Lesson 7: “Now Hear This!”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! |
Adventist, how do you know that Ellen White is a true prophet of God? How do you validate her authority? What do you do with the disagreements between Adventist doctrines and biblical teachings that you might encounter when you, as a loyal Adventist, read the Bible and see things there that you didn’t learn in Sabbath School? What is your actual defense for Ellen’s role as a prophet and biblical interpreter?
Do you defend her a bit like a grandmother whose Sabbath dinners and homemade bread leave warm memories but whose understanding of life clearly disagree with your own? Is your defense of Ellen and of your Adventist legacy an emotional one, a matter of your identity which you don’t want to question?
Who would YOU be if Ellen White is a false prophet?
Rejecting the Prophets
This week’s lesson is entirely directed toward equating Israel’s rejection of their prophets and their warnings with Adventism’s persistent legacy of spawning criticisms of Ellen White’s prophetic role. This lesson assumes an unstated basis: the reader KNOWS that Ellen White is a true prophet of God, and the basis of this KNOWING is Adventist indoctrination.
The authors (remember, the White Estate authored this quarter’s lessons) shamelessly equate Israel’s rejection of Jeremiah’s warnings of the nation’s destruction and his persistent call to the people to repent of their sins of idolatry, child sacrifice, pagan prostitution. Israel wasn’t just worshiping idols, but Israelites were deliberately offering their babies to be burned by Molech and Chemosh within the boundaries of Israel—they equate THAT with Adventism’s persistent discomfort and questioning of Ellen White!
Ellen White was not at all like Jeremiah Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, or the minor prophets. She wasn’t sent by God to turn His covenant people back to Himself and to remind them of His covenant promises and consequences. Yet the lesson shamelessly leads the reader to view his or her own reactions to Ellen White with Israel’s rejection of the prophets!
The assumed but unexplained equation of Israel with Adventism and of Jeremiah with Ellen White is illegitimate. Adventism teaches its members that they are “spiritual Israel” because they alone keep ALL the commandments of God and honor His holy Sabbath. Unlike Israel, who rejected their Messiah, Adventists are taught that they believe in Jesus AND in His “commandments”. Using this assumed but unstated identification of themselves with Israel, the lesson admonishes the reader to be careful NOT to reject “God’s messengers”.
Thursday’s lesson twists 1 Corinthians 10:6–12 to warn Adventists to be obedient. In context, Paul reminds the Corinthians church, which is internally “messy” and struggling with factions and immorality among some of the members, that God judged Israel in the desert for its flagrant sin against His authority and provision, even causing 2,300 Israelites to die because of their immorality. Paul reminds the church:
Now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have arrived. Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.—1 Corinthians 10:11, 12 LSB
The lesson takes this instruction and makes it about Adventism:
In these verses, Paul draws a straight line connecting the past and the present, connecting ancient Israel and the church, of which we who have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior are now a part (Gal. 6:14–16).…
In effect, God is saying that we are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of past generations, if only we heed the admonitions of Scripture and the prophetic messages sent by Him to us through His prophets…While God promises to take care of our needs, He also wants our souls to prosper, even as we prosper in other ways (3 John 2). But true lasting spiritual fullness in the Christian life requires obedience to God’s messages.
First, the lesson states that the church is “we [Adventists] who have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior are now a part (Gal. 6:14–16).” This assumption is incorrect.
Adventism does not teach the biblical gospel that all mankind is born spiritually dead in sin—literally—and is unable to choose to please and obey God (see Romans 3:9–18). It does not teach that Jesus came and offered a full atonement for sin ON THE CROSS. The Adventist prophet, Ellen White, taught that atonement was NOT completed on the cross but that it continues in heaven in a unique and unscriptural doctrine called the investigative judgment.
The core of Christian doctrine is that the Lord Jesus fully propitiated and atoned for sin on the cross (Roman 3:26–28). Ellen White denied that the cross accomplished atonement for sin:
The blood of Christ, while it was to release the repentant sinner from the condemnation of the law, was not to cancel the sin; it would stand on record in the sanctuary until the final atonement; so in the type the blood of the sin offering removed the sin from the penitent, but it rested in the sanctuary until the Day of Atonement.—Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 357.5
This teaching alone disqualifies Ellen White as a prophet of God and judges Adventism as NOT Christian. Yet one might ask, if the cross is not the final atonement, what is? Ellen continued her explanation above in the following paragraph:
Since Satan is the originator of sin, the direct instigator of all the sins that caused the death of the Son of God, justice demands that Satan shall suffer the final punishment. Christ’s work for the redemption of men and the purification of the universe from sin will be closed by the removal of sin from the heavenly sanctuary and the placing of these sins upon Satan, who will bear the final penalty. So in the typical service, the yearly round of ministration closed with the purification of the sanctuary, and the confessing of the sins on the head of the scapegoat.—Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 358.2
Adventism teaches that final atonement for sin is made when Jesus ultimately places the sins of the saved on SATAN, the scapegoat whom, she says, carries those sins into the lake of fire and where SATAN “bears the final penalty” for those sins!
This doctrine is at the core of Adventism. It is the essence of the Adventist great controversy plan of salvation. Adventism teaches that Satan is the final sin-bearer for the sins of the saved. Jesus’ death on the cross, according to Ellen White (and thus according to Adventist doctrine) was not primarily to deal with sin.
Rather, Jesus’ death provided blood for Him to use throughout the investigative judgment which began on October 22, 1844, and which continues indefinitely until He has applied that blood to the sins of the saved that they have actually remembered to confess. Whenever someone who professes Christ confesses a sin, Jesus in heaven is “applying His blood” to the heavenly record of that sin, and He writes “Pardon” after the record of that sin in the heavenly books.
Adventists have gone to great length to re-vision the investigative judgment because they KNOW that this doctrine is unbiblical and anti-christ, yet this doctrine remains the official Adventist doctrine, and Adventists’ worldview is based on the idea that they are “on probation” until the day they die, never knowing whether or not they adequately kept the commandments and confessed every sin to qualify for eternal life at the resurrection.
So, one may ask, if Jesus did not die to atone for sin on the cross, what really WAS the purpose of His death?
Again, Ellen White has the answer:
Jesus died to save his people from their sins, and redemption in Christ means to cease the transgression of the law of God, and to be free from every sin; no heart that is stirred with enmity against the law of God, is in harmony with Christ, who suffered on Calvary, to vindicate and exalt the law before the universe.—Signs of the Times, July 21, 1890, par. 5.
There it is. Jesus died to VINDICATE the LAW!. Jesus managed to perfectly keep the law in spite of inheriting from Mary the propensities to sin from the accumulated weaknesses of generations of sins passed down through his mother’s gene pool. Jesus came and demonstrated that the law Could Be Kept!.
His death illustrated that He had managed to keep the law in spite of the severest persecution of a torturous death at the hands of sinners flagrantly violating the law.
Jesus vindicated the fairness of the law and showed that it COULD BE KEPT. His life and death, therefore, are examples to all who wish to please God. Ellen taught, and Adventism still teaches, that mankind can keep the law with the help of “the merits of Christ”.
Ellen even says that when one believes in Jesus, he will be able to keep the law through “the imputed righteousness of Christ” (12 Letters and Manuscripts, Manuscript 68, 1897, par 28), but the focus is that belief in Christ will result in perfect law-keeping, not in passing spiritually from death to life and being saved ENTIRELY by the work of the Lord Jesus. No, Adventists have to demonstrate their loyalty to God by keeping the law! Here is her declaration in the Review and Herald as late as 1901:
God will test all, even as He tested Adam and Eve, to see whether they will be obedient. Our loyalty or disloyalty will decide our destiny. Since the fall of Adam, men in every age have excused themselves for sinning, charging God with their sin, saying that they could not keep His commandments. This is the insinuation Satan cast at God in heaven. But the plea, “I cannot keep the commandments,” need never be presented to God; for before Him stands the Saviour, the marks of the crucifixion upon His body, a living witness that the law can be kept. It is not that men cannot keep the law, but that they will not.—Review and Herald, May 28, 1901, Art. A, par. 8.
No, Adventism is not a version of Christianity. Underneath all the affirmations and Christian-sounding words, the entire organization teaches a false gospel centered on the need to demonstrate loyalty to God by keeping the commandments—especially the fourth. Sabbath-keeping IS the sign and seal of God, according to Ellen White.
The Sabbath School lessons do not state these facts clearly, but the implications is always there. This view of reality underlies ALL of Adventism. The idea of spiritual death and the need to be born again through faith in the completed atonement on the cross of Christ is missing from Adventism. Obedience is the heart of Adventist salvation, and that idea is the consequence of their disbelief that mankind is by nature spiritually dead and unable to choose to please God.
Salvation is entirely of God, not of our human choices and obedience. He causes us to pass from death to eternal life the moment we believe and trust in the Lord Jesus and His finished atonement on the cross (John 5:24).
Equating Ellen with Biblical Prophets
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The Teachers Comments openly defend Ellen White as a true prophet of God as they address the swelling issue of her critics. The author acknowledges that criticism of her has gone global through the use of the internet, and they develop this argument uniquely. First, they quote from Uriah Smith’s 1868 book The Visions of Mrs. E. G White: Manifestation of Spiritual Gifts According to the Scriptures. Smith, a contemporary of James and Ellen White and an editor of the early Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, defended Ellen’s visions and maligned her critics who were numerous from the earliest days of her testimonies.
Next they quote Ellen herself saying, in 1883,
“From the beginning of my work, I have been pursued by hatred, reproach, and falsehood. Base imputations and slanderous reports have been greedily gathered up and widely circulated by the rebellious, the formalist, and the fanatic. . . . This warfare has been kept up for nearly forty years.”—Selected Messages, book 1, p. 69. [Quoted in the Teachers Comments]
Then the author moves to Dudley Canright. Canright, another contemporary of the Whites who spent some years living in their home as James taught Canright to run the press and to evangelize for Adventism, ultimately left Adventism and wrote several books about his Adventist experiences and of his interactions with James and Ellen White.
For many decades Adventism had attempted to discredit Dudley Canright by popularizing the myth that before he died, he repented of having left Adventism, supposedly making statements that he had been wrong, that Ellen White had been a godly woman, and that he regretted ever leaving Adventism. In fact, I learned this argument in both school and church from childhood through my college years.
Adventism even produced a book authored ostensibly by Carrie Johnson but actually edited and directed by Arthur White, Ellen’s grandson, entitled I Was Canright’s Secretary, in which White spent significant time with a woman, Carrie Johnson, who had apparently worked very briefly—if at all—with Canright. White created a dubious account supposedly documenting that Dudley Canright had been a dishonest man and that he had lied about Adventism when he defected.
All to say, recent documentation has disproved the veracity of Arthur White’s book, and in the past four decades, several of Dudley Canright’s books have been reprinted and also published online. Clearly the man had been a true Christian before his death and had truly left Adventism and exposed the internal hypocrisy of the movement and of the Whites.
I find it most significant that the White Estate addressed Canright head-on and NEVER hinted at the Adventist lie that Canright repented of leaving Adventism. That Adventist myth went completely silent! Instead, the author admitted that Canright’s books have been in circulation, covertly admitting to the work of ministries led by men such as Dale Ratzlaff and the ministry he founded, Life Assurance Ministries, Inc, and its magazine (now online) Proclamation!, when they say:
Canright’s influence on critics of Seventh-day Adventism and Ellen G. White has been profound, shaping opposition well into the twenty-first century. His books remained in circulation after his death and were used by evangelical critics to classify Seventh-day Adventism as a cult throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, Canright’s influence surfaced in academic critiques, which echoed his earlier accusations of plagiarism. By the late 1990s, criticisms of Ellen G. White spread globally via the internet, which made Canright’s Life of Mrs. E. G. White widely accessible. Today, Canright’s works remain influential, freely available online and in reprinted editions, ensuring his impact endures in contemporary debates. (For more details on Canright, see Jud Lake, Ellen White Under Fire, pp. 45–84.)
Once again, the Jud Lake book mentioned in the paragraph above was written specifically to counter Dale Ratzlaff’s book The Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists first published in 1996. Life Assurance Ministries Publications also distributed Dudley Canright’s book Life of Mrs. E. G. White Seventh-day Adventist Prophet: Her False Claims Refuted.
The Teachers Comments in this week’s quarterly conclude their discussion with this overt equation of Ellen White’s prophetic gift with the biblical prophets:
No one who follows [Ellen White’s writings] has been led into sin, and they always inspire greater faithfulness and devotion to God…
Thus, as the biblical prophets before her, Ellen G White experienced her share of personal attacks and the rejection of her prophetic ministry. But her legacy has remained resilient, then as well as now!
Then, the eighth Life Application question at the end of the Teachers Comments asks:
How should those who highly value Ellen G. White’s prophetic ministry respond to the aggressive and hostile campaign against her on YouTube and through other venues?
I have an answer to that question and a response to the conclusion above. First, knowing (as we have demonstrated above) that Ellen White did NOT teach the biblical gospel, did not teach the natural depravity and spiritual death of humanity which renders us humans unable to seek or to please God, and did not teach that the Lord Jesus atoned for sin on the cross—these facts alone disqualify her as a true prophet of God.
We cannot say that followers of her writings have not been led into sin. Actually, her writings DO lead people into sin. While they camp on “morality” and obedience and health and proper clothing and food, they teach a fallible Jesus who could have sinned. Her writings teach a physical-ish “god” who is not truly ONE in three persons but who is three separate beings united in will and purpose. She essentially teaches a tritheism with her “heavenly trio” and her “three Worthies of heaven”. She teaches that the Sabbath is the mark of the saved, and that obedience to the Ten Commandments is mandatory for the saved.
This teaching leads people to the sin of unbelief. It denies the new birth, the literal passing from spiritual death to spiritual eternal life when one trusts and believes in Jesus’ full atonement on the cross and His resurrection which broke our curse of death. We sin if we deny that Jesus’ atonement is ALL we need! We contradict Scripture, as she did, and insist on recommending ourselves to God by our sincerity and obedience. Ellen White absolutely leads people into sin!
No prophet of God would deliver a message from God that misrepresented the Lord Jesus, the Trinity, and the inerrant reliability of Scripture which clearly teaches that we are now in a new covenant on the basis of Jesus’ blood alone. No prophet of God would speak an untruth to motivate people to “be good”!
When an Adventist encounters the exposure of Ellen White and Adventism online, there is only one proper response: investigate for yourself. Don’t automatically state the arguments the organization uses. Don’t argue that reading Ellen has led you closer to Christ. Don’t attack the messengers and accuse them of being Jesuits and fleshly unbelievers.
Instead, go to Scripture. Begin reading whole books of the New Testament slowly, in context, one chapter at a time. Get a notebook and ask God to direct your reading and to teach you what you need to know. Begin copying the book of Galatians, then the book of Colossians, of Ephesians, of Hebrews, of Romans, of John, and so on. Ask the Lord to remove the Ellen White lens from your eyes and to plant you deeply in truth and reality.
There really are objective answers. This questions is solvable!! Ellen White contradicted the Bible and created a false Jesus and a false gospel which shape Adventists’ worldview. Ellen White taught Adventists a false belief about their own nature.
We each are by nature dead in sin, but there is hope. In fact there is only ONE way to be rescued from our natural state of death, and when we follow Jesus’ own words, we will finally see and know how deeply we were deceived.
Ellen White is a false prophet, and our hope is in Jesus alone. Listen to His words, and believe:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.—John 5:24 LSB
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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