Lesson 10: “Authentic Christian Ministry”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! |
Adventist, what IS “ministry”? What makes “ministry” Christian? To drive the question even further, what makes something—or someone— “Christian”? How do you know whether or not YOU are Christian, and where do you find the biblical explanation of what Christian beliefs and practices are? And one more question: what do you do with Bible passages that clearly teach something that contradicts Adventism?
Negation of Clear New Covenant Teaching
This week’s lesson covers 2 Corinthians 3 through 7. These chapters contain some of the clearest and most powerful descriptions of the new covenant, of what Jesus did and what happens when a person trusts Him alone, and of a biblical worldview that we find anywhere in the New Testament. Yet the lesson, as is typical of Adventism, ignores the actual words of the passages and reinterprets Paul’s words. It manages to submerge the revelation of what makes the new covenant NEW and of what makes a believer a new creation and instead weaves a web of confusing words that veil the truth. Saturday’s lesson introduces the week’s studies with these words:
This week, we will look into 2 Corinthians 3–7, where Paul speaks of his ministry of gaining souls for Christ. Ellen G. White says, “The conversion of sinners and their sanctification through the truth is the strongest proof a minister can have that God has called him to the ministry.”—The Acts of the Apostles, p. 328.
In fact, 2 Corinthians 3–7 are not explanations of Paul’s gaining souls for Christ. Chapter 3 leads with a contrast between the old covenant, the “ministry of death in letters engraved on stones” with the new covenant ministry of the Holy Spirit. Paul even states:
But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart, but WHENEVER a person TURNS TO THE LORD, THE VEIL IS TAKEN AWAY.—2 Corinthians 3:15, 16 LSB
The lesson does not even address these verses. Paul is contrasting the fading glory of the old covenant with the increasing glory of the new covenant. The old covenant was defined by the Ten Words written on stone. Although they had glory, it was a fading glory, and Paul reveals why Moses had to hide the glory on his face from Israel after he would talk with God:
Therefore having such a hope, we use great boldness, and [are] not like Moses, [who] used to put a veil over his face so that the sons of Israel would not look intently at the consequence of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is brought to an end in Christ.—2 Corinthians 3:12–14 LSB
The glory of God on Moses’ face was FADING away! Moses hid the fading of the glory from Israel! We who are born of the Spirit, however, are no longer under the law. We do not live under Moses’ authority or follow the law he mediated between God and Israel. When we turn to the Lord, the veil that hid the glory on Moses is taken away.
As born again believers, we have a brighter, more powerful, and a lasting glory that shines from us: the literal presence of the Holy Spirit who resides IN US. We have the resurrection life of Christ in our new hearts and spirits. We have passed from death to life, and God Himself lives IN US. We carry the glory of God into the world whoever we go, and this glory never fades. It becomes brighter and brighter as we learn to trust the Lord and to submit to His word! Paul ends his description of new covenant glory with these words:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, [there] is freedom. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.—2 Corinthians 3:17, 18 LSB
Yet the lesson explain 2 Corinthians 3 this way:
Paul speaks about his ministry by briefly discussing the two covenants: the old one represented by Moses and the new one represented by Paul and his colleagues.…In 2 Corinthians 3:1–4:6, we can see that the old covenant is used to symbolize the legalistic experience of those who depended upon their own works of obedience as the means of pleasing God.…Paul is talking about two different responses, by believers and unbelievers, to the gospel.…Because of the reaction, that of unbelief and lack of faith toward Moses’ ministry, his ministry can be viewed as a ministry of condemnation and death. Because the church at Corinth believed, Paul’s ministry among them proved to be a ministry of righteousness, a ministry of the Spirit who gives life.
The lesson removes the obsolescence of the old covenant. It refuses to deal with the fact that Paul clearly says the old covenant is over. It tries to explain the old covenant as a “ministry of death” by blaming the people themselves for not believing Moses. Because they didn’t believe, Moses’ ministry can be viewed as a ministry of condemnation and death”.
But this is NOT what the verses say. The ministry of death is defined this way:
But if the ministry of death, in letters having been engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, which was being brought to an end, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be even more in glory?—2 Corinthians 3:7, 8 LSB
The law itself defined the ministry of death. It contained the agreement that God would bless the people for obedience and curse them for disobedience. If even one law was broken, the individual was guilty and deserved DEATH. The “ministry of death” was the law itself; it contained a death sentence at its core!
Furthermore, it is not true, as the lesson says, that the old covenant was “represented by Moses and the new one represented by Paul and his colleagues”. Paul never contrasted himself with Moses! Rather Paul is contrasting the old covenant which was MEDIATED by Moses with the new covenant which is MEDIATED by the Lord Jesus and His shed blood. The old covenant was based on the law between God and Israel; the new covenant is completely NEW. It has a new priesthood, that of the Lord Jesus, and it is governed not by the law but by the indwelling Hoy Spirit!
The very essence of the new covenant is completely different. The death penalty contained in the old covenant has been fulfilled by Jesus. Now believers are made spiritually alive and indwelled by God the Spirit. Believers no longer live by or measure their behavior by the law. They no longer figure out God’s will by reading the law. Rather they are united with Christ by the indwelling Spirit. God Himself directs the believer and teaches him or her to apply God’s word to one’s life.
The glory of the new covenant is that the law is completely obsolete; it no longer applies. The living LORD, the author of the law, indwells us, and we listen to Him, not to Moses and the law.
This is the contrast Paul is making, but the lesson ignores it and submerges the power of Paul’s words. Adventists are left feeling even more hopeless than if all they had was the law!
How Did Christ Reconcile Us to God?
Tuesday’s lesson tries to make the point that Paul presented his ministry as Christ-centered so that the Corinthians could boast about him because his ministry wasn’t “self-focussed” as his opponents’ ministries were. The day’s lesson ends this way:
God has reconciled humanity to Himself by means of the atoning death of His Son. Those who were reconciled to God are a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Now, they are supposed to pass this “message of reconciliation” onward by proclaiming the gospel of Christ (2 Cor. 5:19, ESV). In this sense, “we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us” (2 Cor. 5:20, NKJV)
Throughout the day’s lesson the author references texts: 2 Corinthians 5:10, 5:11; Deuteronomy 10:12; 2 Corinthians 12:9, Galatians 6:14, and more. These texts are never quoted but are referenced as support for the argument the author develops. The point of the lesson is to remind the reader to share the Adventist “gospel”. Of course, this gospel is never defined, but the author exhorts the reader to pass this “message of reconciliation” onward by proclaiming the gospel of Christ (2 Cor. 5:19)”.
Of course the reader will think of the Adventist gospel of the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14: they must preach the seventh-day Sabbath, call people out of the Babylon of Sunday churches order to avoid getting the mark of the beast, and of course, spread the health message.
Adventism cannot and does not teach what Paul actually says in the last part of 2 Corinthians 5:
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, [he is] a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all [these] things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. So then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as God is pleading through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 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 5:17–21 LSB
This passage is shocking, and in general Adventists do not know, understand, or teach the new covenant reality Paul explains here. Here Paul explains HOW we become literally new creations. As Jesus hung on the cross, God was “in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”. Notice that: the Father was NOT separated from the Son. Rather the man Jesus experienced the weight and the price of sin by taking our imputed sin into Himself. He felt the separation and weight of sin. He experienced God’s wrath for sin as He hung on the cross—but the Father experienced this grief and sacrifice as well because He was IN CHRIST as Christ hung on the cross experiencing God’s wrath! Both Father and Son participated in the cross.
Paul tells us that God was reconciling the world to Himself as Jesus took His wrath. God was not counting our sins against us because He was counting them against His Son! He participated in the grief and agony of the cross as He reconciled the world to Himself through Jesus’ taking God’s wrath in our place.
Even more, Paul ends this passage by saying God made “Him who knew no sin [our Lord Jesus] to BE sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
In other words, Jesus took humanity’s imputed sin in Himself and experienced God’s wrath and punishment for our sin. He became sin—the thing that separates humanity from God, the thing that God hates—He became SIN so that we might become “the righteousness of God in Him”! Because Jesus became sin and took God’s wrath in our place, when we trust and believe Him, we become His righteousness!
We don’t become able to become obedient, able to “do right”. We literally BECOME the personal righteousness of God in the same way He literally became sin for us! When we trust Jesus and are brought from spiritual death to life, God sees us as His won children, and He credits us with His own personal righteousness. When God looks at us in Christ, He sees Christ’s personal righteousness—the actual righteousness of God Himself—and He credits us with His personal perfection!
This perfection doesn’t mean that we don’t sin; we still have mortal flesh with a law of sin in our members, as Paul tells us in Romans 7. But our dead spirits come to life. We pass out of the domain of darkness and enter the kingdom of the beloved Son. We literally become new creations!
Adventism cannot teach this truth, and it hides it, covering and obscuring the words to make it all about Paul’s ministry and a command for Adventists to preach their three angels’ messages!
Adventism cannot teach this new covenant truth because Adventism doesn’t believe that humans have immaterial identities—literal spirits—that are born dead in sin and must be made alive in Christ.
For Adventists, these amazing new covenant truths are metaphors for committing oneself to Adventist doctrines and practices and sharing their Adventism with the unsuspecting world.
Adventism cannot understand or teach Paul because Adventism holds an unbiblical view of man and of Christ. They teach, on EGW’s authority, that atonement for sin was not made on the cross. Instead, they teach that full atonement is being made in heaven since 1844 as Jesus applies His blood to the sins people remember to confess.
They do not teach the biblical new birth. They do not teach the reality that believers pass from spiritual death to life the moment they believe, and that God credits believers with Jesus’ personal righteousness from that moment onward. A believer’s righteousness and security are not dependent upon his or her obedience. It depends entirely upon trusting Jesus atonement, death, and resurrection, and letting go of all cherished beliefs and personal control over one’s right-doing. When we depend upon Jesus alone, we pass from death to life, and we become the righteousness of God in Christ!
Death Is Not Ceasing to Exist
One other seminal passage the lesson misuses is 2 Corinthians 5:1–10. This passage is one of the clearest explanations in all of Scripture revealing what happens to a believer when he or she dies. Yet Adventism cannot teach it as it is, and they must twist the meaning and hide the words from their members.
Although this week’s lesson purportedly covers 2 Corinthians 3 through 7 (talk about skating through some of the New Testament’s most powerful texts revealing reality for believers), it only gives this passage a reference as a text supporting their idea of death and resurrection. Here’s what the end of Monday’s lesson says:
This hope in the future life captured the mind of Paul so much that he keeps talking about it in the flow of the passage (2 Cor. 5:1–10). He refers to his mortal body by the metaphor of an earthly house. Conversely, the “building from God” is a metaphor for the resurrected body (2 Cor. 5:1), the great hope for believers of all ages
The lesson utterly IGNORES Paul’s actual words:
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. 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. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.—2 Corinthians 5:1–10 LSB
Paul is not merely describing the resurrection. He is overtly stating that when we die, we leave our “mortal tents”. He admits we long for our heavenly dwellings not made with hands, but he also states that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord! He says, further, that believers “prefer to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord”. He doesn’t tell us what this intermediate state LOOKS like, but he says we are at home with the Lord. Just as we are in Christ when we believe, and He is in us, so we remain in Him when our bodies die and our now-living spirits go to be with Him.
Notice even more that in verse 9 Paul says we make it “our ambition, whether at home or absent to be pleasing to Him”. In other words, we are conscious when our bodies die and our spirits go to the Lord. We cannot have an ambition or an ability to please God when “we” are absent from our bodies if we do not exist. Paul is clear that “we”—our immaterial spirits, or identities, live in a body. We are not our bodies! We are immaterial and separate from our bodies at death, never losing our spiritual life that we were given when we trusted the Lord.
Summary
This lesson is a collection of twisted applications of some of the most profound new covenant truths contained in the New Testament. Adventism must distort and obfuscate the real meaning of the passages it teaches in the lesson because Adventism’s worldview does not allow humans to have immaterial spirits that are born dead and must be born again. Adventism cannot lose its attachment to the law because Adventist righteousness is defined as “right doing”, and they insist that true obedient worship requires worshiping on the seventh-day Sabbath. Sabbath worship they believe on the authority of Ellen White, is the mark of the saved when Jesus returns.
Adventism cannot teach that Jesus completed the atonement on the cross and that when a person trusts and believes Him, he literally is credited with God’s own personal righteousness. Adventism does not believe that righteousness is imputed, not imparted and perfected. Even more, Adventism refuses to teach what Paul clearly says about death because Adventism must deny the fact that humans have immaterial spirits.
They are physicalists, and their entire theological structure hangs on their physicalist worldview that insists that they are merely bodies that breathe, and when they die, their breath leaves and they cease to exist until God resurrects them and downloads their identities into new bodies. They also believe that the man Christ Jesus was merely a body that breathed. They believe that when He was dead, no part of Him went to God, and even His divinity hung in the tomb waiting for His resurrection.
Because Adventism has an unbiblical worldview, they cannot teach these passages truthfully. Reality and hope and truth and the completed atonement of Christ are submerged and hidden, and the Adventist reader is reinforced in his confusing physicalism and his mandate to “spread the Adventist gospel”
Adventist, you have seen the passages the lesson refuses to teach. Ask the Lord to help you read His word without an Ellen White lens. Ask Him to reveal the truth about who you are, about your true need of a Savior, and about the finished work of the Lord Jesus.
Repent of your Adventism and your unbelief, and see Jesus taking your sins in His body on the cross. See Him dying for you, paying the price of your sins and then rising on the third day, overturning the curse of death into which you were born. Believe Jesus, and you will know the miracle of passing from death to life and of being credited with the actual righteousness of God in Christ. †
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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