Lesson 12: “Share Him”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Adventist, do you feel helpless and hopeless when you look at your life? You are reminded to share you faith, to share Jesus, to grow your character, to get ready for Jesus to come so He finds you faithfully obedient. I KNOW how helpless I felt as an Adventist. I knew I couldn’t obey Him even when I knew what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t finish the house cleaning by sundown Friday. I couldn’t resist raising my voice when I felt misunderstood. I loved eating chicken when I could, then begged to be forgiven for not observing the health message. I even felt the fleeting temptation to think that “soul sleep” was not comforting; I would much rather believe that my grandma was with Jesus instead moldering in the grave, nonexistent until that nebulous second coming.
Back to the Beginning
This week’s lesson reminds the readers that from an Adventist perspective, their entire purpose in this world is to evangelize and make proselytes. Of course, the lesson puts it in terms of “sharing Jesus”, but the methods and motives are clear: Adventists have to spread Adventism. In fact, Tuesday’s lesson is devoted to sharing “Tips for Sharing Jesus”. These include: “friendship evangelism”, praying for opportunities and boldness to gently share one’s faith, looking for opportunities to share Bible advice with non-Adventists, being prepared to ask one’s friend if they’d like to “take a next step” in Bible study or baptism, and growing in sanctification so one’s actions will always draw people to one’s faith.
What’s wrong with these tips? Why shouldn’t we perfect the ways we evangelize—and why is there even a concern about reminding Adventists that they NEED to evangelize? What would happen if Adventists never reminded their members to make converts?
By now you may have noticed that I often return to the issue of Adventism’s worldview when I address their doctrines and practices. This lesson is a perfect example demonstrating that the Adventist focus on “evangelism” is build firmly on the false foundation of Adventism’s unbiblical definitions of reality. Once again, the Teachers Comments have provided the perfect window into this Adventist bottom line. Indeed, Adventists’ belief that they are physical bodies with no immaterial spirit is the foundation of Adventist evangelism.
Consider this example: if a contractor builds a glorious building that incorporates all the latest materials and designs but economizes on the foundation, subcontracting with a company that uses cheap concrete and does not properly reinforce and cure the foundation, that whole glorious building is a time bomb waiting for that foundation to fail. The entire building is condemned with a faulty foundation. The building cannot last, and repairing the above-ground structure will not save the building. The foundation must be redone—and if the foundation is redone, but whole structure must be demolished so the builder can start completely over.
That metaphor describes Adventism. The Adventist physicalist worldview derived from the revelations of a false prophet cannot sustain or teach truth. The Satan-centric great controversy which flows out of a false understanding of the natures of God and man, sin and salvation cannot save.
In order to address this lesson’s evangelism focus, we will see how the Teachers Comments take us back to the physicalist worldview and explore how that view cannot address people’s true need or God’s full provision for salvation.
“You Are Dust”
At the end of the week’s Teachers Comments are six Life Application activities. The first and the last of these reveal the shape of Adventism’s view of man. The first activity is a personal reflection the reader is to perform outside of Sabbath School:
Activity 1: A Contemplation of Worship (read Lam. 3:29).
- (For personal reflection outside of class.) When you pray, kneel down or prostrate yourself; realize that you are dust (Ps. 103:14). Out of this dust, God will resurrect you if you should die before He comes. With this humbling and wondrous thought in mind, ask God to change your character and turn it into a living reflection of His own.
The reader is asked to think of himself as nothing more than shaped dirt that breathes. Adventists believe that their bodies are all they have besides their breath, and they must work hard to perfect their characters to reflect Jesus before they die and disappear. This is the assignment for each Sabbath School member: prostrate oneself and remember they’re nothing more than dust. Their characters are their responsibility, and they have only limited time to perfect them so that God will remember them as worthy to be resurrected for eternal life.
Yet the proof text used to reinforce this temporary, hopeless identity has a different message in context:
As a father has compassion on [his] children, So Yahweh has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our form; He remembers that we are [but] dust. As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flowers. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more, And its place acknowledges it no longer. But the lovingkindness of Yahweh is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, And His righteousness to children’s children, To those who keep His covenant And remember His precepts to do them.—Psalm 103:13–18 LSB
Yes, Yahweh remembers and knows our “form”: our bodies are “but dust”. After all, HE made us from dust when He created Adam! But notice the rest of the passage; the psalmist does not ask the reader to struggle with character perfection in order to be ready to meet the Lord. Rather he reminds us that Yahweh is eternal and righteous, a covenant-keeping God. He remembers His own children. He made them, and He gives them life, and He knows them. Those who believe and trust Him and honor His word and covenant He will never forget. His everlasting lovingkindness is toward all those who are His!1
No one is forgotten, and we don’t have to grovel in the dirt remembering we are “but dust”. Instead we look up to our Creator and remember that He is the faithful one. His lovingkindness is eternal and will ever let us go. He keeps us—we don’t work to keep ourselves in His favor. His covenant promises cannot be broken!
Furthermore, we don’t disappear when we die. Our bodies will return to dust, but our identities are safe with Him. We don’t become mere data in God’s memory; He loves US—the real identities, the people that He made, and He will create new bodies for US when He returns. That “us” isn’t information; it is literal spiritual identities.
Adventists believe that their eternal future depends upon their disciplines and obedience during their earthly lives—but Adventists fear death. They dread returning to dust because they believe they will not tangibly exist during the death of their bodies. The Bible reassures us that our bodies do not define US. They merely house us:
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge. Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord– for we walk by faith, not by sight– we are of good courage and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.—2 Corinthians 5:1–9 LSB
Jumping To Soul Sleep
Activity 6 is closely connected to Activity 1. It leads the reader from the question of belief in God to considering one’s Adventism to defending Adventism’s physicalism. The questions is designed to reinforce Adventist physicalism by assuming it is real:
Activity 6: Read 1 Peter 3:15 and answer the questions below.
- Why do you believe in God?
- Why are you a Seventh-day Adventist?
- Why do you not believe in the immortality of the soul?
- Prepare arguments to defend your faith in areas where your knowledge is weak. (This last exercise also may be assigned as a project to be accomplished outside of class.)
Notice what the author did there. The question is constructed so that belief in God and unbelief “in the immortality of the soul” are equally true. The two are assumed to be on the same plane of “truth”. This assumption is manipulation and leaves the readers unable to tease apart their own dissonance if they have any. If they believe in God, it is assumed, they are therefore Adventists and do not believe in an immaterial spirit that survives death. The equation of ultimate reality (God IS) with heresy (we do not have spirits and Adventism is the statement of religious truth) is deceptive and deadly.
Significantly, this issue of humans being only bodies that turn into dust is the broken foundation—along with their belief that God is not the classic Trinity but that He is three entities who do not share substance—that requires that all other biblical doctrines be twisted to fit Adventism’s heretical definition of reality.
Physicalism Alters Sin and Salvation
If humans are merely bodies that breath with no immaterial spirit that is their identity, then sin must also be physical. Adventists say that our “sinful nature” is the fact that we have inherited “propensities” to sin, that we are born with genetic predispositions to commit certain sins. In this way sin is literally physical: our gene pool sets us up to fail, and our brains, the physical place where our decisions and choices are made, is the battlefield where we decide to indulge those propensities or to strong-will ourselves NOT to indulge.
This belief that humans are physical beings with brains where choices are made is the reason Adventists insist on practicing and teaching the health message. Eating vegetarian diets, exercising, drinking plenty of water, and ingesting Adventist education and reading materials strengthens the Adventist mind so that the individual can more easily make the “right” decisions when tempted by one’s propensities. In fact, Adventists believe that the Holy Spirit communicates with people through the synapses of the frontal lobes of the brain.
In other words, Adventist “sin” is clearly a physical phenomenon, and a person’s decisions to indulge in sin or not are ultimately willful decisions based on one’s habits and choices and mental hygiene.
Because sin is a physical phenomenon, salvation also is worked out in the physical realm. The decisions to obey the law, to keep the Sabbath, to refuse to eat meat, and to spend oneself doing friendship evangelism and nurturing relationships so that the unsuspecting might be beguiled into become Adventist—all this is the product of physical decisions and discipline. Ultimately, an Adventist’s obedience is the result of good decisions and choices, and God grants them extra power to do the right thing.
From this point it is easy to see that Adventist physicalism not only defines the nature of man, of sin, and of salvation, but it also defines the nature of Christ.
Ellen White taught that Jesus had no advantage that any of us do not have. He was exactly like us: He had to overcome temptation and the propensities He had inherited from Mary, and He showed us how to do that overcoming. He withstood the unimaginable temptations of the wilderness, of Gethsemane, and of the suffering on the cross by praying and depending on the Holy Spirit and overcoming the temptations. By doing this, He showed us how to overcome and be victorious.
Jesus’ sinless life, therefore, is the perfect example for us all. We, like He, can avoid temptation and overcome sin. If Jesus resisted sin, so can we—because we are just like Him.
Not the Biblical Model
Yet the Bible teaches that we are bodies PLUS spirits. Adventism insists that the human spirit is merely “breath”, but the Bible speaks of it differently. For example, Jesus said,
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:24 LSB
God does not have a body contrary to the founding Adventists’ belief. God IS spirit. Furthermore, true worshipers must worship in SPIRIT and in truth. We have spirits that can know and worship God! Jesus isn’t referring to a feeling or an attitude, like a “spirit of worship” or a “spirit of rebellion”. He is articulating reality: those who properly worship God do so in their sprits—and they also worship in truth. Truth is cognitively perceived; it requires the discernment of our thoughts and reason, but it is informed by our spirits that either know and believe God and worship Him or that remain dead in sin.
God gave us His word so that we can know, cognitively, what is true. We are not left to figure out what is true; He has given us data and words to articulate and define reality. When we recognize and believe Him, He brings our spirits to life.
This conclusion, however, requires knowing our natural condition and our true need: we are not born neutral, blank slates we can shape by good or bad choices. We are born condemned and dead in sin:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 lSB
“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. … ‘He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.’”—John 3:18, 36 LSB
We are born physically alive, but spiritually we are literally—not figuratively—dead in sin. We are born cut off from the life of God and unable to seek, please, or know Him. We are literally born under condemnation. We CANNOT get out of our natural condition! God has to intervene.
The gospel of Jesus’ death for our sin, His burial, and His resurrection which broke our death sentence is the power of God that awakens us and brings us to life. God Himself makes it possible for us to believe and trust Him. We can’t on our own.
When we believe, God brings our spirits to life, just as He promised He would in Ezekiel 36:26, and He seals us with His own indwelling Holy Spirit who never leaves us:
In Him, you also, after listening to the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation–having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, unto the redemption of [God’s own] possession, to the praise of His glory.—Ephesians 1:13, 14 LSB
This reality of being made spiritually alive and indwelled by the Holy Spirit permanently is the new birth. The is the moment that transforms a person—not baptism into Adventism. The new birth is what changes us and results in God’s transferring us out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Colossians 1:13)!
Adventism cannot offer people true salvation. Adventism cannot teach the true Jesus nor help people see their true need. All Adventism can do is to offer people a lifestyle, a peculiar set of beliefs and practices that set them apart. Adventist Sabbath-keeping will have no beneficial effects at all on people regarding salvation.
People need to know that they are spiritually dead and must be brought to life. Salvation is not a physical problem; it is a spiritual problem. The issue is not becoming obedient and keeping the law; the issue is being made spiritually alive. The spiritually dead are eternally condemned; the spiritually living HAVE eternal life. The Holy Spirit permanently indwells all who believe, but by nature we are all born dead in sin.
Adventist, you need to know that all your efforts to do good works and to keep the law are useless. They will not recommend you to God. They will not help you to be saved or to stay saved. You are by nature condemned, spiritually dead, and your dead spirit will go into eternity and reman eternally dead, not non-existent but out of the reach of God and His love.
Your real need is to be made alive, and that life comes ONLY through belief in the Lord Jesus and His sufficient sacrifice for sin and His completed atonement on the cross. When you trust and believe that the Lord Jesus has literally paid for all your sin, past, present, and future, once for all, you will pass from death to life, and you will not be condemned. You will receive the Holy Spirit of promise, and your life will be transformed.
In order to “Share Him”, you have to KNOW Him. Sharing Jesus is not a set of practices and beliefs; it does not include Sabbath-keeping or the law, but it requires knowing your true need and trusting His shed blood on your behalf.
I appeal to you: believe in the true Jesus today. Confess that you are dead in sin and need to be brought to new life. Believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus according to Scripture—and you will pass out of death into 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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