COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Over the past eight months I’ve been studying through the Gospel of Mark with a multi-generational group of women. This week I wrote the final study guide for our perusal of Mark’s account of Jesus’ ministry, and I realized that if a person were to simply read the biblical accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension—without an Ellen White lens—that reading alone could unmoor Adventists from their uniquely Adventist doctrines and worldview.
There are many details in the accounts of Jesus’ passion that I could discuss, but I’m going to address five Adventist doctrinal pillars that the biblical records shatter when we look closely at the details of what happened at the cross, at the resurrection, and on the day of His ascension. The five doctrines that Jesus’ death, His resurrection, and His ascension disprove are: the Adventist notion of “soul sleep”; the Adventist view of the nature of humanity; the Adventist belief that being saved is attached to commitment to law-keeping; the Adventist “fallible Jesus” who is not almighty God, and the investigative judgment.
Soul Sleep?
Adventists believe that man has no immaterial spirit that survives the death of the body. According to the book Seventh-day Adventists Believe, “The Bible…does not teach that humans comprise two separate parts. Body and soul exist only together—they form an indivisible union…The soul has no conscious existence apart from the body, and no scripture indicates that at death the soul survives as a conscious entity. Indeed, ‘the soul who sins shall die’.”1
Adventists believe that when they die, they cease to exist; their consciousness disappears, and the person is only a memory in the mind of God. No personal identity of the dead remains anywhere. In fact, Adventists are taught that believing that humans have an immaterial spirit, a personal identity apart from the body, will lead to a person’s being deceived by spiritualism. Importantly, the quote above from the organization’s doctrinal exposition states overtly that “no scripture indicates that at death the soul survives as a conscious entity.”
Yet notice what God the Son, the Lord Jesus, said to the thief who was crucified next to Him:
And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”—Luke 23:42, 43 LSB
Adventists know this text disproves their doctrine, so the approved explanation is that the translators of Scripture inserted a comma in the wrong place on the basis of false tradition. They say that the passage should be interpreted, “Truly I say to you today, you shall be with Me…”
The context, the Greek language, and the pattern of Scripture denies the Adventist explanation. Over and over throughout the gospels, Jesus introduced important ideas with the words, “Truly I say to you…” Never does He include the time limit of “today” when He declares, “Truly I say to you…” In the case of His response to the repentant, believing thief, the Lord Jesus promises him that they will be together in Paradise that very day. They would both die that day, and they would both be in Paradise.
This one promise of Jesus alone is enough to disprove the Adventist doctrine of soul sleep—and it reveals the official lie that nowhere does Scripture indicate “that at death the soul survives as a conscious entity.”
The Nature of Man
The second Adventist doctrine destroyed by the account of Jesus’ death is their teaching of the nature of man. This doctrine is closely related to the doctrine of the “state of the dead”, commonly (but deceptively) called “soul sleep”. (It’s deceptive because Adventism does not believe a person’s soul is merely “asleep” but existent during death. Rather, Adventism teaches that the person actually ceases to exist until the resurrection but that he or she is remembered in God’s mind.)
As quoted above, Adventism teaches that humans have no soul and “no conscious existence apart from the body.” Further, they overtly state, “[No] scripture indicates that at death the soul survives as a conscious entity…”
Yet by stating that He would be with the thief that very day in Paradise (not in the ground waiting for the resurrection), Jesus was also acknowledging that His identity as the man Christ Jesus would be with the identity of the thief in the presence of God in Paradise when both of them died that day. This declaration is not a metaphor; it is a statement of reality. Jesus’ body would go into the tomb, but HE would be with the believing thief that very day.
Furthermore, just before Jesus died, He quotes Psalm 31:5:
And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, “Father, INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT MY SPIRIT.” Having said this, He breathed His last.—Luke 23:46 LSB
John recounts Jesus’ death with these words:
Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.—John 19:30 LSB
Adventists say that “spirit” in these verses means only His “breath”. Yet context demands more than “breath”. Jesus has already told the thief that He would be with Him that day in Paradise, and it is not a physical form that will be in God’s presence. It is a matter of record that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb until the first day of the week. Yet Jesus’ spirit went to Paradise—not by default, but by His deliberate relinquishment of it to His Father. Jesus committed His Spirit to His Father, and He gave it up to Him. This spirit was His immaterial and living identity that consciously knew He was with His Father and with that thief in His Father’s presence.
The account of Jesus’ death alone is enough to cause an Adventist severe cognitive dissonance at the least—and at most, it is enough to shatter the Adventist physicalism that denies the immaterial human spirit that dwells in the human body.
How Are People Saved?
Adventism teaches that salvation is a combination of “accepting Jesus” and thus being forgiven of all one’s PAST sins plus being sanctified by increasingly perfected law-keeping. Ellen White said, for example:
The only hope of the sinner is to cease from sin. Then his will is in harmony with the will of Christ. His soul is brought into fellowship with God. Those who enlist in the army of Christ must in all things submit to His authority and consult His will. Implicit obedience is the condition of salvation.—Signs of the Times, November 15, 1899, par. 8.
No matter how much individual Adventists may deny that they must keep the Sabbath (or any other commandment) in order to be saved, they deeply “know” that if they give up the Sabbath, they are giving up the seal of God and taking the mark of the beast.
Further, because Adventists deny the existence of the human spirit, they do not believe or teach that each person is born dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1–3) nor that the need of each person is to be made spiritually alive. There is no clear way to explain how one is saved within Adventism except in terms of obedience to the law.
Adventists know that Jesus taught that baptism is the mark of public acknowledgment of belonging to Christ, but they teach this rite through the physicalist lens of their own worldview. Since they do not understand the new birth and the completely new creation that is created by God at the moment of belief and trust in Jesus’ finished atonement, they attempt to explain this new life in terms of baptism. For example, Ellen White said this:
At the time of baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the will, the purpose, the inclination is pledged that the whole life—body, mind, and soul—shall be dead to the world and to all selfishness and shall become subordinate to the will of God.—18 Letters and Manuscripts, Lt. 45, 1903, par 3.
Because Adventism does not believe that it is at the moment a person believes and trusts the Lord Jesus that he or she is born again with the resurrection life of Christ, they teach instead that baptism into Adventism—a physical act representing a decision—is the moment that person becomes able to turn from the world and obey the commandments.
Yet the story of the believing thief demonstrates that it is one’s faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Himself and His sacrifice for our sins that is the moment God credits us with His own righteousness. Again, we read the account in Luke 23:
And when they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left. But Jesus was saying, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” AND THEY CAST LOTS, DIVIDING UP HIS GARMENTS AMONG THEMSELVES. … And one of the criminals hanging [there] was blaspheming Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!” But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed [are suffering] justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for what we have done; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”—Luke 23:33–34, 39–43 LSB
Like Abraham who believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6), one thief crucified next to Jesus recognized that He was the true King of the Jews and the Son of God. He acknowledged that Jesus was coming in His kingdom, and he defended Jesus from the slanderous accusations of the other thief. That one thief BELIEVED God, and the Lord Jesus saw his faith and promised to be with him in the Father’s presence that very day when they died.
That thief was saved as he was dying. He had no opportunity at all to keep any commandments or laws. He could not make up for his life of crime. Furthermore, he was not baptized.
The account of the thief with believing faith in Jesus demonstrates that salvation is entirely the work of God. It is by faith in the the Son of God, through the grace of God, that a person’s spirit is regenerated, and the spiritual life that comes from God on the basis of faith is what causes a person to pass from death to life.
It is faith alone that is necessary for salvation, and the account of the thief who trusted Jesus exposes Adventism’s “salvation” as unbiblical: law-keeping is not part of being saved, and baptism is not the thing that gives a person God’s power to be good and to be saved. It is faith alone that God asks of us, and He credits us with His own righteousness when we believe the Son. Adventism’s salvation model is heretical.
Is Jesus Fully God?
While Adventism teaches that Jesus is fully man and fully God, it denies that Jesus shares substance with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Further, Adventism teaches that Jesus gave up His attribute of omnipresence—one of the incommunicable attributes of God that defines Yahweh as the One True God. If any of His attributes is removed, that person ceases to be God.
When God the Son became incarnate in a human body, He did not relinquish any of His “God attributes”. The fullness of deity dwelt in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9).
Ellen White taught that angels called Jesus out of the tomb on behalf of the Father, yet Jesus Himself said this about His death and resurrection:
“For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one takes it away from Me, but from Myself, I lay it down. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father.”—John 10:17, 18 LSB
Only Yahweh, Almighty God, can take and give life—and Jesus declared that He Himself both laid His own life down and took it up again. He is not and was not a demi-god, a lesser deity, a modified version of the Father. He Is Yahweh.
In fact, Jesus’ resurrection demonstrated that He Is God. That morning when the women and the disciples saw the empty tomb, Jesus was gone. His grave clothes were inside, but He was not. That same day He appeared to the eleven disciples, several women, and some other disciples with whom He walked on the road to Emmaus. He took up His own life, rising from the dead, because His sacrifice as God the Son and the Son of Man was sufficient to pay for human sin.
Only God can pay for human sin. Paul says this about Jesus:
Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called [as] an apostle, having been set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was designated as the Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord—Romans 1:1–4 LSB
Jesus’ resurrection identified Jesus as the Son of God in power. He wasn’t an ambassador for God or a representative of God or a diminished form of God. He Is God, and in Him all the attributes of God have always resided.
Jesus’ resurrection was not a fancy parlor trick that Jesus did because He could. He rose from death as the evidence that His blood had been sufficient to satisfy God’s demand for a sufficient substitute sacrifice for human sin. Because Jesus’ blood was sufficient to pay for all human sin, He shattered our curse of death into which we all are born. When we trust the Son, we are removed from our natural condition of being dead in sin. We pass from death to life (John 5:24), and the curse of death no longer has authority over us.
Jesus’ resurrection exposes Adventism’s weak, fallible Jesus as a false god. Only eternal, almighty God could shatter the curse of death He decreed on sinners. Only God could take our sin and pay for us all. Jesus Is God—and His resurrection is our evidence that He is our Lord.
No Investigative Judgment
Finally, the account of Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father 40 days after His resurrection is the final blow to the Adventist foundation. After Jesus’ crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection, He spent 40 days teaching His disciples about the kingdom. Then, on the day of the Feast of Pentecost, He took His disciples to the Mount of Olives and, as they gazed at Him, He ascended into heaven. Mark 16:19 describes the event this way:
So then, the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.—Mark 16:119 LSB
Later that same day, Peter declared this as he preached the first expository sermon recorded in the New Testament:
“Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured out this which you both see and hear.”—Acts 2:33 LSB
Adventism teaches that the Lord Jesus did not enter the Most Holy Place in heaven—the very presence of God the Father—until October 22, 1844. That day, they say, marked the beginning of their investigative judgment whenJesus began judging BELIEVERS to see whether or not their sins had all been confessed and forgiven.
Yet Scripture is unequivocal: Jesus entered the very presence of God and SAT DOWN on the day He ascended. His work was finished, and unlike the earthly priests, He sat down in heaven at the right hand of the Father.
There is no investigative judgment! The scriptural account is crystal clear: Jesus ascended to the Father, and His blood has opened a new and living way for us to approach Him.
Adventism’s foundation is built on unbiblical ideas: a false nature of man, a false view of death, a false idea of how one is saved, a false and fallible Jesus, and an unfinished atonement requiring Jesus to keep applying His blood every time someone confesses a sin.
Yet if Adventists would simply read and believe the accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion death and burial, resurrection, and ascension, they would discover that none of the pillars of their worldview is true. Their religion is built on falsehoods, and their Jesus is not the Jesus who saves.
I appeal to every Adventist: read the gospels and believe what they say. The real Jesus has shown us who He is, and He is the only One who is able to save. Believe Him. †
Endnote
- Seventh-day Adventists Believe, third edition, Ministerial Association/Review and herald Publishing Association, 2018, p. 395
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