Lesson Three: “The Backstory: The Prologue”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson takes pains to affirm the eternal, divine nature of Christ without deviating from the Adventist understanding that He is separate from the Father.
- Jesus’ incarnation is presented as the way God has “tabernacled” with us as Immanuel without dealing with our alienation and need for atonement.
- The nature of man as spiritually dead is ignored; instead, humanity is presented as freely choosing to believe or not.
This week’s lesson addresses John 1 in which John echoes Genesis 1:1, presenting the Lord Jesus as the living Word who was with God and was God and the one who made everything that exists. Like last week’s lesson, this one also manages to carefully say things that aren’t WRONG per se, but it avoids revealing the true Adventist worldview underlying their lessons.
Adventism freely admits that the founders—James White, Ellen White, Joseph Bates, and most of the rest of the first Adventists, were Arian or semi-Arian in their understanding of who Jesus is. Furthermore, they were staunchly anti-trinitarian. James White even established, in his 1861 pamphlet The Personality of God, the Adventist understanding of the nature of God. In his pamphlet, organized as a progression of questions and answers, James explains God this way:
What is God? He is material, organized intelligence, possessing both body and parts. Man is in his image.
What is Jesus Christ? He is the Son of God, and is like his Father, being “the brightness of his Father’s glory, and the express image of his person.” He is a material intelligence, with body, parts, and passions; possessing immortal flesh and immortal bones.—(https://asitreads.com/2020-3-8-personality-of-god/)
Over the decades, Adventism adjusted its description of God, and by the mid-20th century, long after Ellen White’s death, they began publishing statements about the “Godhead” that could be understood to be “trinitarian” if the reader did not know the underlying Adventist beliefs.
Ellen White herself tried to sound more and more “trinitarian”, yet she never abandoned her understanding that the “Godhead” did not share substance. As late as 1906 she wrote:
There are three living persons of the heavenly trio; in the name of these three great powers—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—those who receive Christ by living faith are baptized, and these powers will co-operate with the obedient subjects of heaven in their efforts to live the new life in Christ….(EGW, Testimonies for the Church Containing Messages of Warning and Instruction to Seventh-day Adventists, 60.3, retrieved from https://next.beta.egwwritings.org/book/b249)
To this day Adventist scholars and pastors defend Ellen White’s “heavenly trio” as the correct view of the “Trinity” rather than the classic Christian Trinity who is One God expressed in three persons who share substance, will, purpose, power, and attributes.
These physical understandings of the three persons of God are the real Adventist understandings of the God of the Bible. They do not understand or believe that God is spirit, that Jesus’s body was not His way of dwelling eternally with us as He shares our humanity, nor do they understand that our being made in the image of God is a spiritual reality. They believe that mankind is purely physical, without an immaterial spirit that survives the body at death. They do not know or believe that our immaterial spirits are what are made in God’s image, and that it is our spirits that must be made alive so we can pass from death to life and thereby be assured that when the Lord Jesus returns, we will experience the glorification of our physical, resurrected bodies.
All to say, this physicalism underlies ALL the confusing, painfully careful statements in this lesson. Adventists who read the lessons will not find anything to jar them out of their great controversy worldview complacence, and those of us who know their views and agendas have to “struggle” to show how skewed and eclipsing of the gospel these lessons are.
For example, Monday’s lesson attempts to explain Jesus’ incarnation as His way of revealing God and being able to dwell with us. Here is part of the day’s lesson:
John uses the term in a completely different manner. He maintains that the truth, the logos, is not some ethereal and abstract concept floating between heaven and earth. The logos is a person: Jesus Christ, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).
For John, the logos is the Word of God. More important, God communicated; that is, He revealed Himself to humanity in the most radical way: God became one of us.
In the Gospel of John, the logos represents the eternal God, who enters time and space, who speaks, acts, and interrelates with humans on a personal level. The eternal God became a human being, one of us.…
In the same way, in the Incarnation, Jesus, the divine Son of God, stepped into human flesh, veiling His glory so that people could come in contact with Him.
The lesson authors here develop the point that the purpose of the incarnation was to enable God to speak to us, to interrelate and be in contact with Him. In other words, the incarnation was for the purpose of communication and self-revelation of God to man. God desired for His creatures to know what a loving person He is, so He sent His son to permanently enter the human experience and to reveal God to us in a way we could understand.
In case you think I’m overreacting to the vague word salad of the lesson, I will quote from the Teachers Comments written by Philip Samaan, adjunct professor at the School of Religion at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee:
Yes, the mystery of the Incarnation is hard to fathom because the infinite God endeavored to reach our finite minds to save us. And to save us, God went to the extreme extent of sacrificing His only Son. This act was truly radical. Christ voluntarily humbled Himself, became human, and died for sinful humanity. He willingly altered His eternal nature to retain our humanity forever. Instead of remaining fully divine, now He is both fully divine and fully human. What a tangible demonstration of self-sacrificing love for the entire universe to behold!…
The idea that God desires to be with us continuously is one of the major themes of the entire Bible. God does not want to be a temporary resident but a permanent one. That is why the heaven-given name of God incarnate is “Immanuel,” God with us.
What is so fascinating about this reality is the honor that God affords us in dwelling among us.
The Bible tells us that ALL the Fullness of deity dwelt in Jesus bodily (Colossians 2:9). These comments above do not overtly deny this biblical statement, but they subtly undermine it. Jesus did not take a body in order to eternally dwell with us by sharing our humanity! Yes, to be sure, He does eternally share our humanity—but that incarnation was not His method for sharing eternity with us through shared physical substance. Furthermore, He did not “honor” us by “dwelling among us” as an eternal human.
His incarnation was a giving up of His rightful glory (Philippians 3). His incarnation was not a vote of solidarity from God toward us poor humans. Rather, it was a supreme SACRIFICE because the Lord Jesus took human flesh in order to DIE for us and by becoming sin for us and breaking our curse of death.
Jesus had to be human in order to die a substitutionary death for us. His bringing us into eternal oneness with Him is not primarily His eternally taking a human body. Rather, He came to give life to our dead spirits—out natural condition which we inherit from Adam. He, the Living One who never was spiritually dead, came in a human, mortal body, died a human death that was also infinite because He was also God—and He took our imputed sin into Himself, for the wrath of God for our sin, died, and rose on the third day because His death was sufficient to pay for our sin.
THAT is how God accomplished bringing us into His presence eternally.
The lesson has it upside down: God compromised His full identity as God by taking an eternal identity of humanity, and by identifying with us, He showed us how loving He is and caused us not to fear Him. He permanently honored us by sharing our human nature.
Yet the Bible says that He took human nature in order to reconcile us to Himself. He didn’t permanently give up something to honor us and show us how much He loved us; rather He took flesh in order to obey God to the point of death on a cross in order to propitiate for our sin and to restore our dead spirits to life with His life!
Consider these texts:
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
Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.—Hebrews 2:14, 15
Notice that Jesus’ incarnation was for the purpose of His DEATH. It wasn’t for the purpose of communicating, of being understood by us, of helping us not to be afraid of God. Of course, these things were part of the consequence of His becoming incarnate, but they were not the REASON for it. Rather, Jesus becoming a man was entirely for the purpose of shedding human blood to eternally RECONCILE us to God and to open a new, living way to the Father.
His becoming a man was not itself an act of permanent dwelling with us. Rather, it was His way to identify with our SIN and to take our full punishment for it on the cross. He came to open heaven to us, not just to identify with us as a man. In fact, the ultimate result is that He gives us His life when we believe, and He permanently indwells us with His Spirit. He doesn’t bring Himself down to us; He raises us up to Him.
He doesn’t make us little gods, and He doesn’t reduce Himself. Rather, He restores us to spiritual life and opens the way for us to have eternal access to God in Christ!
Law-Gospel Contrast ignored
Significantly, the lesson does not even ask the reader to read John 1:16–17:
For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.—John 1:16, 17 LSB
The contrast expressed here in the prologue of John is central to the work of Jesus on the cross and to His fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. Adventism, though, insists that the law is eternal, existing in Heaven before creation. Even more, it insists that God Himself is subject to His own law living by its principles and even keeping the Sabbath throughout eternity.
This single passages reveals that the law had a beginning inside of time, and it came through the mediation of Moses and was given to Israel. In other words, the Ten Commandments were not governing mankind prior to Moses delivering them for God—and he delivered them only to Israel.
The Lord Jesus, though, did not come showing us how to keep the law nor reiterating it for the church. He came to bring what had not been previously revealed: grace and truth.
God’s grace was revealed in the Lord Jesus’ death on the cross, in His burial and His resurrection on the third day. God demonstrated His grace in providing complete atonement for our sin in the person and work of the Lord Jesus. Through Jesus, our curse of death was shattered. Jesus took our death and broke the curse that doomed every human ever born on earth—every human, that is, except Jesus Himself.
He was never spiritually dead and did not have to be born again. Rather, He brought life to our dead spirits through His death and resurrection.
Adventism cannot focus on John 1:17 because it reveals that Adventist soteriology is unbiblical. Moses delivered the law; the Lord Jesus fulfilled the law and revealed grace and truth. The truth He revealed is that God Himself provided for our justification by being both just and the justifier of all who believe. The law plays no part in our salvation nor in our sanctification. It was a mirror to reveal our sin; Jesus took our sin into Himself and paid the full price for it. Now, when we believe, He bestows us His undeserved grace—He justifies us and cancels our sin, having taken it Himself, and He credits us with His own righteousness.
No Blood Atonement Mentioned
The lesson, however, doesn’t mention anywhere that Jesus’ incarnation was for the purpose of shedding atoning blood. It doesn’t mention His justification and sacrificial atonement of our sins by the blood of His cross. Instead, it focusses on His demonstrating His desire to be with us by taking on humanity forever.
The Adventist god, the physical heavenly trio, seems to be driven to be understood and to be seen as a good god . He wants us to help him expose Satan’s wickedness and help him demonstrate to the watching universe that He is good and Satan is a liar.
Adventism consistently avoids the significance of Jesus’ sufficient shed blood.
Furthermore, the Teachers Comments stress that humans have “free choice”, and they participate in the “joint mission of salvation that Father and Son agreed on from the foundation of the world”. —(p. 42)
Once again, and so subtly that one almost looks nit-picky, the wording emphasizes the Adventist understanding that God is not truly One. The Adventist separation of God and Jesus is articulated by calling salvation “the joint mission” that “the Father and Son agreed on from the foundation of the world”.
God is One: the Father and the Son did not “agree” on a plan. Jesus coming as the sacrifice for sin is an eternal plan. Unlike EGWs description of Jesus pleading three times with His Father to let Him come be the sacrifice, God has no Plan B. Look at these texts:
…just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love—Ephesians 1:4 LSB
He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but appeared in these last times for the sake of you—1 Peter 1:20 LSB
And all who dwell on the earth will worship him, [everyone] whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain.—Revelation 13:8 LSB
(Rom 3:23-26 LSB) for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom 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 3:23–26 LSB
Born Dead
The way the lesson presents John 1 and the incarnation of the Lord who is the Word of God ignores the true nature of man. We are not born with free will, able to choose or not to choose to follow God. We are born utterly dead in sin:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB
The lesson reiterates the Adventist view that each human has the freedom to follow God or not:
Rebellion against God’s light and life, in choosing darkness and death, is but following Lucifer’s tragic example.
Yet Scripture tells us that no one is able to please God, to choose God, or to serve Him (Romans 3:9–18). We are born utterly spiritually dead, and dead people have no freedom to rise above their natures. We cannot pull ourselves out of our spiritual death.
God has to call us from the darkness. He has to reveal Himself, and when He sent the Lord Jesus in the likeness of sinful flesh—the only human ever born who was not spiritually dead—He sent us rescue!
We do not choose darkness and death; we are born into darkness and death. We are, in fact, born under Lucifer’s power and control. God sent the Son into the world to break the power of the evil one at the cross. He came to show us our true nature and to trust His work of atonement and propitiation on our behalf. He came to die for us so we can be redeemed from the darkness and death into which we are born!
This lesson has obscured the most remarkable core of the gospel, the gospel that demonstrates that Jesus Is God and that we must be born again—literally. Our naturally dead immaterial spirits must be brought to life through our trust and belief in Jesus’ death on the cross.
Jesus didn’t come to permanently dwell with us by sharing a body and honoring us by altering his divine nature on our account. Rather, He came to redeem us from our natures and to give us life through His resurrection which broke our curse of death. He releases us from the darkness and gives us a permanent place with Him as part of His own body when we believe! The lesson portrays God’s relationship to us upside-down. It portrays Jesus eternally lowering Himself to cast His eternal lot with us. Instead, Jesus eternally redeemed us and raises us up to eternal life. It is not Jesus’ becoming a man that makes Him Immanuel; it is His becoming our sin and breaking our curse, rescuing us from our bondage to death. His role as Immanuel is entirely tied to His salvation of us. He identified with us to die our death and redeem us, not to honor us simply by taking human flesh.
Jesus came to DIE, and His death has opened heaven to us. He asks us to trust Him, to believe that He has done everything necessary to atone for our sin.
If you haven’t trusted Jesus, if you haven’t admitted that you are spiritually dead and lost and in need of a Savior, look at Jesus as He took your sin to His cross. See Him shed the blood that satisfied God’s demand—His own demand—of death for sin, and thank Him for taking that curse into Himself.
Entrust yourself to Him, to His becoming your sin, taking God’s wrath for you, dying and being buried, and rising on the third day. Trust Him—and He will bring your dead spirit to life. You will know what it means to be made alive and eternally transferred out of death. You will know what it means to have eternal life! †
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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