How much do you know about seventh-day Adventism? I thought it was just that “Saturday thing” – they went to church on Saturday, we go on Sunday. I’m on the radio with Colleen Tinker of Proclamation Magazine. And this is a good magazine based on former seventh-day adventists’ presentation of the true gospel to help people who are seventh-day Adventists escape this religion. Why? Because their founder Ellen White, this woman predicting the future and the end times all of the time, she had a lot of very bad teachings that persist to this day. Do you know what they are?
Number one: Humans do not have an immaterial spirit. We’re like animals. We’re body plus a life force, which is your breath. Kind of weird but basically we’re sort of like the animals and we don’t have a spirit that dies and then goes to heaven to be with Jesus where we await for the final judgment, where we get our eternal bodies (First Corinthians 15). Instead we just stop breathing and then we’re dead and so the whole idea of having our sins forgiven, atoned for by the propitiation, the atoning work of Jesus, it gets all mangled up in seventh-day Adventism. Seventh-day Adventists, because of their immaterial spirit breath thing, Jesus, they teach, didn’t have a spirit and when he was in the grave he ceased to exist. That’s heresy. The “kingpin” doctrine teaches that Jesus will one day pour over sins and those who have not confessed their sins will not receive full forgiveness. These poor people who are on the SDA, they’re walking around not knowing for sure if they’re gonna have their sins forgiven. What makes it kind of frustrating and difficult to witness to somebody in the SDA is because they use the lingo. They use the lingo but they have different meanings to it. They’ll tell you “Oh yes, Jesus died for our sins, it’s just a different Jesus. Oh yes, the atonement is very important but it is not full forgiveness of sins for you for eternity so that your soul can go to be with the Lord while you wait for your physical body, which will last forever.” They don’t teach any of that and so these people, they’re in this religion and they bought into it, but all they bought for themselves is a yoke. And don’t you feel sorry for them? Maybe you’ve been a Christian for a long time. Sweet but it’s hard to be working your way to heaven. It’s exhausting to always be trying and doing. That is a heavy system to be under and these people, you gotta feel sorry for them.
Here’s more. Satan is a scapegoat on whom sins will finally be placed because the atonement wasn’t completed on the cross. I thought when Jesus said “it is finished” he actually meant “it’s finished.” Who pays for sins here? The scapegoat is not the devil. That was a picture of Jesus in the Old Testament sacrificial system. The scapegoat, when the priest would lay his hands on the goat, the scapegoat then would be sent out into the wilderness with the sins of the people. That’s Jesus, not the devil but that’s what the SDAs believe.
SDA’s teach that there are three worthies of heaven but deny the Trinity. There’s another one that puts them squarely in heresy land. This has been decided for centuries. God – three distinct persons, one God – it’s the Trinity. Not just three worthies, which is not the Trinity at all. These people they’re gonna die and they’re gonna be judged by God and they are gonna be found wanting because they don’t believe in the true God. It’s an idolatrous system the SDA is.
In order to believe clearly, you must think clearly. In order to think clearly, you must eat well. That’s why they’re big into vegetarianism and all their health programs. You gotta get your body cleansed so that your brain can be clear, so that you can believe our heretical teachings. Their hospitals and health seminars are considered the right arm of the gospel. It’s kind of their way to reach out to the community through health, to get them thinking clear so that they’ll buy their doctrine.
And then finally, the last thing. They consider Sunday worship the mark of the beast. They think that you and I, for going to church on Sunday, that we are the mark of the beast. They actually teach that if you don’t go to church on Saturday, you won’t have your sins forgiven because you are the mark of the beast.