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“Why is keeping the Sabbath so important to you?”
The question reverberated in my mind, piercing through my scripted answers and years of conditioned responses. It hacked through the confusing twists and turns of my worldview and cut to the root of the fearful gospel by which I lived. The tears came unbidden, and, in a broken voice, I was finally able to admit with unbridled honesty the driving force behind my Sabbath loyalty.
“If I stop keeping the Sabbath, then I will lose my salvation.”
I grew up in a multi-generational, conservative Seventh-day Adventist family. We embraced every historic doctrine of Seventh-day Adventism, and, although on the conservative side, we were well within the mainline Seventh-day Adventist church, and I was steeped in Adventism.
My family instilled in me a love and deep respect for Ellen White and her writings. While I never would have admitted to others or myself that I held Ellen White on the same level as the Bible, in practice I viewed her writings as being as important—if not more important—than the Bible. I finished reading my first Ellen White book on my own when I was only 11. By the time I was 20, I had read at least seven of them completely and had read large portions of many more.
Just before my ninth birthday I eagerly attended my first Revelation Seminar, and about a year later, my family started an Adventist church plant in which I was actively involved for the rest of my childhood. My parents homeschooled me through many of my early grades, but I graduated from the eighth grade of an Adventist school, and then I graduated from Campion Academy. Campion had a more progressive environment than did the Adventism in which I grew up, but this academy still taught and confirmed every historic Adventist doctrine. I received straight A’s in every Bible class and on every theological paper. I was a faithful Seventh-day Adventist and loved everything about it. I had absolutely no desire ever to leave the Adventist church.
Sometimes, being an Adventist gave me a sense of pride and elation. I was so blessed to have been born into the remnant church, to have been born into the truth! Indeed, I had been privileged to receive light and truth that no other church was practicing. I was so happy to be a part of God’s special end-time remnant church and to be spreading the Three Angel’s Messages.
At other times, being an Adventist sent me into crushing despair. I had been taught that if I lived up to the light that I had been given and never rejected any of it, then I would be ready to stand before God without a mediator at the close of probation. But I knew that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not live up to that light. I lived in fear and uncertainty of my salvation. I used to cry myself to sleep at night begging that God would help me to stop sinning and get one step closer to perfection, or I would beg Him to take away my free will so that I could never choose to reject Him at the last minute. Any time I sinned, I would have a picture in my head of the recording angel writing down what I had done in the books in the heavenly sanctuary, and I knew I must confess that sin before I forgot about it, lest any forgotten sins be held against me in the investigative judgment.
In short, I was a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, from a very young age I heard the call of God and felt Him drawing me. I had a deep longing to know Jesus. On the other hand, the Jesus that I knew was a weak Jesus who was not even finished with His atonement, and, because of this incomplete work, He was not strong enough to save me or to keep me.
Trouble brewing
After it became apparent that I would not be able to afford an Adventist college, it was decided that I would attend a public university that was close to an Adventist college because, in our minds, this solution was the next best thing to attending one. After spending one year of college in my hometown, I found myself as a vocal performance major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), right on the doorstep of Union College. I had many friends at Union from Campion and soon became familiar with the Adventist community in Lincoln. However, trouble was brewing with my chosen major.
In October of 2011, my junior year as a voice major, my voice teacher asked me why I would not audition for any of the operas at UNL. One of the performances was always on Friday night, so I told her that I could not because of the Sabbath. She invited me off campus to discuss this dilemma, and I agreed. I felt this conversation was an opportunity for me to share the “Sabbath Truth” with my teacher.
Instead, it was in this meeting that my voice teacher asked me a rather piercing question: “Why is keeping the Sabbath so important to you?”
At first I gave her my scripted response, but she kept pressing for an answer to her “why?” Finally, the realization struck me so hard that I started to cry. I said tearfully that if I didn’t keep the Sabbath, I would lose my salvation. What she said next stopped me dead in my tracks and cut through all of my programmed responses. She gently told me that I needed to read the Bible for myself and find out where my salvation comes from. Her words made such an impression on me that I was driven to do just that. I started reading the Bible without Ellen White interpreting for me for the first time in my life.
I read through Romans and Galatians, and both of those books were telling me the exact opposite of what I had always been taught as an Adventist! This dissonance created huge turmoil in my heart. As blasphemous as it sounds, I literally felt as if the Bible was lying to me. Adventism was the truth, so how could it disagree with the Bible? Even though what I was reading in Scripture was telling me that Adventism was wrong, I ignored the evidence and pushed it away, because it simply could not be true. After all, I could not reject any of the light that I had been given, or I would be putting myself in grave danger.
Christmas surprise
Christmastime brought a new revelation about the roots of Adventism. At my university, the choirs come together to produce a Christmas concert every year. One of the classic carols that we sang that year was “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” I memorized and internalized the words to that hymn. When I went home for Christmas and sang this same hymn at my church using the Adventist hymnal, I was surprised to discover that the words were different. The part about the Trinity and about Jesus being God had been removed. The original words of the second verse of this carol contained a majestic salute honoring the Trinity and the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
However, in the Adventist hymnal, this glorious text had been replaced with a verse that completely eliminated Jesus’ deity and His virgin birth (see box, compare text in bold).
I remembered being told that some hymns in the Adventist hymnal had been altered because some of the doctrines expressed in the original hymns were “incorrect,” but Adventists believed in the deity of Christ and in the Trinity, right? Why had these words been changed?
Not trinitarian
A little research revealed that early Adventists did not believe in the Trinity or in the deity of Christ but were Arian or semi-Arian at best. Ellen White repeatedly contradicted herself as to the deity of Christ, and James White went to his grave denying the deity of Christ. Even J. N. Andrews, for whom the Adventist theological seminary is named, did not believe that Jesus is God. Today, in fact, the Adventist view of the Trinity is not the same as the orthodox doctrine of One God in three Persons taught in Scripture. The Adventist trinity is more in line with tritheism because it ignores that God is one in substance. Moreover, there are many leftover teachings from Adventism’s “Arian period”, including that Jesus is Michael the Archangel, which I had been clearly taught. This news left me stunned and bothered me deeply.
By February of 2012 I couldn’t keep all the contradictions I was seeing between Scripture and Adventism to myself and decided to reach out. One evening in my apartment, I did a search on the internet for former Adventists in Lincoln and came across a man named Chris Lee. I wrote him a letter, telling him about my confusion and frustration. At that point I wanted badly to embrace the idea that I just needed to believe in Jesus as my Savior by repenting and putting my trust in Him, but my Adventist chains would not let me accept this simple fact. Instead, I sent Chris a cry for help.
No sooner had I sent the email than I received a phone call. It was from a Bible teacher in Southern California, Dr. Walter Bramson. My voice teacher knew him, and had given him my phone number. She had told him that I was questioning Adventism. After he introduced himself, I told him a little bit of my background and of how I was struggling.
One of the very first things he said to me was, “Do you know what a cult is?”
That question made me furious! But, in spite of my feelings, I listened to what he had to say. He told me that the Sabbath had nothing to do with my salvation, either in obtaining or maintaining it, and that it was never a requirement for me to keep the Sabbath in the first place because I was a Gentile. He was confirming what I had studied, but I still could not accept it. After all, he wasn’t an Adventist, so that meant that he did not have the truth that I possessed!
At the end of the conversation, he asked me if I believed in Jesus, and I said yes. He said, well, then, if you believe in Jesus as your Savior, then you are saved! I told him that it couldn’t be that simple.
I hung up the phone, but his words still rang true in my heart.
Still pondering the gospel he had spoken to me, I went back to my laptop. A couple of weeks before, I had written a blog post about my questions. Since I had posted the blog, no one had even looked at it, much less commented on it. At that moment, however, I suddenly had several comments, and they were all from former Adventists!
How did these people find me? In the space of that phone call, several former Adventists had suddenly found my blog, and they were all telling me that they understood, that they had had the same questions, and that they were praying for me. I could not believe what had happened.
I found out later that a former Adventist had been doing some research that night for his own blog about coming out of Adventism. He had merely typed the word “Adventism” into Google, and of all the websites that could have come up under this query, my blog site showed up in his search engine results! He felt compelled to read my blog post because the title, “What Must I Do to be Saved,” caught his eye. That question is not something that would be likely to be found under the tag “Adventism.” He read it and felt impressed to pray for me and to share my blog post with a group of former Adventists on Facebook. He found me and shared my blog at about the same time that I was writing my letter to Chris Lee, and that is how all those “formers” found me in the space of a phone call. God’s timing is perfect.
Chris Lee wrote me back and referred me to Ane Edwards, a former Adventist lady who also lived in Lincoln. That week, I met with her every day and started studying with her. My jaw dropped when she had me read Leviticus 16 out loud, and I realized that the scapegoat could not be Satan, that only Jesus could bear and atone for my sins. I did a covenant study in my apartment, and immediately I knew that I had been lied to my whole life.
That entire week, I felt the spiritual warfare raging around me. I was seized by a fear so intense that it completely disrupted my life. I literally felt as if something at the very core of my being, something very deep, dark, and evil, was being ripped out of me.
At the end of the week, I was again alone in my apartment one Friday night. I read chapter 28 of The Great Controversy again, only this time I was seeing it through different eyes. As I read Ellen White’s words on the investigative judgment, all I felt was darkness and no hope. Then I got out my Bible and read through the first two chapters of Ephesians, and I was blown away.
Three things stood out to me. The first was that the Holy Spirit is the seal and guarantee of our salvation. I had always been taught that the Sabbath was the Seal of God, but Scripture was telling me that the seal was the Holy Spirit. I had been taught that Ellen White said that we could not say that we are saved, and all of the doctrines of Adventism showed me that salvation could never be sure. However, the Bible clearly taught that the saved are sealed with the Holy Spirit, and that He is given as a guarantee of salvation. Ephesians used very strong language that affirmed salvation assurance for the believer.
The second revelation that impacted me was that I was dead in my transgressions and sins; this fact was why I needed to be saved by grace alone. I had heard countless times from Doug Batchelor, a prominent Adventist evangelist and the director of Amazing Facts, that “We are saved from our sins, not in our sins!” While we are saved from our sins, the Bible also says that we are made alive while we are still dead in our sins, for it is by grace that we are saved. My condition was far worse than just having a propensity to sin; I was actually dead. My spiritual death was why I needed grace.
The third and last thing Ephesians revealed to me that night was that faith is a gift from God and not something that I can produce or manufacture. I had always thought that faith was something I had to muster up within myself. However, I could not produce this faith; it had to come from outside of myself because I was born dead. I suddenly realized that God had given me faith, and I must now act on that faith in belief by repenting and putting my trust in Jesus.
That was the moment that I finally understood the gospel. I trusted Jesus as my Savior that night. I knew that I needed Him to be my Savior and Substitute and that I needed His grace and nothing else. I turned to the Lord Jesus in repentance and accepted the free gift of salvation by grace through faith and was born again that night.
Jesus is worth the cost
Leaving Adventism comes at a very high cost. I have lost much leaving the Adventist church, but Jesus is worth it. Knowing Him is so much better than anything I left behind.
I left the Adventist church because it not only compromises the gospel but actually teaches a false gospel. The true gospel is that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose again. Adventism teaches a different Jesus, and the Jesus I know now is not the same Jesus I knew in Adventism. The Jesus I now know is fully God and not Michael the Archangel. He is finished with atonement; He gives me secure salvation assurance. Moreover, He forgave me ALL my sins (past, present, and future) and will never hold me under condemnation. He is my eternal Sabbath rest; He disarmed Satan at the cross and came to earth first and foremost to be my Substitute. He had no chance of failing His mission because He is Sovereign God. He will never stop interceding for me and is the One who bore all my sins, my guilt, and my shame. He is the One who took the penalty and the blame for them all, ultimately and forever.
This is the Jesus Who reached down and saved me while I was still dead in my transgressions and sins, and, through the Holy Spirit, He brought me out of my spiritually dead state and gave me new birth so that now my spirit is alive in Christ. This is the Jesus Who is holding me in His hand and will never let me go. This is the Jesus with Whom I am seated in the heavenly realms throughout all eternity. I am kept by His grace and have been declared righteous forever.
I know that I am saved. †
Copyright 2013 Life Assurance Ministries, Inc., Casa Grande, Arizona, USA. All rights reserved. Revised July 8, 2013. Contact email: proclamation@gmail.com
Elaina Matthews grew up in a multi-generational, conservative Seventh-day Adventist family in Pueblo, Colorado, and attended Campion Academy. She is a senior vocal performance major at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and attends Lincoln Berean Church. She hosts and moderates a Facebook group for young adults that is related to the Life Assurance Ministries website, BibleStudiesforAdventists.com. Her group, Bible Studies for Adventists: Young Adults, is an open group that seeks to compare what is taught in the Collegiate Quarterly with Scripture.
This photo was taken during Elaina’s testimony at the Former Adventist Fellowship Conference in Redlands, California, last February, where she first told her testimony printed here. She also sang “Blessed Assurance” and “Before the Throne of God Above.” You may view her testimony on YouTube.
S U M M E R • 2 0 1 3
VOLUME 14, ISSUE 2
D E P A R T M E N T S
Stories of FAITH