Which Will You Have—God—or god?

Doctrine, Feature, Jeanie Jura

JEANIE JURA | Eternally Alive in Christ |

In Genesis 1:26 we read that God created man in His image:

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.’”

In Adventism, God has been recreated in man’s image and possesses the nature and attributes of man. 

In Patriarchs and Prophets, Ellen White wrote her imaginative back-story of how sin began. In that narrative, she uses sweeping descriptions of the very thoughts of God, of Lucifer, and of the angels—both good and fallen. In the process she adds over 3,000 words to the Bible, inventing a story that God has not seen fit to reveal to us. In that story, she elevates the behavior and thoughts of Lucifer while lowering the true nature of God Himself. In fact, Lucifer becomes the tragic hero of the story.

In that description, and in many other places in what she wrote, she fleshed out the many ways that she saw God as less than He is according to His own Word. Some of the ways that God has been reduced to a lesser god can be seen in her story. 

She claims that God was accused by a created being of being unfair in making all heavenly beings obey His law which, Lucifer said, it is not possible to obey. In her narrative that accusation puts God on the defensive. She says that God was forced to go to war with one of His created beings to defend His honor. He was put on trial before all mankind and even the supposed unfallen beings on other planets.

She said that this god was forced to limit his power in order not to infringe on the “free will” of his created beings. 

She said that those created beings were now responsible for “vindicating” this god and his law.

According to Merriam Webster dictionary, to vindicate means to:

  1. free from allegation or blame
  2. to provide justification or defense for
  3. to protect from attack or encroachment
  4. to maintain a right to

So, according to Ellen White’s elaborate story, we, the lesser created beings, created in God’s image, are actually equal to, or even elevated over Him, and are required to free Him from blame, defend Him from the accusations, and protect Him from this attack by proving the devil wrong. We even help Him maintain His right to BE God.

The implications of this worldview are vast and terrible to contemplate. If we fail in this task, Ellen’s “god” could actually lose this war, and the logical result of that is that He would no longer be God. 

But Wait—There’s More

But putting God into this impossible situation was not enough for her. She was not through with God, and she went on to further lessen Him and His very attributes.

She created a Jesus who was “elevated to be equal with God” in the distant past, an action which provoked Lucifer to fall into sin because of jealousy.

She created a Jesus who did not know if He would be raised from the dead. In her words, He “could not see through the portals of the tomb”.—Desire of Ages, p. 753  (The idea makes me want to imagine the surprise and utter relief He would have felt when He was raised from the dead!) 

But she was still not done. After the resurrection, He had to briefly go to heaven to see if His sacrifice was enough to pay for our sin. This belief has two dangerous aspects, both damaging to the deity of Christ:

  1. It assumes that He was less than God, so He did not know the very thoughts of God—which means that He had to go find out.
  2. It says that, as a “lesser god”, He was not even sure if He had succeeded, so He had to consult the “greater god” to make sure.

The first one point above fits in with her opinion of Jesus as not always being God, but the second directly contradicts the Bible which says that His sacrifice was (known) from before Creation. (See Ephesians 1:3, 4.) Hebrews 4:3 says that His work and His choice of us was finished “from the foundation of the world”. Her view of god implies that the cross was an afterthought.

Side note: an interesting story to read is found in Early Writings, starting on page 149. She wrote that after the fall, all heaven was sad because man was now lost. There follows a lengthy description of how Jesus had to beg the Father three times before the Father would allow Jesus to be our Savior. In over 1,000 words she invents a lurid story of the despair and gloom of the angels, with the angels offering to die for us, and being refused, before Jesus finally convinced the Father to let Him be the sacrifice.

But then, she contradicted herself by writing this:

“Before the foundations of the earth were laid, the Father and the Son had united in a covenant to redeem man if he should be overcome by Satan. They had clasped Their hands in a solemn pledge that Christ should become the surety for the human race.”—Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 834.

So which was it? God has a physical body and actually “clasped hands”, pledging a plan to redeem man IF he sinned? Or after the fall, Jesus had to beg His Father to let Him be the sacrifice?

So which god is the real God? The lesser, weak god created in the fertile imagination of Ellen, or the Almighty, eternally existing God as revealed in the Bible?

Revelation of the Real God

The God of the Bible has many, many descriptions of the different characteristics that are part of Him and His very nature.

That real God is:

  • Sovereign—meaning to possess supreme power, above   all
  • Immutable—unchanging in His nature. Even when His dealings with man may change in different situations, God Himself never changes.
  • Almighty—having all power over all
  • Omnipresent—there is no place where He is not present
  • Omnipotent—having virtually unlimited authority
  • Omniscient—He knows all and has unlimited wisdom and knowledge infinitely superior to ours
  • Good—in His very nature He IS good and all goodness comes from Him.
  • Holy—meaning “separate”, above all.
  • Righteous—free from any sin.
  • Joy—not one we often associate with God, but He is the source of all joy as well as truth and mercy. We have joy (the fruit of the Spirit) because He is joy.
  • Invisible—John wrote that no one has seen God except the One who came from Him. In the incarnation, Jesus took on humanity and is visible, but is still no less God.
  • Forgiving—the very plan of salvation was accomplished to forgive our sin, make our dead spirit live and give us eternal life.
  • Truth—John wrote “thy word is truth”. Nothing that is not of truth can come from Him.
  • Love—God’s love is infinite, limitless, unfathomable.
  • Glory—the glory of God was seen, made manifest, in Jesus.

So we must consider which God we believe. 

The god-come-lately Jesus with a fallen, sinful nature, lack of foreknowledge, uncertainty about His ability to finish His mission; a god who is on trial and could still lose, who is forced to limit his very nature to accommodate his accuser, and who is relying precariously on his created beings to help Him win a war with that created being so that He can continue being “God”—is this God?

How about the Jesus who sounds like a person no one would want to be around: “Christ is our example. Do you imitate the great Exemplar? Christ often wept but never was known to laugh,” as Ellen White wrote in four different manuscript releases. 

“Never known to laugh”? If that were true, why did people crowd around Him everywhere He went? He must have been a person that people loved to be around.

Or is our Lord Jesus the Almighty, Omnipotent, Eternal God who always was and always will be? He is the God who loved us infinitely more than we can understand, to the extent that He took His own wrath on Himself and died for us.

Our eternal destiny depends on which one we believe: God or the god created in man’s image.

As for me, I believe in and rely entirely on the One, True, Almighty God of the Bible. †

Jeanie Jura
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