September 6–12, 2025

Lesson 11: “Apostasy and Intercession”

COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine | 

Do you remember the account of Aaron making Israel a golden calf while Moses was on Mt. Sinai, receiving the Ten Commandments? The author uses this event as a source of lessons for the Adventist audience—and reinforces the great controversy worldview: God allows freedom of choice for people to serve evil or Himself. 

Ironically, the lesson asks why people fall into idolatry and asks the reader to think about the kinds of idols that can hold their heart. The seventh-day Sabbath is never hinted at as an idol and a false focus of worship. Further, the author makes much of Moses’ interceding for the people with God but ignores the role of the Levites in repenting and carrying out God’s judgment against the people. The contrasts and shadows of the old covenant compared with the inauguration of the new are entirely missed. 

Great Controversy Reinforced

This week’s lesson opens with rhetorical questions about why Israel fell into open idolatry so quickly when Moses went up the mountain to receive the law. The people had pledged to do all that God had asked of them, and Moses had already sprinkled them with the sacrificial blood that ratified their conditional covenant with God. They had just experienced escaping their enslavers by passing through the seabed of the Red Sea, watching as the Egyptians tried to follow them but were drowned as the waters overcame them. They had received manna and meat from heaven, and God had made bitter water sweet for the entire nation and its animals as they trekked through the Sinai desert. 

Yet there at Sinai they experienced a Great Fail.

Monday’s lesson appeals to Ellen White to confirm that Aaron failed as a leader and leads the reader to contemplate the ways people make their own idols. It says: 

Tuesday’s lesson goes further into directing the readers to identify their secret idols, pointing out that they would never think that they were doing what ancient Israel did: 

The lesson continues by discussing that Moses interceded with God not to abandon Israel, offering to be blotted out of God’s book if God would only forgive Israel. The author does mention that Moses destroyed the golden calf and mentions, in the Teachers Comments, that the unrepentant rebellious ones had to be eliminated. 

Then the Teachers Comments begin reinforcing the great controversy worldview, helping the Sabbath School teachers know how to present this story through the lens of the Adventist worldview: 

Not A Window Into the Great Controversy

The significance of the contrast between the events surrounding God’s giving the Old Covenant to Israel through the mediation of Moses and His inaugurating the New Covenant after His death, resurrection, and ascension is utterly ignored. In fact, Adventism cannot exist outside its unique worldview that denies humanity’s natural depravity, the role of the Law in exposing and condemning sin, and the necessity for each covenant to have its own unique priesthood. 

We have seen that the week’s lessons led by emphasizing that humans naturally create their own idols. The author asked how Israel could have demanded an idol while Moses was hidden on the mountain. Monday’s lesson even asks, “In what ways does the golden calf apostasy reflect what is written in Romans 1:22–27?”

Romans 1:22–27 describes the three cycles of God’s giving people over when they refuse to acknowledge Him. He first gives them over to their impurity, then to their perversions, and finally to their depraved minds, not only engaging in all unrighteousness but encouraging others to do so as well. Yet the question about how the golden calf apostasy reflects this cycle of depravity ignores Romans 1:21–23 which explains exactly what happened to Israel:

Israel refused to believe. Their sin-darkened hearts refused to acknowledge God and to give Him thanks, and they fell into their own demand to worship something they could control—like the pagans in Egypt had done. The lesson leads the reader to identify his or her secret sins and to feel guilt over them, as we quoted above. They are to feel convicted about focussing on pleasure, grades, entertainment, politics, music, success, food—the list goes on. Yet there is not a hint that the actual core of Seventh-day Adventism is idolatry! 

The seventh-day Sabbath is the Adventist idol. They believe that the Sabbath will be the final “test” in earth’s history that will divide the saved from the lost. Even more, they believe that Sabbath—a created day—is the “seal of the living God”. Look at these two quotes from the Adventist prophet Ellen G. White:

Adventism does not have the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus at the center of its teachings. In fact, Adventism doesn’t believe in the all-powerful Lord Jesus who could not have sinned nor failed in His mission. Rather they teach that Jesus did not complete the atonement at the cross.

Further, as the Teachers Comments said Adventism teaches that God must limit Himself. He would never restrict people’s supposed “free will” but must allow them to freely choose to side with Satan or Himself. Even more, the Adventist great controversy model sees God as not always getting “what He desires”. The sovereign God of Scripture whose plans cannot fail nor be thwarted by any creature is not the god of Adventism. The god of Adventism respects Satan’s freedom and privileges just as he respects humanity’s privileges and freedoms. 

Notice again, as quoted above, Adventism overtly states, “God also is restricted in His actions. He cannot act against these “rules of engagement” between himself and Satan.

This is not the God of Scripture; it is the god of Ellen White!

The irony of this lesson is that the author ASSUMES that his readers are shaped already by their Adventist worldview of free will, a restricted god, and a protected Satan who’s allowed to demonstrate the full effects of his rebellion. Adventists believe they are objectively comparing God and Satan and helping to vindicate the good guy—God. 

Yet Adventism does not teach or believe that each person is born literally dead in sin, under the influence of Satan, and in need of being rescued by our sovereign God who has sent His Son to be our Redeemer. 

The Adventist worldview teaches its members that they are born free to choose, that God restricts Himself and gives Satan freedom to act at will—within the “rules of engagement” agreed upon by the players, and it teaches its members that their “ace in the hole” to gain the victory over Satan and to side with Jesus is their decision to keep the law and to observe the seventh-day Sabbath.

This worldview is completely false, and Adventists are blind to the fact that they are tethered to an idol which they defend by saying that their Sabbath is the mark of true worship. They defend their idol by saying the Law is eternal and is the revelation of God to them. 

The fact that Adventism is built on an idol tethered to the old covenant law explains how this lesson misses the significance of what happened at the giving of the old covenant. 

Nature of Covenant Revealed

While the lesson does make the point that Moses functioned as the mediator between Israel and God at the giving of the law, it fails to explain the significance of what happened when Moses came down the mountain and saw the hedonistic revelry around that golden calf. 

Aaron had been put in charge while Moses was gone, hidden on the mountain in the cloud of God. Aaron had sinned against God by being weak in the face of the nation’s demands for an idol. Then Moses took charge:

Aaron was among those sons of Levi. The tribe that would become the priestly tribe of Israel repented and stood with Moses—and they had to carry out God’s command and consequence: they had to kill their brothers, friends, and neighbors in hand-to-hand sword combat:

The day that Moses received the Law, 3,000 Israelites died because of idolatry. The covenant God made with Israel included blessings for obedience but death for unbelief and rebellion. The giving of the law, mediated by Moses, was marked by a demonstration of the terms of that law: death for unbelieving rebellion against their God who had rescued them. 

This rebellion could not be temporarily atoned by the death of an animal. Those who died were those who had unrepentant hearts that had blatantly worshiped a false god in the face of Yahweh delivering His covenant document to them! Those rebellious ones paid with their own lives—a demonstration of the terms of their new law.

Yet Moses presented the Israelites with the opportunity to repent. Only the Levites repented—those whose descendants would be the mediators of atonement and forgiveness to the nation throughout its generations. And those repentant Levites had to perform God’s justice, killing 3,000 men who insisted on defining worship the way they wanted it. 

Moses pled with God and begged Him not to abandon His people, and God agreed He would not. Yet God also said that He would blot “out of My book” whoever had sinned against Him—those who did not repent.

This promise of God was fulfilled when the first generation of Israelites wandered in the wilderness forty years because of their unbelief and grumbling. Although God saved the entire nation out of Egypt as He had promised Abraham He would do, He did not allow the hardened, unrepentant Israelites who sinned against Him to enter the Promised Land. Their children who were born in the desert were those who actually entered the Land. 

New Covenant Shadows

The Mosaic covenant was defined by its central document, the Ten Commandments. It demanded death for sin, and in graphic ways God’s seriousness about His demands for His people’s loyalty and obedience was demonstrated. There was no substitution allowed. The guilty died, and the repentant were the ones who mediated God’s judgment among the hard-hearted.

Moses alone was called into the thick cloud that covered the mountain. He alone went into the presence of God as He wrote the covenant document. Moses the mediator God chose to go between His nation and Himself, had to deliver God’s commands and judgments to the Israelites, but he couldn’t personally relieve them of their guilt. He was a man like them. He could only mediate God’s instructions and see that they were carried out. 

Yet there are parallels between this moment in Israel’s history that contrast and compare with the inauguration of the new covenant centuries later. We read about the introduction to the new covenant in Luke 9:28–36:

Notice that at this moment, just days away from the cross, Jesus was revealing to His three closest disciples the nature of the new covenant and how it would be completely different from the old. Yet notice the details that are similar—that are intended to cause the disciples and also us to recognize that this transition is an act of God.

Just as Moses was called into an obscuring cloud that hid him from the sight of the people—and that cloud was God’s own presence—so Peter, John, and James were overshadowed by a cloud, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. Notice that Moses and Elijah were leaving Jesus when the cloud of God’s presence covered the three disciples and the Lord Jesus. While they were inside that clouds, they heard God speak—just as Moses had heard God speak on Mt. Sinai and had received His Ten Words for the nation. 

After God had spoken, the cloud lifted—and Jesus alone was before them. Moses—who represented the Law to Israel—and Elijah—who represented the prophets to Israel—had disappeared. The new Authority in the new covenant would be the Lord Jesus alone! God the Son in human flesh—the God-Man was the new Word. No longer would God’s covenant with those who believe Him be the written law delivered by Moses from God. Now it would be God the Son Himself!

Just a few weeks later, 10 days after Jesus’ ascension, to be exact, Jesus’ disciples were praying and waiting as He had instructed them, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Immediately they began speaking in other languages, and Peter preached the first new covenant expository sermon at the temple in Jerusalem. Notice what happened:

In contrast to the old covenant which Paul called “a ministry of death, in letters having been engraved on stones” (2 Corinthians 3:7) which had been marked by the death of 3,000 unrepentant Israelites who had brazenly rebelled against God and practiced idolatry in the midst of His people, the new covenant was inaugurated with 3,000 Jews coming to faith in their Messiah and being born again. The new covenant was marked by 3,000 souls passing from death to life! “…for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”—2 Corinthians 3:6 LSB

The Sabbath School lesson takes this account of the apostasy of Israel at the giving of the law and morphs it into a moral lesson for Adventists, confirming implicitly their worldview that God is limited, people are not depraved, Satan operates under rules of engagement, and Adventists are to obey God by keeping the law, observing the Sabbath, and praying for sinners so that they will repent and obey. This lesson is stripped of its significance by an organization that has conscripted this story to guilt its members into doing the will of the Adventist organization, praying to obey and praying for those who have sinned among them. 

Yet even at the giving of the law God was showing His people that not only was He asking them to be loyal to Him, but He was providing a means to help them. He gave them a mediator and a whole tribe of priests to intercede for them. He gave them a means of worship and atonement that would cause them to know the seriousness of sin and His demand for substitutionary sacrifice. 

God’s law foreshadowed the Messiah who would come and fulfill all these Mosaic shadows—and He has come! His atonement IS complete!

If you have not trusted the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus in His death for sin, His burial, and His resurrection according to Scripture, come to Him today. Confess your sin and repent, asking Him to be your Savior—and trust Him. Thank Him for the new covenant in His blood, and you will pass from death to life. No longer under the curse of death, you will know true Sabbath rest and have peace with God. Come to Him today—and you will enter the new covenant reality of being an adopted child of God. Believe Him today—and pass from death to 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.

 

Colleen Tinker
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