HOME / PROCLAMATION! MAGAZINE / 2009 / MAY/JUNE / EDITOR'S COMMENTS

MAY/JUNE 2009
VOLUME 10, ISSUE 3

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D E P A R T M E N T S

Editor's COMMENTS

Retraining my Adventist mind
Colleen Tinker

 

As a child (OK—as an adult also) I often stared at the belt of Orion and imagined that Jesus would descend from that central point of light surrounded by a cloud of bright angels. He would collect those who would be saved, and they would return to heaven through that same opening.

Sometimes when I feared Jesus might be returning but I wasn't ready to meet him, I would comfort myself that He couldn't come yet; there had been no time of trouble when the international death decree would give Sunday-keepers permission to kill us Sabbath-keepers as we fled to the hills.

Other times I would see moonlight shining through a break in the Oregon clouds, and I would fear it was Jesus coming—but I knew it couldn't be because there had not been a small dark cloud the size of a man's hand in the east that grew bigger as it resolved into Jesus coming with His angels.

I firmly believed I as an Adventist was part of "spiritual Israel". As the remnant church, we had replaced Israel as God's chosen people, but like Israel, we struggled with unbelief. God was waiting for us to obey Him perfectly; He couldn't bless us if we rebelled against Him by breaking His Sabbath with secular conversations, tasting pork, or fraternizing with the "Philistines" outside our ranks. Moreover, our collective disobedience of God's commands was preventing Jesus from returning. He wouldn't reward us with heaven until we perfectly reflected His character. If I was not faithful—if I had even one unconfessed sin—Jesus would not be able to place my sins on Satan the scapegoat who would carry them into the cleansing fire of hell where he would be punished for them.

I believed every one of these things was either in the Bible or directly revealed by God.

I felt quite at home in the books of Exodus and Leviticus, and I found some comfort in Psalms. The epistles, however, confused me, and Hebrews was downright dull. I knew Paul was the apostle to the gentiles, but I understood "gentiles" to mean the non-Jews alive in the first century. As part of spiritual Israel, I believed we had a more complete revelation of truth than those early Christians had. It never occurred to me that Paul was God's apostle to me, a modern gentile. Of course, Paul was part of the Bible, but after all, even Peter said he was hard to understand!

This confusion was the reason we needed our special messenger who illuminated Scripture for us, making plain the hidden meanings in the ancient texts. How fortunate we were, I thought, that God had given His spiritual Israelites an inspired commentary in the person and work of Ellen White!

Years later when I finally heard and embraced the gospel of God, I entered a long process of rooting out the non-biblical ideas that shaped my worldview. I felt loss when I let go of the romantic notion that Jesus would descend from a passageway in Orion. It was embarrassing to realize that the Bible did not say Jesus would return in a cloud that started out small, dark, and the size of a man's hand.

Moreover, it was deeply shocking to me to finally realize that the scapegoat in Leviticus 16 represented Jesus, not Satan. I was horrified at my early teaching.

Shedding an Ellen White-shaped worldview and adopting biblical reality took time, but confidence and trust have been the result of living in truth. I lost my cut-and-dried picture of the future, but I have gained a relationship with a God who is so big I cannot understand Him. He is so powerful and patient that I can completely rest in Him. He is in charge of His own plans; I cannot change His mind. Rather, He changes me.

In this issue Martin Carey explores the Adventist tradition of Orion's opening. Autumn McMinimy tells how she discovered that she is a gentile, not an Adventist Israelite, and Dale Ratzlaff discusses the frequent claim that Paul and Jesus disagree. Esther Aust shares her faith story, and Carolyn Macomber has written a poem describing her experience of being born again. Joan Yorba-Gray tells how words of Scripture comforted her during a crisis of health in her long walk with HIV.

We pray that as you read, you will meet the powerful Jesus who is sovereign over all reality and who reveals all truth. He is enough! †

 

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