What About Graham Maxwell and Tim Jennings?
I became a Christian, and then, about a year into it, discovered Adventism. There are several things that I have felt were off about it, but I initially came across Graham Maxwell who seemed to be sharing a different view of God than mainstream Adventists. I was wondering if anyone in your ministry has heard of Timothy Jennings with Come and Reason Ministries or Dr. Brad Cole, Herb Montgomery, Marco Delmonte. I only ask because they talk about how the righteousness by faith message got twisted back in 1888 at the Minneapolis conference. They also have different views of the two covenants and God’s law. I wonder how you as a ministry would perceive things through their lens.
I am open minded, I am okay if I find out everything is a lie within Adventism. The only thing I am holding onto at this point is the state of the dead as I do not believe people immediately go to heaven when they die.
Is there anyone that is open to doing Bible studies in regards to Tim Jennings teachings? I am a newer believer (within the last 3 years I was saved.) Tim Jennings’ explanations of the Sabbath make sense to me.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you for writing. I have to ask you a few questions: have you read any of our material at ProclamationMagazine.com? Or have you listened to our Former Adventist Podcast or our Former Adventist Fact Check weekly podcast that addresses the Sabbath School lessons?
First, the late Graham Maxwell espoused and taught, for about 40 years, a view of atonement that was not penal substitutionary atonement. He taught that God was a loving God who didn’t need his son to shed blood for atonement. He even wrote in his book Servants or Friends? that the blood of Jesus is “dark speech”. He purposefully created a view of God that did not require the blood of Jesus for atonement, and he promulgated this view to medical professional students at LLU for over 40 years.
Timothy Jennings and Come and Reason are similar although they do not approach the subject in exactly the same way. Yet the bottom line is the same: the blood of Jesus is not the central point of the gospel. Jennings makes much of Sabbath-keeping, and in this he reveals his loyalty and dependence upon the prophetess Ellen White.
The bottom line for all of these people is the same: they are deeply, fully, proudly Adventists. They claim to have a more gospel-oriented version of Adventism, but under the surface structure, they all have the same worldview that all Adventists have always had: they believe in a powerful Satan who leveled legimtate questions about God’s character that God must answer. They believe that keeping the seventh-day Sabbath is the mark of those who know and honor God and that the Sabbath reveals God’s “character”. They believe that man is purely physical, a body that breathes, and when the body ceases to breathe, the person’s identity ceases to exist except as a memory in God’s mind. This physicalism means that Adventists do not believe in “original sin”, that all men are disconnected from God’s life and born, literally, spiritually dead as per Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–18. They believe that salvation is about somehow accessing Christ’s “righteousness” as His power that helps them obey the law—because Ellen White declares that the Sabbath is the mark of those who are saved, and worship on Sunday is the mark of the beast. Thus Adventists believe that salvation must include loyalty to the “moral law”, especially the fourth commandment, and they never realize that the REAL problem is that all humans are born dead and are unable to seek, choose, or please God. God Himself must come to us and reveal Himself and draw us to Himself.
Further, Adventists from the beginning believed that God is not a Trinity. Their founding beliefs shaped all of their doctrines, and they believed that Jesus was not eternal almighty God but emanated or began in the distant past. The Holy Spirit, they believed, is power from God. Although Adventism gradually morphed and adopted a more Trinitarian-sounding statement, it never adopted the classic Christian doctrine of the Trinity. They have never believed that the three Persons of the Trinity share substance, and they believe Jesus is fallible and could have sinned. They believe God risked the universe and the godhead by sending Jesus who could have failed in his mission and plunged existence into chaos. This idea is complete heresy. Jesus is infallible and could not have failed in His mission.
Finally, ALL Adventists hold onto a belief in Ellen White. Some endorse her as a prophet; some say she was a God-inspired writer who provided guidance when the movement was young. Yet whatever way they view her, they all hold to her as a God-ordained gift for their church. They use her as scriptural commentary and their doctrines are derived from her writings.
All of these underlying beliefs are consistent among Maxwell, Jennings, and all the other Come and Reason people. They Are Adventists with a physicalist worldview and a firm belief that Ellen White has given them the paradigm of the great controversy for understanding realty and Scripture. Yet the Adventist teaching that God limits His own power to accommodate the free will of people is completely unbiblical. God is sovereign; as He asked Job, where were you when He created the world? Where were you when He formed and named the stars? Can you tame leviathan? And who are you to think you can explain how God works?
God has revealed Himself in His word, and by reading contextually without trying to accommodate the great controversy paradigm that comes from EGW, we find a completely reversed worldview from the SDA worldview. God created mankind, and Adam plunged the entire race into spiritual death that eventually results in physical death. Yet God also provided the only possible rescue of us from our own spiritual death. He took His own curse of death for sinners into Himself. He sent the Son, eternal, fully God with all the attributes of deity dwelling in Him bodily (Col 2:9) to become sin for us by imputation. As He became a curse for us and hung on the cross, even nature responded to God’s wrath being poured out on His Son for human sin. The sun darkened; the earth shook, and for three hours Jesus took God’s wrath and finally gave up His own spirit in death. Three days later, by His own divine power, He came to life and shattered our death sentence because His blood had been sufficient to pay for all our sin.
These Adventists do not believe that Jesus completed the atonement for sin at the cross. In fact, they teach that Jesus’ death was more of an example than a substitute: he demonstrated the lengths to which He would go to convince us He was good. He died to demonstrate that sinful man actually wants to kill God and be their own god, and so forth. Adventism does not teach that God, in Christ, atoned for our sin in full and broke His death sentence against all who believe and trust His blood and atonement and resurrection.
I am going to give you some links to read, and I urge you to listen or watch our two podcasts: Former Adventist Podcast and Former Adventist Fact Check. You will begin to understand the differences between Adventism and biblical Christianity. Adventism is a deception, a counterfeit Christianity that leads people deeply into bondage and despair. It is not Christian, and the law/Sabbath is not part of the gospel.
I also urge you to stop reading Adventist material. It is designed to deceive and to confuse you. Instead, begin reading through whole books of the New Testament. Read Galatians every day for a month. Then read John, and Hebrews, and Colossians, and Ephesians. Ask God to teach you what you need to know and to lead you to truth and to Himself.
Also, if you are interested, please email and ask for a link to join our Friday evening FAF Bible Studies at 7:00 PM Pacific Time.
I will give you some links below. https://lifeassuranceministries.org/2026/05/29/how-the-gospel-disproves-adventism/. https://lifeassuranceministries.org/2022/08/18/what-is-seventh-day-adventism/
Disoriented by Leaving Adventism
I was hoping to speak with someone that I might be able to talk to via voice, whether through Discord or maybe even over the phone. I’ve been hesitant to reach out simply because I am fearful of falling into the same trap I was once in.
I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I was told, you know, this is the only way, this is the truth, this is the light, so to speak. And as I got older, I think around age 16, I ended up leaving the church altogether. I’m now 37, and recently, within the last year, I started to do a lot of research as I started to get a little bit closer to God. I was under the assumption that because I couldn’t be perfect, I would never obtain salvation. It’s not that I disregarded God altogether, but I stopped worrying about following him.
I stopped worrying about trying to do what was right because I knew I was already lost because I couldn’t be perfect, as I felt I was taught within the Adventist organization. Now that I have left the organization altogether, it seems a bit odd that so many people are following what is clearly wrong. I’ve done a ton of research, and I found numerous accounts where Ellen White was incorrect on a lot of things, so the very foundation of Adventism is false. A lot of the principles and teachings of Adventism are inaccurate according to the Bible, which should be our only source truth.
I don’t understand—and I’ve been trying to figure out why—so many people are still within that organization when it is clearly false, and the whole purpose of Adventism is that they are “the remnant church”, the true church, the one that is supposedly right in God’s eyes. And yet, if you do any type of research, you can clearly see that its claim is not true.
My whole family is Adventist. I have a lot of people within my family who are higher up within the organization, and I simply don’t understand it.…I feel like I have a lot of unanswered questions, and I’m hoping to hear from someone that maybe has already gone through this struggle and come to some resolution. Maybe they can give me a bit more light, as I feel like I’m in a very dark area, and I have no one to really talk to. I also feel that I’ve simply just been rejected by most of my family or have been written off as hopeless or helpless.
My main concern is my younger sister. She has been marginalized from the family, and she stays in contact with me as I am the only one that seems to be understanding. She’s made a lot of bad choices in her life, and her children are being raised by others who are Adventists.
I feel like if one looks at Seventh-day Adventist principles, it almost seems like a different God that they are worshiping, a different “savior” that they are worshiping. And the fact that they say that Satan will ultimately pay for the sins in the lake of fire tells me that their own reasoning and their belief system very well may put them in hell.
All of this worries me because if I sit here and I know the truth, I should be telling them, but I also feel like for whatever reason, God doesn’t want me to. And I’m hoping that maybe there’ll be some type of clarity by speaking to someone else. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. I’m just really grasping at straws here.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Thank you for writing. First of all, you are not alone; your experience reflects what so many of us experience as we leave Adventism.
Your perceptions are accurate. Adventism actually IS dark; EGW received visions but not from God. Her teachings consistently deny the identity and eternality of the Lord Jesus as fully God. They deny His finished atonement. They deny that salvation is entirely a work of God and say that perfect obedience is the condition of salvation. EGW teaches an unbiblical view of the nature of man. Her unbiblical teaching of the identity of God/the Trinity and her unbiblical teaching of the nature of man have twisted the entire Adventist understanding of sin and of salvation as well.
I want to invite you to come to our Friday evening FAF Bible studies. We meet in person and via Zoom at 7:00 PM on Friday evenings, Pacific time. If you email FormerAdventist@gmail.com and request a link, Richard will add you to the mailing list to receive the weekly links with the attached links to the evening’s study sheet and the song we’ll sing together. We go verse by verse through Scripture and learn to understand the words and to compare what Scripture says with what we thought the Bible said. I believe you would love the fellowship as well as the learning.
People remain in Adventism because they love their Adventist identity. They have a position, a place, a role within the organization. They are educated and employed there. They understand the culture, the food, the worldview. Many Adventists do not want to deal with the dissonance that their questions bring up; they prefer their comfort. They prefer their self-appointed identities as God’s true people even if their beliefs are founded in deception. They reason that if so many intelligent people have been able to make Adventism make sense, who are they to question?
Yet Scripture says that men love darkness rather light. Our natural condition is “dead in sin”, as Ephesians 2:1–3 explains, and dead people can’t choose the light. God has to reveal Himself, and He enables us to see that we face a decision. Many people are not willing to pursue the implications of that decision.
Have you listened to the Former Adventist Podcast and/or our Former Adventist Fact Check? I believe that these two podcasts will be very helpful for you. We discuss our Adventist beliefs and worldview and contrast that with what Scripture actually says. I believe that if you begin following these two podcasts, you would find yourself gradually beginning to understand what’s WRONG with Adventism and why it’s so confusing. Yet God’s word, on its own, read contextually and literally, makes complete sense. But we have to learn to trust it and read it.
Here are links to tour latest episodes of our two podcasts on YouTube. They are also on any podcast server such as Apple or Spotify, etc. I am also attaching links to a couple of article that will help you understand the warped worldview of Adventism and the pagan, new-age sources of Adventism’s health message. Also, ur website ProclamationMagazine.com is full of articles on every subject related to Adventist doctrine. We have free online books that address Adventism: Dale Ratzlaff’s Sabbath in Christ and The Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists are extremely insightful and address all the Adventist proof-texts and assumptions about the Sabbath and about the investigative judgment:
- June 6–12, 2026 - June 4, 2026
- We Got Mail - June 4, 2026
- How the Gospel Disproves Adventism - May 29, 2026