostles.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: From Scripture.
Colleen: You know, I remember early – well, in the first, oh, few years after leaving Adventism, as I was moderating the Former Adventist Forum, there were some very heated arguments online that I had to figure out how to moderate about things that were really way above my pay grade, I hadn’t learned these things –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – but there were arguments about Calvinism and Arminianism and Pelagianism and what’s real and what’s true, and what about my choice, and what about my free well, and what about God’s election? And I figured I would really have to figure this out, and I started reading through portions of the New Testament that just talked about election, that talked about choose, about belief, commands to believe, and I read documents that people gave me explaining these different views, and I was left quite troubled. I remember one day desperately asking the Lord to clarify my thinking and to help me see what was in the Word, and it dawned on me, everything the Bible says is true, and if two things appear to be contradictory on the surface but the Bible says both of them, for example, if it says that God elected us in the Son, as it does in Ephesians 1, from the foundation of the world –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and if it also says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,” both of those are true.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I do not have to explain how.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I just have to know that what it says is true, and from God’s perspective, there’s no conflict. I am a human stuck in three dimensions and time, and to me what the Bible says may appear to be something I have to hold in tension sometimes.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But if both parts of that tension are in Scripture, I have to believe it. And the thing that I’ve discovered is that believing that all of this is true when the Bible says these things, I feel far less confused –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – than when I was trying to figure out, “What’s true? What’s true?” When the Bible says it, the tension – there’s something actually reassuring about that tension –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – because then my decisions are valid, my decisions are real, they have eternal consequences, and yet I can trust God, who said He chose me in His Son from the foundation of the world, and I know He has brought me to life because the Spirit of His Son is in my heart teaching me to say, “Abba, Father,” as He said He would do for those who trust Him. So I can believe both.
Nikki: Don’t you think, too, that’s part of resting in Christ? I mean, isn’t that kind of part of our Sabbath rest?
Colleen: Yes, totally.
Nikki: He has accomplished our salvation, and now we’re His children, and we get to just rest in knowing that our God is so much bigger –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – than we are, than we can understand. We can’t explain Him.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: We don’t have to, that’s not our job.
Colleen: No, no, uh-uh.
Nikki: We just have to trust and obey.
Colleen: That’s right. And I’ve come to believe that I can’t embrace an “ism,” whether it’s Calvinism or Arminianism or Pelagianism or Adventism, the “ism’s” take something away, they explain, they try to make a formula out of what the Bible says, and I actually can’t. The Bible is sufficient, and it tells me far more than I can understand, and yet there’s a reassurance and a truth about that. I’ve also found that I’ve had to pray that the Lord will keep me grounded, that He will protect me from deception, because I was immersed in deception for half my life, and if I’ve been deceived once, I could be deceived again, and I’ve had to ask Him to keep me grounded in His Word, grounded in truth, grounded in reality, and keep me faithful and protect me from deception, and His Word is faithful to do that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And let me just say, I think I need to clarify what I just said, I do not put Adventism in the same category as Calvinism or Arminianism.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: Calvinism and Arminianism are schools of thought that actually have valid biblical principles involved in them.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: One can be a true believer and embrace both of those views. Adventism, I believe, is a false gospel.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I was just making a play on the “ism’s.” [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: It’s also important to remember how Jesus viewed Scripture.
Nikki: Yes. That was a big game changer for me.
Colleen: What are some of the things that hit you about that?
Nikki: Well, I wish I could bring to mind everything I’ve heard. I’ve heard great teachers –
Colleen: Same here.
Nikki: – give wonderful examples, but Jesus uses verb tense and grammar to settle theological disputes during His ministry.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: I mean, He had a very high view of Scripture. He is the author of Scripture.
Colleen: Absolutely. Even that text that Adventists like to use to try to say we are still supposed to keep the 10 Commandments, but that’s not the point, where Jesus said, “Not one jot or tittle will in anywise disappear from the Law until all be fulfilled.”
Nikki: Right. Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, those jots and tittles are the smallest, minutest details of grammar, and Jesus – by the way, it’s worth mentioning, as He hung on the cross, what was it He said? “It is finished.” “It is finished.” Everything necessary for salvation was finished, the atonement was finished. Jesus said, “I have not come to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And then, after His resurrection, Jesus appeared to His disciples, and He taught them. They gave Him broiled fish to eat to prove He wasn’t a spirit – notice that, His resurrection body, He ate fish.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And it says in verse 44, “He said to them, ‘These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses’ – that’s the Torah, the first five books – ‘and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.'” That summarized the entire Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. He fulfilled everything in those books. In fact, remember what He said to the Pharisees when they were begging Him for a sign, He said, “No sign will be given to you except the sign of Jonah.”
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: You know, I remember sitting in a Sabbath school class years ago in which the Adventist pastor was getting a doctorate at Claremont University, and he had quite a liberal view of Scripture, and he taught a Sabbath school class on the book of Jonah and said, “Jonah is more real than if it actually happened.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: But Jesus believed Jonah happened. Jesus, the author of Scripture –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – confirmed that and said, “That’s the sign that I’m giving you, the sign of Jonah.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Just as Jonah was regurgitated after three days in the fish’s belly, Jesus, unheard of to these people, came out of the belly of the earth in a glorified body.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Jesus confirmed that that was a true story.
Nikki: Um-hmm. It’s fascinating to me how Scripture, God in His sovereignty through Scripture, it answers every cultic accusation out there.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I love the fact that, you know, you have these Jews who say, “Oh, well the first part of Isaiah was written by one guy and the second part by another –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – but then you have Jesus come and quote from that first part of Isaiah and then say, “This same Isaiah also said,” and then quote from the second part.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There’s an answer for everything in here.
Colleen: There is. Every cultic aberration is answered in Scripture, and the longer I’m out of Adventism the more clearly I see that. Sometimes it’s tiny details –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – but even the grammar, the verb tenses, the prepositions are significant, and they shed light on it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Which brings me to a point that I think it’s worth talking about as we draw this discussion to a close, because there’s so much more we could say –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – but we can’t keep them here forever with us. How do we read the Bible so we know we can depend on it? It’s important to realize that the Bible must be read like a normal, ordinary book.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: As our women’s Bible teacher has often said – Elizabeth Inrig has often said, “Words matter, and context –
Nikki: – “is everything.” [Laughter.]
Colleen: – “is everything.” [Laughter.] So the way we were taught Bible as Adventists was clearly not contextual.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: We learned proof texts and thought everything we believed was in the Bible.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But when we began to read chapters and verses in context, reading the verse the proof text was in and then reading the verses around it and then the whole chapter and then maybe the whole book, those proof texts ended up not saying what we’d been taught they said.
Nikki: Yeah, that was shocking.
Colleen: It is, and it’s a little embarrassing.
Nikki: Uh-huh.
Colleen: We have to read in context, and we have to remember that it’s important to read understanding who the first audience was.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: The Bible was written to specific people at specific times, and we can’t just go to it and say, “What’s this verse mean to you?”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We have to say, “What was the writer saying, to whom was he saying it, and how would those first readers have understood this?” And we can’t even come close to applying it to ourselves until we first understand what it meant to the first readers.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And then seeing how that related to things in other books of the New Testament or Old Testament where the text is found and then seeing how it relates to texts in the other Testament, and after we see the context of how words are used in Scripture, then we can say, “What is the principle this is teaching? What is an application of this to my life?” And an application to me today cannot be wildly different from what it was to the first audience.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: The meanings don’t change.
Nikki: One of the things that was really helpful to me in learning a proper hermeneutic was understanding the difference too between descriptive and prescriptive passages.
Colleen: Excellent point.
Nikki: So a lot of the time when I would read especially Matthew right after leaving Adventism, and I’d read that Jesus was in the Temple, or even in Acts, you know, they went on the Sabbath. Suddenly it was like, “Oh, no, I’m supposed to be doing that.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Well, no, these are descriptive passages. These are not commands. These are not prescriptive.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And that really helped me start going, “Wait a minute, is this God telling me that this is what He expects from the church or am I getting a historical account of what happened at a specific time?”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And remembering that Jesus was born of a virgin under the Law.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: This was God’s design.
Colleen: Yes. And before He went to the cross, He instituted the New Covenant in His blood when He had that last supper with His disciples.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And He gave them those glasses of Passover wine, which they knew was Passover wine, a tradition handed down from Moses, and He said, “This is the New Covenant in my blood.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And then He gave them that amazing promise, “I will not drink of this again until I drink it new with you in my Father’s Kingdom, but you do this in remembrance of me.”
Nikki: Um-hmm. The fulfillment of all the shadows.
Colleen: Of all the shadows.
Nikki: And He gives us a series of new commands. There are definitely commandments that we are to keep as Christians in the church. He said, “Go into the world and teach them all that I have commanded you.“
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: He says in Matthew, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.“
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: We have a whole new series of commandments for the church that we learn when we read it in context, understanding it was written to believers –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – not to the whole world –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – it was written to believers. That’s where we get the fundamentals of our faith, you know –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and how we’re to live.
Colleen: The Law of Christ.
Nikki: Yeah. And then also understanding the importance of knowing what genre you’re reading. When you’re in the Old Testament, is this history?
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Is this prophetic? Is it poetry and wisdom? Finding out that a lot of the Adventist doctrines are rooted in poetry –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – was comical.
Colleen: It is comical. We can’t make doctrine from passages of Scripture that are not didactic –
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: – that are not intended for teaching.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: There was just a lot about the way we learned to understand Scripture that was inside-out from the way it actually is –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – when you read it in context. I often think, since I used to teach English, you know, I would never suggest to a class that they could read a Shakespeare play and make it mean whatever it seemed to mean to them or to take a line out here or a line out there. I mean, you could end up with everybody killing themselves with poison, like Juliet.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But you have to read contextually. The entire piece has to be read as a normal book. Same with the Bible.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It has normal rules of grammar, normal rules of vocabulary, and when we look at it that way, it starts to make sense, but always remembering to ask the Lord to teach us.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Because He wrote it, His Spirit inspired it, and we are the privileged recipients of this living Word that changes everything.
Nikki: And it is clear, we don’t need people in high positions to tell us, “Oh, no, it doesn’t really mean that; this is what we know it means.” No, it’s a part of this covenant. It is a part of the covenantal promise that no longer will we need someone to tell us –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – God Himself will tell us, His Spirit illuminates Scripture. Certainly, He gave us teachers –
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: – certainly He did. But the Scriptures themselves are clear.
Colleen: And when we believe that the Bible is inseparable from God Himself, that it is His Word, it examines us, it reveals us to ourselves, and it reveals Him to us, it’s something that we can’t actually twist for our purposes –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – without knowing that we’re actually sinning against God. The Bible means what it says. It is alive, it is living, and His Spirit will apply it to our lives. And fundamentally, the most amazing thing that we get from Scripture that’s not revealed through God’s revelation of Himself in creation is the truth about Jesus and how God provided for our salvation.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s unique in the Bible. No other religion has a God who sends His Son as incarnate in a human body to take our sin, to take the punishment intended for human sinners, take that into Himself, go to the cross, die a human death, and rise from death and break the curse on sinful man. This is the unique message of Scripture that’s not found anywhere else in all of creation. And it’s the life-changing thing that we all need.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: There’s not much more we can say that’s more powerful than: Read your Bible, ask God teach you, to ground you in truth and reality, and to protect you from deception. He is faithful. He will not trick you. So read your Bible, and drink your last dregs of coffee with us. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: We’re really happy to have shared this time with you again.
Nikki: Yes, and we will see you next week. †
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