Lesson 2: “The Message of the Cross”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Adventist, what was the purpose of “the cross”? Why did Jesus die? What do we learn from the cross? What was God doing by having His Son be crucified? How does the cross bring about redemption of humanity? Was Jesus’ death a substitute punishment for human sin, or was it a demonstration of God’s willingness to go to extreme lengths to show He loved us? What did His death accomplish, really?
Foolishness To Those Who Are Perishing
This week’s lesson was a demonstration of obfuscation. The author attempted to make sense of 1 Corinthians 1:17–31 and 2:1–5, yet even after taking over an hour to read the lesson, the Teachers Comments, and related texts, I could not articulate, from the lesson, the actual purpose of the cross. There were plenty of pious statements, but nothing in the lesson explained what Jesus actually DID by dying on the cross.
First Corinthians 1 and 2 are profound passages about God’s wisdom and the foolishness of mankind. Paul is writing to believers, to an established church. He is reminding them of his teaching while he stayed with them for a year and a half. He is reminding them what it means to be “in Christ” as per 1 Corinthians 1:30. He is reminding them that the truth they have, the truth that has changed them and caused them to become born-again believers has resulted in their being filled with the Holy Spirit and given the “mind of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:16).
Paul is reminding these believers that what they have in Christ is completely unseen by unbelieving Jews and gentiles. Jews look for signs; gentiles look for wisdom. But the Corinthians know the reality of Christ, the true wisdom of God that has changed the normal life of natural man by the blood of Christ shed on the cross: the “penal substitutionary atonement” of the man Christ Jesus who took our sin in His flesh on the cross by imputation and died an eternal, sufficient death to satisfy God’s wrath against sin.
Death was the Trinity’s declared consequence for human sin, and in Adam all humanity is born dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1–3). Jesus is the only One who was able to die a substitutionary death for humanity. He was God and our Creator; He was fully man and able to die a human death that satisfied the Trinity’s demand that all sinners must die. In other words, the Lord Jesus paid the price that He had established for human sin.
This is all in the background as Paul writes the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians. His discussion of God’s wisdom—the fact that God sent His Son in human flesh to be the substitute for the human race in order to redeem all who believe—is unimaginable to unbelievers. Unbelieving Jews looked for a sign; they were unwilling to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah because He came in a different way than they expected. They wanted a miracle-worker who would forever punish Rome and establish the Jewish kingdom again. Unbelieving gentiles had no understanding of Jesus’ substitutionary death; they looked for intellectual wisdom. They were all about philosophy, reason, intellectual arguments. The literal death of the God-Man for human sin went against their pagan worldview.
The lesson never explains why Paul would preach “Christ and Him crucified”. Its discussion of 1 Corinthians 1 and the first five verses of chapter two actually remind me of Paul’s words about gentile “wisdom”. For example, in Sunday’s lesson, the author explains that Paul preached in Athens as per Acts 17 and then he went to Corinth. The lesson states this:
In Athens, Paul used logic, science, and philosophy, but this resulted in little fruit. So, “he decided to follow another plan of labor in Corinth in his efforts to arrest the attention of the care-less and the indifferent. He determined to avoid elaborate arguments and discussions, and ‘not to know anything’ among the Corinthians ‘save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.’ ”—Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 244.
I read that passage—and then I re-read it. Stunned, I turned to Acts 17 to see if there was any hint that Paul had attempted to persuade the Athenians by using their own rhetoric style but ended up with “little fruit”. In fact, the passage suggests nothing of the sort. The Athenians heard Paul conversing with some of the philosophers in the marketplace, and they asked him to explain the “strange things” they heard him saying:
So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all [people] life and breath and all things; and He made from one [man] every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined [their] appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His offspring.’ “Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to suppose that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the craft and thought of man. “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now commanding men that everyone everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He determined, having furnished proof to all by raising Him from the dead.”—Acts 17:22–31 LSB
I have long thought that this particular sermon of Paul’s is one of the most beautiful, insightful deliveries recorded in the book of Acts. Paul led those Greek pagan philosophers through creation, through His sovereignty and provision for all life on hearth. He led them through God’s pre-determined decision of where and when each person and nation would exist. He used their own poetry to establish that all mankind belongs to God, and His Divine Nature is far above all objects that any man can devise. Paul talked them through God’s patience in overlooking their sin and has now brought to them the appointed day of repentance. He warned them that they must repent because He has “fixed a day” in which a Man He appointed will judge the world, a Man qualified by having been raised from the dead!
This sermons summarized everything important for those Athenians to understand: Yahweh is greater than their gods, than they themselves, than their own mental constructs. Yahweh “owns” them, and Yahweh will judge them through the One qualified to judge by having risen from the dead!
The fact that the lesson downplayed this sermon as merely addressing the Greeks with “logic, science, and philosophy” is incredibly revealing. Adventism has NO idea of the significance of Jesus death—and especially no idea of the meaning of His resurrection! In one simple passage the author of this lesson revealed that Adventism cannot define what an unbeliever needs to know. They cannot articulate that a pagan mind needs to understand that God Is, and He is sovereign, that He is their creator, the one who judges, and that He has provided God the Son to judge AND save them if they repent of their wickedness and idolatry. Furthermore, He is qualified to judge AND save because He has overturned the curse of death by His own sufficient sacrifice and resurrection!
Adventism Doesn’t Like Jesus’ Blood
Adventism simply cannot articulate that Jesus has fully atoned for human sin. Even more, within Adventism there is a growing movement among some that insists that evangelicalism has misunderstood Paul, that the penal substitutionary atonement is not biblical. For example, we recently had a comment on our YouTube channel under one of our podcasts from an Adventist elder. In his comment he said:
Regarding atonement, the evangelical faith has largely gotten caught up in PSA [penal substitutionary atonement], which unfortunately is not supported Biblically. To add to that, the idea that the cross finished everything in redemptive history has damaged the power of the church to transform lives.
As I read this Sabbath School lesson, I realized that the author was verbally dancing all around the idea of Jesus’ cross-death without ever explaining why Paul would preach Christ and Him crucified. He was leaving room for exactly the attitude that the YouTube comment articulated. Many Adventists prefer to think that Jesus’ death took care of sin in a general way, that all people are born into a world in which sin is forgiven, and all they have to do is to agree and “sign on” to being saved. Of course, they then show their loyalty to God by continuing to keep the Sabbath and by doing compassionate social deeds for the needy.
What’s missing from this perspective? Repentance!
Adventists have no real understanding that they need to repent. Furthermore, because they have no idea that they have an immaterial spirit that is born dead in sin and must be brought to life, they do not understand the biblical teaching of being born again.
The Adventist great controversy, physicalist worldview is much more like a pagan Greek’s view than it is biblical. In fact, the Adventist worldview does not understand that when Adam ate the forbidden fruit, he literally died spiritually that very day—just as God said he would. His body continued to live, but his spirit died. His and Eve’s and all humanity’s physical death was the consequence of their spiritual death.
Ephesians 2:1–3 tells us that we are all born dead in sin, “by nature children of wrath”. Jesus said that all people are condemned until they believe; when they believe, they pass out of condemnation (John 3:18).
Adventism does not believe that humans have spirits separate from their bodies, and they do not believe people are literally born spiritually dead. They do not understand that salvation is about BELIEVING and passing at that moment from death to life. Salvation is about our spirits recognizing who Jesus is and that He took our sin and paid its price and TRUSTING Him completely. When we trust Him and give up all we love—including our Adventist identities and our intellectual constructs and believe in Jesus alone, we have eternal life (John 5:24).
Because Adventism does not believe in a biblical view of the nature of man, Adventists do not understand the significance of Jesus’ cross. In fact, Jesus’ blood makes them uncomfortable. It seems “too much”, it seems to put them in Jesus’ debt. They don’t like to think that He personally bled and died their death.
Wednesday’s lesson further reveals the Adventist lack of understanding of the scope and sufficiency of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It says:
For centuries, the cross has been, for Christians, a symbol of faith. It is hard for twenty-first-century Christians to understand how crazy the idea of a crucified God was for the first-century mindset.
However, it is precisely because this was such a shocking message that makes it worthy of our most profound reflections. The portrait of a crucified Messiah makes it entirely clear to the whole universe how far God was willing to go to complete the plan of redemption.
What does that even mean—that the “portrait of a crucified Messiah makes it entirely clear to the whole universe how far God was willing to go to complete the plan of redemption”?
How FAR God was willing to go? How far COULD God go? And who is judging how “far” God would go? Who is judging God, after all?
And there we see a foundational flaw in the Adventist worldview. Their god is on trial. Their god is allowing Satan and Jesus to engage in a great controversy over the souls of men. The Adventist god is being judged by the watching universe to see whether or not He is “fair”. Somehow his allowing his son to come to earth and take on flesh to engage with Satan as a human is a public act of divine humility that is intended to convince the watching universe that God isn’t self-serving; He is self-sacrificing and even put his son in harm’s way in order to give humans a fighting chance and in order to defeat Satan.
Right there, in that veiled but revealing confusion we see the Adventist great controversy.
This belief is heresy! God is not on trial. The universe is not judging God; He is the creator of all the exists, as Paul’s sermon to the Athenians declared. God is the final judge and arbiter of all—and there is no “watching universe”!
Furthermore, Jesus’ hanging on a cross is not the “thing” that shows God’s humble compassion. Jesus died as the willing Sacrifice for us. Not only that, but 2 Corinthians 5:19 explains that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them…”
The Father was IN Christ as He hung on the cross, enduring God’s wrath for human sin. Jesus was not alone on the cross although Jesus the Man felt the weight of human sin separating Him from experiencing the Father’s closeness. This passage in 2 Corinthians—part of the very books this lesson series is supposedly addressing—tells us that the Father was IN Christ as He hung on the cross, endured God’s wrath, and died!
The cross is about Jesus’ paying the sufficient sacrifice to atone for all human sin. His resurrection, however, is the proof that His death was sufficient. God’s demand was satisfied; Christ’s resurrection broke our curse of death, and when we believe and trust His finished atonement on the cross, we pass from death to life! We leave behind our natural curse of sin into which we were born.
When Paul said He preached Christ and Him crucified, he never meant he ended with the cross. He always included the resurrection, just as he did in Athens. The cross of Christ implies the resurrection, and the resurrection is what gives us LIFE!
Adventism simply has no idea what the resurrection of Jesus actually means because it does not understand our natural curse of spiritual death and our passing out of death into life when we trust Jesus’ completed substitutionary atonement.
Furthermore, it is 1 Corinthians 15:3, 4 that declares the simple gospel which Paul said God gave him and that he always preaches:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,—1 Corinthians 15:3, 4 LSB
Again, this definition is in the first of the two books this lesson attempts to teach, but the impact of this pure gospel message is never explained. This is the pure gospel which Paul preached, which all the apostles preach, and which we still preach today. Yet Adventism does not understand this nor teach this gospel. Again, the lesson cannot explain the significance of the cross of Christ. It cannot explain what Jesus actually DID on the cross or WHY He did it. All it can do is to say that Jesus on the cross somehow helps to vindicate God’s reputation!
Adventism’s Different Gospel
At the end of Friday’s lesson there is a discussion question which reveals even more of the counterfeit nature of Adventism’s gospel. Here is the question:
The message of a crucified Christ was a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness for the Greeks. What biblical themes that we preach today can produce the same effect in modern audiences, and why?
This question reveals the Adventist belief that Paul’s gospel was present truth for his day. Today, though, we have new details to preach. What “biblical themes” might Adventists be preaching today that would be different from a crucified Christ?
We all know that Adventism’s gospel is the three angels’ messages. These messages are “code” for teaching the seventh-day Sabbath and the call to leave the Sunday churches and to avoid receiving the mark of the beast, or Sunday-keeping. The Adventist gospel also includes the “health message” which they say provides them with physical and mental health in order to perceive the Holy Spirit and to live holy lives. The Adventist gospel includes the idea that Jesus did not complete the atonement on the cross but that He is continuing to apply His blood and to atone for sins as people remember to confess them. The Adventist Jesus did not offer one sacrifice that paid for all sin all at once.
Yet 1 and 2 Corinthians alone are very clear: there is ONE GOSPEL, and it is eternally true. The message of the Lord Jesus taking our sin in His body on the cross and dying in our place is universal and applies for all time. Only Jesus is in the gospel. There is no Sabbath message, no health message, no “sanctuary service” or ongoing atonement.
The true gospel addresses sinful man and asks us to believe and trust in Jesus’ sufficient, once-for-all blood atonement. Adventism doesn’t like Jesus’ blood, but Jesus’ blood is the only way to the Father. We cannot see God apart from trusting Jesus and receiving His atonement for our sin. Second Corinthians 5:21 says this:
He made Him who knew no sin [to be] sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:21 LSB
The gospel Paul preached is the gospel the Lord asks us to share today. We are all born dead in sin and need to be made alive. We can only receive life for our dead spirits when we trust and believe in the finished blood atonement of the Lord Jesus.
If you have never trusted Jesus alone, if you have never admitted that you are helplessly sinful and unable to please God, come to Jesus and repent. See Him hanging on the cross, having become sin for you by imputation. See Him taking God’s wrath for your sin as He hung between heaven and earth and the sun refused to shine. See Him crying out as He committed His spirit to the Father as He died. See Him buried, and see Him shattering death early in the morning on the first day of the week as He broke your curse of death! His sacrifice was sufficient to pay for your sin—for all sin—once for all!
Believe in Him today—and you will know what it means to be truly alive. Let your Adventist specialness go and embrace Jesus alone. Your life will never be the same! †
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