Lesson 4: “The Conflict Behind All Conflicts”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
This week’s Sabbath School lesson states that Adventism interprets the Bible through the lens of Ellen White’s great controversy. In fact, Adventism rejects a plain reading of Scripture that reveals God as sovereign over all history and reality and teaches instead that because of Israel’s free will, God adopted a second-best option for getting the nation into the Promised land. This week’s studies clearly reveal that Adventism is not part of Christian tradition; it does not have a biblical view of man or of God, of salvation, of the church, of Christian living, or of eschatology. This lesson admits that its understanding of all reality depends on Ellen White’s great controversy paradigm. This admission exposes Adventism as a deceptive religion posing as Christian but leading people away from the gospel of Jesus’ finished atonement.
Great Controversy Dependence Admitted
This convoluted lesson superficially looks at the story of Israel marching around Jericho for seven days before finally marching seven times on the seventh day as the people shouted and the priests blew trumpets—and the walls came a-tumblin’ down.
Significantly, the Bible passages were Joshua 5:13–15 and Joshua 6:15–20. The author left out the first 12 verses of Joshua 5, but these were some of the most significant verses of the story. Before Israel took Jericho but after they had crossed the Jordan River, the Lord commanded Joshua to circumcise the nation. Joshua 5:1–7 explains that while the generation that escaped Egypt had been circumcised, they had not circumcised their children during their 40 years of wilderness wandering. Before Israel could undertake the Lord’s warfare, they had to be consecrated to the Lord’s service by taking the mark of circumcision which identified them as Abraham’s promised offspring. God’s covenant promises to Abraham’s offspring were only for the sons of Isaac—but the nation had to take the sign of the Abrahamic covenant before they could participate in God’s promises.
After they were circumcised, they celebrated Passover for the first time since one year after their rescue from Egypt (see Numbers 9:1–5). As they endured God’s judgment in the wilderness, the symbolism of Passover likely meant little to them because Passover symbolized God’s deliverance of them from judgment. That renewed celebration of Passover (Joshua 5:10–12) required that they be circumcised. Uncircumcised Israelites were prohibit from participating in the Passover ceremonies.
Significantly, after they celebrated that first Passover in 40 years, the manna stopped. Israel had eaten manna since a month before the covenant was given at Mt. Sinai. It was God’s provision for them—sustaining them even through their years of judgment in the wilderness in spite of their unbelief. God provided for them because they were His nation. When they entered the Promised Land and celebrated their first Passover, eating their first produce from the new land, the manna stopped. From that time on, God provided for them with food from the Promised Land.
They were finally ready to participate in God’s promises and plans that would rid the land of the unrepentant sinners who inhabited what God had always intended to give to Israel in fulfillment of His covenant with Abraham. Circumcised and celebrating God’s deliverance as they observed Passover, they were finally ready to follow God’s direction to overthrow Jericho.
The lesson doesn’t even mention this part of the story, but these details give context to what comes next.
Saturday’s lesson leads by saying that “the idea that God was behind the conquest of Canaan pervades the book of Joshua.” It further says, “God claims to be the initiator of these violent conflicts and end with these words:
How is it possible to reconcile the image of a “warlike” God with His character of love (for example, Exod. 34:6, Ps. 86:15, Ps. 103:8, Ps. 108:4) without diluting the credibility, authority, and historicity of the Old Testament?
This week and next, we are going to explore the difficult question of divinely commanded wars in the book of Joshua and elsewhere.
Monday’s lesson sets up a defense for the great controversy between Christ and Satan. Using Revelation 12:7–9 where John the Revelator saw a war heaven with Satan and his angels being cast out, using Isaiah 14:12–14 and Ezekiel 28:11–19 which describe the arrogant apostasy of the kings of Babylon and Tyre with allusions to a evil power behind then, and using Daniel 10:12–14 where Gabriel tells Daniel that he and Michael, the prince of Daniel’s people—the author uses these passages to “establish” the supposed existence of Ellen White’s great controversy. The great controversy, of course, is the Adventist worldview that says God is in a conflict with Satan to vindicate His character to the watching universe. In this scenario, God, the sovereign creator of all, must prove that his rebellious creature, Satan, is a liar. He actually has to prove that He is right and His fallen angel is wrong!
Tuesday’s lesson develops this idea further:
Ultimately, God is at war with sin and will not tolerate this conflict forever…The concept of the total destruction of the Canaanites must be under-stood on the basis of the biblical worldview, in which God is involved in a cosmic conflict with the exponents of evil in the universe. Ultimately, God’s reputation and His character are at stake…
In other words, God’s destruction of the Canaanite cities such as Jericho must not be seen as God violently destroying people groups in favor of one nation. Rather, these battles must be seen as God helping Joshua win these messy wars so that evil will be clearly seen and God’s ultimate mercy will show that all that suffering was because of Satan, not the Creator.
Yet God is not at war with sin. Sin was Adam’s choice, and we are all sinners in Adam. God has always been at work to bring about the redemption of man and ultimately of the earth as He promised Eve in the garden, and to bless the world through the offspring of Abraham as He covenanted unconditionally in Genesis 15. It is unbiblical for Adventism (and the lesson) to state that “God is at war with sin”. God is not in a conflict with Satan and is not fighting sin. He has already provided the solution to the sin that Adam brought on humanity. Adam, not Satan, is responsible for human sin—and far from being in a battle with Satan, God the Son identified with Adam’s doomed descendants and became a man, taking our sin by imputation, and dying our death and breaking our curse of sin because His shed blood was sufficient to satisfy God’s demand that sinners must die!
Satan is a deceiver, misrepresenting his own power and God’s sovereignty, and Adventism has drunk his Cool-Aid, deceiving millions and millions of people with the idea that Satan is fighting with Jesus to tarnish God’s reputation. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. God is already accomplishing the saving of nations by His own sacrifice. Satan is already a doomed foe.
God Deferred to Second-Best
Thursday’s lesson develops the idea introduced by Ellen White on page 48 of the lesson quarterly that
God “did not design that they should gain the land of promise by warfare, but through submission and unqualified obedience to his commands.”—Ellen G. White, Signs of the Times, September 2, 1880,
Thursday’s lesson actually is titled “The Second-Best Option” and says that because of Israel’s murmuring, God changed His original plan that there would be no fighting to gain the Promised Land and pivoted to a second-best idea that included His helping Joshua with his battles:
Without compromising His principles, God comes down to the level where His people are, continually calling them back to the ideal plan: complete and unreserved trust in divine intervention. In fact, the law of warfare (Deuteronomy 20) was given only after the 40 years of wilderness experience, which was also caused by Israel’s unbelief. New circumstances demanded new strategies, and it was only then that God required Israel to completely annihilate the Canaanites (Deut. 20:16–18).
God has no Plan B. He is completely sovereign, never surprised, and omniscient. He always intended for Israel to participate in warfare. Deuteronomy 20 is not revealing a new plan; Israel would always be involved in taking Canaan, but God had always promised that the removal of the people would be His work. God did not “come down to the level where His people are”. He brought Israel into His plan
His plan was to judge the unrepentant hearts of the Canaanites and to remove them from the land with their child sacrifices and demonic worship. The Promised Land would belong to God’s nation Israel—and they would be involved in removing the last vestiges of the people just as God commanded them at each battle. They would see God working supernaturally to drive the people out, to turn on each other and kill one another, as He used hornets and fear to cause them to fall in terrified chaos.
God had no second-choice plan. What occurred was always God’s plan. He did not lower Himself to their primitive level; rather He exalted them to participate in His plan to cleanse the land and to install His own covenant people where unrepentant evil had resided.
God Defers to Israel’s Choice?
Friday’s lesson opens with a blasphemous scenario:
When rebellion against God’s authority arose in the universe, either God was going to cease to be what He essentially, immutably, and eternally is and give away the leadership of the whole universe to one of His rebellious creatures, or He was going to be the holy, righteous, loving, and merciful Father of all that exists. The Bible presents the second picture, and in this case, the clash between the forces of evil and His power is inevitable.…
“God had made it their privilege and their duty to enter the land at the time of His appointment, but through their willful neglect that permission had been withdrawn. . . . It was not His purpose that they should gain the land by warfare, but by strict obedience to His commands.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 392.
Never was God, even theoretically, facing a decision as to whether or not to “give away the leadership of the whole universe to one of His rebellious creatures”! Satan has never presented God with a dilemma or surprised God. Satan has always known he is the creature of God’s eternal creative power, and while he has created much chaos and deception, he has never been in doubt about his fate. God never faced a moment of deciding whether or not to hand over the leadership of the universe to Satan or to anyone else!
The Adventist god is not the sovereign, almighty, omniscient God of Scripture
Furthermore, Ellen White is just plain wrong. The Bible never says that God had to change his timeline because Israel refused to obey. Neither does Scripture say that God never intended for Israel to be involved in the removal of the people from Canaan. God ALWAYS said He would fight for His people and drive the Canaanites out, but Israel’s participation was not a second choice. It was God’s intention that they watch how He removed the people against all odds, bringing them into the battles in the ways He decreed. He decreed that the priests would lead with the ark. He decreed that He would terrorize the people by means other than Israel’s fighting. Israel was asked to trust Him and to participate in killing the enemies of God when God told them to, but God always led the battles.
Israel was asked to participate in God’s judgment of evil. These battles were not indiscriminate violence but God-ordained evacuations of people who were so evil they were defiling each other as well as the land which God had covenanted with Abraham would belong to His people.
Open Admission of Dependence on Great Controversy
Finally, the Teachers Comments openly state how the great controversy is necessary for understanding reality. On page 52 the author states that many Christians are troubled by the idea of seeing God as a warrior who fights for His people against other nations. He goes on to say:
The great conflict between good and evil, which started with the rebellion of Lucifer in heaven, is an indispensable aspect of the proper worldview to deal with this complicated matter. God’s involvement in Joshua’s wars can be correctly understood only in light of His participation in this broader conflict. The correct understanding of this great conflict impacts all biblical doctrines. It is not an exaggeration to affirm that the great conflict is the most appropriate Adventist lens through which to interpret this issue and Scripture as a whole. Indeed, the Bible encourages us to employ this lens from the very beginning.
He admits that the great controversy is NECESSARY lens for interpreting “Scripture as a whole”. No wonder Adventists cannot see the reality of their own depravity, the justice and mercy of God, and the nature of salvation!
The great controversy is entirely made up out of whole cloth, derived from Ellen White’s great controversy vision of 1858. It turns reality upside down, making Satan free and powerful and God self-limiting because in fairness He has to let Satan play out his evil hand so everyone can finally see that he is evil and God is good. In this paradigm, God is subservient to the free will of evil. He can’t oppose evil because that would make Him unfair to His creatures!
Yet Scripture tells us that God is completely sovereign, even over evil. Satan cannot do one tiny thing beyond what God allows him to do. Satan is under God’s authority—God is not subservient to Satan’s free will!
Amazingly, the Teachers Comments go on to summarize the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of Adventism into six categories, and each category is explained through a great controversy lens. Following are the six categories with excerpts from the lesson’s explanations of them:
God: At the center of the great conflict is the “theodicy.” In a self-inflicted, temporary limitation, God allows evil to develop to a certain point to show its true character, so that His creation may see it in its true light…Any reading of Scripture without this perception will eventually produce a distorted view of God’s character, whether concerning His ability, or willingness, to end evil.
Notice that the lesson states that if God is not viewed as self-inflicting a temporary limitation on Himself, if He does not allow evil to develop enough to show off its “true character”, then God’s creation will misunderstand God. We will all have a distorted view of His character!
Scripture is clear: God is all-powerful and sovereign. There is nothing hidden from Him, and there is nothing outside His authority, boundaries, and control. He never self-limits. We creatures are all under His authority—and so is Satan. Satan is not allowed to run amok and develop his evil without God’s controlling intervention. Always Satan is kept in check by our sovereign God. He is a doomed villain, and his end is already assured. Adventism has a weak God who is subject to Adventists’ wills and thoughts. Ultimately, Adventists see God as a “gentleman” who won’t overstep His bounds of their free wills.
They have a weak, unbiblical God.
Man: The rebellion initiated in heaven was transferred to this earth when the first couple chose to ally themselves with Satan by disobeying a clear and direct commandment of God (Genesis 3). As a result, death, decay, and suffering entered the once-perfect environment of this world. From that moment on, humans were born with the propensity for evil (Rom. 3:23), which, without God’s intervention, would bring this world to a state of chaos…
Adventism sees humans as merely born with propensities for evil. They do not believe we are by nature spiritually dead, literally, and under the wrath of God by nature. Because they do not believe humans have immaterial spirits separate from the body, they do not understand spiritual death and the need to be made alive—born again—by belief and trust in Jesus’ finished work. Rather, they believe that humans must overcome sin by following Jesus’ example and learning to exercise better will power and keep the law better and better. They must overcome sin. They do not know that humans are unable to please God apart from being born of the Spirit.
Salvation: At the center of this plan was the atoning death of Jesus and His ministry in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 9:11–28). In Jesus, humanity has a new opportunity and, by His power, can overcome sin…
The Adventist view of salvation is that Jesus came to be our example, to show us how, by praying and depending on the Holy Spirit, we, too, can overcome sin and perfectly keep the law. In this way, Adventists believe, they can become saved. Jesus died to forgive our past sins, but going forward, His example is our hope for staying saved. We must obey.
The Church: The church has the mission to preach the everlasting gospel (Rev. 14:6) in the context of the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) and bring people from all the nations to its fellowship…
Notice that “the gospel” is never defined but is attached to Revelation 14:6: the “first angel’s message” which, they say, is the Adventist command to tell the world that the investigative judgment has started, and people everywhere are to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. The real gospel, however, is defined in 1 Corinthians 15:3,4. It is that Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture, that He was buried, and that He rose from death on the third day according to Scripture. When we trust His finished work, we are saved and born again. This message is the biblical purpose for the true church; we are to declare to the world that they are dead in sin and that the Lord Jesus has finished all that is necessary for salvation. This is the purpose of the biblical church!
Daily Living: The cosmic conflict is the narrative that shapes our lives… aligning ourselves with the moral principles of His law serves as evidence of our new experience of salvation in Christ. Obedience to divine commandments, especially the observance of the seventh day as the Sabbath, as an act of worship, will be at the center of the controversy during the closing moments of this cosmic war on earth
At the heart of Adventism’s concept of daily living is the commitment to keep the Ten Commandments, especially the fourth commandment: to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. Notice that the lesson itself emphasizes that the Sabbath is “especially” important. “Divine commandments” are important, but it is that Sabbath that is especially important—because Ellen White stated that it is the mark that identifies those who are saved from those who are lost.
Last-day Events: the impact of the great-conflict worldview is even more substantial on the doctrine of last-day events. The time of the end starts after the end of the 2.300-day prophetic period and paves the way for the divine judgment in three phases. The first phase, also known as the pre-Advent judgment, started on October 22, 1844, when the restoration/purification of the heavenly sanctuary began (Dan. 8:14). It extends until the second coming of Jesus, which opens the second judicial phase, also known as evidentiary judgment, wherein the redeemed will participate during their stay of 1,000 years in heaven (Rev. 20:4–6). At the end of this period, the executive judgment closes the cosmic conflict with the destruction of Satan, his angels, and all impenitent sinners…
And here the lesson admits that the great controversy is especially important in shaping the Adventist view of last-day events. Adventism teaches that the first judgment—the investigative judgment in heaven where Jesus is supposedly still carrying out His uncompleted atonement as He applies His blood to the confessed sins of the saved—started in 1844 and continues to this day. No one knows when it will end—and as people continue to be born, the likelihood of Jesus ever reaching the end often seems increasingly remote. This invented judgment will continue until the second coming when, they say, the second judgment will commence: the judicial phase during which the saved will spend a thousand years in heaven going through God’s records of events and having all their questions answered as to why some people were saved and others weren’t. They deserve to have their questions answered, they say, and they expect to be able to have God satisfy them during the heavenly millennium.
The Bible is clear that the millennium—however one sees it—is not in heaven but on earth. Nevertheless, Adventists expect to spend 1,000 years in heaven having all their questions answered. When this evidentiary judgment is done, the great controversy will finally come to an end when Jesus returns to the earth to execute His final judgment on all sinners, evil angels, and Satan. The destruction of Satan, according to Adventism, will mark the end of the great controversy because the opponent, Satan, will finally be destroyed. His destruction—not the eternal blood of the covenant shed by the Lord Jesus—will be the assurance that sin will never rise again. Ellen White actually gave Satan that much power. His destruction—not Jesus’ blood and finished atonement—will be the guarantee of eternal sinlessness!
Conclusion
This week’s Sabbath School lesson has revealed clearly that Adventism cannot exist without Ellen White and her great controversy worldview. Every one of their doctrines is shaped by and depends upon the great controversy paradigm. Adventists cannot even read Scripture at face value. They cannot read it contextually using normal rules of grammar and context; they must read it through the interpretive lens of the great controversy. Ellen White is mandatory for Adventists to remain Adventists, and their worldview is thoroughly shaped by Ellen White’s visions—even if they don’t realize it.
Yet the story of Joshua leading Israel in defeating Jericho as they began to inhabit the land God promised them—this account is a demonstration of God’s faithfulness to keep His covenant and His word. God had promised Abraham that his descendants would come into the land when the cup of the Amorites’ iniquity was full, and exactly as He covenanted, God brought Israel into Canaan. He promised His people that He would fight for them—and His covenant promises to give Israel the land would come to pass exactly as God had said.
God has also covenanted to bring to spiritual life those who trust the Son and His finished blood atonement for our sin. His covenant in the Lord Jesus and His blood is unconditional and eternal. For everyone who believes and trusts Him, the Lord will give that person spiritual life and the assurance of eternity.
God is literally calling you to trust Him. Ask Him to show you what is true and real, and ask Him to show you His will in His word.
I have a suggestion: get a notebook, and begin, a few verses at a time, to copy the gospel of John into that notebook, asking God to teach you what He knows He wants you to know. I guarantee that Adventism did not teach you what John actually says! The words mean what they say; pay attention to verb tenses and prepositions. Ask God to protect you from deception and to show you who you are, who Jesus is, and how to trust Him.
God is faithful. His word cannot fail, and it means exactly what it says. God will not trick you. If you haven’t trusted His finished atonement—His death, burial, and resurrection all done according to Scripture to atone for your sin—trust Him today. Ask Him to rescue you from the confusion of Adventism and to teach you truth. Trust Him today—and you see Adventism for the deception that it is. Believe Him, and you will 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.
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