Lesson 12: “Living With Each Other”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Adventist, what is the proper role of the husband and the wife in a marriage? What does it mean that the wife is to be subject to her husband? How do you explain a wife’s submission in a marriage and the command for husbands to love their wives and not be embittered against them—all of this in light of the fact that the entire Seventh-day Adventist organization exists in submission to a female prophetess? In spite of the Sabbath School lesson’s attempts to support Paul’s instruction for Christian families, Adventists themselves know that under the surface, Adventism trains it members to support feminist values.
The Adventist Illusion
This week’s lesson looks at Paul’s instruction for family and work relationships found in Colossians 3:18–4:6. The lesson is predictable and makes an effort to sound both socially acceptable and conservative. It doesn’t deny that Paul addresses slavery, and it upholds the point that wives are asked to submit to their husbands—but also emphasizes that the husband’s command to love his wife makes the wife’s submission easier. The author presents the marriage dynamics as “mutuality—consulting each other, thinking things through together, and making decisions as a couple.” A wife, Sunday’s lesson states, would be following a biblical “path to peace” if, when the couple reaches an impasse, the wife would “acquiesce to her husband’s judgment, provided it does not violate the Word of God.”
The author also makes the point that “the wife’s loyalty is to the Lord first and to her husband second. The wife’s individuality must not be swallowed up by her husband, nor can he act as her conscience.”
Significantly, Paul’s instructions to the church for intimate relationships are called “household codes” in Sunday’s lesson, and in Saturday’s introduction to the week, the author says,
The home has sometimes been called “the family firm.” It’s an interesting way to describe how the home operates. There are definite similarities between running a business and running a household. There should be general agreement on values, goals, and objectives. Everyone should get along with each other and do their part well for things to run smoothly. The same principles apply to the church, which is essentially a large family.
This objectified approach to “family”, comparing it to a corporation and also to the church, reveals that Adventism truly has no foundation on which to understand nor teach the nature of biblical submission, love, and care that God established in the family. It attempts to affirm the biblical counsel, but it misses the heart of what marriage is and how families function.
Further, the lesson reflects the Adventist position of publicly affirming the evangelical Christian position on marriage and the roles of husbands and wives, but its public affirmation does not expose the true foundation on which its male-female roles are based: the central, defining role of a female prophetess. In reality, Adventist culture functions from a feminist perspective; even while giving lip-service to the idea that the husband is “head of the house”, women often retain the idea that the wife is the neck that turns the head.
What’s Real?
In order to understand Paul’s clear and often counter-cultural teaching on marriage, we need to remember what happened with Adam and Eve sinned. God cursed the serpent to crawl on the ground. He did not curse the woman or the man but rather delivered severe consequences to them, and He cursed the earth—the substance from which Adam was made and to which he was now sentenced to return when he died. He would have to work hard to eke a living out of the earth.
God’s consequence to Eve was that she would have pain in childbirth and difficult dynamics in her marriage relationship:
To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain and conception, In pain you will bear children; Your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”—Genesis 3:16 LSB
Built into God’s binding all creation to decay until its renewed state will be redeemed when the glorified sons of God are revealed (Romans 8:19–23), is the struggle between man and wife: women will desire their husbands—a word that suggests a passionate need to control and possess—but the husband’s headship and dominance will be a source of trouble and anguish. In fact, the Hebrew word behind “desire” is the same word God used when He told Cain that
“sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.”—Genesis 4:7 LSB
The meaning of “desire” is the same: a passionate intensity to possess the other.
Sin broke Adam and Eve’s spiritual union with the life of God and plunged them and all humanity into spiritual death. Because men and women are no longer by nature alive with the Life of God but are born dead in sin and under the power of the spirit at work in the sons of disobedience (see Ephesians 2:1–3), wives would have troubled relationships with their husbands. A wife’s natural desire for her man and her husband’s natural response of taking control would yield unresolved power struggles and competition between them. In fact, there would be no effective way to resolve the troubled intimacy between unregenerate, natural men and women.
In fact, the reality of the Genesis curse became so destructive that in Deuteronomy 24:1–4 Moses gave Israel guidelines for divorce:
“If a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts [it] in her hand and sends her out from his house, and she goes out of his house and goes and becomes another man’s [wife], and if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts [it] in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, [then] her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, since she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before Yahweh, and you shall not bring sin on the land which Yahweh your God gives you as an inheritance”.—Deuteronomy 24:1–4 LSB
God did not give permission nor guidelines for divorce in Genesis nor at any time before Moses delivered these to Israel near the end of the wilderness wandering. Jesus addressed these guidelines and gave the new covenant guidelines which He was ushering in as He taught the coming kingdom of God:
They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to GIVE HER A CERTIFICATE OF DIVORCE AND SEND [her] AWAY?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” The disciples said to Him, “If the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry.”—Matthew 19:7–10 LSB
Jesus explained that divorce had been allowed in Israel because of the hardness of their hearts. Under the old covenant, before Jesus came and ushered in the new covenant in His blood, men were spiritually dead. Those who responded to God’s revelation of Himself were able to believe in Him, as did Abraham and David, for example, but the permanently dwelling Holy Spirit and the new birth of a person’s own heart and spirit through faith in Jesus’ atonement was not yet a reality.
God allowed divorce in Israel as a protection to the women who were rejected by their husbands. Divorce afforded a way out, a protection from circumstances that would otherwise have led to continual abuse and even death at the hands of natural man.
The new covenant brought a new reality. With new hearts, new spirits, and the indwelling Holy Spirit, believers were no longer spiritual dead. They have new power and new potential and the ever-present Holy Spirit to help them love with God’s love. This intimacy with God was not present before Jesus opened the new and living way to God through His broken body.
The lesson does not explain the HOW or the WHY that Paul makes so much of the relationship between a husband and a wife. The absence of this explanation leaves the reader relating to Paul’s words as to a new law, a new set of rules. In fact, that’s exactly what the lesson called Paul’s instructions in Sunday’s lesson: “household codes”.
Paul, however, is clear in Ephesians 5:22–33 that marriage is patterned after not a firm or a corporate organization of any kind but rather after the eternal relationship of Christ and the church. Jesus is the husband, and the church is the bride. The wife is to be subject to her husband as the church is subject to Christ, and the husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the church.
The eternal pattern is not a legal partnership or mutual agreement: it is the eternal reality of the Father giving to Jesus all those He chooses to give Him, and the eternal relationship of the church to Jesus is the reality that earthly marriage is to foreshadow.
No spiritually dead couple can live out the eternal love and submission that is God’s gift to the Son and to His bride; only those who are born again can begin to live out their faith in Christ by loving the other for Him. Paul says this:
But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives [ought to be] to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.—Ephesians 5:24–27 LSB
Wives’ submission to their husbands in the new covenant is possible because they are submitting to their Savior. As they relate to their imperfect husbands as born again but still imperfect women, they can trust God and lean on the Lord as they learn to submit and trust their husbands because they are trusting first in God. And husbands can learn to lean on their Savior and love their wives, sacrificially caring for them because they love and trust their Savior who has given himself for them.
EGW Taught Us Differently
Adventism, however, does not believe in the biblical new birth; it denies that humans have immaterial spirits that are by nature dead and must be born of God, coming to eternal life through faith in Christ. Without the new birth, there is no way a couple can live out Paul’s instructions because they do not have the life of God in them. Instead, they approach Paul’s words exactly as the lesson does: as “household codes” giving good advice—another Law that they must keep along with the Sabbath and the rest of the 10 and the health laws from Ellen White. For the Adventist, these words of Paul are impossible to understand or practice because the means of their fulfillment is lacking: there is no new birth with the literal power of the Spirit indwelling to make the concept of Christ and His bride real to them.
Ellen, stuck in her Adventist physicalism that denied the literal new birth, counseled the Adventists how to preserve women from draining all their vital force through their husbands’ sexual urges. She taught that women had to be preserved for mission and other work, and that men must retrain their passion so they had their vital force for church work.
Here are a few EGW quotes about husbands and wives:
Let the Christian wife refrain, both in word and act, from exciting the animal passions of her husband. Many have no strength at all to waste in this direction. They have already, from their youth up, weakened their brains, and sapped their constitutions, by the gratification of their animal passions. Self-denial and temperance should be the watch-word in married life; then, when children are born to parents, they will not be so liable to have the moral and intellectual organs weak, and the animal strong. Vice in children is almost universal. Is there not a cause? Who have given them the stamp of character? A Solemn Appeal 178.1
But very few feel it to be a religious duty to govern their passions. They have united themselves in marriage to the object of their choice, and therefore reason that marriage sanctifies the indulgence of the baser passions. Even men and women professing godliness give loose rein to their lustful passions, and have no thought that God holds them accountable for the expenditure of vital energy, which weakens their hold on life and enervates the entire system. A Solemn Appeal 170.1
Some men and women professing godliness debase their own bodies through the indulgence of the corrupt passions, which lowers them beneath the brute creation. They abuse the powers God has given them to be preserved in sanctification and honor. Health and life are sacrificed upon the altar of base passion.—A Solemn Appeal 171.1
With these and a great many other passages, the female prophetess who established the doctrines of Seventh-day Adventism wove into its fabric the idea that marital relations debased both husband and wife, and the life and energy of the women were to be spared from the desires of the husbands.
It’s clear that Ellen had no concept of the new birth. It’s also evident that she based her understanding on the then-prevalent idea of “vital force”, a belief that a hypothetical force existed that was the causative agent for the development of life, she thought that marital relations drained the limited amount of vital force that was in each person. The only way she could understand Paul was to morph his words into permission to limit sex within marriage in order to protect women from the animal passions of men.
Whether Adventists have been taught these ideas from Ellen White or not, they have permeated the Adventist worldview. They lie behind her health message which was intended to subdue the “animal passions” and limit sexual relations. These ideas have also permeated the Adventist worldview that embraces a feminist approach to life: women are valuable and must not allow men to overpower them. Women must be able to care for themselves and even abort babies if a pregnancy threatens the quality of their life. Women have the “last word” because men’s animal passions will overpower the finer sensibilities of the woman if she’s not on the alert. Women, in fact, can do anything a man can do—including keep peace at home by acquiescing if she and her husband can’t come to an agreement about the family. Her acquiescing, however, is done from the perspective of knowing she can “turn the head” of her husband because she herself is “the neck”. These subtle but powerful ideas lead to families managed by manipulation and passive aggression.
What about the children?
The lesson affirms Paul’s admonition that fathers not provoke or exasperate their children, but this instruction, like the instructions for husbands and wives, is not a set of “reciprocal responsibilities”, as the Teachers Comments say on page 160.
Again, a born-again father (and mother) will have the living Lord Himself indwelling his new heart, and he will understand that he can lean on the Lord at the very moment the child is acting out. He can ask the Lord, moment by moment, to show him how to love the child for Him—and God is faithful. He WILL show the parent, or give the parent words at the very moment they’re needed, to speak truth to the out of control child and to know how to set effective limits.
The lesson never hints, though, at the way Ellen herself wrote to her own son Willie. She used lofty words to expound the need to love and discipline the child so they would be true to God, but most Adventists don’t know that her REAL beliefs about children have caused a continuous attitude of stern control and punitive actions toward misbehaving children. For example, read these words she wrote:
The Lord loves those little children who try to do right and He has promised that they shall be in His kingdom; but wicked, naughty children, God does not love. He will not take them to the beautiful city, for He only admits the good, obedient and patient children there. One fretful, disobedient child would spoil all the harmony of heaven.—1LtMs, L13, 1860, par 3
When you feel tempted to speak impatient and fretful [words], remember the Lord sees you and will not love you if you do wrong. When you do right and overcome wrong feelings, the Lord smiles upon you. Although He is in heaven, and you cannot see Him, yet He loves you. When you do right [He] writes it down in His book; and when you do wrong, He puts a black mark against you.—1LtMs, L13, 1860, par 4
Think you that God can cover or hide iniquity in children and preserve them whom He hates? No, never. God hates unruly children who manifest passion and evil tempers, etc. He cannot save them in the time of trouble. They will be eternally lost through parents’ neglect. Their blood will be upon their parents. How can parents be saved with the blood of their children upon them, when they might have saved their children?—1 Ellen G. White Letters/Manuscripts 403.3
Ellen’s underlying belief that God hates naughty and unruly children has always permeated Adventism. Parents have lived in fear that their disobedient and unruly children will not only be lost themselves but condemn them, the parents, to be lost as well. Adventist parents live in perpetual anxiety that their children will give them a bad reputation in their local Adventist communities. They believe that they will be blamed if their children misbehave—and the prophet herself established that belief within their hearts.
Furthermore, Adventist women feel the burden not only of getting those children in line and making sure they’re involved in church, but they also feel responsible for their husbands’ looking good and being involved in church as well. The idea of submitting, at a personal and vulnerable level and not just in a problem-solving setting in the “family firm” is almost anathema to the average Adventist woman. She feels compelled to be as educated and potentially independent as her husband, never to be a victim of circumstances if his earning power should cease.
On the other hand, many Adventist husbands feel overwhelmed by the anxiety and demands of the well-ordered home their wives demand, and they become silent or absent, avoiding conflict and immersing themselves in work or hobbies because they can’t deal with their wives’ desires.
This Sabbath School lesson is useless in helping Adventists overcome the natural results of their own spiritual death that show up at the most vulnerable places within the family. Furthermore, it is glaringly obvious that there is a huge fact that Adventists overlook: their religion is shaped and driven by a WOMAN. No matter how much Adventist church leaders may fight over whether or not women should be pastors—no matter how much individual Adventists may try to use Paul’s counsel as household codes of behavior, nothing can undo the influence of Ellen White’s leadership and control over Adventism.
Every single Adventist pastor, male and female, is consciously or unconsciously bowing the knee to a woman prophet! Every Adventist pastor who is receiving wages from the Adventist organization is living under the influence and control and interpretations of Ellen White!
It is dishonest for Adventists to say that women are to be subject to their husbands and that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Christ is NOT the head of Adventism: a false prophetess, Ellen White, is the true Head of Adventism. The dynamics of a born-again marriage are impossible within Adventist homes because Adventists are still spiritually dead, trying to do right and control their children so they all become worthy of salvation.
With Ellen White as the true foundation and doctrinal authority in Adventism, it is impossible to submit to Christ as the head of the church. Men and women are under the spiritual authority of a woman who established false doctrines and a false Jesus, and the biblical Jesus is out of reach—and with Jesus out of their reach, a trusting, intimate marriage and a safe family environment is also out of reach.
There is only one way to resolve this issue: have you trusted Jesus alone? Ask the Lord to remove your Ellen White lens and to teach you what His word really says. Ask the Lord to show you your own sin and to teach you to trust Jesus alone. See Him taking your sin and taking God’s wrath for your sin as He hung on the cross. See Him dying and then shattering the tomb as He rose on the third day, His atonement completed! Repent of your Adventism and ask the Lord to place His Spirit in the place where Adventism has lived in your heart and identity.
Believe Jesus today—and pass from death to life! You will never be the same. †
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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