Lesson 4: “Unity Through Humility”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
As an Adventist, have you ever been in a congregation where you experienced true unity? How do people achieve unity—and is there unity among people who are not together in a specific church? What about the “example of Jesus”? How is His humility and condescension related to achieving church unity—or is it? Why do people have so much trouble being unified, even in church?
What’s Wrong with This Lesson?
This week’s lesson focusses on Philippians 2:1–8 which describes Jesus’ willingly becoming incarnate, a man who lived among sinners—a servant of both God and men. He humbled Himself in order to become our sacrifice, but Adventism teaches us that His humbling Himself was an example to us of how to live with humility in unity with each other.
The foundational problem with this lesson is the assumption—never articulated—that man has no immaterial spirit that is involved with our identities as sinners. From an Adventist perspective, people are born “sinners” by means of inheriting propensities to evil. They do not teach that man is literally born spiritually dead, that Adam and Eve actually did die the day they ate the fruit in the garden. Their immaterial spirits died, and they lost their connection to God’s spirit and life. Their spiritual death led to their physical death.
In order to understand why Philippians 2 is not teaching church unity as the consequence of following the example of Jesus, we have to understand what is wrong with man and what Jesus’ humbling Himself actually meant. To explain the biblical revelation of human nature and the Lord’s incarnation, we first begin with some Adventist statements about their physicalist view of humanity. The following quotes are from Seventh-day Adventists Believe, third edition. This book is the internal description of the 28 Fundamental Beliefs; it explains to Adventist members exactly what their carefully-crafted statements of belief actually mean.
“Though created free beings each is an indivisible unity of body, mind, and spirit, dependent upon God for life and breath and all else. When our first parents disobeyed God, they denied their dependence upon Him and fell from their high position. The image of God in them was marred and they became subject to death…Their descendants share this fallen nature and its consequences. They are born with weaknesses and tendencies to evil…” (Taken from Fundamental Belief #7, “The Nature of Humanity”)
“We might compare [this breath of life] with the streams of electricity that when they flow through various electrical components, transform a quiet, gray panel of glass in a box into a pulsating splash of color and action—when we flip the switch on a color TV. The electricity brings sound an emotion where once there was nothing.”—Page 93
“Nothing in the Creation account indicates that man received a soul—some kind of separate entity that, at Creation, was united with the human body.…a new soul comes into existence whenever a child is born, each ‘soul’ being a new unit of life uniquely different and separate from other similar units.… The souls has no conscious existence apart from the body.”—Page 94, 95
These and countless more statements and sources reveal the Adventist belief that humans are no more than bodies that breathe. The problem with believing that humans are merely bodies that breathe and that, when the breath ceases, the person ceases to exist, is that it ignores what the Bible says about the nature of man and of sin. If we refuse to believe that Adam’s sin changed something literal in humanity and separated us all by nature from the life of God, we cannot understand what the Bible says about salvation, about the church, or about how we are to function within the church. Even more, unless we believe the truth about our human natures being dead in sin, we have no idea why Jesus became sin for us and died to pay for sin.
Jesus Paid Satan the Sin Debt?
Recently I was listening to a video on the Faith for Today YouTube channel in which Roy Ice was conducting the first of eight sessions of his The Bible Lab entitled “The Third God”. Yes, his subject for this series is the Holy Spirit. This ongoing class is one of the Sabbath School offerings at Loma Linda University Church, and Roy Ice, formerly on the pastoral staff at LLUC, is now a speaker for Faith for Today.
The title of the series gives away Adventism’s confusion about the nature of God and the reality that God is ONE, and the mystery that there are three person expressing one God is not taught in Adventism. Instead—as Ice’s title reveals—Adventism actually believes in a tritheism.
They try to use language that affirms one God and three persons, but the title of this series alone reveals Adventism’s belief that the three persons are distinct beings. Again, I am struck all over again that never does the discussion include the attributes of God nor the fact that all three persons must have all the attributes of God in order to BE GOD. Instead, the discussion repeatedly speaks to their idea that Jesus had to go away and, because He could’t be with them everywhere because He had a body He had to send the Holy Spirit.
Ice tried hard to explain that the Holy Spirit can be in everyone and in that way be close and personal with everyone so they know that God is with them even though Jesus can’t be. Yet never (so far) has he mentioned that sin destroyed our connection to God’s life, and never has he said that sin has separated us from God.
Shockingly, he actually stated several times in the first session that Jesus paid the debt of sin TO SATAN! Paying the debt to Satan, he said, showed that Satan couldn’t claim humanity as his any longer, and Jesus can claim us now.
This belief is at the core of Adventist soteriology. Adventism cannot teach that our problem is that we are literally born dead in sin and that we must literally be born again, born of God, born of the Spirit. In fact, if we take Ice’s comment to its logical conclusion within the Adventist worldview, we realize exactly why he says Jesus’ job was to pay a debt to Satan. The great controversy paradigm teaches that Jesus is in a battle with Satan, that Satan has made accusations against God that God is obligated to answer, and Jesus, with our help, must prove that Satan is wrong and God and His law are good. For His part, Jesus disproves Satan by paying him for us.
Furthermore, the great controversy paradigm has Satan ultimately carrying the sins of the saved out of heaven at the end of the investigative judgment. According to Ellen White and Adventist doctrine, Satan is the scapegoat who will bear the sins of the saved into the Lake of Fire and be punished for them.
Let’s face the facts: in Adventism, Satan is the tragic hero. He is the one Jesus had to buy off. He is the one who accuses God, and we have to prove him wrong. Satan, not our sovereign, triune God, is the most powerful and fearsome force in the universe. He is responsible for Adventist sin, and he is responsible for cleansing heaven itself of our sin!
All of this satan-centric doctrine stands on the foundation of Adventism’s physicalism, its denial of the true nature of God (insisting that both the Father and the Son have physical bodies), of man and of our spiritual death and of the significance of the Lord Jesus taking human flesh and paying God’s own demand for sin: death.
In truth, God, not Satan, is the One who needed to be propitiated. Adventists, however, refuse to believe this clear teaching of Scripture because it contradicts their prophetess and their great controversy worldview.
The Human Spirit
It was Jesus who clarified that the Adventist view of God having a body and man having no immaterial spirit was heresy. When He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, He said:
“You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:22–24 LSB
God IS SPIRIT—and that includes all three persons of our ONE GOD! God IS Spirit—and true worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth! This clear statement of God the Son (who is spirit) is not a metaphor. It is a literal statement that true worship comes from the spirit of those who believe and trust God.
Paul explains in Ephesians 2:1–3 what our natural condition is: we are all born 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
We are “by nature” children of wrath. We are all under judgment UNTIL we believe, and those who do not believe remain under the wrath of God:
“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. … He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”—John 3:18, 36 LSB
Jesus is the One who said that we are dead and must pass from death to life—and He further identified this miracle as being “born again”, or born of the Spirit through believing in HIM—God the Son—who became sin for us and completed the atonement for our sin by paying sin’s price: death and enduring the wrath of God on the cross. Jesus told Nicodemus:
Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” … Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which has been born of the Spirit is spirit.”—John 3:3, 5–6 LSB
Notice that Jesus differentiated between flesh and spirit. Humans have spirits, and the new birth is spiritual, not physical. It is not just new ideas and facts that we mentally affirm; it is literally our dead-in-sin spirits coming to life by the power and life of the risen Christ and by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit!
Consider one more of Jesus’s quotes:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”—John 5:24 LSB
Notice that Jesus said belief is the consequence of hearing His word—not just affirming His teaching but believing “in HIM who sent Me”. When we see and believe that the Lord Jesus fully atoned for our sin and that our depraved, natural spiritual death must be reversed by spiritual life, we then believe the Father as well. He is the One who sent the Son to become flesh so He could provide the proper propitiatory sacrifice for human sin! And when we believe, the result is not a metaphor as I understood it in Adventism. Is it literal. We pass from death—our natural condition—into life. This life is a miracle! It is His resurrection life (as per Romans 8:9–11) given to us when we believe!
This isn’t just me extrapolating from proof texts. This fact is what Jesus Himself said—and He Is God. He cannot lie, and He does not trick us. We are naturally spiritually dead, and we need to have our spirits brought to life.
This spiritual LIFE is what marks the transition from natural humanity into those who are truly saved. Those who have been brought to spiritual life through trust and faith in Jesus’ FINISHED atonement are the living. In fact, only this understanding explains Jesus’ words to the man he asked to follow him. When the man protested that he needed first to go and bury his father, Jesus said:
But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.”—Luke 9:60 LSB
Jesus taught that salvation has nothing at all to do with law-keeping. Rather, it is the effect of BELIEVING in HIM and being spiritually brought to life, born again, and sealed by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The “dead” includes ALL humanity by nature; the living are those who believe in Jesus and His sufficient shed blood. Only when they believe do they pass out of death—and this death and life are not metaphors. They are literal and real—and spiritual. We have immaterial spirits that are our identities, and we are born spiritually dead and must be made alive.
Adventist Confusion
Adventism does not believe in the spiritual nature of man nor of God. Even though they don’t teach it as overtly as in the past, Adventists still have the idea that God has a physical form that we resemble, and they deeply believe that no part of a human exists after death except as data in God’s memory.
Because Adventists deny the natural depravity of man (because they do not believe we have immaterial spirits that are born dead and must be born again), they redefine sin. They hold fast to their idea that human free will is the power that humans exercise to choose to do right and keep the law, and they persist in believing that human sin is the responsibility of Satan, not of Adam.
Adventists insist that Satan is the cause of human sin; in the Adventist paradigm, humans were the victim of his deception and temptation, not of their own choice to disbelieve God. Because they insist that Satan is responsible and that God handed man into Satan’s demonic hands, they say that to get man back, Jesus had to satisfy Satan’s accusations of human law-breaking. Jesus came to pay Satan’s correct assessment that man sinned and didn’t deserve eternal life, so Jesus came to pay humanity’s debt that they owed to their accuser—Satan—who insists that we are not qualified to be saved.
Because Adventism has a false view of reality, they do not believe in One God who is Spirit expressed in three persons, each of whom has the same substance. Each has all the attributes of God. Satan is a rebellious creature, not a cosmic power who can accuse his own Creator with claims of unfairness!
Because Adventism does not believe that man has a literal immaterial spirit which must be made alive and rescued from God’s curse, not from Satan’s accusations, they simply cannot read and interpret the Bible correctly.
Adventism believes that the church consists of people who have the right biblical interpretations and practices. They believe that Saturday-Sabbath is the visible mark of true believers, and they believe that Jesus is essentially Satan’s adversary sent to provide the trump card over Satan’s claims.
Adventism does not believe that Jesus came and paid God’s curse on sin: death. It is God, not Satan, who declares natural man condemned. Yet God provided Himself in the person of His incarnate Son to pay the price He Himself demanded. Satan has absolutely no role in our salvation nor in benefitting or suffering from Jesus’s sacrifice and atonement.
Because Adventism completely misses the reality of the new birth in those who believe, it misses the message of Philippians. The epistles of the New Testament are written not to the world nor to people struggling to figure out how to be saved. Rather Paul wrote to BELIEVERS who are already born again. They have already passed out of death into life! The commands in the New Testament are not commands explaining how to achieve salvation. They are commands to people who are already saved; they explain how to live with one another in the true body of Christ.
The lesson purveys the classic Adventist viewpoint that Jesus is our ultimate example, that if we follow His example for pious humility, we, too, can become humbly pious. For example, Thursday’s lesson asks this question:
How can, and should, focusing on what Jesus did for us at the cross—seeing the Cross as our example of surrender and humility—make us more humble, as well as more submissive to God?
The cross was not our example for living with humility! It was our eternal hope: the means by which we are saved when we place our faith in Jesus! If the cross were our example, we would have to see that somehow we, too, have to submit to death in order to satisfy God.
No! We submit to Jesus’s death. When we have done that, the issue of humility becomes clear. We live by the indwelling Spirit who is God’s gift and guarantee of our eternal salvation (Ephesians 1:13, 14). The Holy Spirit is not a power source that we receive when we ask for it, as Roy Ice teaches his Bible Lab members. No, the Holy Spirit indwells us when we give up our efforts to please God and believe and trust Jesus’ finished work.
The lesson uses Philippians to say that just as Jesus humbled Himself to take the form of a servant, so we must learn to live with humility. Yet the lesson misses what Jesus actually did. Never, in His humbling Himself, did He give up any part of His full deity. He did not give up His omnipresence nor His omniscience nor omnipotence. He did not give up His eternality. He gave up His glory and took the form of a Jewish man. He did not have to “overcome” sin. He lived sinlessly because His immaterial, human spirit was never dead! He was born spiritually alive!
Only AFTER we are born again through believing and trusting in His finished work of atonement does His life become an example to us of how to suffer and live with integrity among sinners.
For those who haven’t trusted Jesus alone, Jesus is the Way, the singular way that a person can re reconciled to God. For the unbeliever, Jesus is the One he must trust fully.
For the born again believer, the Lord Jesus is our Head and Husband, and He is our teacher and example for how to live lives of integrity. Yet Jesus is not the example for an unbeliever. For them, He is only One Thing: the only way they may be saved through faith in His blood.
The lesson’s focus on Adventists’ becoming united through learning to live with humility is an impossible goal. Adventism as a system is not Christian.
Adventist unity cannot be reached because in general, Adventists are not true believers. They have the wrong view of God, of themselves, and of the atonement. They have Jesus paying off Satan, and they have Jesus completing the atonement in heaven in the investigative judgment. They have Jesus preparing to place our sins on the head of Satan who will be punished for them.
Adventism is not Christian, and Paul’s instruction to the Philippians and his teaching about Jesus’ humility do not apply to Adventists. This epistle is not a “how-to” book to help Adventists live in unity. Rather Paul is reminding the believers at Philippi that Jesus is God, and He gave up what was rightfully His in order to live as a man and to take our sin and death.
This book is a call to anyone who is not born again to look at Jesus and to bow the knee to Him alone.
There is no unity for anyone who is not born of the Spirit and hidden with Christ in God. Shared doctrines and goals do not create unity.
Adventists need to look outside their great controversy framework and ask God to teach them how to read Scripture without the lens of Ellen White.
If you have not trusted in Jesus’ finished work alone, this is the time to do so. Ask the Lord to show you what His word means in context. Read the words of the Bible in the normal way, observing the ruled of grammar, vocabulary, and context.
The Lord knows your spiritual confusion, and He came to shed light on the darkness that we all shared as Adventists.
See Jesus, always fully God, even in the womb and in the tomb, who always sustains creation and always intercedes for us with His blood. Admit your need and your sin, and trust Him. See Him taking your sin to the cross and dying, then rising from death on the third day as He shatters His curse of death.
See Jesus who has fully atoned for you—and who has never been paying Satan but has satisfied God Himself. Believe Him today—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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