July 24–30

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.

Lesson 5: “‘Come to Me…’”

This week’s lesson attempts to explain one of Jesus’ most beautiful statements—but one which seemed sentimental and metaphorical when I was an Adventist. As I read the Sabbath School lesson for next week, I realized all over again how vague, how just-out-of-reach the power of this passage was to my Adventist perception. The passage is Matthew 11:28–30: 

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (ESV)

I remember hearing the song “Come Unto Him” from Handel’s Messiah for the first time when I was eight years old. I first heard it as a piano transcription which I learned for a recital. I will never forget how beautiful I thought the song was, and the piece in my piano book included the words from Matthew 11:28–30 which Handel had set to music. 

I do not remember any other piano pieces from that era of my life, but I I vividly remember how much that simplified Handel song and its words impacted my eight-year-old heart. Then, when I was 14, I heard a recording of the piece with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and I will never forget its impact. 

Handel’s setting made this passage of Scripture unforgettable to me—and in my Adventist paradigm, the music redeemed the words. When I would read this passage in the Bible, the words seemed like a command that I couldn’t quite understand. They sounded lovely and almost utopian: an ideal that beckoned like the mirage of an oasis in a desert—a mirage that I kept trying to reach but never could.

The words, though, reminded me of the music—and the music embedded Jesus’ promise indelibly in my heart. There had to be something there that I couldn’t see, something more wonderful than I could understand. 

I understand it now, and what Jesus promised IS more wonderful than I had imagined!

What’s wrong here?

As I read the Sabbath School lesson, I experienced that old Adventist frustration as the author’s confusion and human-centric thinking obscured Jesus’ shocking promise that HE IS OUR REST! The lesson reduces this rest Jesus invites us to find to rest from internal anxiety and burdens and from societal pressures managed by smartphones. 

In Sunday’s lesson the author ends with these words: 

“We love to talk, and rightly so, about all that God does for us in Christ and how we cannot save ourselves and the like. All that is true. But in the end, we still have to make the conscious choice to ‘come’ to Jesus, which means surrender to Him. Here is where the reality of free will becomes front and center in the Christian life.”

The thought questions at the end of the lesson pushe home the point: “What burdens are you carrying? How can you learn to give them to Jesus and experience the rest He offers at so great a cost to Himself?”

And right there is the sticking point. How, indeed, is an Adventist supposed to “give to Jesus” the burdens he carries? It’s nothing more than a taunting metaphor!

In Tuesday’s through Thursday’s lessons we find the author trying to explain that fact that Jews often referred to the Law as to the yoke. In fact, the author even takes the reader to Galatians 5:1. The lesson says, 

“In Galatians 5:1, Paul wrote: ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage’ (NKJV). What does that mean? How has Christ made us free? What is the difference between the yoke He asks us to carry and the “yoke of bondage” that Paul warns us against?”

The next sentence, however, destroys the glorious words Paul wrote in Galatians. The lesson states: 

“We can be sure that whatever exactly Paul meant by the “yoke of bondage,” he was not referring to obedience to God’s law, the Ten Commandments. On the contrary, it’s through obedience, by faith, understanding that our salvation is secure, not based on the law but on Christ’s righteousness covering us, that we can have true rest and freedom.”

These sentences are an unbelievable outrage—except that they are absolutely true Adventism. This is the double-speak, the confusion I learned as a child which the beauty of Handel counteracted. This argument is the reason my Adventist mind could not see the power in Jesus’ words. In fact, even after leaving Adventism during the first few months I couldn’t see these words as helpful in refuting the Adventist teaching about seventh-day Sabbath rest. It seemed almost disconnected from the Adventist arguments and thus nearly worthless as an explanatory passage. 

This lesson offers us EGWs deceptive rhetoric which leads the unsuspecting Adventist down a road to bondage. Far from finding rest in Christ by turning over one’s burdens to Him, the Adventist will see this passage and the typical Adventist explanation as one that introduces Jesus—but then it quickly obscures His completed work of atonement and His being the propitiation for our sin and jerks the Adventist to gaze on—The Law! 

In fact, the thought question at the end of Thursday’s lesson asks, “Why is living a life of obedience to God’s law one of more restfulness than one in which we disobey that law?”

And there you have it. Jesus’ incredible promise that He would be our rest, that we are to take HIS yoke—not the yoke of the law—upon us and learn from Him, and we would find rest for our souls—this unbelievable promise is utterly lost. The Adventist is thrown into an abyss of law-keeping instead of life in Jesus, and he/she is told that keeping the LAW is what actually gives one rest!

The egregious twisting of words to obscure the promise from the lips of our Savior is blasphemous. It is, actually, incredibly evil. Jesus is saying that He, not the Law, will be our rest if we turn to Him. He doesn’t invite us to Him only to throw us back into the gutter of failure and sin from which He called us—but that very picture is the one which Adventism paints. They insist that keeping the LAW is the restful condition to which Jesus calls them!

What is true?

The lesson made a show of explaining the context of Matthew 11:28–30 by saying this passage followed His cursing Chorazin and Bethsaida for their unbelief. The author, however, failed to point out that this beautiful promise is IMMEDIATELY followed by Jesus addressing the Pharisees’ accusations that He and His disciples broke the Sabbath as they picked and ate grain while walking through a field.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees was paradigm-shattering, but as an Adventist I never understood what He was saying. Jesus said to them,

“Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:3–8).

Here is what Jesus did in His answer: He first compared Himself and His disciples to King David and his men. Jesus reminded them that when David came to the priest as he and his men were fleeing from an enraged King Saul, they had no food. He asked the priest to give him and his men some of the tabernacle’s showbread to eat—bread which only the priests were allowed by law to eat! David was not a priest; he was not even from the proper tribe to be a priest, and yet both he and his men ate that showbread—something that was unlawful for them to do.

Another part of that story which Jesus didn’t say but which is clear when one reads the story of David in 1 Samuel 21 is this: David had already been anointed king of Israel by Samuel. His anointing was still a secret; Saul was still on the throne, but David was God’s anointed even though the priests and the people did not know that fact yet. David knew, however, and God knew—and Jesus was intentional about making a parallel between David and Himself. 

Then Jesus reminded the Pharisees that the Law itself commanded the priests to work on the Sabbath. Jesus equated the priests’ Sabbath work with literally breaking the law. He asked, “Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?”

The priests routinely broke the Sabbath—not figuratively but literally. The law required them to do particular jobs on Sabbath, and those jobs caused them to break the Sabbath—and yet those priests were INNOCENT! (Remember, these are Jesus’s own words!)

Again, Jesus is making a comparison between Himself and His men and the priests who weekly broke the Sabbath without guilt!

And then Jesus makes His final point—one so shocking that most people probably couldn’t take it in: “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.”

Jesus was saying, David’s anointing by God, even though it was still secret, trumped the law. He broke the law and ate the showbread and was NOT GUILTY because he was God’s anointed! More than that, the priests’ anointing trumped the law. God’s appointment of them to administer mediation between the people and God was the higher responsibility; it superseded the command to keep the Sabbath. 

Jesus compared Himself to these anointed men from Israel and claimed for Himself the right to interpret the Sabbath laws, to outright break the overt command and yet be guiltless because God’s anointing of Him was a higher value than His command to keep the Sabbath.

Greater than the temple

Then Jesus said the most startling thing: 

I tell you, something greater than the temple is here (Matthew 12:6).

In that one sentence Jesus revealed His identity. He was more than the anointed David, and He was more than the anointed levitical priesthood. In Himself was all the reality of every single shadow contained in the temple and its rituals. 

Jesus Himself is the Bread of Life. He is the Light of the World; He is the veil that separated the Most Holy Place with its shekinah glory from the people (Heb. 10:20). Jesus is the sacrifice for sin and guilt; He is the mercy seat; He is the ark holding God’s covenant with the people; He is the One who kept that covenant with the Father. Even more, He is the reality, the substance of the Law which was written on stone in the ark. In Jesus is the eternal, omnipotent righteousness that fulfills every command of the Law, and in Jesus is the substance and reality of Sabbath rest!

Jesus IS the shekinah glory, the presence of God which historically had hovered inside the temple over the mercy seat, dwelling in Israel in the midst of God’s people. That shekinah glory, however, was replaced and fulfilled by the Lord Jesus Himself!

If the Pharisees had been really listening to Jesus, they would have heard and known that everything about their religion and their nation pointed toward the Lord Jesus—and He had come!

He was not merely a Jew subject to the law; He was the Author of the law, and He was OVER the fourth commandment, not under it. He alone had the authority to fulfill the figurative rest of every seventh day, and to initiate true Sabbath rest for all those who would believe in Him—a Sabbath rest that transforms each person every day of his or her life.

The lesson author says that Paul couldn’t have meant the Ten Commandments when He wrote not to be entangled again in a yoke of bondage, but Jesus stated that He was greater than the temple—greater than all it contained, including the Sabbath command! 

The context of Matthew 11:28–30 reveals that Jesus was declaring His identity and His authority—and He was greater than David and the priests; He was greater even than the temple because every single shadow connected with the temple was realized IN HIMSELF!

The lesson cannot tell its readers how to come to Jesus and turn their burdens over to Him because Adventism does not know or teach the true gospel of our salvation. The Adventist “gospel” is the Three Angels’ Messages—which they interpret as the seventh-day Sabbath, the investigative judgment, and “get ready because Jesus is coming”. 

The true gospel, however, is simple: Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture; He was buried, and He rose on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3,4). When we acknowledge that we are by nature dead in sin and under the wrath of God (Eph. 2:1–3), when we turn to the Lord Jesus and trust His blood and finished atonement as the full payment for our sin, we are born again, and God adopts us as His own children (Rom. 8:14–17); He seals us with the indwelling Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13–14), and He teaches us to call Him our Father by His spirit witnessing to our spirits (Rom. 8:16). 

When God saves us and shows us that Jesus alone is our salvation, we enter His rest. Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28–30 suddenly have meaning—and it is not confusing. It is clear: Jesus IS our Sabbath rest. Our souls receive His life, and we are eternally secure in Him.

I now understand why Handel’s “Come Unto Him” was so compelling to me as a child and young adult. God used a seventeenth century musician to immortalize the story of the Lord Jesus in music that is performed to this day. People who would never read or understand Scripture hear the gospel of the Lord Jesus, and the music causes those words to be recorded in people’s brains that would otherwise never hear them. 

When Jesus’ words were connected to Handel’s music, the Adventist confusion surrounding this passage fell away, and my heart could hear the promise our Lord gave the world without the frustration of not knowing how to access it. Then, when I finally heard the gospel of my salvation, Jesus’ words began to make sense for the first time. My confusion and longing were replaced by gratitude and joy, and my heart knew its Sabbath rest. 

I want to share this piece with you; please listen to Adele Addison sing Handel’s “Come Unto Him” accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein conducting. I pray the Lord Jesus will transform your life with this unconditional promise from Him to you. †

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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