Adventists Reacts to “Listen to Jesus Not the Law”
Out Of Her Mind
The women is out of her mind. Who is Jesus and what laws exist , His laws, that governs the well being of God’s creation? Give up one and you give up both…………what a hoax going on in here.
—VIA YOUTUBE
The Ten Written on the Heart?
How can one listen to Jesus and not the law? Jesus Himself is the embodiment of the law. He taught us how we should obey the law—with love in our heart—and not be like the pharisees. How can we not listen to the law that God has written on our heart? “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.”—Jeremiah 31:33
—VIA YOUTUBE
Response by Jim Liley, online moderator: May I suggest doing some research on what in Christianity is referred to as the Law/Gospel distinction? The laws written on the Christian’s heart are the commands and teachings of Christ, not the 10 Commandments of the Old Covenant.
How Is This Adventist Wrong?
First, I particularly appreciated your article in Proclamation! a few weeks ago encouraging us to stick with the Bible as sufficient and not rely on, for example, the early church fathers so much. I had been seeing this trend online and had been concerned about it, so I appreciated the article for that reason.
Now to my question for you:
I am wondering how to interpret this message from my Adventist neighbor. It sounds like he understands imputed righteousness correctly, so I’m not sure how to reply. For context, He is a firm believer in the investigative judgement and the inspiration of EGW.
Here is an excerpt from what he said in our conversation:
“I understand Christ’s righteousness best from considering the implications of the three days of Jesus’ death, rest, and resurrection. Second Corinthians 5:21 says, ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Our sin was nailed to the cross in the person of Jesus. (Colossians 2:14) The ‘It is done’ of redemption (justification) echoes the ‘it is finished’ of the original creation. There is nothing more that we can add; God has done it all Sabbath rest follows both in acknowledgement of that completed work and complete rest. (Ezekiel 20:121, Hebrews 4) Then the resurrection promises a completely new life, transformed into His likeness (sanctification)—Romans 8:11,”
I’m wondering if you can help me understand what He actually means here so that I can respond with clear gospel.
Much appreciation for your labors of love in the Lord! Please help me keep praying for the true Jesus to be known in our local Adventist community here in Australia.
Many thanks and much love.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Your neighbor is saying words which sound like he believes what you believe, but he doesn’t have the same definitions that Christians have.
First, notice his words when he speaks of “the implications of the three days of Jesus’ death, rest, and resurrection”. The Bible never calls Jesus’ burial His “rest”. That idea is the Adventist idea that Jesus “rested” in the tomb, keeping the Sabbath (rest) in His death. Adventism teaches that Jesus was in the tomb on the Sabbath keeping the seventh day, resting from His work of crucifixion, and honoring the Sabbath before He did His work of resurrection on the first day. This idea is nowhere in Scripture, and the underlying assumption is wrong. Jesus was not keeping the Sabbath in His death. Rather the Sabbath was always a shadow of Christ, and with Jesus’ completion of the full atonement for sin, the old covenant was coming to an end—and with it the seventh-day Sabbath. The Sabbath was always the sign of the Mosaic covenant (Ex 31:13), and the old covenant was ending with Jesus’ death, BURIAL, and resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15:3,4 articulates the simple gospel: that Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture, that He was buried, and that He rose from the dead on the third day according to Scripture. Never does the Bible speak of Jesus’ burial as His “rest”, and no—the Maker of the Sabbath and the Giver of the law was not subject to the Sabbath He Himself gave to Israel to be a witness of HIM (Romans 3:21). He was a the LORD of the Sabbath—He was ABOVE the Sabbath. He was fulfilling the Sabbath when He died, was buried, and rose again. He did not HONOR a DAY in the tomb.
Moreover, He did not “rest” in soul sleep—another not-articulated assumption in your Adventist friend’s mind. Adventists believe that when you die you cease to exist, because they do not believe people have immaterial spirits that survive death. They believe that one’s “spirit” is literally one’s “breath”, and when a person ceases to breathe, he also ceases to exist. They believe that God retains the memory of a person’s personality and character in His own mind, and at the resurrection He creates a NEW body and essentially downloads the memory of that person’s data, so to speak, into the new body. Then God makes the new body breathe, and there’s your resurrected person. As you can see, this belief actually teaches that the person who died has no ontological connection with the resurrected person. This belief is one of the reasons Adventists fear death to such a degree. They do not know whether or not they will be resurrected to life or to judgment, and further, they have questions about how the resurrected person can actually be THEM. They believe that the resurrected person will experience his new life just as if he had not died and will pick up where he left off: the downloaded memories and personality will appear to be the same person—but Adventists Know that in their worldview, the dead do not actually exist except as a divine “memory”.
But Jesus did NOT cease to exist in death, and He did not rest. He told the thief on the cross that He would be with him THAT DAY in Paradise (Luke 23:43). Peter tells us that when He died, He went to the spirits in prison “and made proclamation” to them (1 Peter 3:19). While we don’t know exactly what this passage in 1 Peter is describing, we know that when Jesus died, He proclaimed something to “the spirits in prison”—a phrase generally thought to describe lost spirits or fallen angels or both—with the suggestion that He declared victory over the curse of sin. He had shed the eternal blood of the eternal covenant, and He had paid for human sin. Death had lost its clutch on humanity. Spiritual death was shattered by Jesus’ blood, and from that moment on, all who believed Him would be brought to spiritual life. The curse of death could not claim them.
So we see that the Adventist assumption that Jesus was “resting” in the tomb is not true. Yet this paradigm is foundational to Adventism. They must believe that humans have no immaterial spirit. If they did believe the biblical teaching that humans have spirits, they would have to take seriously the fact that Ephesians 2:1–3 says everyone is born dead in sin, by nature children of wrath. But Adventists do not believe that “spiritual death” is a literal death, a literal disconnection from the life of God. They believe that sin is genetically transmitted through the generations, with each person receiving the inheritance from his forebears that gives one tendencies to sin. These tendencies must be disciplined and overcome.
This fact means that Adventists see Jesus’ “becoming sin for us” to be a figurative, metaphorical thing, and they teach He died to pay for all one’s past sins. Then, when a person “accepts Jesus”, he becomes responsible for overcoming sin, for keeping the law more and more perfectly, and for confessing every sin they commit so that, in heaven, Jesus can “apply his blood” to those new sins for pardon in the investigative judgment. Adventists do not believe that the atonement was completed at the cross; they believe that was only the first phase of atonement, and the second phase continues in heaven in the investigative judgment as He applies His blood to sin as sins are confessed by believers.
Also notice that your friend says the “it is finished” of redemption equals justification.
No! The “It is finished” is the completion of Jesus’ ATONEMENT!! This is a very important distinction. Jesus’ blood was shed once for all, and it covers ALL our sin, past, present, and future. But this atonement is not applied to any individual until that person recognizes that he or she is utterly sinful and helpless and places his trust in the finished atonement of the Lord Jesus. When a person trusts and believes in Jesus’ completed atonement, THEN that person is JUSTIFIED.
Do you see the importance of this distinction? Jesus’ death was a propitiation, a full payment for sin that satisfied God (Romans 3:26, 27). We who are dead in sin receive JUSTIFICATION when we believe and receive “the abundance of His grace” (Rom 5:17). Jesus fully ATONED for sin on the cross. This is the fact that Adventists deny! Your Adventist friend slips the word “justification” into his explanation of was finished on the cross—but Jesus’ death was NOT justification. It was propitiation which made atonement for sin! There is no second phase of atonement going on in heaven!
Furthermore, “justification” is not what Jesus did when he died; justification is what is CREDITED to us when we believe. It is what is done TO US because of the atonement which Jesus accomplished on the cross!
Here is Romans 5:15–18:
But the gracious gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. And the gift is not like [that which came] through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment [arose] from one [transgression] resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the gracious gift [arose] from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.
Notice that Paul says NOT that Jesus finished “justification” on the cross but that by His sacrifice there resulted in “justification of life to all men”. In other words, Jesus’ sacrifice atoned fully for sin. Whenever a person trusts the Lord Jesus, on the basis of His sufficient sacrifice, the believer is credited with justification. Justification is the EFFECT of Jesus’ sacrifice on the believer who trusts Him. It is not the transaction that was finished on the cross. ATONEMENT is what was finished on the cross! Propitiation was finished on the cross!
Then your Adventist friend says that the resurrection “promises a completely new life, transformed into His likeness (sanctification).” Again, he misses one of the most important parts about the resurrection.
Since Adventists do not believe people have immaterial spirits that are born dead in sin and must be born again, they do not see Jesus’ resurrection as having any effect on them in this life. It is only a promise for the future—if they progressively keep the law more and more perfectly and overcome and remember to confess whenever they slip and commit a sin.
Yet Romans 8 and 2 Corinthians 3 tell us that when we believe, we are placed into a NEW covenant—a covenant that no longer is administered by the law but by the Spirit. When we believe, we literally, spiritually, “pass out of death into life” (John 5:24). We are transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved son (Colossians 1:13). We become born again, spiritually alive and also indwelled by the Holy Spirit who seals us and guarantees our eternal inheritance (Ephesians 1:13,14). Galatians explains that we are no longer under the law but under a new law: the law of Christ—and nowhere in the New Testament is there any hint that we are to observe a weekly Sabbath day in the new covenant. Neither does the New Testament tell us that the Ten Commandments continue to have a function for the church. Galatians, in fact, explains that we are under a new covenant, not of Sinai, and that if we go back under the law, we fall from grace (Gal. 5:4)!
Jesus’ resurrection is the THING that literally shattered the curse of death by which everyone ever born (except Jesus) is condemned to death. We are literally born dead—and being saved is NOT learning to discipline ourselves to keep the law and control our sin, but it is about BELIEVING GOD, as Abraham did (Gen 15:6), and being born of the Spirit—made spiritually alive and passing NOW from death to life! The resurrection is the source of our spiritual life! Yes, it is a promise that our physical bodies will one day be resurrected as well—but the resurrection has power now for us. It is the means by which we can be born again. The curse of death has been shattered by the perfect, once-for-all atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus!
Adventists have absolutely NO understanding of this miracle of spiritual life and of the removal of the curse of death through faith and trust in Jesus’ completed atonement!!
Your Adventist friend is not articulating justification by faith. He is articulating Adventism: the belief that because Jesus kept the law and died a sinless death, they, too, by following His example, can overcome sin and be saved. They see all of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection as examples for them and as a future promise of one day being free from the mortal flesh. They do not have spiritual life—the new birth—in their paradigm at all. The sanctification that Romans 8:11 articulates (which your friend uses to support the idea that the future resurrection will be their sanctification) is actually describing the spiritual growth available to everyone who has been born of the Spirit and is spiritually alive in Christ. Only the born again have the ability to learn to trust Jesus in their temptations and to do His will when they are tempted. The literal new birth makes it possible for people to become more and more like Christ as they earn to see as He sees and to apply Scripture to their lives, depending and trusting in Him as they walk step-by-step through life’s trials.
Adventists will talk a deceptively good “talk” to their Christian friends, but you have to know that his paradigm is completely backwards from reality. Their god is limited by needing to be fair to Satan and sinners. Their Jesus is fallible and could have failed in His mission. Their Jesus gave up His omnipresence by taking a body—for this reason they believe He had to send the Holy Spirit to take His place. But if Jesus no longer has omnipresence, He is not God. Their Holy Spirit is more of a force, or power, from God even though they have learned to call Him a “person”. Adventists deny that the Trinity shares substance. They believe in three separate beings who share a Name (God), a will, and a purpose—but not substance. Hence—a Jesus who is not omnipresent.
It is likely impossible to have a meaningful conversation with this person because he knows how to use words to deceive you—and likely he doesn’t fully understand that he means something different than you mean. You need to know that the Adventist worldview is physicalist: man has no spirit apart from breath, and the new birth is a metaphor for mental assent to Adventism. Unless this Adventist would be willing to pursue ongoing, systematic Bible study with you where you read contextually, chapter by chapter, through books of the New Testament and use no commentaries to do explain the words, it is unlikely that he would be able to perceive how his proof-texts have been learned out of context. †
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