Lesson 13: “Choose This Day!”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
When you read the Old Testament stories of Israel, what do you think you are supposed to learn from them? As an Adventist, how is your freewill related to God’s faithfulness to keep His promises? Do you see yourself as being pivotal in whether or not God will do what He says? Are His blessings and fulfillments conditional upon your own free will decisions to obey Him or not?
What Determines History?
Although this lesson nodded to the fact that the book of Joshua ended with Joshua affirming God’s actions and faithfulness in getting Israel into the land, those acknowledgments were countered by repeated reminders that people have free will to obey or not, and people’s personal decisions determine the ultimate outcome of God’s promises. For example, Tuesday’s lesson says this:
As a true and faithful leader, Joshua respects the free will of his people and wishes that Israel would serve the Lord out of free choice rather than compulsion…Israel is free to say “no” to Yahweh after their divine election, but that would be nonsensical and absurd. Israel can say “yes” to God and continue to live, or they can turn their backs on Him and cease to exist.
This summary statement follows the author’s reference to Joshua’s challenge to Israel in Joshua 24:14, 15:
“So now, fear Yahweh and serve Him in integrity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve Yahweh. If it is evil in your sight to serve Yahweh, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh.”—Joshua 24:14, 15 LSB
Joshua was about to die, and he was reviewing the covenant terms with Israel before he left them. In the verses above, he was reminding them of the pagan gods from which God had delivered them from Egypt. He was calling on the nation not to worship either the old Egyptian gods or the Amorite gods in Canaan. They were to serve Yahweh! Furthermore, he told them, he and his house were serving Yahweh. They had to choose between the Egyptian and the Amorite gods if they refused to honor Yahweh—but there was no doubt that Joshua and his family were honoring Yahweh!
The author of the lesson, however, takes this passage and appropriates it to teach that Israel had free will and the power to exercise it badly to the point that their very nation could cease to exist!
This idea, however, is not Scriptural. It reflects Adventism’s great controversy worldview—that free will is our ultimate gift from God and that God Himself will limit His power to honor our free will choices!
What does God say about Israel’s being able to potentially destroy their nation’s existence?
In Jeremiah 31, just one verse after God delivered His promise of a new covenant for the houses of Israel and Judah, God says this:
Thus says Yahweh, Who gives the sun for light by day And the statutes for the moon and the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar; Yahweh of hosts is His name: “If these statutes are removed From before Me,” declares Yahweh, “Then the seed of Israel also will cease From being a nation before Me forever.” Thus says Yahweh, “If the heavens above can be measured And the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also reject all the seed of Israel For all that they have done,” declares Yahweh.—Jeremiah 31:35–37 LSB
Notice that it is not a person but God Himself who says that the only way the seed of Israel can cease from existing is if the statues governing the sun, moon, and stars and the laws governing the waves of the sea were to cease to exist. God is the Source of the laws governing the heavens and the seas, and He is The One who preserves the seed of Israel. Even if (and when) He disciplines Israel for persistent unbelief (as He did in then Babylonian exile and again when Jerusalem was destroyed and Israel was dispersed in AD 70), still He is preserving Israel’s seed, and He will bring them back. In fact, He promises to make a new covenant with the nation and to remove their sin from them.
Even though the nation apostatized and experienced God’s judgment and discipline in their 2000-year diaspora, the nation cannot annihilate itself. God’s promises are keeping Israel, and even though the current state of Israel is in unbelief, yet there IS a nation named Israel using Hebrew as a national language. God is preserving the seed of Israel, and a remnant is. God’s people have never been annihilated.
The lesson does not take what God says about Israel seriously but instead has developed an argument explaining that Old Testament Israel was able to say “no” to Yahweh—a “no” that would outweigh diving election. Adventism teaches that human free will is the trump card over God’s promises. Humans can prevent God from fulfilling His covenant promises, according to the Adventist framework of freewill. Yet God declares that He will never cause Israel’s seed to cease to exist. His promises outweigh Israel’s freewill and apostasy!
Conscious Conversations
Wednesday’s lesson further reveals Adventism’s lack of understanding of how to avoid idolatry. The author develops commentary on what “idolatry” is and how to avoid it—unlike Israel who repeatedly fell into it. The lesson states:
The sinful human heart does not have the natural tendency to bend and listen to God’s voice. It takes conscious decisions on our part to incline it toward fulfilling God’s will.
The Israelites’ answer literally reads: “We will listen to His voice.” This expression emphasizes the relational aspect of obedience. Israel is not asked to routinely follow lifeless rules. The covenant is about a living relationship with the Lord, which cannot be fully expressed by mere regulations. Israel’s religion was never intended to be legalistic; rather, it was to be a constant conversation in faith and love with a holy and merciful Savior.
First, Adventism teaches that we are born with sinful tendencies and propensities to evil that cause us to sin and to NOT obey God. As the above quote reveals, the Adventist antidote to this supposed natural tendency to evil is to make “conscious decisions” to obey God. This plan, however, never works. No Adventist that I know is able to become more and more obedient. Instead, they become more and more compulsive (if they are observant) and guilt-driven to focus on self-discipline and self-denial to become more compliant with the law. They often become obsessive-compulsive about prayer, as I did as an Adventist, begging God to help me deny myself and to make right decisions and to overcome my inner desires and feelings of rebellion and hopelessness.
This method of self-improvement doesn’t work because humans are NOT born with “natural tendencies” toward evil. We are born completely, literally, spiritually dead in sin. We cannot please God by trying harder. We can only find peace and reconciliation by recognizing that we have no ability whatsoever to overcome sin. We are dead, and we need a Savior. When we look to Jesus and see that He became sin for us and died the death our sin deserved, when we see that He propitiated for us by shedding His blood and BEIEVE and trust Him that He has done absolutely everything necessary for our salvation, then we pass from death to life.
God transfers us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son, and we are born again. Our spiritual death is removed, and He brings our spirits to life—and He indwells us. Literally! We become alive!
Only by becoming born again through faith in the Lord Jesus can we begin to please God.
Furthermore, the above quote says that Israel’s obedience was not supposed to be legalistic but “a living relationship”. Adventism has no idea what this “living relationship” actually is nor how to achieve it. They do not teach that we are dead and must be made alive through faith in Jesus. As the quote says, Israel was to have a “constant conversation in faith and love with a holy and merciful Savior.”
This idea is pure fantasy. Israel was never instructed to have constant conversation with a loving Savior! They were always to observe their covenant laws, bringing sacrifices and offerings to God exactly as the law prescribed, offering blood sacrifices for their sins. They were to bring their offerings to the priests who would present the blood to the Lord God on the people’s behalf. They would mediate atonement and forgiveness and consequences to Israel for every in fraction, accidentally or deliberate.
Their relationship with God was never on the basis of “conversations”. It was always on the basis of blood sacrifices and trusting that God meant what He said.
Israel, like Abraham before them, had to believe God. In fact, belief has always been what God has demanded of His people. Abraham had to believe God’s covenant promises and act on His word—and he did. Israel had to believe God and offer the prescribed offerings and sacrifices in the prescribed ways so that they could be atoned before God. They had to believe and trust God and do what His covenant commands demanded. If they did, they would receive their covenant blessings. If they failed to believe and obey, they would receive the disciplines God had promised. They weren’t conversing “in faith and love with a holy and merciful Savior.” They were honoring Yahweh and offering sacrifices as He said. If they didn’t do these things, they suffered His disciplines.
Adventism is determined to present God as patient and loving, and they eclipse His holiness and judgment. God hates sin, and He demands blood to propitiate for sin. Israel had to use animals for sacrifices because God hadn’t yet sent the Savior from the line of Judah, but those lambs were types of the coming Savior. Israel didn’t know Jesus yet, but they knew their God blessed them when they repented of sin and worshiped Him as He demanded.
Adventism, however, suppressed the centrality of blood for being in relationship with God.
Church Can Cease to Exist?
Thursday’s lesson reveals further the physicalist-driven Adventist belief that not only do humans cease to exist, God’s people can also cease to exist as a group. This quote is from Thursday’s study:
In fact, the church is always one generation away from extinction, and so it was with the Old Testament people of God. A great chapter in the history of Israel comes to an end. Its future depends on what kind of answers it will give to the many questions that concern the future. Will Israel be loyal to the Lord? Will they be able to continue the unfinished task of possessing the whole land? Will they be able to cling to Yahweh and not get entangled in idol worship? A generation under Joshua has been faithful to the Lord, but will the next generation maintain the same spiritual direction that has been traced by its great leader? Each successive generation of God’s people, reading the book of Joshua, must face these same questions. Their success depends on the nature of the answers they provide in their everyday lives and how they relate to the truths they have inherited.
That quote states that both Old Testament Israel and the church is “one generation away from extinction”. This statement reveals Adventism’s belief that people’s choices determine the existence of God’s people. God may have His promises and plans, but people’s decisions actually drive history. They can cause themselves to become extinct!
Further, the last two sentences reveal this dynamic more clearly. The author says that every successive generation has to answer the questions Joshua posed to Israel: whom will they serve? The author summarizes the Adventist worldview by saying that the people’s success—whether that was the nation of Israel in the Old Testament or the church in the New—depends on the people’s answers to Joshua’s questions.
Of course each person has to answer to God for how he or she responds to God’s revelation of Himself and of His call to believe Him. Yet this need for each person to believe has absolutely nothing at all to do with the success or existence of the church or of Israel! God Himself sustains His people!
Individuals may not experience God’s blessings if they have hard, rebellious hearts. But the church itself has never been one generation away from extinction!
Remember what Jesus told Peter at Caesarea Philippi?
“And I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.”—Matthew 16:18 LSB
Jesus spoke these words in the upper region of the Galilee right at the center of the local pagan worship. The “gates of Hades” was a deep cave into which pagan threw their sacrifices, both goats and human, as offerings to Pan. Jesus took His disciples to the cultic center of pagan worship and declared, after Peter had said He was the Christ, the Son of the living God, that He was building His church on Peter’s witness—and evil would never be able to destroy it!
Jesus deliberately declared the eternal existence of His church at the very “gates of Hades”, and He declared His church and His power to be sovereign over that of the pagan gods. Nothing could destroy His church!
Yet even here, Adventism reveals that it doesn’t teach the plain meanings of Scripture. It must make human free will sovereign over omnipotence. God would not be fair, Adventism says, if He has sovereign foreknowledge and election. Yet destroying God’s sovereign power and purposes puts every human at risk. We have no absolute safety, not absolute reality or help. We become our own internal authority if our own free will trumps God’s sovereign power!
Reduced To Moralisms
Once again, the Sabbath School lesson has reduced God’s word to a series of moral lessons. Adventism must have members who are committed to the organization, putting their money on the line, their reputations on the Adventist line, their time on the Adventist Sabbath. They look at the words of the Bible, walking through the book of Joshua, yet dealing with the passages through an Adventist lens.
The book of Joshua is the story of Joshua’s taking Israel into Canaan and reminding them to honor the covenant God made with them. This book of the Bible is not for moral teachings within a man-made religion counterfeiting Christianity!
The book of Joshua is for us to see that God has consistently kept His covenant promises made to Abraham, taking Israel into the land, blessing them for honoring His covenant. Never are we supposed to appropriate the stories of Israel and make them about us, today. This book is a revelation of God’s faithfulness and a descriptive account of how God established Israel in Canaan and drove out the Canaanites.
This work was the work of God. We can know that He is faithful and His word cannot fail. He will do what He says, and we can trust Him to be faithful, even when we are not. As Paul said:
It is a trustworthy saying: For if we died with Him, we will also live with Him; If we endure, we will also reign with Him; If we will deny Him, He also will deny us; If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.—2 Timothy 2:11–13 LSB
The book of Joshua shows us that God’s self-revelation is true: He is faithful—even when His people are not. His people cannot, by exercising free will, take themselves out of existence. God preserves those He foreknows and calls—including Israel.
If you have not laid down your compulsive efforts to please God and recognized that you are hopelessly sinful, unable to please God, you need to face the truth. You have been born dead in sin, but our sovereign God reveals Himself in creation so that all are without excuse. Admit your sin and your need, and trust the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement on that cross. Believe that He died the death you deserve and was buried. Believe that He rose on the third day according to Scripture—and you will pass out of your natural curse of death into life! When you place your faith and trust in Jesus’ finished atonement alone, you will know what it means to pass from death to life.
Being good and making good decisions is not the way to be saved. Rather, we must each believe God and believe in the One whom He sent.
Trust God’s word and ask Him to teach you what He wants you to know as you submit yourself to His revelation in it.
Believe Jesus today—and you will know what it means to be reconciled to the one true sovereign God who cannot be overpowered by your will. He is God, and you are His creature. Believe in Jesus and you will be adopted as His child.
The Lord is faithful. Believe Him today! †
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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