The Double Standard…And Heresy?

In Order for this post to make sense, watch The Video by Dr. Judd Lake, a Seventh-Day Adventist scholar and theologian.

It is always puzzling to me how Adventist scholars, academics, and administrators can say publicly without retribution, things that the common pastor or lay person cannot say without threats, calls for resignation, and condemnation.

Here we have Dr. Judd Lake, a professor and chair at Southern saying (at time stamp 2:36 - 3:12) that "we [Seventh - day Adventists] definitely believe atonement was completed at the cross..."

Now, while most people, having even nominally read their Bibles, will state, "Amen! Absolutely." They would be wrong. Seventh-day Adventists DO NOT believe atonement was completed at the cross. Dr. Judd's post proves my point that instead of tackling the difficulties, errors, theological quagmires Seventh-day Adventists have found themselves in, we divide the church by ignorance or intentionally ignoring.

The Atonement isn't just a big deal....Atonement is the WHOLE deal, the purpose, the meaning, the magnum opus of love of God.

The Seventh-Day Adventist position is that Atonement was STARTED at Calvary and will be COMPLETED with the destruction of Satan at the return of the New Jerusalem.

Listen to Dr. Lake, he does not say this either. He says that Atonement was completed at the cross, yet IT'S work grew beyond the cross to the heavenly ministration of Christ in the Sanctuary. There is a huge difference theologically between Dr. Lake and the Adventist Official position.

The foundations for Atonement not being completed at the cross are found in the writings of O.R.L. Crosier. A man that never became a Seventh-Day Adventist and even later publicly recanted his espoused beliefs regarding the sanctuary and atonement not being complete at Calvary.

How then did Crosier's belief become the Seventh-Day Adventist Beliefs? Because of this statement by Ellen White in her first 'professed vision,'

“The Lord showed me in vision, more than one year ago, that Brother Crosier had the true light on the cleansing of the sanctuary, et cetera, and that it was His will that Brother Crosier should write out the view which he gave us in the Day-Star Extra, February 7, 1846. I feel fully authorized by the Lord to recommend that Extra to every saint (A Word to the Little Flock, pg. 12).”

Crosier's Beliefs...

“Those who hold that Christ entered the Holy of Holies at, and has been ministering therein ever since His ascension, also believe, as of course they must, that the atonement of the Gospel Dispensation is the antitype of the atonement made on the tenth day of the seventh month under the law. If this is so, the events of the legal tenth day, have had their antitypes during the Gospel Dispensation. The first event in the atonement service of that day, was the cleansing of the Sanctuary, as we have seen from Leviticus 16. Then, upon their theory, the Sanctuary of the new covenant was cleansed in the early part of the Gospel Dispensation.

Evidence is not wanting that neither the earth nor Palestine, their Sanctuaries, was then cleansed. I call them their Sanctuaries, for they are not the Lord’s. But if the Lord’s new covenant Sanctuary was then cleansed, the 2300 days ended then; but if they are years, which we all believe, they extend 1810 years beyond the 70 weeks, and the last of those weeks was the first of the new covenant or Gospel Dispensation. The fact that those days reach 1810 beyond the 70 weeks, and that the Sanctuary could not be cleansed till the end of those days, is demonstration that the antitype of the legal tenth day is not the Gospel Dispensation; Again, if the atonement of that day is typical of the atonement of the Gospel Dispensation, then the atonement made in the Holy, Hebrews 9:6, previous to that day, was finished before the Gospel Dispensation began. It has been shown that that atonement was made for the forgiveness of sins, and I have found no evidence that such an atonement was made on tenth day of the seventh month. The Gospel Dispensation began with the preaching of Christ, and if it is the antitype of the legal tenth day, one of the two things is true; either the Saviour, instead of fulfilling, has destroyed the greater part of the law, the daily service of the Holy which occupied the whole year except one day, the tenth of the seventh month; or else He fulfilled the whole law except one three hundred and sixtieth part of it before the Gospel Dispensation began, and before He was anointed as the Messiah to fulfil the law and the prophets. One of these two conclusions is inevitable on the hypotheses that the Gospel Dispensation and the atonement made in it, is the antitype of the legal tenth day, and the atonement made in it. Upon which of these horns will they hang? If on the former, the declaration, “I came not to destroy the law”, pierces them; but if they choose the latter, it then becomes them to prove that the law, which had a shadow of good things to come, was fulfilled within itself, that the shadow and substance filled the same place and time; also they will need to prove that the entire atonement for the forgiveness of sins was made before the Lamb was slain with whose blood the atonement was to be made. Now it must be clear to every one, that if the antitype of the yearly service (Hebrews 9:7), began at the first Advent, the antitype of the daily (Hebrews 9:6), had been previously fulfilled; and, as the atonement for forgiveness was a part of that daily service, they are involved in the conclusion that there has been no forgiveness of sins under the Gospel Dispensation. Such a theory is wholly at war with the entire genius of the Gospel Dispensation, and stands rebuked, not only by Moses and Paul, but by the teaching and works of our Saviour and His commission to His apostles, by their subsequent teaching and the history of the Christian church. But again, they say the atonement was made and finished on Calvary, when the Lamb of God expired. So men have taught us, and so the churches and world believe; but it is none the more true or sacred on that account, if unsupported by Divine authority. Perhaps few or none who hold that opinion have ever tested the foundation on which it rests.

1. If the atonement was made on Calvary, by whom was it made? The making of the atonement is the work of a Priest? but who officiated on Calvary?-Roman soldiers and wicked Jews.

2. The slaying of the victim was not making the atonement: the sinner slew the victim, Leviticus 4:1-4, 13-15, etc., after that the Priest took the blood and made the atonement. Leviticus 4:5-12, 16-21.

3. Christ was the appointed High Priest to make the atonement, and He certainly could not have acted in that capacity till after His resurrection, and we have no record of His doing any thing on earth after His resurrection, which could be called the atonement.

4. The atonement was made in the Sanctuary, but Calvary was not such a place.

5. He could not, according to Hebrews 8:4, make the atonement while on earth. “If He were on earth, He should not be a Priest.” The Levitical was the earthly priesthood, the Divine, the heavenly.

6. Therefore, He did not begin the work of making the atonement, whatever the nature of that work may be, till after His ascension, when by His own blood He entered His heavenly Sanctuary for us (The Sanctuary, pg. 17-19).”

Ellen White reaffirms Crosier's beliefs in 1890 with the publication of Patriarchs and Prophets,

"As Christ at His ascension appeared in the presence of God to plead His blood in behalf of penitent believers, so the priest in the daily ministration sprinkled the blood of the sacrifice in the holy place in the sinner's behalf. The blood of Christ, while it was to release the repentant sinner from the condemnation of the law, was not to cancel the sin; it would stand on record in the sanctuary until the final atonement; so in the type the blood of the sin offering removed the sin from the penitent, but it rested in the sanctuary until the Day of Atonement (Patriarchs and Prophets, pg. 357)."

Uriah Smith wrote in the Review and Herald, October 19, 1876, " the death of Christ and the atonement are not the same thing. And this relieves matter of all difficulty. Christ did not make atonement when He shed his blood upon the cross. Let this fact be fixed forever in the mind."

Denis Fortin writing for an Adventist Theological Journal agrees with Ellen White's Patriarchs and Prophets statement, that Christ's death on the cross was merely a reflection of the daily sacrifices not the atoning sacrifice. "Waggoner's logic is impressive, for if Christ's death completed the atonement, what then would be the need for the intercessory ministry of Christ in heaven after his ascension? "If his mediatorial work was completed when he was on earth . . . then he cannot be a mediator now! and all that the Scriptures say of his priesthood on the throne of his Father in Heaven, there making intercession for us, is incomprehensible or erroneous."But what Waggoner perhaps failed to see in his study of biblical atonement was instances where sacrifices were offered in the Old Testament and atonement done without the priestly ministration of blood in the sanctuary (e.g. Leviticus 6:8-13; 7:1-6). This certainly implies that sacrifices have atoning merits of their own before any ministration in the sanctuary (Journal of the Adventist Theological Society (14:2), Autumn 2003, pp. 131-140)."

In my talks with several of my friends that are Adventist scholars, academics, and administrators, this is the greatest issue of Seventh-Day Adventist theology. It is an issue that goes ignorantly unnoticed or passively, as in the case with Dr. Lake, passed over. For I would agree with Dr. Lake. Atonement was completed at the cross, and its encompassing work expands through Christ's mediatorial work on our behalf. Yet it is not the adventist position.

Why does having a correct view of atonement matter?

For one, it is counter to Scripture. So we no longer can claim to be Sola Scriptura, or we lie.

It robs Christ of the magnitude of what took place on the Cross as a focal point of God's love for the universe and the consequences of sin.

There is no assurance of forgiveness for sin or salvation until Satan dies, once again making Satan a place where he does not belong.