“Well,” she said, “they told us that the judgment is going on in heaven right now, which meant that at any moment your name could come up, even if you didn’t know when. But if you’re not absolutely perfect when it does (you’re at the movies or something like that), then your name is blotted out of the book of life, and you are lost. The only trouble is you don’t know that you’re lost, and although you’re still trying to be perfect, it’s too late.”

How did the “good news” get so good? It’s easy. It got that way from misusing Ellen White, from taking a few select references (while ignoring everything else that she, not to mention the Bible, says on the topic), and from these few select references constructing an entire theology—no matter how contradictory to the rest of inspiration that theology is.

Every person who joins the Adventist Church ought to be required, before baptism, to read the chapter “Joshua and the Angel” from Ellen White’s Testimonies for the Church, volume 5 (pp. 467-476). This section gives a clear, balanced presentation of the pre-Advent judgment and, if read in entirety, would help eliminate the kind of “good news” that my wife and who knows how many others have been “blessed” with all their lives. Because space allows me to extract only a few quotes, and lest I be accused of doing what I have just decried, I say, please read the entire section in order to get the whole picture.

With Zechariah 3:1-7 as her scriptural basis, White wrote about Joshua, the high priest, “clothed with filthy garments” (verse 3), which represent the sins of the God’s people. While Joshua is entreating the Angel of the Lord for mercy, “Satan stands up boldly to resist him” (p. 468). She wrote: “The high priest cannot defend himself or his people from Satan’s accusations. He does not claim that Israel are free from fault” (p. 468). “The people of God,” she said, “have been in many respects very faulty” (p. 474), and “they are fully conscious of the sinfulness of their lives” (p. 473). And Satan, ever the accuser, “points to their filthy garments, their defective characters. He presents their weakness and folly, their sins of ingratitude, their unlikeness to Christ” (p. 473).

How then can these people–-who have “defective characters,” who have “weakness and folly,” and who have been “very faulty”— stand in judgment before a holy God? There’s only one way.

“Jesus our Advocate,” she wrote, “presents an effectual plea in behalf of all who by repentance and faith have committed the keeping of their souls to Him. He pleads their cause and vanquishes their accuser with the mighty arguments of Calvary” (p. 471). “We cannot,” she said, “answer the charges of Satan against us. Christ alone can make an effectual plea in our behalf. He is able to silence the accuser with arguments founded not upon our merits, but on His own” (p. 472).

And precisely because of their wonderful Saviour, and because of what He has done for them, these people are “purifying their souls by obeying the truth” (p. 471). They “exert every energy of the soul in the work of overcoming” (p. 472). They are promised that, through “repentance and faith,” they can “render obedience to all the commandments of God.” And though they have sinned, they have not given themselves over to the control of evil; and, having confessed their sins, they plead “for pardon through Jesus their Advocate” (p. 472).

However much emphasis Ellen White placed on holy living—as did Jesus, Paul, John (Matt. 5:8; Rom. 6:12; 1 John 3:7)—she clearly showed that the foundation of our acceptance with God rests in the “mighty arguments of Calvary” alone, the only way we can be acceptable to a holy God.

“Zechariah’s vision of Joshua and the Angel,” she wrote, “applies with peculiar force to the experience of God’s people in the closing up of the great day of atonement” (p. 472). In other words, in the day of judgment, when our names come up (Luke 12:8; Rev. 3:5), Jesus once and for all stands in our place; His righteousness alone—the only righteousness sufficient to meet the demands of the law—re-mains as our surety of salvation, now and especially in the pre-Advent judgment.

After all, anything else would hardly be “good news,” now, would it?

_________________________
Clifford Goldstein is the editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guides.