Lesson 8: “Having Faith”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
For Adventists, faith is frustrating attempt to believe well enough to obtain what one hopes to receive while trying to suppress the fear that God doesn’t want you to have what you pray for. Adventist “faith” is inseparable from Adventist “prayer confusion”, and it is founded in the deep belief that if one isn’t properly keeping the commandments, one’s faith cannot be effective or powerful. Adventist faith is inextricably linked to keeping the law—and, of course, especially the Sabbath.
Faith and the Adventist Worldview
This lesson walks the reader through successive platitudes about faith like a mustard seed, faith is not a feeling, faith and doubt can exist together—and so on. Punctuating the week’s studies are quotes from Ellen White which leave the reader as uncertain how to develop faith as they likely were before they read the lesson! For example, Monday’s lesson says this:
“The unbelief which is cherished in the soul has a bewitching power. The seeds of doubt that they have been sowing will produce their harvest but they must continue to dig up every root of unbelief. When these poisonous plants are pulled up, they cease to grow for want of nourishment in word and action. The soul must have the precious plants of faith and love put in the soil of the heart and enthroned there.”—Ellen G. White, Faith and Works, p. 17.
When we have doubts about God, His character, or His Word, what should we do with them? God does not ignore or bypass human reason, for He created us in His image and invites us to dialogue with Him, as He did with Abraham, Moses, and Job. God invites us to learn to work within His large, infinite patterns of reason, even if at some point we must surrender to what we don’t fully understand.
I ask you: what do these paragraphs mean? How are we to understand that Abraham, Moses, and Job worked within God’s “large, infinite patterns of reason,” and how are we supposed to figure out what that means for us? How are we supposed to, as the lesson says later in the week, cooperate with the Holy Spirit and thus glean the fruit of faith? Frankly, I don’t understand these ideas. How does one accomplish them? How do we figure out how to work within God’s large, infinite patterns of REASON? How do we know God’s reasoning patterns? I frankly have no idea how to “do” this—and these kinds of pious clumps of words leave me feeling irritable and frankly a bit stupid. Surely it can’t be THAT vague—can it?
And where do the accounts of Abraham, Moses, and Job demonstrate some sort of mutual dialog between them and God? The Bible reveals God sovereignly speaking to these men and telling them His own sovereign will and ways. Abraham, Moses, and Job were men of faith because they BELIEVED God, not because they had mutual philosophical dialogs!
Abraham believed God without any evidence that God’s promises could come true—yet he trusted Yahweh. God credited him with righteousness for believing Him. Moses believed God and led Israel out of Egypt, managing a rebellious group of at least two million rough Israelites who were ready to stage a coup against God and also against Moses—but God was faithful and gave Moses His constant promises and presence to do His will. And Job—contrary to what I learned about Job in Adventism, Job the righteous actually repented at the end of the book for having spoken of things he didn’t understand. Job actually donned sackcloth and ashes and repented for thinking he understood God!
The Bible does NOT reveal that God invited these men into DIALOG with Him. Rather, He engaged them and told them who He IS, and they had the grace and faith to believe Him.
These men had faith in God. They recognized His sovereign power and authority, and they humbled themselves before Him and believed—even though they couldn’t explain or foresee how He could do all that He promised. Even in loss, these men believed God. They did not reason with Him.
Faith and Your Personal Testimony
Wednesday’s lesson opens by telling the reader to read Hebrews 11, “the great faith chapter”, and then it asks him or her to respond to a list of questions. The second question puts the issue of the Adventist worldview into clear focus: “What role does faith play in your personal testimony and in your conversion?”
I have never met an Adventist that truly had a “personal testimony” or “conversion”. Oh, I’ve heard plenty of Adventists share their “testimonies”, but those Adventist testimonies are nothing like the faith stories of Christians. They often tell of finding some relief or peace is discovering the structure of Adventism after living in lawless destruction, or they tell of their relief at finally knowing the truth and embracing the Sabbath.
Yet Adventists in general cannot tell true faith stories or conversion stories. Adventists do not believe in the biblical teaching of being born again through faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. They have no understanding of what it means to hear the gospel of our salvation—that by having faith in the death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus for atoning for our sins and breaking the curse of death—all according to Scripture—and to be filled with the permanently indwelling Holy Spirit of promise who is our guarantee of our eternal inheritance!
Adventists cannot talk about biblical faith without understanding the biblical gospel. They can only talk about how they mustered the courage to leave Sunday churches or a life of sin and embraced the Sabbath and the Three Angels’ Messages instead! This conversion is not biblical faith. It is a lateral move within the domain of darkness, not a coming to life spiritually and being transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son!
Within the Adventist worldview, the idea of “faith” is related to white-knuckling it through doubts and cognitive dissonance, hanging tightly to one’s Adventism, and praying for God to help them whether or not they see or know God’s will. Adventist faith thinks it must believe that they’ll get what they pray for IF they pay their tithe, keep the Sabbath, and avoid eating meat and maybe eggs.
Yet biblical faith is a gift from God that enables us to stand securely because we KNOW He is true, that His word cannot fail, and that He is utterly sovereign and will keep us safe in Him.
Fatih is IN GOD, not in answered prayer or personal courage or determination or self-control. Faith is our trust and submission to Yahweh Himself!
Teachers Comments Reveal Skew
Once again, the clearest glimpse into the Adventist skew comes in the Teachers Comments. Page 107 attempts to define “faith”, and it sets up its line of reasoning this way:
Hebrews 11:1 is the only biblical text that defines what faith is (Heb. 11:1). For Paul, the author of Hebrews, faith is made of two components. The first component, “the substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1), refers to the last event of human history, the “Advent,” or the coming of God’s kingdom at the end of time, which is also “the promise” that the “elders” of the Old Testament “did not receive” (Heb. 11:39, NKJV).
The second component of faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). This aspect refers to the first event in human history, the Creation of the world. Note that the word “seen,” blepomenon of Hebrews 11:1, points to the “seen,” blepomenon of Hebrews 11:3, which refers to the Creation of the world. In other words, the foundation of faith concerns two events that are fully under divine control: God’s Creation of the world and the Second Coming. Faith calls us to believe in the nonvisible process of Creation and to hope in the nonvisible, not-yet event of Christ’s second coming. Thus, the fundamental understanding of faith is based upon these two events: Creation and the hope of the Second Advent.
The comments go on developing this Adventist idea of “faith” and concludes with “The Faith of the Saints of the End”. In this section the author says,
The most immediate application of the canonical integration of the Old and New Testaments is the association of “the law and the gospel,” which Ellen G. White uses to explain our “distinctive” name (Selected Messages, book 2, p. 385). It is also significant that it is on the basis of this association that the name “Seventh-day Adventist” has been legally adopted to found the historical creation of the Seventh-day Adventist Church: “We the undersigned, hereby associate ourselves together, as a church taking the name, Seventh-day Adventists, covenanting to keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus Christ” (The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Oct. 8, 1861).
Obviously, this confession of faith is also found in the apocalyptic text of Revelation, interpreted as a prophetic reference to the last-day witnesses of biblical truth (Rev. 14:12). In this verse, “the saints” are identified as “those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” (NKJV). The law and “the faith of Jesus” mean more than just the concrete action of obedience, along with abstract and spiritual faith. The syntax of the phrase suggests, in fact, that the two actions belong to the same truth, with two possible nuances: the obedience to the law is the faith of Jesus; that is, Jesus’ faith. For, in biblical thought, faith is righteousness (see Gen. 15:6). This reconciliation between “the law of Moses” with the faith in Jesus’ coming characterizes the message of the eschatological Elijah (Mal. 4:4–6) and constitutes the mission of the two witnesses who represent the testimony of the Old and New Testaments (Rev. 11:3–6).
As vague and difficult as these examples of Adventist reasoning are, I have to be thankful that they have actually put this confusion into print. It confirms that Adventism’s purpose in using Scripture and in teaching “Christian ideas” to its members has one specific motive: to endorse and reinforce the Adventist worldview in the minds of the members. Even when they badly misuse Scripture, they hide their faulty reasoning behind erudite confusion, and the average Adventist will never realize what is missing in their reasoning or false in their interpretation of Scripture.
First, in using Hebrews 11:1 to say that faith is founded in the future second coming and the work of Creation is completely laying an Adventist grid over the Bible and deducing something that is NOT THERE. Here is Hebrews 11:1–3:
Now faith is the assurance of [things] hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.—Hebrews 11:1–3 LSB
In context, these texts are not saying that “the foundation of faith concerns two events that are fully under divine control”: creation and the second coming. This passage of Hebrews is based on the arguments made in the first ten chapters of Hebrews! The actual basis of this faith which is the ASSURANCE—the completely certain reality— of our eternal inheritance which we haven’t yet seen. Faith is not founded in the “I hope so” hope of wishing for heaven, and it is not based in the fact that God created the world. Rather the argument in Scripture is the “faith” is based on the reality of the Lord Christ and His superiority to all aspects of the law!
The book of Hebrews argues that Jesus is better than the angels; better than Moses, better than the law and its seventh-day Sabbath. Jesus is our new high priest according to a different order from Levi/Aaron: He is according to the order of Melchizedek!
Further, Jesus offered Himself once for all, and He SAT DOWN at the right hand of God! His work was FINISHED! The Lord Jesus gives us a change of the priesthood, from Levi to Melchizedek, and with a change of the priesthood there must also come a change of the law (Hebrews 7:12).
Hebrews 9 and 10 explain how Jesus fulfilled all aspects of the tabernacle service and has established a new a living way to God through His body—that is, the curtain! Jesus has fulfilled ALL of the law and has permanently opened the way to God for ALL people!
Faith is based on who Jesus is and what He has completed, not on the idea that He’s coming again and He created the world.
In fact, the argument above about faith being based in the second coming and creation is heretical. What Hebrews is telling us is that our true faith is based on the actual person and work of Christ Himself! Without His death for sin and His resurrection according to Scripture, we would have no basis at all for faith! Yet He came and fulfilled Scripture and opened a new and living way to God by His own shred blood!
Adventism and the Sabbath School quarterly never MENTION Jesus as the founder and source of our faith. His substitutionary atonement is not mentioned at all. Instead, the argument is developed to say Adventism is the one true last-day church that combines the Old and New Testaments into a forced unity that has nothing to do with Christ but everything to do with holding onto the Ten Commandments while saying God saves by grace!
In the second quote above, they reveal their true intentions. Using their proof-text, Revelation 14:12, to say that Adventists are the people “who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus”, they proceed to warp the words to say that keeping the commandments of God and having the faith of Jesus are really the same thing. The author argues that “the obedience to the law is the faith of Jesus; that is, Jesus’ faith.”
Then they morph “Jesus’ faith” into this: “For, in biblical thought, faith is righteousness (see Gen 15:6).”
This conclusion is utterly untenable. The Bible never suggests that keeping “the law” equals “the faith of Jesus” or “Jesus’s faith”. This reasoning is deceptive, playing with words to get the text to say something it does not say.
But notice what comes next: “This reconciliation between ‘the law of Moses’ with the faith un Jesus’ coming characterizes the message of the eschatological Elijah…”
Notice how cleverly they actually included the words “the law of Moses”. NOWHERE is the law of Moses mentioned in Revelation 14! Nowhere in keeping the commandments of God is the “law of Moses” even hinted. The commandments of God in Revelation 14 are the “entole”, the instructions, commands, teachings of God, not the LAW of God! God’s instructions and commands are new in the new covenant: God command is stated by Jesus Himself ion John 6:29:
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
Before any New Testament commands can apply to a person, he or she must first BELIEVE in God’s provision: the Lord Jesus and His shed blood and His resurrection which shatters our death sentence! We have to BELIEVE JESUS! We are never asked to obey the law or, more specifically the law of Moses!
Yet Adventism insists that God’s true church must keep the seventh-day Sabbath. They must be growing in their obedience to the Old Testament law, and this is the point in the Teachers Comments: Adventism falsely united the Old and the New Testaments into an undistinguished whole that its members must observe. They are not taught to read contextually or to understand the biblical covenants. They are not taught to understand that the Lord Jesus inaugurated a new covenant in His blood, and the old covenant with its law is now obsolete and fading away.
Now, true believers are made alive when they trust and believe in the Lord Jesus!
This lesson is discouraging and vague because Adventism does not teach the truth about Jesus. This lesson on faith completely leaves out the work of Christ and the inauguration of a new covenant in His blood, and it binds the consciences of its members under it threats of eternal death if they do not embrace the Ten Commandments and keep the Sabbath! They misinterpret Revelation to deceive their members into thinking they alone have the true “faith of Jesus” because they keep the law—and they actually believe that law-keeping equals Jesus’ faith. They teach that the only way they come into deeper relationships with God Himself is through the avenue of keeping the law—especially number four—more and more perfectly.
This teaching is blasphemy. We only come into a relationship with God when we trust and believe in Jesus’ finished work alone. Faith is God’s gift to us when He reveals His Son to us. When we believe, our faith increases, and the Holy Spirit teaches us to apply God’s word to our lives.
This Sabbath School lesson mis-defines “faith” and forces the reader to think of faith as something related to keeping the law and believing Adventism. The Adventist worldview is essential for the reader of this lesson to understand “faith” the way the author presents it.
True faith is believing that God’s word means exactly what it says in context because one believes God. He has identified Himself and His will with what He has revealed in His word, and true faith will not grow unless we take God at His word.
I appeal to you: check your Adventism with God’s word in context. In fact, get a notebook, and, since we are discussing “faith” and referring to Hebrews 11, begin copying the whole book of Hebrews into that notebook, a few verses at a time. You will be amazed at what the book actually says!
If you haven’t trusted Jesus alone, come to Him and admit that you are a sinner and that you need a Savior. Thank Him for taking your sin to the cross and enduring God’s wrath in your place, and trust and believe that He has fully propitiated and atoned for your sin. Believe Him! And see that on the third day He rose from death, shattering your death sentence, and when you trust Him alone, you will pass from death to life. You will be forever safe in His hands!
Trust Him today. Believe His words and place the full weight of your life onto His atonement for you—and your will know what it means to have living faith. You will be born again, and your Adventist confusion will be forever resolved in the eternal power of Jesus’ blood. †
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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