Stephen
Terry, Director
The
Key to Unity
Commentary
for the October 27, 2018 Sabbath School Lesson
“ This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says:
Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do
not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the
temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” If you really change your ways and
your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the
foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this
place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let
you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. But
look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.” Jeremiah 7:3-8,
NIV
Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that the very Seventh-day
Adventist General Conference that has brought about what may be the most
divisive period in denominational history claims to have, in the Sabbath School
Lesson they publish, the “key to unity.” Such a claim may be bitter gall to
those who have felt the brunt of persecution by that same authority. That
bitterness is about to grow, now that the denomination has established curia at
the recent Annual Council meeting to deal with challenges to their authority.
Whether they say so in so many words or not, their actions reveal a belief that
they must purify the church by rooting out vestiges of non-conformity with
recently adopted creedal documents. Since the 1980 approval of the “Fundamental
Statement of Beliefs” by the General Conference in session, the General Conference
has sought to define our faith upon ever more narrow lines in an effort to
exclude those who do not measure up. Since membership is a local church affair,
the General Conference has been thwarted to some degree in its efforts to
control orthodoxy. The recently created Compliance Committees, with memberships
composed of those who have been hand-picked by the General Conference, take a
major step toward overcoming that obstacle. In view of these changes, it seems appropriate
to illustrate this commentary with James Tissot’s picture of Jerusalem burning
and its people being led into captivity by the Babylonians in the 6th
century BC.
When one considers the teachings of Jesus, it is very
hard to understand any biblical rationale for this desire to purge out the
unorthodox among us. “The Parable of the Weeds”[i] revealed that the work of
rooting out those who do not belong has the potential to cause more harm than
good. Just as it may be hard to distinguish weeds from wheat until both are
fully developed at the time of the harvest, it is very difficult to determine
who is truly serving God and who isn’t. This is true because we cannot know
what is in the heart of another with certainty, and also because the sin which
clouds our own perspective gets in our way. We are all sinners, condemned by
those sins to die. Yet at times, even though we are all pigs in the same dirty
sty of our own making, some of us feel that we are somehow better than the rest
and have an inherent right to establish a pecking order, hopefully with us on
the top. But this was never to be the attitude of those in the Kingdom of God.[ii] Instead it was the
attitude that brought the whole world into sin and destruction in the days of
Noah as each sought to secure advantage over the other even to the extent of
brother killing brother. Or as in the days of Jesus incarnation, killing the
Messiah and believing that such a murderous act was God’s will in the interests
of orthodoxy.
How could such a murder have taken place? The Jews had
come to presume upon their status as God’s chosen people. They came to believe
that there was something intrinsically special about them that caused God to
set them free from captivity in Egypt. To some extent, they still believe this
today. But it was not because of who they were, but rather because of the
character of God that they were rescued. If anything, based on their perfidy as
they wandered the wilderness, they may have been among the least righteous
people on earth. They believed that God was displacing others in favor of them because
they were somehow better than the ones they would conquer. Yet, in due time,
their sins became even worse than the sins of those other nations.[iii] The belief in their special
calling caused them to become blind to their true state, but lest we become
arrogant about ourselves compared to their failure, we should remember the
words of Paul. He said that we should not consider ourselves better because we
have been grafted into the vine lest we also be cut off.[iv] This should particularly
be a lesson to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. We tell ourselves we would not
be like those Jews who failed to recognize the Messiah and persecuted the early
church. But just like the Jews did with Jesus, we do all we can to quench the
Spirit should it make any attempt to operate outside the confines of the received
orthodoxy of the established church. We prefer the Spirit to be poured out in
dribs and drabs from containers we hold in our hands rather than popping up in unapproved
people at unexpected times in unusual places.
We perhaps see ourselves as having a more secure status
than the chosen people because we are the “remnant” church based on our
interpretation of Revelation 12:17 in the King James Version of the Bible, “And
the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of
her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus
Christ.” Because we preach the Ten Commandments and witness about Jesus Christ,
we claim to be that remnant. Not only that, but by our behavior, we act as
though the word “remnant” trumps the word “chosen” and claim that everywhere
people will come out of Babylon to join us when the Parousia is near. We tend not
to see ourselves as being in Babylon. Instead we see everyone else as succumbing
to that delusion while we are magically immune. Unfortunately, just like the
Jews of old, we feel we continue to have such special status no matter how
vile, corrupt and petty we may become with one another.
We are also somewhat Schizophrenic about who we are as a
denomination. On the one hand, we see ourselves as a part of the great
Protestant movement through the centuries, while on the other hand, we see the
judgments and prophecies of that movement as not applying to us in any way
except favorably. We see the entire Christian community as deceived by Babylon
over the question of the Sabbath, and because we recognize the biblical
seventh-day Sabbath we cannot be deceived. But is it not foolish to think that
this is the only deception that Babylon will employ? Can we be saved from
Babylon if we keep the Sabbath but lust for wealth and power? And even if we
keep the Sabbath, will we be spared from Babylon if we make the Sabbath a
burden of rules and regulations and encourage petty spying on one another to
make sure no one transgresses what we have defined the Sabbath to be? We laugh
at Jews who would pin a kerchief to their garments so they would not be holding
it in their hand and thus carrying a burden on the Sabbath. But we ourselves
may refuse to help someone who asks for our help on the Sabbath, preferring to
help them on some other day, even though Jesus taught against this very thing.[v] We have become such narrow
rules lawyers, that we will only allow health care work on the Sabbath since
Jesus healed on that day. We overlook his examples of letting the animals out
to pasture and rescuing them. We fail to understand the principle behind the
Sabbath which is about caring for others, even animals, as a recognition that
they also have sprung from the hands of the Creator we honor when we observe
the Sabbath. When we fail in our understanding like that, even the Sabbath can
be a barrier to unity among Christians.
When we set up barriers like this between ourselves and
others, it becomes easier to see things from a rather narrow perspective
prophetically. For instance, even though we consider ourselves Protestants, we
see the land beast of Revelation, chapter 13,[vi] as applying to every
other Protestant denomination in the United States except our own. After all,
if we are the “remnant” then we cannot be “them.” We may falsely believe that no
matter how corrupt we become, we will never speak with the voice of the dragon
as the land beast does. We can see the corruption in other denominations and believe
it about them, but thanks to the special “remnant” plank we have in our own eye
we cannot see its application to us. If we cannot overcome this blindness, we may
not find any key to unity, and God may allow severe trials for the “remnant”
just as he did for the “chosen” that we might finally see. Maybe it is not too
late to avoid that.
