Lesson 5: “God Fights For You”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
This week’s Sabbath School lessons are the second round of attempts to explain Israel’s battles against the Canaanites from a great controversy perspective. Implicit in these studies are the assumptions that God’s character is on trial in the universe, that humans (and demons) are created with free will that God must honor, and that the readers (Adventists) can help establish peace in their world . Once again, the need for covenant blood to atone for sin and thus establish peace is missing. The great controversy model causes Adventists to read their own agenda into the Old Testament accounts.
Ignoring God’s Warning Against False Prophets
Saturday’s lesson introduces the week’s studies by reminding the reader that they are looking at the stories of Joshua taking the Promised Land through the lens of the Great Controversy—a paradigm which the author clearly identified in the last lesson to be the lens through which the entire Old Testament account of God’s battles and Israel’s conquests to be understood.
In a nutshell, the confusion of this lesson can be summarized by saying that Adventism, in spite of Scripture’s clear statements and warnings, insists on holding onto a false prophet and her non-biblical worldview: the supposed great controversy between Christ and Satan that drives all of God’s decision and actions in the world.
As the lesson opens it establishes Adventism’s bottom line with an omission which is egregious, but this omission is entirely typical of Adventism. Sunday’s lesson opens with this assignment for the day:
Read Genesis 15:16, Leviticus 18:24–30, Deuteronomy 18:9–14, and Ezra 9:11. What are these texts telling us about God’s larger plan in offering the land of Canaan to the Israelites?
These texts include God’s promise that Abraham’s descendants would come back to the land He promised when the Amorites’ cup of iniquity was full, the discussion of the Canaanites’ unrepentant evil that defiled the land, the warnings against idolatry and the Canaanites’ commitment to witchcraft and spiritism that defiled the land, and finally Ezra’s collective confession for the nation’s idolatry and abominations as they returned to the Promised Land after their Babylonian enslavement.
Ironically, the day’s lesson focusses on the Deuteronomy passage and the fact of the Canaanites’ witchcraft, necromancy, and spiritism as an explanation for why God had to drive them out of the land. Here is the opening paragraph after the reading assignment quoted above:
We need to look beyond the book of Joshua to completely understand what was meant by the iniquity of the nations inhabiting Canaan. These nations’ abhorrent practices of child sacrifice, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, and spiritualism give us a hint (Deut. 18:9–12).
Yes. The Canaanites were steeped deeply in demonic worship and practices. Yet look at what the lesson didn’t mention at all—the verses following Deuteronomy 18:9–12!
“And Yahweh said to me, ‘They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their brothers like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And it will be that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require [it] of him. But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ Now you may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which Yahweh has not spoken?’ When a prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which Yahweh has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.”—Deuteronomy 18:17–22 LSB
The verses that follow those used in the lesson reveal and condemn their own prophet, Ellen White! God not only condemned all forms of spirituality apart from the worship of the Lord God, but He described the kinds of people that could arise within Israel that they were to disregard. Those who disregarded God’s instructions from the prophet He would send them (a messianic promise) would be liable before God for their refusal to obey His commands.
Even more (and particularly applicable to Adventists), if a prophet ever arises who speaks in God’s name but whose words are NOT from GOD—“that prophet shall die”.
Did you notice that? A false prophet was to DIE. Furthermore, if a prophet ever speaks in the name of Yahweh and the prophecy does not come to pass, that thing is NOT from GOD. No one needs to fear that prophet!
In this one passage (and there are many others throughout both Testaments) Ellen White is condemned to death, and people are told they are not to fear anything she says! She is to be utterly disregarded!
I find it SO interesting that this passage, out of all four required for the day, is the only one the author developed in the lesson. Adventists are somehow subconsciously sensitive to their dependence on a prophet, and they go to great lengths to explains what THEY consider to be the marks of a false prophet so that EGW will be excused. Here they use the very same chapter that condemns Ellen to explain why the Canaanites’ religion had to be destroyed!
If they would simply deal with the whole of Deuteronomy 18, the rest of the lesson would be a moot point. This very passage destroys their prophetic foundation, and their great controversy paradigm is shattered with God’s condemnation of Ellen White’s false prophecies, false trinity, false nature of man, and false gospel.
Atonement Eclipsed by Social Conscience
Monday’s and Tuesday’s lessons attempt to explain God’s motives for destroying the Canaanites as Israel went into the land. First we’ll mention Tuesday’s emphasis: the author goes to great lengths to say that God never intended to “annihilate” the Canaanites but merely wanted to “dispossess” them. Here is a quote from Tuesday’s lesson:
However, all the inhabitants of Canaan, and those who, on an individual basis, recognized God’s sovereignty prior to the conquest, or even during the conquest, were able to escape through immigration (Josh. 2:9–14; compare with Judg. 1:24–26).…
Analysis of the biblical texts related to the conquest of Canaan revealed that the original intent of the conquest implied the dissipation of the Canaanite population. However, the majority of the Canaanites, like the pharaoh of Egypt, hardened their hearts and, as such, became one with the culture to such an extent that the destruction of their culture meant they had to be destroyed, as well.
It’s no mistake that the author used the term “immigration” in a lesson appearing in October, 2025. Further, God always required that the Canaanites be utterly removed and destroyed from the land. He didn’t make arrangements for them to be dissipated among the local population; He strictly forbade the Israelites from intermarrying with them. The problem here is that Adventism is committed to protecting God’s reputation as part of its great controversy worldview. It attempts to rephrase His decisive condemnation of entrenched evil and His call for destruction of evil.
Yes, God has always called gentiles to Himself as they have responded to His revelation of His divine nature and eternal power (Romans 1:18–21), but the Canaanites were a non-negotiable situation. They had to be utterly removed and killed.
Monday’s lesson sets the stage for the equivocation of God’s decree for the Canaanites to be destroyed. In a confusing lesson saying that God’s “image” as a warrior shows that He won’t tolerate rebellion forever, the author concludes the day with these words:
Therefore, one can affirm that the goal of Yahweh’s activity is never war itself, or victory itself, but the reestablishment of justice and peace. Ultimately, to judge and to wage war, or to deliver justice, are the same thing if God is the subject of the action.
In spite of the progressive-sounding “niceness” of the idea that God’s war is the same thing as establishing justice and peace, the author’s point is weak and confusing. What does he really mean—and how DOES God reestablish justice and peace?
The author NEVER mentions that God Himself supplied the blood atonement that established justice and peace for all humanity. Further, the author says that demanding the Canaanites’ blood was God’s justice, but he emphasizes in Wednesday’s lesson that these wars were limited. They only occurred in a certain period of history and geography under “tight theocratic control”. In other words, one must not deduce that God actually approves of war. He had His reasons—and those reasons only applied to a tiny slice of Israelite history and were the result of human choices to rebel.
The author never explains that God is the One who said the wages of sin is death. The Canaanites’ deaths were God’s just dealing with their sin. Their blood paid for their own sin, and God was cleansing the land as He destroyed the Canaanites and brought in the nation dedicated to Himself. The Promised Land was cleansed by the blood of the Canaanites who died in their sins.
Free Choice and Peace
Wednesday’s lesson is a defense of free choice and an explanation of God’s allowing people “to move from one side to the other” by their own choice as did Rahab, Achan, and the Gibeonites.
Thursday’s lesson, however, returns to the theme of peace and develops the Adventist reasoning “As violence breeds violence…peace engenders peace.” The author then ends the day’s lesson with these thought questions:
Think about all the ways we can, by seeking to emulate Jesus, be agents of peace. What about your own life right now? In what ways, in whatever conflict you might be facing, could you be an agent of peace instead of conflict?
Here again, as the lessons near the end of the week, the take-home point is that the reader must be committed to following the example of Jesus and become an agent of peace. There is no clear discussion of HOW a person can generate “peace”. The lesson refers to an account in 2 Kings 6:22 where Elisha and his men defused a delegation of Syrian soldiers who had staged yet another incursion across the Israelite border, but Elisha and his men had, instead, taken the men, blindfolded them, brought them to the Israelite king in Samaria, and then told the king not to kill them but to feed them instead. The Syrians “did not come again into the land of Israel” (2 Kings 6:22).
The lesson used that account to show that surprising the enemy with peace stopped the violence—but this interpretation is not what the account was showing. In the first place, two verses later reveals that after some time, the Syrian king himself led an army and “besieged Samaria”, the capital of Israel (the northern kingdom). The peaceful end to the Syrian border incursions had not stopped Syria’s commitment to do violence against Israel.
Secondly, the author completely missed the point of this account. The NASB95 text notes explain the event this way:
In reality the Arabian [Syrian] soldiers had been taken captive by the power of the Lord, not by Jehoram’s military prowess. The Lord’s purpose was to demonstrate to them and their king and to the Israelites and their king that Israel’s national security ultimately was grounded in the Lord, not in military forces or strategies.
This incident was not an illustration of the author’s point that peace generates peace, and violence generates violence. The issue was that God was IN CHARGE of the armies—both Israel’s and the enemies’!
Yet Friday’s lesson ends with this discussion question:
The Old Testament contains many stories of war and conflict, but ultimately, it forecasts a vision of peace. What role should Christians play in establishing peace in their environment?
True to form, the entire week missed the real point about God’s intervention as He removed the indigenous people from Canaan and brought His nation, Israel, into their Promised Land. It misses the point that the land was God’s to assign; it didn’t belong to any people; it belonged to Him. He is the One who promised Abraham that He would give the land to Abraham’s descendants who came through Isaac and Jacob: the nation of Israel. God was fulfilling His covenant as He removed the Canaanites and brought in Israel.
The main issue wasn’t the people and their “value” or their “rights”. The issue was God’s word. He was fulfilling His word—and as He did so, He was giving all those with whom He interacted—from the Canaanites like Rahab to the Israelites who were His own people—the opportunity to BELIEVE HIM.
Yahweh is the one true God, and Yahweh was sovereign over all the Canaanite deities.
As for the issue of peace—the lesson missed its opportunity to explain the real truth: peace is not possible apart from the full atonement for human sin paid by the Lord Jesus as He bled on the cross, endured God’s wrath against sin, died, and then shattered the tomb on the third day.
Yet Adventism cannot explain this truth. Adventism does not teach or believe that the Lord Jesus completed the atonement on the cross. Rather, it teaches that Jesus is currently involved in a “second phase” of the atonement in heaven—an Ellen White-condoned doctrine that says on October 22, 1844, Jesus moved from the Holy Place into the Most Holy place where He reviews the books of sins committed by all who profess Christ.
Yes, that’s right—the investigative judgment is not about UNBELIEVERS but about professed BELIEVERS. If there is even one sin on their records that has not been confessed, that sin remains against them. If the sins Jesus finds in the books have been confessed, then He “applies His blood” to them. He then writes “Pardon” after their sin—and when He is finally done reviewing the heavens books, Jesus will place the sins of the saved on the head of Satan—the scapegoat—who will carry them into the lake of fire and be punished for them.
Satan, not Jesus, is the final sin bearer who is punished for the sins of the saved.
It is no wonder that Adventism cannot even deal with God’s justice against the unbridled evil of the Canaanites without modifying His holiness and justice. Adventism must make God seem loving and kind, unwilling to punish unrepentant sin unless He’s pushed to do so.
God is sovereign. Justice is a component of His love, and mercy and grace are part of His holiness. God has taken full responsibility for the sins of mankind—unlike Adventism’s god who must vindicate His character and prove to the universe that SATAN is responsible.
NO! Humans are responsible for human sin, and in His mercy, God the Son became a man so that He could take the sins of humanity into Himself and die in our place. He endured God’s wrath so that, if we trust Him, we will not have to do so.
Paul reveals the amazing thing that God did for us:
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
The Adventist great controversy paradigm and its prophet Ellen White could never teach Adventists this reality. The Adventist God is guarding His reputation and is involved in disproving the devil. The Adventist Jesus is weak and fallible, a nice guy who suffered unfairly and showed us how to endure hardship without complaining. Ellen White’s god could not actually establish peace because He didn’t actually deal with sin.
Adventism has a Jesus who did not take full responsibility for us and rescue us. He was simply an annoyingly good example, and Adventists are to do what He did and be good.
Adventism has a false prophet who gave Adventists a false gospel, a false Jesus, a false view of humanity, and a false view of salvation.
God, however, gave us His own Son who became a man and took our sin by imputation so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
Have you believed Him? Have you entrusted your sin to the Lord Jesus whose blood has atoned for it? Trust Him today. Believe that He has completed everything necessary for your salvation. There is no second phase of the atonement. The Lord Jesus is all you need.
Believe Him today, and you will 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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