GRACE IS HIS LIFE AS YOURS

Adventists are particularly sensitive to challenge by former Adventists. They make some excuse about not wanting to discuss issues and quickly withdraw into denial, often with the words, ‘It must be some Adventist off-shoot.’

BROKEN CISTERN

Adventist teachers of integrity have spent their lives doing their best to undo the worst excesses of a crap gospel. Many of them have died without realising that it is entirely another gospel with which its adherence are cursed.

The saying ‘must be an off-shoot’ is particularly curious in the Adventist context given that this denomination along with the Mormons, Christadelphians and Jehovah’s Witnesses belongs with the major sectarian Offshoots of the 19th Century.

SAD BEGINNINGS

As someone has unkindly or kindly noted, Adventism is a faith that arose out of a mistake about the coming of Christ – a date-setting feature that Jesus warned about but which the Adventist Movement went ahead and did. The rationalisation relied on to support this mistake and cover the disobedience has been the bizarre sanctuary doctrine along with it convoluted Investigative Judgment theology that robs Believers of the vicarious humanity of Christ and perpetuates the knowledge of good and evil disguised as Christianity.

Many Adventists these days do not hold to the Investigative Judgment but they still speak of grace and cling to the law. Grace in Adventism is not usually linked to the incarnation where Christ’s person is graced as us. Adventism’s grace is a grace that helps one cope with the law which is a grace that is really no grace at all.

DEAD ALBATROSS

It’s the Sabbath that ties Adventism to the law and the old covenant. When I was a toddler my mother told me that other Christians believed the law had been done away with and Adventists did not. Sadly it is the Sabbath that binds them to the law and the retarded quality of belief and practice it involves.

The law did cease at the cross and was replaced by union with God in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the meaning of the ripped temple veil.

‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ GAL 2.21 NIV.

‘The Sabbath’ is the main icon of Adventism. It has become a pseudo messiah and a pseudo grace that affords a nominal rest and a problematic peace. There is no ‘rest for human restlessness’ in Adventism because it is essentially a religion of self-effort in which one works to ‘keep close to Jesus’ and be worthy of Christ and overcome as He overcame.

HALF ALIVE/HALF DEAD

It’s a hybrid religion that claims to be a member of the Body of Christ yet lives in the mindset of the separation of the law. In Adventism Adam is not undone because Christ is not its life. Christ and the law is life – which is really no life at all and more a lie than a life. People strive to be a worthy life with Christs help which means that in this ‘gospel’ you are as you were had there been no cross. Adventism dilutes the cross and substitutes the Christ who is one with the Father for a christ who is one with the law – in other words a false christ.

Nevertheless Adventists are a people graced with some of the aroma of Christ even though their gospel is crooked and their christ distorted. Anyone who believes in Jesus is saved. But the quality of this salvation in this life depends on having a gospel of grace and truth – not one in which we are graced to do our best in a gospel that some have made up and which those who could know better have perpetuated as an ammendment to the apostles doctrine.