COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
I sat in my eighth grade Bible class watching my teacher draw a diagram on the chalkboard. Beginning at a point on the left side of the board, he drew a gradually ascending line punctuated by sharp drops of varying depths. While the direction remained ultimately upward, the progression of the line was seriously slowed by the peaks and valleys which impeded its progress.
That line, he told us, represented our lives. Once we accepted Jesus—an event represented by the line’s point of origin—we would gradually become more and more obedient. Our goal, of course, was to attain perfection like Christ’s. We would likely die before we finished our goal, he explained. We would repeatedly sin and fall away, but as long as the direction of our lives continued toward that perfection until the time of our death, God would make up the difference. My teacher explained that at the beginning of our Christian lives, we had almost no goodness, and we needed Christ to make up the entire gap between our sin and His righteousness. Gradually, however, as we became more and more perfect in our obedience to His law, we needed Christ to make up less and less difference between us and perfect righteousness.
Ultimately, if we should live long enough and continue to devote ourselves to perfection, our characters would perfectly reflect the character of Christ. We would no longer need Him to stand in the gap, because we ourselves would have attained the righteousness of Christ. This ultimate character perfection was necessary because, we were told, in the last generation, God’s people would have to stand during the time of trouble without a mediator or intercessor (Ellen G. White [EGW], The Great Controversy, pages 425, 614, and 648). Perfection, we were taught, was the goal of every Christian. Christ’s death was necessary for legal purposes, but once we accepted His payment for our sins, we had to dedicate ourselves to becoming like Him in order to be ready for salvation.
Better sounding words
In recent years many Adventists have begun teaching a more orthodox-sounding gospel. We are saved by grace through faith, they affirm. For example, in the teacher’s edition of the Sabbath School quarterly for July–August, 2006, The Gospel, 1844, and Judgment, Clifford Goldstein, the principal contributor and editor says, “The good news of the judgment is that Jesus, in His righteousness, gets us through the judgment because He stands there in our place…Otherwise, all of us would be lost because none of us, no matter our works, has enough righteousness to stand before a Holy God. Unless we are clothed in a perfect righteousness that none of us possess or could ever earn, we would have to stand in our own works, our own righteousness; and because we are all sinners, we would all be condemned” (p. 150).
While these and other statements say that our own efforts do not qualify us for heaven, still, upon closer investigation, we see that Adventism is still teaching that our works play a role in validating Jesus’ “right” to save us.
While these and other statements say that our own efforts do not qualify us for heaven, still, upon closer investigation, we see that Adventism is still teaching that our works play a role in validating Jesus’ “right” to save us. No matter how they adjust their vocabulary, Adventists still remain tied to EGW and her permeating, foundational doctrine of the Investigative Judgment.
“In the end, what the judgment tells us is that, in a special way, our works are coming under scrutiny before the onlooking universe. If we love God, if we are rejoicing in the salvation He has given us, we will want to send a message to the world and to the universe that, indeed, we love and serve the Lord who has done so much for us. Good works testify to the reality of the faith that we have in Christ; and though they don’t save us in the judgment, good works reveal that, though we are sinners, Christ has done the right thing in bringing us into “his kingdom that …shall not be destroyed” (Dan 7:14))” (Goldstein, p. 170).
Following this paragraph of the quarterly are these thought questions, “What kind of message do your works send to anyone who might be watching them? What changes do you need to make in order to send a better message?”
John Fowler, editor of the lesson commentary, also includes this comment:
“Those who claimed to have accepted Jesus will have their fitness for heaven examined [in the investigative judgment] on the basis of their loyalty and discipleship to Christ. This examination also will demonstrate to the universe that Christ’s atoning death vindicates God’s position in the great controversy and His judgment on sin and Satan” (p. 153).
In other words, many Adventists today are teaching a Biblical-sounding gospel of justification by faith, but they confuse the message by retaining the need for good works in order to remain saved and to be “safe to save”. Additionally, these good works are necessary to help vindicate God’s right to destroy sin and Satan.
Further, Goldstein says “we are saved…only through the righteousness of Jesus, which is credited to us by faith, a faith that is always manifested by works.” Yet he qualifies this claim of being saved through Jesus’ righteousness by saying, “This righteousness covers us the moment we, through a complete surrender of ourselves to Christ, claim it for ourselves, and it stays with us (though not unconditionally) right through the judgment” (p. 156).
This conditional righteousness is linked to a person’s maintaining adequate works of faith.
Jay Gallimore, president of the Michigan Conference in the North American Division, spoke at the Ten Commandments Weekend sponsored by Three Angels’ Broadcasting Network held in Washington, DC, on the first Friday and Saturday of May this year. In his sermon addressing the first commandment, Gallimore said, “Redemption gives birth to trust; trust gives birth to obedience [to the law], and obedience gives birth to victory over sin.”
While Adventists are beginning to speak on the one hand of being saved as a gift of grace through faith in Jesus, they betray their unchanged belief that salvation is conditional—that it depends upon each individual demonstrating faith by increasing obedience to the Decalogue, thus “passing” the investigative judgment and justifying God’s decision to save us.
In Adam, in Christ
Perhaps the underlying reason Adventists cannot grasp the true gospel of grace and the security of salvation is that they do not truly understand what it means to be born “in Adam”—nor do they understand what it means to be “in Christ”.
When Adam and Eve sinned (Genesis 3:1-7), they experienced the spiritual death that caused them to know shame and guilt. They hid from God; Adam blamed Eve; Eve blamed the snake, and they even blamed God. Their fall brought sin to the human race, and from then on, every human comes into existence in a condition and position called “in Adam”. Further, this condition means we are born doomed to death: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). In Romans 5:12-14 Paul also tells us that “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” He is even more graphic in Ephesians 2:1-3 where he explains that we were all dead in our trespasses and sins; in fact, we are “by nature objects of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1-3).
The basic truth that all humans are born spiritually dead, doomed to physical death, and objects of God’s wrath is repugnant to most people.
The basic truth that all humans are born spiritually dead, doomed to physical death, and objects of God’s wrath is repugnant to most people. Without understanding this fact, however, people are not likely to see that they are completely unworthy of redemption. They can’t be good or do good on their own because they are fatally flawed. Their most stellar personal achievements and self-discipline are all tainted with corruption and count for nothing in God’s eyes.
The transfer to being “in Christ”
The question is, how does one transfer from being “in Adam” to being “in Christ”? This is the process which Adventists typically do not understand from a Biblical perspective. It has nothing to do with a conditional acceptance either of Jesus or by Jesus. Further, being “in Christ” is not secured nor confirmed by perfectly reflecting Christ’s character nor by producing works that “prove” we have faith. On the contrary, our transfer to the position of “in Christ” is entirely God’s work.
Paul says in Colossians 1:13 that the Father “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and has brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” God the Father Himself facilitates our transfer to being “in Christ”. Further, Ephesians 2:4 & 8 tells us that because of His great love for us, God in his mercy made us alive with Christ. “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works so that no one can boast.” In addition, Romans 5:17 clarifies that all who receive God’s provision of grace and the gift of righteousness “will reign in life”.
God Himself rescues us and transfers us to being in Christ. He provided for this miraculous change of position by Jesus’ death and resurrection—a sacrifice He made for each of us when we were still dead in our sins. Romans 3:21-26 describes this mystery; a righteousness apart from law has been made known in Jesus. This righteousness comes through faith in Jesus “for all who believe”. God presented Jesus as a “sacrifice of atonement” through faith in his blood. God took the initiative to restore humanity to himself. He offered himself as an atoning sacrifice to satisfy his own justice.
Not only did God take the initiative to reconcile us to himself—he doesn’t wait for us to clean up our act before declaring us righteous. As Colossians 2:13-14 tells us, when we were dead in our sin, Christ made us alive with Christ by forgiving our sin, canceling the written code that was against us—nailing it to the cross—and disarming the rulers and authorities, making a public display of them.
Furthermore, God not only forgives our sin and reconciles everything in heaven and on earth to Himself in His body through death (Col. 1:20-21), but he raised us up with Christ and “seated us with him in the heavenly realm” (Ephesians 2:6-7).
In the past I always thought of these positional statements—“in Adam”, “in Christ”, “Seated us with him in the heavenly realm”—as metaphors explaining some nebulous spiritual concept which we couldn’t really grasp. I am now seeing that these are real. When we receive the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, we literally move to a new position: in Christ. Our lives are now hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). But what does it mean to be brought to life spiritually? What does it mean that we are “hidden with Christ in God”? Further, how do we know these things are real at all?
The “proof”
For decades I struggled to understand what it meant to have a relationship with Jesus. I wanted to have one—I prayed to have one—but I couldn’t figure out what people (usually non-Adventists) meant when I heard them talk about “knowing Jesus” or “loving Jesus”. In fact, when I heard people talk about being “born again” or “knowing the Lord” I felt downright annoyed.
The song “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” always suggested to me that I was missing something—I had no idea how to experience love for Jesus or His love for me—but I finally decided that the idea of loving Him was also simply a figure of speech for some legal, rational transaction that I made with God. Of course, I was never sure I had actually completed such a transaction—or if I had, I was never sure it continued to be valid. The whole business of “knowing Jesus” was elusive and troubling.
I finally began to realize that the Bible clearly explains this miracle, and the Holy Spirit confirms it in us when we submit ourselves to Jesus and invite Him to reveal Himself to us. In Ephesians 1:13-14 Paul tells us that when we believe in Jesus, we are “marked with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession.” 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 further confirms this divine seal of protection. In this passage Paul tells us that God anoints us, sets His seal of ownership on us, and puts His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee of what is to come.
This miracle of the Holy Spirit living in us is what constitutes our new birth. When we accept Jesus and the Holy Spirit indwells us, our spirits which have been dead in sin come alive, and we become new creatures. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but Spirit gives birth to spirit,” is the way Jesus explained this phenomenon to Nicodemus (John 3:6).
Further, this birth by the Spirit is how we KNOW we have passed from death to life (John 11:25-26). Romans 8: 15-17 explains that the indwelling Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
God gives us this Spirit from Himself so we “may understand what God has freely given us” (1 Cor. 1:12).
We are not left to guess or to play a mental game of believing in something which is merely a concept. The Holy Spirit literally confirms to our spirits that we are in Christ—adopted sons and daughters of God—and heirs with Christ. This knowledge is real—but it is not generated by our rationalizing or by cognitive skills. It is spiritual knowledge which only comes when, through surrendering to belief in Christ’s sacrifice for us, we receive the Holy Spirit and with Him, the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:14-16).
The security
When we have accepted Jesus and become born of the Spirit, we can know we are eternally secure in Him. This new birth marks our transition from being “in Adam” to being “in Christ”. Our lives are hidden with Christ in God, and when He is revealed, we also will be revealed with Him in glory (Col 3:3-4). Nothing can remove us from Jesus’ or the Father’s hands; we are held in an eternally secure double grip (John 10:27-31). We will not be condemned, but we have already passed over from death to life (John 5:24). Even if we die, we will live—and if we believe in Him, we will never die (John 11:25-26).
When we are sealed and guaranteed our eternal inheritance, we then learn to live by the Spirit. Adventism often explains living by the Spirit as having the power to keep the law and do good works. This, they explain, is necessary for proving we are worthy of salvation—and indeed, necessary to stay saved.
In reality, living by the Spirit means learning to yield to Jesus instead of giving in to our self-protective, self-indulgent temptations. Paul explained the predicament of a person “in Christ” in Romans 6 and 7. “In my inner being I delight in God’s law,” he says, “but another law is at work in the members of my body” (Romans 7:21-25).
In Christ, our sinful mind no longer controls us. Our natural sinful mind cannot hope to submit to God’s law, but if the Spirit of Christ is living in us, we are no longer controlled by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, because now we are alive (Romans 8:7-10). When our spirits come alive in Christ, they are eternally connected to God through the Holy Spirit—but this spiritual life inhabits, for now, a body still dead in sin (Romans 8:10). Because of this condition, we still struggle with our sinful flesh. Our sinful flesh has no hope of becoming perfect—only at the resurrection will we have sinless bodies. Yet even in this condition, our sinful flesh is no longer in charge of us when we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
With our future secure and our position having been transferred from “in Adam” to “in Christ”, there is no condemnation when our sinful flesh fails. Further, when we are “in Christ Jesus” the “law of the spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death”(Romans 8:1-2). Now we have a new position and new power to enable us choose to submit to God and to surrender our temptations and habitual responses.
The difference between living by the Spirit when we are “in Christ” and trying to produce good works by the power of the Spirit is one of position. If we try to produce good works, praying for the Holy Spirit to help us, we are operating from the flesh, as if we were still “in Adam”.
The difference between living by the Spirit when we are “in Christ” and trying to produce good works by the power of the Spirit is one of position. If we try to produce good works, praying for the Holy Spirit to help us, we are operating from the flesh, as if we were still “in Adam”. This perspective depends on some external standard of morality and service by which we measure our spiritual progress. Adventists generally use the 10 Commandments and the traditional lifestyle teachings derived from Ellen White’s counsels as their standard of behavior.
Paul was forceful, however, in stating that if a person studies Moses (the law), a veil covers his heart, and his mind is made dull. Only in Christ is the veil removed and is freedom possible (2 Corinthians 3:14-18). Further, he told people who were in Christ that if they turned back to the law and used it to determine their justification, they had fallen from grace (Galatians 5:4-5).
Instead of depending on the law, a person in Christ depends completely upon Christ for his good deeds and his spiritual growth. Jesus is faithful to complete what He begins in us, Paul wrote in Philippians 1:3-6. Living by the Spirit means we offer ourselves as living sacrifices to Him (Romans 12:1), willing to surrender our lusts, dreams, anxieties, desires for gossip, revenge, and self-indulgence to Him.
When we are in Christ, we no longer struggle with sin. Instead, we deal with Jesus, and when sin tempts us or even overtakes us, our response is to submit and surrender to Jesus instead of to fight with sin. The challenge of being in Christ is that we give up our control to Him instead of owning it ourselves. As we respond to our Father’s discipline, we begin to realize that God asks us to surrender whatever identity we have that is other than Him. He asks us to trust Him for our provision, our contentment, our authority, our fulfillment—even for our work and our good deeds. We have to allow Him to teach us what He wants us to do, submitting ourselves to Him as we also submit ourselves to His teaching through His Word.
Judgment complete
When we are in Christ, we no longer have to prepare ourselves to pass the judgment. We have been judged in Christ, and we will not be condemned (John 5:24). Jesus cancelled the written code that was against us, nailing it to the cross in his body and defeating the spiritual powers and authorities who had claimed the right to “own” us (Eph 2:14; Col. 2: 14-15).
In Adam we are all spiritually dead, by nature objects of wrath. But God in mercy and love took into Himself the curse of the law and became sin for us. Instead of allowing us to die our deserved death, He took responsibility for us. Jesus, our Creator, took on a human body in order to represent us. He, the fullness of deity, contained Himself in a physical body, and as our representative—as the second Adam—lived the life we could not live, died the death we should have died, and broke the power of death by rising from the grave by the power that was within Him. God Himself took into Himself the separation and suffering that belonged to us.
We can never look at God and the singularity of the cross and accuse God of being capricious or vengeful. He Himself bore our sin, became the curse, and died the death of separation within Himself that belonged to us.
When we are in Christ we are in the most secure place in the universe. We are alive, we are forgiven, we are free, and we begin to bear the imprint of Christ as we surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit Who is in us. When we are in Christ we are literally hidden in God, and we no longer have to prove that we are worthy of salvation.
Jesus covered us with His blood and righteousness, and when God looks at us, He sees Jesus first. He looks at us through Christ, and He sees His perfection.
When we are in Christ that slowly ascending line measuring our stumbling increase in perfection is irrelevant. Our eternal security is not judged by our good deeds or by perfectly reflecting the character of Christ. When we are in Christ we will never stand without a mediator because we are hidden with Him in God. We are both saved and established by God through the gospel (Romans 16:25); we never have to keep ourselves saved.
In Christ we are seated at the right hand of God. In Christ we are children of God, and in Christ we finally know love.
“For you have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). †
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