Lesson 9: “Sin, the Gospel, and the Law”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Adventist, when you sin, how do you restore your relationship with God—or do you actually have a relationship with God? Does the law help you relate to God? Does the gospel help you? What Is the gospel, anyway—and what power does it have over your sin? Do you ever feel as if you cannot satisfy God’s demands, no matter how hard you try? Does it ever occur to you that perhaps Adventism didn’t tell you the truth about who you really are or about what sin has actually done to humanity?
Adventism Denies Spiritual Death
This lesson opens with the Adventist view that our sins sever us from God, and our obedience to the law can restore our relationship with Him. This view is entirely consistent with the Adventist understanding that humans have no immaterial spirit that is born dead and must be made alive. In fact, Adventism, on the authority of Ellen White, teaches its members that obedience to the law is the secret to being worthy of salvation. For example, Saturday’s lesson sets the stage with these words:
Yes, every person has sinned, and our thoughts, motives, actions, and words hurt others, ourselves, and God. Ultimately, sin destroys our relationship with God, but God has revealed Himself to us through the knowledge of His law, which shines light on the sin in our lives.
This week let’s explore the reason God gave us His law and, when someone transgresses God’s law and consequently sins, what or who can help to restore their relationship with God.
We see there that Adventism teaches that our sins destroy our “relationship with God”, and the lesson sets out to explain how to restore that relationship by getting help from God to obey. Sunday’s lesson presses harder on the Adventist worldview, reminding readers that the great controversy is playing out in their lives, and satan is trying harder and harder to keep them from having “a close relationship with God”:
The great controversy is real, and we are all involved in it. The cosmic battle that began in heaven is now being played out in each of our own lives, as well.
Satan knows that he has to pull out everything he’s got in the times that we’re living in, right before Jesus comes, to keep us from having a close relationship with God. Perhaps you’ve been distracted with something that may not necessarily be wrong in itself but takes so much time and energy that there’s very little left for God.
In typical Adventist fashion, the lesson reminds the reader that the burden for their obedience and relationship with God lies in their own decisions. They are to blame if they don’t feel close to God, and they are responsible to repair that relationship—as if the relationship were originally in place, and they allowed it to lapse. Just to establish the groundwork supporting our analysis that Adventism requires personal obedience as a condition for salvation, we will share some Ellen White quotes:
Our salvation depends upon our keeping all of God’s commandments. Perfect obedience without hesitancy or doubt is all that God will accept. We should not even obey the commandments merely to secure heaven, but by obedience to please Him who died to save sinners from the penalty of the transgression of the Father’s law. The sinner’s salvation depends upon his ceasing to transgress and obedience to that law he has transgressed. No one should venture or presume upon the mercy of God, feeling at liberty to sin as much as he dares, and not abandon the hope that God will finally pardon and save. It is a sad resolve to follow Christ as far off as possible, venturing as near the verge of perdition as possible without falling in.—3 Lt Ms, Lt 35, 1877, par. 25
Christ came to this earth and lived a life of perfect obedience, that men and women, through His grace, might also live lives of perfect obedience. This is necessary to their salvation. “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” —15LtMs, Ms 80, 1900, par. 10
Christ has a church in every age. Obedience to the commandments of God gives us a right to the privileges of this church. There are those in the church who are made no better by their connection with it. They themselves break the terms of their election. If we comply with the conditions God has made, we shall secure our election to salvation.—RH July 17, 1900, Par. 22
The Bible never requires obedience to the law as a condition of salvation. Even more, Jesus did not come to keep the law in order to show us how to keep the law as He did.
Adventism cannot teach the biblical gospel because Adventism teaches a heretical view of the nature of man: that humans are merely bodies that breathe. They do not teach that humans have immaterial spirits that can know God or not, spirits that are born dead in sin and must be made alive in Christ.
Adventists do not teach that we are by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), nor that there is NOT ONE person who does good or seeks for God (see Romans 3:9–18).
Adventism steadfastly refuses to believe that when God created man in His image, it was God’s giving him a spirit from Him that constituted the essence of that image. God is not physical; He does not have a body. He is spirit, and he created man to be able to worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Our being in God’s image is not a physical thing; it is our spiritual nature, our identities as spirits that defines our being in His image.
The true gospel does not include the law, nor is the law attached to the gospel. The law was given to Israel 430 years after God’s made His unconditional covenant with Abraham (Gal. 3:17), and it lasted UNTIL THE SEED came: the Lord Jesus (Gal. 3:19). In fact, Hebrews explains that the gospel frees us from “the dead works” of keeping the law in order to please God:
Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of teaching about washings and laying on of hands, and the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.—Hebrews 6:1, 2 LSB
For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?—Hebrews 9:13, 14 LSB
None of our works of the law help us achieve salvation. Instead, now that Christ has come and is the fulfillment of all the shadows of the law, He Himself IS our salvation. He is our entire access to God, the entire reason we are justified when we believe. His obedience to become sin for us and to die in our place on the cross IS our salvation when we believe. In fact, the law was given to INCREASE SIN, not to teach us to stop sinning! Read Paul’s words:
For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were appointed sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be appointed righteous. Now the Law came in so that the transgression would increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.—Romans 5:19–21 LSB
Adventism, however, cannot teach this simple gospel of the Lord Jesus becoming sin for us, taking God’s wrath in our place, dying our death and being buried, and rising on the third day, shattering our curse of death because His blood was a sufficient payment for our sin. They cannot teach this gospel because they do not believe that humans are born literally spiritually dead. Salvation is not about obedience; it is about being made ALIVE in Christ through faith in Him.
We are by nature dead and under God’s wrath, spiritually dead and disconnected from God. We cannot be saved unless we receive His resurrection life by faith. Obeying the law with increasing success is not the essence of our salvation. Consistent Sabbath-keeping will not recommend us to God whatsoever. We are saved ONLY when we trust in Jesus’ completed atonement and place our faith and belief in His shed blood as the sufficient payment for God’s just demand that sin requires death.
When we believe and trust God, we pass at that moment from death to life, and we are sealed by the permanently indwelling Holy Spirit who gives us the life of Jesus and teaches us to trust Him and to apply His word to our lives.
What Does Adventism Do with Adam’s Sin?
The Teachers Comments again reveal the true nature of the Adventist worldview and doctrine. On pages 121 and 122, we find this confusing but telling rationalization of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve’s sin:
The only passage that discloses the effect of sin on the nature of Adam and Eve is found in Genesis 3:22, 23, in which God notices that Adam and Eve were originally like God. (Note that the Hebrew verb hayah, translated “has become” in Genesis 3:22 /NKJV], should be translated as “was” in the past tense, just as in Genesis 3:1). The common translation “has become” wrongly suggests that the sin marked an improvement in their condition and status. In addition, such translation gives the impression that the serpent was right when he warned Eve that God did not want her and Adam to become like Him (Gen. 3:5). In reality, God deplores the tragic reality that, after sin, Adam and Eve have lost their likeness to Him. Only God acknowledges, then, the real negative effect of sin on them. Adam and Eve were unable to make a confession of sin because they had lost their connection with God. As long as Adam and Eve had not sinned, their connection with God allowed them to discern the reality of sin. As soon as they departed from God’s presence, they lost their capacity to discern between good and evil. As Ellen G. White comments: “By the mingling of evil with good, his [Adam’s] mind had become confused, his mental and spiritual powers benumbed. No longer could he appreciate the good God had so freely bestowed.”—Education, p. 25.
The basic lesson we learn from the fall of humanity is simply this: because humans have sinned, they have lost their innate sense of discernment, the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. So, apart from God, we are unable to exercise that judgment successfully. For this reason, God gave us the law and the gospel. We need the law to guide us in the right direction. Likewise, we need the grace of Christ to help us walk with hope and love in that direction.
It should be immediately obvious that the author is not believing the words of Scripture. Instead of reading Genesis 3:22, 23 as written, the author instead declares that the Hebrew underlying “has become” is mistranslated! In order to understand this discussion, let’s first read Genesis 3:22, 23:
Then Yahweh God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us to know good and evil; and now, lest he send forth his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever”—therefore Yahweh God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.—Genesis 3:22, 23 LSB
This response follows Eve’s and Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit, and it echoes what the serpent said to Eve as he deceived her:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which Yahweh God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it, and you shall not touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”—Genesis 3:1–5 LSB
So, when Adam and Eve hid after eating the fruit, God used the same word that the serpent used: BECOME. Satan promised Eve that she would become like God if she ate, and God said after they ate, that “man has become like one of Us” (most likely a reference to the persons of the Trinity).
Exactly how did man become like God in eating that fruit? Does God have a shadow-self that knows sin? Was knowing good and evil a GOOD thing, a form of becoming self-aware and god-like, as I heard an Adventist pastor, Rudy Torres, teach in his Sabbath School class years ago at Glendale City Church?
Appeal to Hebrews Scholar
I love language and I know English, but I do not know Hebrew. I am privileged, though, to know a Hebrew scholar. I appealed to our Life Assurance Ministries board member, Kaspars Ozolins, a former Adventist who earned a doctorate in historical linguistics at UCLA before he left Adventism. After becoming a Christian, Kaspars earned an M. Div. at The Master’s Seminary in Sun Valley, California, before serving in Cambridge as a research associate at Tyndale House in Old Testament and the Ancient Near East. Today he is on the faculty at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as Assistant Professor of Old Testament Interpretation.
Normally I do not recite the titles and academic accomplishments of the commentators and sources I use, but in this case, I am giving details because I know how Adventists think. They measure people’s authority by their academic and professional accomplishments, and I want Adventists to know that the sloppy interpretation of these Teachers Comments are illegitimate and intentionally deceptive. Here is what Kaspars said about the quote above taken from the Teachers Comments:
You know what this is? This is an argument for man’s works over against trusting in God.
- First, the Hebrew: the verb could be taken either way, but the context definitively rules out the SS interpretation. For comparison, see Exodus 32:1.
- The whole flow and argumentation of the passage is upset with the interpretation suggested by SS. The presentation particle הִנֵּה (“behold”) often draws attention to new facts on the scene. The subsequent language indicates clearly that God’s response is in reaction to these new facts on the scene.
- What is especially sinister about this argument is that, contra the SS claim, the argument *does* take the side of Satan! Knowledge of good and evil is what he offers. So knowledge (= potentially a form of works-righteousness) is favored over simply trusting what God has said.
- In fact, I have long suspected that what the serpent actually is offering Eve is a rival form of deity. One can easily translate verse 4 in the following way: “You will become gods, knowers (pl.) of good and evil.” So I find the SS argument to be perhaps another piece of evidence which demonstrates that time and time again, Adventism takes the side of SATAN.—Kaspars Ozolins, May 4, 2026.
God was not saying that Adam and Eve had lost their identity as creatures made in the image of God. He was not arguing that before they ate, they had spiritual discernment but afterwards, they lost their ability to discern between good and evil. God was definitely NOT teaching that because we don’t have natural discernment any longer, we need the law “to guide us in the right direction” while also needing “the grace of Christ to help us walk with hope and love in that direction.”
And just by the way, if Adam and Eve had spiritual discernment before they ate, why on earth did they fall prey to Satan’s deception? Clearly pre-fall Adam and Eve were not wise like God! They were creatures who were made in His image but who were still vulnerable to deception!Their problem was that they did not BELIEVE GOD. They were tempted to look away from trusting God even without understanding WHY He commanded them not to eat.
God was saying that by not believing His word to them and taking the serpent’s bait instead, they suddenly KNEW evil. They personally experienced spiritual death: they hid, they knew shame; they blamed each other and the snake and even God Himself for their sin. They took no personal responsibility. They literally DIED the day they ate: they were permanently disconnected from God’s life, and they had no possibly way to gain back that connection with God. They Were Dead.
God, eternal and sovereign and all-knowing, KNEW what evil was. He knew that if they ate that fruit through disbelieving His word to them, they would no longer have His spirit and His life. They would be physically alive but spiritually dead—and this spiritual death is what they bequeathed to all humans after them.
Adventism, though, changes the meaning of the text in order to preserve the idea that Adam and Eve simply lost their identity as carrying God’s image. Yet Scripture NEVER says humans are not in God’s image because they have sinned. What it does say is that they are dead and condemned by nature—but they are still the creatures God made in His image.
Adventism erases man’s immaterial spirit and changes the definition of “death” to something merely physical. Instead, they build a case for us to need to return to law-keeping in order to please God. The gospel, they say, is depending on “Christ’s merits”—His perfect law-keeping—as a power source for us to obey the law. They must insist, as Ellen White said, that our salvation depends upon following Christ’s “example” and learning to obey the Commandments—especially the fourth, of course.
If humans are merely physical, bodies that breathe, then sin also must be physical: yielding to temptation and breaking the law. Salvation, then, must also be physical—managing to KEEP the law while asking Jesus to help them be strong enough to obey. After all, if He obeyed the law, we can, too—and Jesus came to show us that if we pray enough and trust His example enough, we’ll succeed just as He did.
In learning to discipline ourselves to keep that law, then, we will actually become like Christ—and what Satan offered to Eve will actually be ours: we can become godlike, partakers of “the divine nature”—through our commitment to keep the law, obey the Sabbath, and see Jesus as our guide and example. In being committed and obedient, therefore, we will prove that we are safe to save. By keeping the law we draw ever closer to God’s heart and reflect His character more and more perfectly, heaven will be our just reward for our commitment to obedience to the law.
This Adventist belief is heresy. The truth is that when Adam and Eve sinned, they died spiritually, and the entire human race was condemned to spiritual death through Adam. Because there was no possible way we could reverse our condition, God sent His Son in the form of a man. Fully God clothed in flesh, the Lord Jesus never sinned because He was born spiritually alive, conceived by the Holy Spirit and never in danger of sinning or failing in His mission. He lived as a human, growing up, becoming a teacher in Israel, and finally dying on a cross for us. He became sin for us so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). On the third day He shattered our death sentence by rising from the dead because His sacrifice was sufficient to satisfy God’s justice.
When we acknowledge that we are sinners, born unable to please God and in need of a Savior, when we repent and trust Jesus’ substitutionary death for our sin and believe that He rose from the dead on the third day—all according to Scripture—we pass at that moment from death to life, and God’s Spirit seals us for eternity at that moment.
If you have not admitted you are a sinner and acknowledged that the Lord Jesus has already done EVERYTHING necessary for your salvation—that your dead works of keeping the Sabbath and the food laws have no merit and will not contribute to your salvation—then look to Jesus now.
Trust Him alone—and pass today from death to life! You will know the power of the gospel and the gift of the Lord Jesus on your behalf. Believe—and be born again today. †
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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