Lesson 8: “The Power of the Resurrection”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! |
Adventist, what difference does Christ’s resurrection make to you in your earthly life? Is it a promise of something that will happen by and by, or is it something that changes your daily reality? What did the resurrection MEAN, and what changed in the fabric of reality—or did anything change?
What’s wrong here?
It’s hard to show exactly what’s wrong with Adventism’s teaching about the resurrection without understanding its heretical physicalist worldview. Yet because Adventism teaches that humans have no immaterial spirit separate from the body, they can ignore the biblical teaching about the nature of man: dead in sin.
Because Adventism believes humans are physical bodies that come to life and display personality and emotions and will when they actually breathe, they do not understand the significance of God’s declaration that Adam would die the very day he ate of the forbidden fruit. Adventism says that Adam did not die that day, but he BEGAN to die. Yet God said he would die the day he ate.
Adam DID die—he died spiritually. He hid; he and Eve knew shame; they named each other; they blamed the snake; they even blamed God (…this woman you gave me…). Adam and Eve died that very day; their physical deaths years later were the consequence of their spiritual deaths.
It is Adam’s spiritual death that we inherit as humans. We are all born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:1–3). It is our spiritual death that must be overcome in order for our physical death to be redeemed.
Jesus told Nicodemus, the respected and religious Pharisee:
Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 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. “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear its sound, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.”—John 3:3–8 LSB
Being born again is the miracle of having our dead-in-sin spirits brought to life by Christ’s resurrection life. Notice that Jesus distinguished between flesh and spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh; Spirit gives birth to spirit.
Jesus was not referring to bodies and breath. He was speaking of the parts of humanity that He made when He created Adam—and the part of Adam that was in God’s image was his spirit: the very thing that God personally breathed into Adam at creation.
Here is God the Son, the Creator Himself, saying to Nicodemus that there was nothing he could do to ensure that he would be saved. Nothing at all. He had to be born again. Jesus knew what he was saying; He Himself was the Creator, and He was also the Author of life and of God’s word to mankind.
Jesus confirmed this fact that man has an immaterial part that reflects God when He said to the Samaritan woman:
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:24 LSB
Jesus wasn’t speaking in a metaphor; He was articulating reality. God does not have a body; He IS Spirit. He is immaterial. True worshipers must worship the God who is Spirit in their own spirits. They must worship in spirit—in the immaterial part of their very identities, the part of them that can know the God who is spirit—and they must also worship in truth.
Truth is mentally perceived, processed by synapses and evaluated by logic and reason. Truth is reality. True worshipers must be willing to KNOW what is real and true; being sincere in a false worldview does not equal true worship. True worshipers must worship in spirits that acknowledge the One True God and worship Him according to the terms and reality that He reveals cognitively in His word and spiritually by His own Spirit teaching us how to understand and apply His word of truth.
The lesson attempts to explicate 1 Corinthians 15, the chapter most famous for its addressing the resurrection, on the foundation of a false worldview. It reiterates throughout the lesson statements and questions which cement the reader in his Adventist physicalist worldview, mocking and shaming those who believe the biblical model of body and spirit as the identity of man.
Establishing a False Foundation
Adventism mocks the biblical belief that humans are bodies and spirits that separate at death. By denying humanity’s immaterial spirit that is by nature dead and under the wrath of God (John 3:36), by denying that each person is born cursed and condemned (John 3:18), they shape a “plan of salvation” that put themselves in the driver’s seat. If they are only physical, then sin has to be physically defined and physically driven. Inherited sin they say, is genetic propensities to evil.
If sin is physical, inherited genetically from our forebears and driving us inexorably toward sins that are condemned by the law, then salvation must be our commitment to deny our flesh and to “accept Jesus”, believing that He managed to NOT act on His genetic propensities inherited from Mary.
Adventists understand Jesus’ sinlessness to be the result of His perfect submission of His will to God as He prayed and depended upon the Holy Spirit’s power to strengthen Him to say NO to temptation. They see sinlessness as the perfect obedience and submission of one’s will that Jesus demonstrated, and they believe that if Jesus managed not to break the law, they, too, can avoid sin by praying ceaselessly and asking the Holy Spirit to help them, just as Jesus did.
This scenario IS Adventism’s model. The Holy Spirit is their Helper to give them the will and the power to say NO to sin. Jesus’ perfect “merits” of sinless obedience are the model and promise they depend on to help them also obey God.
To an Adventist, “sin” is physical, and ultimately salvation is also physical. Jesus’ sinlessness was a literal victory won in His flesh as he resisted Satan and submitted His will to God. Jesus is the Adventists’ example.
Yet this understanding of man’s nature, of the nature of Christ, and of the nature of sin and of salvation is heretical. This is NOT what Scripture reveals.
Salvation is NOT about becoming obedient. It is not about vindicating the law or vindicating God. It is not about obeying the Sabbath or embracing the law more and more deeply. Rather salvation is about one thing: believing God and passing out of spiritual DEATH into LIFE.
Obedience is not the mark of a person who is safe to save. Being born again, made spiritually alive, is the mark of salvation.
Adventism’s teaching about the resurrection is a deceptive shell hiding Adventism’s despair. Adventists do not know whether or not they will be resurrected as one of the “saved” or resurrected for the Lake of Fire. They don’t know because they don’t know how to be saved. They don’t know who Jesus really IS nor what he really accomplished. They have no idea what His resurrection actually did for the world!
Lesson Shames Members Into Physicalism
The lesson reinforces its hopeless physicalism with well-placed quotes and questions. For example, Monday’s lesson asserts,
By and large, ancient pagans did not believe in resurrection, especially in the Greek world, with its belief in body-soul dualism (at death the soul soars off to wherever the souls of the dead supposedly go).
Adventism continually reminds its members that the idea of humans having spirits is a false idea borrowed from “Greek dualism”. This assertion is nonsense. The fact that Greeks had a false view of death and human nature does not make the biblical fact that we have bodies and spirits false. Yet Adventism has subtly shamed its members if they ever question the biblical texts that deal with the human spirit.
Consider Thursday’s lesson and what it says in the last paragraph:
Think about it: we close our eyes in death, and the next thing we will experience is the second coming of Jesus, when He raises us from the dead. No matter when a believer died, even thousands of years ago, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” they will be made alive “at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:52, NKJV).
Notice that the author reinforces the traditional Adventist teaching that when a person dies, he ceases to exist until the resurrection at the second coming which will be “the next thing we will experience”. They reinforce that a person will die and be utterly unconscious—read that “non-existent”—until Jesus comes. It will SEEM immediate because they haven’t experienced any passing time as their bodies decayed into dust for years or millennia. Since Adventists believe there is no immaterial human spirit, the dead are simply gone, remembered in God’s mind and brought back into existence when He returns—re-created as new bodies with the old memories downloaded into it.
The Teachers Comments again reinforce the traditional Adventist belief. Notice how the author interpret’s Paul’s teaching about death and resurrection on page 107 of the Teachers Quarterly:
Many Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, but not in a resurrection. To them, resurrection of the body sounded like regression, not liberation. Paul says the opposite. He underlines a wholistic biblical view of humans as whole beings, not as beings with souls that can exist without bodies. For Paul, the resurrection is the final victory, where even death itself is defeated—not by escape but by transformation of the whole person…Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 was countercultural—a bold confrontation with the intellectual assumptions of Corinth. Instead of disembodied souls floating off nebulously into the ether, Paul paints a picture of a new creation in which death is defeated and in which the people are redeemed.
The Adventist readers would not flinch at these words, yet they do violence to the Scriptural witness about death and resurrection. Once again the author tries to contrast Paul’s teaching with Greek dualism, but he insists that Paul taught a “wholistic” view that humans are WHOLE beings without “souls that can exist without bodies”. He calls this view “biblical”, and again the mocking tone emerges near the end of the quote where the author speaks of “disembodied souls floating off nebulous into the ether.”
Never does the Bible describe the spirits of the dead as nebulous floating off into the ether! Here is what Paul actually says:
Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord– for we walk by faith, not by sight– we are of good courage and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.—2 Corinthians 5:6–9 LSB
Paul is clear that “we”—our immaterial identities—leave our mortal bodies at death and go to the Lord where we would PREFER to be. Furthermore, whether we are at home in our bodies or away with the Lord, we make it our ambition to PLEASE Him. No one can make an effort to please the Lord unless he or she exists and is conscious! The Adventist characterization of a person’s spirit leaving the body at death is not only ignored but mocked by Adventism!
What About Resurrection?
Knowing the biblical teaching that our immaterial identities, our spirits, exist during death either with the Lord if the dead is a born-again believer, or being kept “under punishment for the day of judgment” (2 Peter 2:9) if the dead is an unbeliever completely changes the impact of the resurrection.
In order to understand, we have to go back to Jesus—who He is and what He did. First, Jesus is God the Son who became incarnate—He took a body and added human flesh to His identity as eternal, almighty Yahweh. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, He was not born dead in sin as all the rest of humanity has been born.
Jesus was different. Fully man, He was nevertheless always spiritually alive, never dead in sin and subject to sinful desires and motivations. He was God, and God cannot sin. Furthermore, as a man, He was not dead in sin but spiritually alive, never having to be born again.
Jesus was sinless because He was spiritually alive from the moment of His conception. He did not sin BECAUSE He was sinless. Adventism, however, teaches that He was sinless because He never sinned. Adventism has Jesus’ identity exactly backwards.
Jesus did not come as our example to show us how to obey and keep the law. He came as our Substitute, fully qualified to offer Himself as the one complete and perfect Sacrifice that could actually pay for human sin. As God and Creator, He had the authority to represent all humanity as He offered Himself as our sacrifice. As a sinless, perfect man, He was qualified to shed human blood that was sufficient to satisfy God’s demand that those who sin must die.
Because Jesus was able to represent all humanity by His authority as Creator God and by His shared human identity—yet a sinless, fully alive human—He was able to offer a substitute sacrifice that would pay the price of each person who BELIEVES in Him.
Because God the Son as Jesus the sinless man fully propitiated for human sin by His own sacrifice of Himself, He rose from the dead. His resurrection wasn’t simply God calling Him back because He had been an obedient Son. Rather, His resurrection was the PROOF that His death had been sufficient to satisfy God’s death sentence for sinners.
Jesus now is the Substitute for each person who believes and trusts God and the Lord’s finished atonement for sin.
The reason the curtain in the temple ripped when Jesus rose was that His blood fully satisfied God’s demand. A new and living way was opened to the Father for ALL humans who approach God on the basis of faith in Jesus’ atonement.
The resurrection was the shattering of the death sentence into which every one of us was born! The reason the new birth is a new covenant phenomenon is that our spirits could not be made new and come alive until Jesus had offered the sufficient sacrifice for human sin. Furthermore, the permanently indwelling Holy Spirit was not possible until Jesus had offered His sacrifice, opened the new, living way to the Father by His blood and ascended to the Father from where He sent His Holy Spirit to indwell all who believe and trust Him.
The new birth is what God promised through Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and it’s what Jesus told Nicodemus was needed in order to see the kingdom of heaven.
The resurrection shattered the curse of death into which everyone is born—and it’s the reason we who believe are able to be born again. Jesus removed our curse—and He asks us to trust His shed blood and resurrection alone for our salvation.
Adventism has absolutely no concept of the resurrection as the shattering of our natural state of death. Even more basically, Adventism doesn’t believe each person is born literally spiritually dead and unable to please or to seek God apart from the Father’s drawing us and giving us faith to believe!
Adventism has no belief in the biblical teaching of the nature of man, of the nature of Christ, of sin and salvation, or of death and resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is the means by which we who believe are born again. As Paul says,
Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath [of God] through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.—Romans 5:9–11 LSB
Because Jesus died, we who believe are justified by His substitutionary atonement. Because He rose and lives again, we are SAVED by His life! It’s not His commandment-keeping life that saves us; it’s His resurrection life! He literally reversed our curse of spiritual death!
When we believe and are born again, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, it is the Spirit who is our guarantee of our eternal future and resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is not merely a promise that we’ll rise one day; it’s the evidence that our curse has been paid!
Our spiritual life is the evidence and guarantee that our physical resurrections are inevitable. Yet we have to believe and trust Jesus alone.
Jesus’s resurrection is all about His sufficient sacrifice for sin on our behalf. As our Substitute, He fully satisfied God (Romans 3:26, 27). Because He fully paid for human sin, He shattered our curse and overturned our legacy from Adam. When we believe, we pass, as Jesus said, from death to life, and our physical resurrections are guaranteed when our spirits have been born again.
If you haven’t admitted that you are spiritually dead and not able to obey and please God, look to Jesus. See that the law was never intended to help you be good; it was always intended to point out your sin. Jesus, however, came to take your sin and to pay the price it demanded. He died your death. He was buried, and on the third day He rose, shattering your curse of death!
He is enough! Trust Jesus alone. He has done everything needed to save you from your sin and your own nature. Jesus is Lord. Trust Him today, and 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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