Lesson 13: “Grace, Love, and Fellowship”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! |
Adventist, do you struggle to experience true fellowship? Do grace and love define your church interactions? Why about your internal prayer life? Do you experience God’s grace and love, and if so, what does that look like? If you are having trouble living in grace and fellowship defined by love, perhaps you are actually worshiping a false god..
Adventism’s God Is Not In Scripture
We have been saying that the skewed Adventist worldview is anchored in an unbiblical understanding of the true nature of reality. Adventists are physicalists, denying the human immaterial spirit that is their identity, the immaterial part of themselves that leaves the body at death, going into the Lord’s care. Preceding this physicalist view of man, however, is the foundational belief that God is physical.
We have shared before that James White brought an overt anti-trinitarian worldview to the fledgling Adventist organization—a view that Ellen White adopted—until she altered it in The Desire of Ages. In his pamphlet, James White wrote this, apparently in direct contradiction of the Westminster Confession which declares that God is “without body and parts”:
What is God? He is material, organized intelligence, possessing both body and parts. Man is in his image.—James White, Personality of God, accessed at https://asitreads.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/1861-PersonalityOfGod-JamesWhite-1.pdf
Further, in The Adventist Review and Sabbath Herald, 08-05-1852, Vol. 3, No. 7, p. 185, James White wrote:
“To assert that the sayings of the Son and his apostles are the commandments of the Father, is as wide from the truth as the old Trinitarian absurdity that Jesus Christ is the very and Eternal God.”—Quoted in “Discovering the Adventist Jesus”, Colleen Tinker and Jeremy Graham, research assistance, Proclamation! Vol. 3, 2007, Life Assurance Ministries, Inc.
All of Adventism’s doctrines were formed on top of this anti-trinitarian worldview. It wasn’t just James who was anti-trinitarian; so were Joseph Bates, J.N. Andrews, for whom the flagship Adventist seminary was named, R.F. Cottrell, and most of the founding Seventh-day Adventists.
Ellen White even wrote that God exalted Jesus to be equal with Himself, and this exaltation triggered Lucifer’s jealousy that yielded the Great Controversy between Christ and Satan.
In later years Ellen modified her writing about Jesus, and Adventism slowly adopted a more trinitarian-sounding doctrine of God. Yet never did Ellen White endorse the classic Christian Trinity. Today while most Adventists say they believe in the Trinity, in practice their “trinity” is actually a tritheism. They understand God to be the “heavenly trio”, or the “three Worthies of Heaven” that Ellen White endorsed well into the 1900’s.
In fact, Dr. Jerry Moon of Andrews University wrote a 2006 paper entitled, The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen White’s ‘Heavenly Trio’ Compared To the Traditional Doctrine. In this paper he stated:
Ellen White’s view did change—she was raised Trinitarian, came to doubt some aspects of the Trinitarianism she was raised on, and eventually came to a different Trinitarian view from the traditional one. […] In her earliest writings she differed from some aspects of traditional Trinitarianism and in her latest writings she still strongly opposed some aspects of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. It appears, therefore, that the Trinitarian teaching of Ellen White’s later writings is not the same doctrine that the early Adventists rejected. Rather, her writings describe two contrasting forms of Trinitarian belief, one of which she always opposed, and another that she eventually endorsed.—Journal of the Adventist Theological Society (JATS), Spring 2006, “The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen White’s ‘heavenly Trio’ Compared to the Traditional Doctrine,” by Dr. Jerry Moon, Andrews University Theological Seminary. Quoted in Proclamation!, Vol 3, 2007, “Discovering the Adventist Jesus” by Colleen Tinker and Jeremy Graham, research assistant, Life Assurance Ministries, Inc.
In fact, this week’s lesson reinforces this Adventist understanding. Although they have carefully crafted their Fundamental Belief #2, entitled, “The Godhead”, to sound so close to trinitarianism that those not aware of the true internal beliefs might not catch the problem, still their words leave room for the distorted Adventist doctrine of God.
Significantly, Adventists do not believe or teach that the three Persons of the Trinity share SUBSTANCE. They teach that they share a will, a purpose, and a name, but not substance. Sharing substance, however, is a central belief in understanding that God Is One. In this way they believe and teach that there are three distinct beings within their Godhead. In fact, until recently their official Seventh-day Adventist website stated that God is three Beings. Only recently did that wording change when a former Adventist contacted the General Conference, and the change was made.
Even today, however, the idea of three distinct beings is conveyed on the official Adventist website. Notice this quote:
Have you ever been on a winning team?…A team has a common goal. While each person may fill a different role, they all work together to accomplish the mission. The triune God may be compared to a winning team.…Like a winning team, each person of the Godhead has a different role. They each have a special relationship to humanity. God the Father sustains and supports us. God the Son saves us from sin and shows us a better way to live. God the Holy Spirit guides us in the way of righteousness. All three work together for our salvation.— https://adventist.org/beliefs/official/trinity
This “winning team” still conveys the original Adventist teaching that God is physical. A winning team cannot be ONE BEING. A winning team must have distinct members physically different from each other. A winning team can be pictured, as I was taught in Adventist middle school, that the Godhead is like a family of three: a Father, a Son, and the Holy Spirit whom we might find analogous to a mother.
Yeet the Lord Jesus Himself, God the Son, told us the truth about God:
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:24 LSB
I was taught that my physical shape and features were made in God’s image. Yet God is spirit, according to God Himself present in human flesh—and spirit does not have physical shape or palpable definition. Furthermore, Jesus’ statement also makes it clear that the real way I am made in God’s image is that I have also have a spirit—an immaterial part of me that can know and worship God who is spirit!
Deuteronomy 6:4 quotes Moses declaring to Israel:
“Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one!”—Deuteronomy 6:4 LSB
When one of the scribes asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was,
Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.’ “The second is this, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”—Mark 12:29–31 LSB
God Is ONE is the central, foundational fact of reality. The three persons of the Trinity have distinct expressions of the one God, but God is One being.
Can I explain this? No! Yet we know that when Jesus came and took a body, adding humanity to His deity, all the fulness of deity dwelt in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9; 1:18).
God is not physical—and our essential identities are not physical, either. We are created with spirits in God’s image, and we are housed in bodies, as Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 5:1–9.
Adventism teaches a different god than Scripture reveals. God’s “substance” consists of His immaterial attributes, and all three persons share all of those attributes equally. They don’t share copies or versions of God’s attributes, they share the exact same attributes: omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternality, love, mercy, justice, wrath, goodness, faithfulness, and so on.
Adventism does not teach that the three person share substance because they retain the idea that the three are distinct in a material sense. They believe and teach a false view of the nature of reality, and their god is not the sovereign, almighty, powerful God of Scripture. If God is wrong, humanity is also wrong. Sin is therefore misdefined, and salvation is misdefined. If God is wrong, an organization can justify almost any perversion of reality that promotes their internal agenda.
Why This Focus?
In Lesson 13 of this third quarter of Sabbath School lessons, the author once again exhorts the readers to practice love, grace, and fellowship. Yet this exhortation is meaningless apart from understanding that God is not physical and that God is ONE. Saturday’s lesson says this:
“Be of one mind, live in peace” (2 Cor. 13:11, NKJV), are a call to unity. This atmosphere of joy, restoration, encouragement, unity, and peace is the condition for the presence of God, “the God of love and peace” (2 Cor. 13:11, ESV). It results from our triune God’s work in the human heart (2 Cor. 13:14).
Grace, love, and fellowship result from the work of the triune God for us. These three Christian features promote an atmosphere characterized by God’s presence.
While they refer to God as “triune”, we know that their tri-unity is a tritheism, not the classic Trinity. Practicing an atmosphere of joy, restoration, encouragement, unity, and peace is not “THE CONDITION for the presence of God”. Rather, being indwelt by the true triune God on the basis of our faith and trust in Jesus’ finished work PRODUCES joy, restoration, encouragement, unity and peace. The lesson, as usual has the concept backwards. No humans can practice these virtues unless they are born again and given new hearts, new spirits, and the indwelling Holy Spirit.
God doesn’t show up and affirm these characteristics when we commit to practicing them. Rather, we must trust and believe God, as Abraham did. We must place our entire trust in God who IS LOVE.
Yet Monday’s lesson explains God’s love as a characteristic of God that is revealed in nature. It quote’s Ellen White from Steps to Christ, page. 10:
We can also see God’s love in nature. In that regard, Ellen G. White says, “ ‘God is love’ is written upon every opening bud, upon every spire of springing grass. The lovely birds making the air vocal with their happy songs, the delicately tinted flowers in their perfection perfuming the air, the lofty trees of the forest with their rich foliage of living green—all testify to the tender, fatherly care of our God and to His desire to make His children happy.”—Steps to Christ, p. 10.
Scripture does not explain God’s love this way. First, Romans 1:20 explains what creation actually reveals:
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, both His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.—Romans 1:20 LSB
Creation reveals God’s “eternal power” and “divine nature”. It’s not a tender “love” that nature displays primarily but God’s sovereignty and creative authority. Furthermore, all man are without excuse for claiming not to believe in God, because creation reveals His ultimate, eternal, sovereign authority and power!
God’s love is revealed ultimately one way:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.—Romans 5:8 LSB
God demonstrated His essence, His identity as LOVE, by loving us condemned sinners and sending Christ to die for us. God Himself paid our penalty and shed human blood to redeem us from slavery to our dead spirits.
Furthermore, love is not merely a description of God’s “character”. Love defines God; it is the definition of His substance. John said it this way:
And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.—1 John 4:16 LSB
The lesson, in contrast, says this in Tuesday’s study:
We believe in one God, the unity of three Persons who live eternally in a relationship of love. This triune God loves us and summons us to love one another in a way that reflects the love among the Three Members of the Godhead.
Do you see the difference? God who is spirit is not comprised of “three members”! Members are distinct, separate, yet united by a common cause. The God of Scripture is ONE BEING expressed in three Persons who share substance. Each person IS LOVE, IS JUSTICE, IS MERCY, IS WRATH, IS GRACE—and so forth.
Friday’s lesson even quotes Ellen White from one of her most telling tritheistic passages written in 1906:
“There are three living persons of the heavenly trio; in the name of these three great powers—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—those who receive Christ by living faith are baptized, and these powers will cooperate with the obedient subjects of heaven in their efforts to live the new life in Christ.”—Ellen G. White, Evangelism, p. 615.
Notice that the Adventist prophet who commands Fundamental Belief #18 as the doctrinal statement defending her defining, prophetic role within Adventism, calls God “three living person” of a supposed “heavenly trio”. We are intended to see three separate persons in her designation of a “trio”—and this understanding was endorsed in Jerry Moon’s 2006 paper as well as in other Adventist publications written by Adventist scholars.
Furthermore, Ellen describes these three “powers” as cooperating with obedient subjects of heaven! God does not cooperate with man! God is sovereign over man. God provides His intervention to redeem and reconcile us with human blood shed by God the Son who took human flesh and added a body to His identity as God who is spirit. God makes covenant promises and keeps them—He does not “cooperate” with us if we obey His law.
Our obedience is the CONSEQUENCE, not the cause, of our trusting and believing God and casting ourselves and our sin at the foot of His cross. When we BELIEVE Him, He causes us to pass from death to life (John 5:24), and he transfers us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Colossians 1:13).
This final lesson of a quarter that focussed on Paul’s new covenant books of 1 and 2 Corinthians in which he explains the differences between the old and new covenants and in which he explains how we are to live and to understand our new position in Christ when we believe—the lesson took these books and USED them to guilt the Adventist readers into doubling down to observe the law and to evangelize new proselytes.
This lesson exhorting the reader to practice love, grace, and fellowship completely misses the truth of these attributes of God and their effects within His body. We cannot practice grace or love apart from being born again, and we cannot experience the fellowship of the body of Christ apart from being born again through faith and trust in Jesus’ finished atonement for our sin.
When we believe in Him, He gives us His resurrection life and brings our dead spirits to life. He indwells us with His Spirit, and we become united with Him by His Spirit and united with all other born again believers as well, joined by His life and His Spirit.
Adventism cannot teach this astonishing truth, and it warps the Bible to obscure this amazing truth.
I appeal to you: trust Jesus. Thank Him for atoning for your sin and for shattering our common curse of death. Thank Jesus for taking humanity so He could shed human blood for you. Believe Him today—and you will know what it means to be indwelt by the God who IS LOVE and who will place you in true fellowship with others who are also alive in Christ. †
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.
- False Trinity of Adventism (Q3 L13) - September 17, 2026
- We Got Mail - September 17, 2026
- Is Ellen White a True Prophet? (Q3 L12) - September 10, 2026