Lesson 1: “Recipe for Success”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
What do you think? Are God’s promises conditional—or unconditional? Do you have to obey in order for God to complete what He says He’ll do? Or—think about this: what covenant are you under? Are God’s covenant promises conditional upon people’s obedience to His laws? And what about salvation?
“Recipe for Success”
The last Sabbath School lesson quarterly for 2025 is entitled The Lessons of Faith from Joshua. It is written by Barna Magyars, the executive secretary of the Inter-European Division and the chair of the Biblical Research Committee of that division. Formerly he was the president of Andrews University, Romania. Incredibly—and yet not surprisingly—this first lesson introduces God’s establishment of Joshua as Moses’ successor who will lead Israel into Canaan—and the account is presented as a formula for how Joshua will succeed. The formula is developed through the week’s studies as a balance between faith in God’s promises and Joshua’s—and Israel’s—obedience to the law.
In typical Adventist fashion, God’s promises are pictured as depending upon the people’s willingness to obey. God, in fact, is described as waiting for obedience before executing His promised blessings.
In fact, the very title of this week’s lessons—“Recipe for Success”—confirms the Adventist view that we humans hold the key to realizing God’s power. A recipe is a method with specific ingredients which we follow according to a plan in order to produce a desired result. Joshua is described as having a specific plan to follow in order to achieve success in leading Israel into the Promised Land. And yet—God had covenanted to bring Israel into the land. That promise did not depend upon Joshua following a “recipe”. In order for Joshua to lead Israel into Canaan, he would have to meditate on God’s word and remember to trust God’s promises instead of taking matters into his own hands. Yet God’s covenant to take Canaan for His people was an unconditional promise. He would do what He said He would do—even in the unlikely event that Joshua would apostatize and turn away from God.
Separating God from His Word
In Tuesday’s lesson, Magyars develops the idea that Joshua and Israel had to know and keep God’s law “in order to assure success in the forthcoming conquest of the Promised Land.”
What Magyars developed was a subtle but convincing explanation that separates God from His own word. In fact, this separation between God and His word is the currency of Adventism. Adventists do not believe the Bible is God’s inerrant word; they believe it has mistakes because their prophetess Ellen White clearly made mistakes and wrote internal contradictions. This reality permits them to edit God’s word to make sense to them from their Adventist, great controversy worldview. They reinterpret words and concepts and say the Bible makes claims that it never makes. They disempower God’s word, making it merely the words of fallible men doing the best they could with the ideas God gave them, and they refuse to equate God’s word with God Himself.
Here is what the lesson says:
There is nothing magical about the promises of God. They don’t have the power in and of themselves to secure their own fulfillment. The guarantee that they will come true lies in the presence of God, who says: “ ‘I will be with you.’ ” Indeed, the presence of the Lord was crucial for the survival of the Israelites. Without it, they would be only one among many nations, with no special call, identity, or mission (Exod. 33:12–16). The presence of the Lord was everything Joshua needed to succeed.
This blatant diminishment of God’s word is both shocking—and predicable in Adventism. Let’s look at this statement. First, the word “magical” has no place in a discussion of God’s word. In fact, Acts 19 records that the Ephesians burned their books of magic when they became believers:
Also, many of those who had believed kept coming, confessing and disclosing their practices. And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and were burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing.—Acts 19:18–20 LSB
Using the word “magic” in a reference to God’s word is to deliberately trivialize God’s power. Even a “light-hearted” reference to God’s word not being “magical” is to make a veiled connection between the Bible and spiritual deception. Magic is a dark art. God’s word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path (Psalm 119:105). Even this attempt in the Sabbath School lesson to mildly shock readers is blasphemous.
We know from Hebrews 4 that God’s word is equated with God Himself. Furthermore, John 1:1 identifies Jesus as “the Word”. The Lord Jesus, our creator, is the embodiment of God’s word. Whatever God says—happens. There is never a rescinding of God’s word, and there is never a change of God’s mind. What God said, happened—just as we see in the Genesis account of creation. What God says—happens. We cannot reinterpret His words or explain them away. What He says IS. Here, in the context of hearing God’s word TODAY, believing, and entering His rest, is what God tells us about His word:
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of Him to whom we have an account [to give].—Hebrews 4:12, 13 LSB
In this passage we see that God’s word is alive. It has the power to expose our darkest motives to ourselves and judge us. And notice that verse 13 follows 12 with no explanation, moving seamlessly from saying God’s word divides into our deepest recesses and exposes them—and reminding us that there is NO CREATURE hidden from God’s sight. God’s word is connected to God Himself. It exposes us to ourselves and also to God.
Frankly, I fear for those who do not see and believe this equation between God and His inerrant, infallible word. To say God’s word is not magical in itself but that fulfillment of God’s promises requires the presence of God is to deny that God is present in His own word. His word WILL accomplish what He sends it out to do.
Furthermore, the “presence of God” with any individual is dependent upon each person’s belief in God’s word. God’s word tells us how to experience God’s presence: we are to BELIEVE GOD as Abraham did in Genesis 15:6. Jesus said that now, after He has come, this is what we are to do:
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”—John 6:29 LSB
This lesson is teaching the readers that they hold the key to experiencing God’s presence—they must obey those commandments, and if they do, they will finally experience God. Jesus Himself—God the Son—actually told us how to know God. We have to come to Him and believe Him—believe in His finished atonement on the cross and in His breaking death by rising from the tomb because His blood paid for sin! He said this:
“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
Faith and Obedience: Recipe for Success?
Thursday’s lesson overtly anchors the readers to the confusion of Adventist double-speak. First, the author attempts to define “wisdom” as “success” or “prosperity”. He makes a general statement that the idea of being successful is often linked in the wisdom literature to the “acting wisely by fearing God and obeying His Word.”
Then the author leads the reader further into confusion by saying,
“According to this insight, success is not necessarily defined as material prosperity, though it does not exclude it. Success has to be seen as a state of harmony with the spiritual values and principles that lie at the foundation of God’s created world and that are expressed in His law.
“Indeed, trust in God’s promises, especially the promise of salvation by faith alone and obedience to His law, are not opposed to each other. They represent two sides of the same coin.”
Notice how the author attempts to twist the definition of “success” into obedience to the Ten Commandments. The logic here is illegitimate and deceptive. First, he establishes that his conclusion is based on his own attempt to equate “success” with “wisdom”. This equation, first of all, is not the way Scripture defines “success”. While the wisdom literature personifies “wisdom”, which is an attribute of God, we cannot equate acting wisely with becoming successful necessarily.
In other words, in the context of this lesson, we cannot say that Joshua would be successful in leading Israel into the Promised Land if he remembered to obey the law. Yet that is the context of this argument. The author shamelessly takes the biblical account of Joshua 1:7–9 where God tells Joshua that His law would be in his mouth, and he was to remember it and do it—while assuring him that He would always be with him—and twists that to bind the conscience of the Adventist reader to the Ten Commandments—especially the fourth.
Further, the author then places “the promise of salvation by faith alone”directly with “and obedience to His law” as the Adventist recipe for being saved. He shamelessly states the Adventist salvation formula: “faith alone” and “obedience to His law.”
“Faith alone” is NOT the flip side of the coin of “obedience to the law”!
This application of God’s charge to Joshua as marching orders for Seventh-day Adventists is illegitimate on many levels. First, it completely obscures the fact that Joshua’s assignment was under the authority of the Mosaic covenant. God gave a CONDITIONAL covenant to Israel, and the Ten Commandments were the actual Ten Words of the covenant. They were the central document of a two-way agreement between God and His nation.
This covenant was never given to anyone else—and that fourth commandment was never required of anyone other than Israel. The seventh-day Sabbath was the sign of the Mosaic covenant. Israel would know God’s blessing as He worked for them while they stayed in their tents every seventh day, no matter what emergency demanded their attention. If they trusted God and stayed in their tents, He would take care of them better than they could themselves. This was His covenant sign to them—and it was never given to anyone else.
Second, when the Lord Jesus came incarnate to earth, He fulfilled in Himself all the shadows of the law (Hebrews 10:1). The Seventh-day Sabbath, as well as all the other sabbaths required in the law, was a shadow of the reality found in Christ:
Therefore, no one is to judge you in food and drink, or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day– things which are [only] a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.—Colossians 2:16, 17 LSB
When Jesus came, He Himself became the perfect, eternal sacrifice for sin, and He became our new High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek—not according to the order of Aaron and the Levites. With a new priest of a new order, the Law—including the Ten Commandments—cannot be viable any longer:
Now if perfection was through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the people received the Law), what further need [was there] for another priest to arise according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be designated according to the order of Aaron? For when the priesthood is changed, of necessity there takes place a change of law also.—Hebrews 7:11, 12 LSB
Notice what that text says: without the levites, the MUST BE a NEW LAW! The Ten Commandments with their sign of the seventh-day Sabbath was based on the levitical priesthood. When the priesthood changes, the law MUST change.
The lesson with its illegitimate stitching together of “law” and “grace” is wrong. It is overtly teaching false doctrines that Scripture denies. The lesson denies that our salvation is entirely the work of God, and that when we believe in Jesus’ finished atonement for sin, in His burial, and His resurrection on the third day according to Scripture, we pass at that moment from death to life.
We literally receive from God His imputed, personal righteousness credited to our account. We do not “become” righteous or have imparted or infused righteousness given to us to help us obey the law and show God that we love Him. Rather we are literally given spiritual life. We are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, and we are credited with God’s righteousness when we become one with Christ.
God Helps Those Who Help Themselves?
The lesson admits that Adventism’s recipe for success doesn’t actually promise anything certain. In the discussion question at the end of Thursday’s lesson we read this:
However much by God’s grace you seek to keep His law, how has your own experience shown you your need for Christ’s covering righteousness?
This question reveals Adventism’s working rule: “Do your best, and God does the rest.” It’s closely related to another adage that is nowhere in Scripture: “God helps those who help themselves.”
Every Adventist KNOWS that no one ever manages to keep that law perfectly! No one ever manages to suppress all rebellious desires and urges. No one ever perfectly keeps the edges of the Sabbath—even if only in their minds. No one ever manages never to have temptations to rage or lust. No one!
This question reveals Adventism’s fall-back: if you do your best, God will make up what you lack by applying Jesus’ perfect obedience to your efforts.
The Bible NEVER teaches this idea!
So what is actually true?
The Lord Jesus told us how to be saved: we are to do the work of God—believe in the One whom He sent (John 6:29).
Well, yes, you may say—but then what?
Believe is the ONLY thing we are to do—but belief is not merely a mental assent to an idea that Jesus died for sin. Belief includes realizing that Scripture tells one the truth: we are by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3) and completely unable to seek God, to please God, to honor God, or to find God (see Romans 3:9–18).
We are to allow God’s word to reveal to us that we are dead by nature, spiritually dead and without the life of God. We need a Redeemer to rescue us, not a perfect Example to show us how to keep the law!
We are never asked to keep the law to be saved!
When we believe that the Lord Jesus has taken our sin into Himself, that He has endured God’s wrath for our sin and died the death we deserve—and that He broke that natural curse of death into which we are born, we pass at that moment from death to life!
Paul tells us that when we hear this gospel of our salvation and believe, He places His Spirit in us as a permanent seal, a promise of our eternal inheritance:
In Him, you also, after listening to the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation–having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, unto the redemption of [God’s own] possession, to the praise of His glory.—Ephesians 1:13, 14 LSB
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
When we believe, God literally brings our dead spirits to life, and we are credited with His personal righteousness which is alien to us. Our own obedience never counts as part of our justification. Rather we are justified on the basis of faith in the Lord Jesus’ finished work ALONE.
Once we are justified and indwelled by the Holy Spirit, we have the actual Author of the Law residing n our hearts. He Himself teaches us now, showing us how to submit our minds to His Word and allowing Him to change us as we learn to apply His word to our lives.
This ongoing transformation is our sanctification—but it is never part of our justification. It does not contribute to our being saved nor to our staying saved. Rather, our ongoing sanctification is the fruit of the fact that we are already saved—made alive and placed eternally in Jesus, credited with His actual righteousness.
There is no recipe for success in Scripture. Rather, the Bible reveals that we cannot succeed by figuring out how to please God. There is absolutely no way for us to contribute to our salvation. All we can do is to believe God and allow Him to show us how to trust Him moment by moment.
That belief was the secret to Joshua’s success as he took over for Moses. He believed God’s promises, and He trusted Him, leaning on Him and asking Him to give Him the wisdom only He can give. He kept God’s word close not because he had to do behaviors to please God but because He trusted God and knew that God’s word was alive and powerful. He trusted God’s law—the whole of God’s word—and learned to submit His mind and heart to the all-powerful One whose word changed his heart and revealed God’s will.
Have you trusted the Lord Jesus alone? Have you admitted that you cannot please God nor obey that law? Agree with God that you are dead in trespasses and sins and that you need a Savior. See Jesus enduring God’s wrath on that cross as He became sin for you. See Him being buried—and rising on the third day because His blood broke forever the curse of death into which we are born!
Believe Him today—and you will be saved! †
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.
- September 27–October 3, 2025 - September 25, 2025
- We Got Mail - September 25, 2025
- September 20–26, 2025 - September 18, 2025