Seventh-day Adventist pioneers called the message they discovered, "the truth." They titled their first periodical the Present Truth. Their successors still speak of new members as "coming into the truth" and of apostates as "leaving the truth."
In 1881 Ellen White wrote, "It is as certain that we have the truth as that God lives; and Satan, with all his arts and hellish power, cannot change the truth of God into a lie." [l]
It almost sounds as if Seventh-day Adventists think they are the only ones who possess truth! On the contrary, however, they acknowledge their deep indebtedness to countless other Christians through the ages who have cherished and passed on truth from one generation to another, often at the peril of their lives. We have already traced the special debt which Adventists owe to Seventh Day Baptists. Let us look briefly at their debt to others.
But first, what is truth? Jesus answers, "I am ... the truth" (John 14:16), and "Thy word is truth." (John 17:17) So truth is "Christ" and "Bible doctrine."
"Doctrine" means "teaching." The Bible teaches the truth about God. Jesus, too, taught the truth about God. At a time when many regarded the Supreme Being as either unreasonably angry at man's failings or heartlessly unconcerned about his sufferings, Jesus presented Him as a loving heavenly Father.
Jesus said that God is so gracious that He offers salvation to anyone who simply trusts in Him with all his heart. "Whosoever believeth in him" has everlasting life! (John 3:16) He promised quietly, "Set your troubled hearts at rest. ... If I go ... , I shall come again and receive you to myself, so that where I am you may be also." (John 14:1-3, NEB) Jesus also promised that until that happy day arrives, He would be with mankind in a very personal sense through His representative, the Holy Spirit, who is just like Him. (See John 14:15-18, 25-29; 15:26,27; 16:7-14) To assure people of this, He invited His followers to eat a simple meal, the Lord's Supper, reminding themselves the while that He desires to be "in" them and become part of them, just like food.
Jesus taught that when a person dies, God does not torment him in some unseen place, but lets him rest, peacefully "asleep," until the resurrection. (See John 11:11-14; 5:28,29)
Jesus also taught the truth about a God who wants everyone to be free. No one should be compelled even to be a Christian. People should be instructed first and then baptized only if they choose to believe. (See Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:16) He taught further that, if we would like to continue as His friends, we should keep God's commandments. He promised us the needed help to do this, adding that living in harmony with God would yield happiness. (See John 15:1-11)
Jesus spoke so many wonderful truths about God that the people who listened to Him "were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips." (Luke 4:22, New International Version) At the risk of their careers, even the temple police once disobeyed an order to arrest Him. "Never man spake like this man," they explained. (John 7:46)
When Jesus left the earth, He gave His apostles "the spirit of truth" to continue teaching the true doctrine--the truth about the Truth.
Sadly, things went wrong. Just as Paul had warned, false teachers arose. (See Acts 20:28-31; 2 Timothy 4:3,4) In a tragically short time, Christ's truth became badly distorted. False doctrines brought a false concept of God and; with it, a loss of spirituality.
Righteousness by faith was never totally forgotten, and some Christians in every age held firmly to their faith in God. But in the confusion of the Middle Ages, people eager to find peace with God were often taught that in addition to "believing," God wanted them to go on difficult pilgrimages, visit shrines, and perform other penances [2] of various kinds. Above all they were told to remain on good terms with their pastors, for priests, it was said, were appointed by God to hold the keys to heaven and hell, and to close heaven against any who did wrong. Since many priests in those days were dishonest and corrupt, many people came to despise God in the same way they despised priests.
Babies were baptized as soon as they were born, turned into church members before they knew what it meant to be Christians.
The literal second coming of Christ was not denied, but medieval theologians preferred to think that the second coming had already taken place. Misapplying Revelation 20:4, they said Christ had come and set up His bishops on their thrones (cathedra) in their churches (cathedrals). [3]
Instead of teaching that in death a person sleeps, it was said that unbaptized persons went straight to eternal torture in hell when they died and that even the faithful were often assigned to purgatory, an intermediate place where they were burned for an indefinite period before advancing on to heaven. Legends were invented to support these theories. A grave in England, for example, was said to rise and lower from time to time, proof positive to the pious that the soul buried there was suffering in torment. When young people asked if they might help their dead parents or grandparents pass more quickly from purgatory to heaven, they were assigned additional penance. If they asked, "Have we done enough?" the reply was, "No one knows."
Diaries and devotional works of monks and saints reveal that for many Christians the Lord's Supper continued through the Middle Ages to be an occasion for intimate fellowship with a personal Saviour. At the same time, the simple words of Jesus, "This is my body"--translated into the Latin, "Hoc est corpus meum"--were believed to turn the communion bread into the actual flesh of Christ, [4] and to make the wine so sacred that laymen were forbidden to drink it lest they accidentally spill the "blood of God."
Superstitious folk entered churches at midnight to steal away fragments of the body of Christ and sprinkle them for good luck among their cabbages. It was popularly felt that little need existed for sermons or, indeed, for any worship except at the moment when a little hand bell rang and the pastor pronounced the words, "Hoc est corpus meum." Services were accelerated to make this mystic moment come the quicker. Christ's words of spiritual fellowship became for millions little more than magic.
As the truth about God was forgotten and false doctrines took its place, people grew increasingly careless or superstitious about personal religion. In general, they regarded God as being either angry or unfeeling--much as the Jews had done before Jesus came to set the record straight.
How God must have longed to present the world once more with the real evidence about Himself! How pleased He must have been when John Wycliffe opened his mind for new truth!
Wycliffe, a loyal Catholic theologian, loved the Lord Jesus and believed that Christ was the source of all truth. He begged his fellow Catholics to lay aside various man-made traditions and follow Scripture as the Christian's only guide.
Enemies threatened to kill him. Once as he lay ill, they came to mock him. But he sat up in bed and said, "I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars."
Wycliffe became the father of the first translation of the whole Bible into Middle English. Hundreds of handmade copies were circulated. Special preachers called Lollards were sent about England in distinctive clothes reading this Bible to the people and teaching them to put Scripture above tradition.
A century passed and Martin Luther appeared, often on his knees before God seeking truth. As a professor in a Catholic university, he was required to teach the Bible as the Word of God. But so many penances were required of him that heaven seemed impossible and God an angry judge. "Love Christ?" he asked in a moment of anguish. "I hate Him."
The writings of Saint Augustine helped him. Then with intense excitement he discovered in the Bible that sinners are not saved by "works" but by simple faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He discovered "the priesthood of believers," the thrilling truth that every man may come to Christ directly without the mediation of priests and saints. "The gates of Paradise opened wide," he said, "and I walked right in."
Luther agreed with Wycliffe that the Bible and the Bible alone is the rule of faith. At the Diet of Worms in 1521 he declared with consummate courage, "Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason, I can do no other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God."
Luther accepted also what Wycliffe had discovered about the Lord's Supper, namely that the bread does not turn into the body and blood of Christ. [5] He emphasized that the meal is a supreme occasion at which Christ assures us of the free forgiveness of every sin. Thus Luther accepted insights of previous Christians in the rediscovery of truth, added others of his own, and passed them on to millions after him.
All over northern Europe thousands of Catholics rejoiced with Martin Luther. Large numbers gave their lives for their faith. Lutheran ministers were at times hanged from trees in batches. It seemed to them cheap enough to give their all in exchange for the truth about their Saviour.
In France and Switzerland other devoted Catholics continued their study and discovered additional truth that had been obscured in the Middle Ages. The most notable of these, John Calvin, father of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, had as logical a mind as Luther's was enthusiastic.
He systematized the exciting biblical truth newly coming to light. It is unfortunate that Calvin's name today is associated so disparagingly with "predestination."
True, he did teach it, but to the people of his time it did not sound as it does to us today. People then had been taught that their destiny depended on the caprice of priests and bishops who "held the keys" to the kingdom of heaven. Calvin said that people were indeed predestined--not by men, however, but by God, before the foundation of the world!
It is difficult today to grasp the immense relief that came over Calvin's congregations when they learned from the Bible that their destiny was so far removed from the fickle whims of pastors and priests that it was settled by God thousands of years before such men were born.
Calvin was not completely correct. He taught that once a person had been chosen by God for salvation, even the person himself could not choose to be lost. Nonetheless, when he put a man's destiny in the hands of God rather than in the hands of other men, he moved his people significantly closer to Bible truth.
More than Luther, Calvin laid before his followers the possibility of victory over sin and challenged them to live each day better than they had the day before. Whereas Luther recovered chiefly the doctrine of our transformed status before God (justification by faith), Calvin emphasized the transformation of character (sanctification by faith) that God's grace makes possible.
Thousands of Catholics accepted with gratitude the recovered truth that Calvin taught them, and many of these also gave up their lives as a result.
In England the followers of Calvin came in time to be known as Puritans because of their concern to purify what seemed to them to be the rather immature Christianity of the new Anglican Church.
To the Puritans we owe the King James Version of the Bible. In 1603 they petitioned King James I for a new translation for use in worship services. The king complied and appointed forty-seven scholars of the realm to undertake the task. Eight years later, in 1611, the famous King James Version came off the press. Who can estimate what this translation has done, to the glory of God?
On the continent of Europe devout Anabaptists called for "believer's baptism." And they gave their lives for it when necessary. The first Anabaptist to die appears to have been a pretty Swiss girl whose head was held under water in a horse trough in mock imitation of believer's baptism. Others died in this way or by being drowned in rivers. Or burned at the stake. Or barbecued beside a fire. Others were laid on open coffins too small for them. Soldiers pounded them in with their hobnailed boots.
Analogous to the Anabaptists on the continent of Europe were the Baptists of England and America. [6] These also insisted that only believers and not infants should be baptized. But unlike most Anabaptists they advanced to "baptism by immersion."
In the eighteenth century teaching on predestination began to grow stale. Millions who had never felt the fear of priests began to fear that God Himself might have chosen them to be lost! John Wesley recovered the New Testament truth that salvation is free for all--for "whosoever believeth." (John 3:16)
Wesley founded the Methodist Church, which accepted the principles of "the Bible and the Bible only," the "priesthood of believers," the status of the Lord's Supper as a memorial bringing through faith a healing sense of the presence of Christ, and the doctrine that the Christian's life should be a transformation. Wesley always held to infant baptism, but he and his church permitted baptism by immersion to those who desired it. (Ellen Harmon was baptized by immersion into the Methodist Church.)
What the Methodists did was typical of other Christians. They accepted truth from those who had gone before and added further new light, and in this way God's truth was ever seen more clearly.
There were individual Christians, too, through the centuries, who learned that God does not torture sinners after death but lets them rest. Wycliffe believed in the "unconscious sleep between death and resurrection." Martin Luther taught that death in Christ "is a fine, sweet, and brief sleep." In England the Anglican Francis Blackburne, the Baptist Matthew Caffyn, and the Puritan poet John Milton shared this belief. In America the former Methodist minister George Storrs and the former Congregationalist minister Charles Fitch also taught the sleep of death. These are a few samples of a large number who believed the same. [7]
Reference to Storrs and Fitch reminds us that in the early nineteenth century came the great interdenominational second advent awakening, in which the truth about the second coming of Jesus shone with greater luster than it had since the second century. Out of that awakening rose the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Annie Smith was a Baptist.
Rachel Oakes was a Seventh Day Baptist.
Hiram Edson, Frederick Wheeler, and Ellen Harmon were Methodists.¸
Joseph Bates and James White were members of the Christian Connection.
Stockbridge Howland was a Congregationalist.
As these and increasing thousands of others became Seventh-day Adventists in the early days of the new movement, they did not give up the beautiful truth about God which they had learned in their former denominations. Instead, they found new glory in it as they learned still richer concepts.
Justification through Jesus Christ, victory through the Holy Spirit, salvation by faith alone, the Bible as the only rule of faith, priesthood of believers, baptism by immersion, the near return of Christ--all this and more Seventh-day Adventists drew from their former churches. To it they added the Sabbath (from the Seventh Day Baptists) and fanned its flame into a brilliant torch. More than any before them, they taught that a gracious God lets the dead sleep until the resurrection. Supremely, they offered to the world the exciting news about the great new enterprise in which Jesus is now engaged in heaven.
So when Adventists say that they have "the truth," they mean that they have the truth that other Christians held before them, and also the present truth, the special additional truth which applies particularly to this present time.
The knowledge that Jesus is in the most holy place, blotting out sins, would not have been truth in the days of Martin Luther. Jesus wasn't in the most holy place then. But He is now. And the implications are immense.
When Adventists invite a friend to leave his denomination and become a Seventh-day Adventist, they don't expect him to give up everything he knows as a Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic. Far from it! Every beautiful facet of truth he learned about Jesus in his former church, he should cherish even more warmly in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, adding to the glorious things he already knows the great and vital truth discovered by Seventh-day Adventists.
When an Adventist says he has "the truth," he is not boasting. It isn't his truth. It's God's truth; truth which God has revealed, not to satisfy curiosity, but to be spread everywhere to everyone who will listen, to everyone for whom Christ gave His fife and whom He lives to save.
God has placed this lustrous truth in our hands. Now He asks us urgently, expectantly, to run with it and tell it to the world.
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