Death” is the featured topic this month in the Adventist Review’s seven-part “Digging Deeper” series of articles addressing core Adventist beliefs. The first three topics were the Mark of the Beast, the Trinity, and Deception. This month the magazine is arguing the organization’s materialistic view of human nature and its nihilistic view of death deceptively called “soul sleep”.
The anchor piece this month defending Adventism’s view of human life and death is a composite piece written by five Adventist authors: Lael Cesar, an associate editor of Adventist Review; Scott Pierce, pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist church in Puyallup, Washington; Daniel Matteo, the pastor of the New Norfolk church and the youth ministry director of the Tasmanian Conference in Australia; Richard Martin, pastor of the New Life Adventist church in Hampton, Virginia; and Adrienne Benton, a lieutenant commander who serves as a chaplain in the United States Navy.
Each of the five defends the Adventist view that death is “unconscious oblivion”—that the dead literally go into the ground and nothing of them remains until God reconstructs them at the resurrection. Interestingly, none of the five ever address the biblical view that the spirit of man goes to God when the body dies. Instead, all five assume that death is simply physical loss of life and breath.
Lael Cesar attempts to explain that Adam and Eve introduced death by disobeying God in the garden, yet his explanation does not deal with the reality of their spiritual death which is our legacy. He develops the argument that the “men of faith and women of courage immortalized in the book of Hebrews’ pantheon of spiritual heroes lived long ago looking for a city made by God Himself (Heb. 11:10). The day is coming soon when their faith shall be palpably confirmed as they are gifted physical immortality in the form of bodies no longer subject to corruption of any sort.”
Cesar uses the story of Job to establish the idea that the hope beyond earthly suffering is the resurrection, yet he never hints at the New Testament statements that we pass from death to life when we believe in Jesus, and that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:1–9).
What is “sleep”?
Cesar further develops the Adventist argument that the biblical metaphor for death is “sleep”. He states,
“Sleeping” is the biblical description of death (Job 7:21; Dan. 12:2; John 5:29; 11:11–16; 1 Thes. 4:13–18). The metaphor clarifies the mental and physical condition of the dead as one of total unconsciousness, without any of the pain or glory often claimed: “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccl. 3:20), whether they lived lives of selfless blessing to all or lives of self-centered exploitation and greed (emphasis mine).
Cesar, arguing from the Adventist worldview, denies the existence of the human spirit which is the immaterial part of ourselves. Our spirits define our identities and are either dead in sin or alive to God in Christ Jesus through believing in Him and being born again. Our spirits go to the Lord when our bodies die, and we wait in Him—not in unconscious oblivion or non-existence—for the resurrection when He will reunite our spirits with our resurrected bodies.
Adventism, however, understands consciousness to be the product of our brains when our bodies are alive, powered by breath.
To be sure, Jesus defined death as sleep when He said of Jairus’s daughter, “The girl is not dead but sleeping” (Mt. 9:24). Adventism denies Jesus’ implicit explanation that human death is not annihilation, it is not ceasing to exist as when an animal dies. Rather, Jesus was saying that human death is NOT a condition of ceasing to exist.
When a human being sleeps, he is not “gone”. His identity and “mind” still exist. He is not consciously interacting with the immediate world around him, but his mind has not ceased to function. His body will awaken back to conscious interaction, but during sleep, he himself did not cease to exist. His mind was alive and working even through his conscious brain was shut down.
Adventists take this metaphor of sleep and redefine its normal meaning. In fact, the definition of “sleep” is helpful in understanding what Jesus really meant and in perceiving how Adventism skews His words. Wikipedia defines sleep this way:
Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body, characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings. It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli but is more easily reversed than the state of being comatose.
Jesus was introducing to the Jews around him the idea that “death” is not a permanent condition but one from which a person will return. Not only was Jesus defining death, however, He was also showing them that He Himself was God with the power to raise the dead to life.
Adventism agrees that death is temporary and that people will return. What they have insidiously done, however, is to teach that the actual existence of the person who dies ceases to exist except in God’s memory. Within Adventism, the resurrection is actually a re-creation. The person’s literal self and identity, they say, ceases to exist when the body ceases to breathe. God simply remembers who they were, and eventually, He will recreate a glorified body and infuse it with what He remembers that person to have been.
In reality, the Adventist resurrection is not a continuation of the actual person who died. There is no ontological connection between the person who died and the person who rose. In fact, the resurrected person is akin to a perfect clone of the one who died—only with a new and improved body.
Jesus, however, was specifically teaching something different. Jesus used the word “sleep” to define death because He knew what sleep was. The body of a person who has died has no more voluntary muscular function; he has no more sensory activity and is not conscious of his surroundings, but that person himself EXISTS. He has not ceased to be or to “know”. He has not disappeared. God has him, and God will reunite him or her with a new body.
Cesar’s words above demonstrate the Adventist view that man’s mind and body are merely physical. His spiritual life, therefore, is centered in his brain. There is no “spirit” separate from the body; thus, when one ceases to breathe, one ceases to exist.
Present with the Lord?
Every author in this article conspicuously avoided the New Testament texts that tell us that to “be absent from the body” is to “be at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). This reality of being at home with the Lord when absent from the body, Paul tells us, is “very much better” (Phil. 1:23) than is remaining in the body.
In addition, while the resurrection is the great hope of Adventism, the Adventist version of the resurrection is not the biblical reality. More than once throughout the article the authors referred to 1 Thessalonians 4:13, 16–17:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.…
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Significantly, however, they did not discuss 1 Thessalonians 4:14:
For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
Adventists simply do not deal with the plain meaning of verse 14: God brings with Jesus those who have fallen asleep! Only after He descends from heaven with the righteous who have died are the dead in Christ raised first.
The Lord rejoins the spirits of those who died with their resurrection bodies, and the resurrection is complete.
Philippians 1:22–23 and 2 Corinthians 5:1–9 are explicit that we are present with the Lord (present tense) when we are absent from the body. 1 Thessalonians 4:14 clearly states that God brings those people who have died (fallen asleep) in Christ with Him when He returns, and then the dead in Christ rise first!
Moreover, Jesus plainly told the believing thief who died on the cross next to His, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43).
One author mentioned this Luke reference, but he did not discuss the fact that Jesus said they would be in paradise that very day, together. Instead, author Seth Pierce simply said, “Just as Jesus promised to remember the dying thief on the cross next to Him, He will remember us, too. And the next thing we know will be life in paradise.”
Yet Jesus plainly said they would be in paradise that very day. Adventists cannot adequately deal with the clarity of that verse, so they claim that the translators put the comma in the wrong place, that the verse should read, “Truly, I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.”
They change the meaning of Jesus’ words to fit their theology that death is the cessation of existence.
The Adventist fear of spiritualism
Ellen White taught that believing the human spirit survives the death of the body leads to spiritualism. In The Great Controversy, p. 588, she says:
“Through the two great errors, the immortality of the soul and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his deceptions. While the former lays the foundation of Spiritualism, the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome. The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of Spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.”
Adventism, therefore, teaches that believing in what they call “life after death” sets people up to be deceived by evil spirits masquerading as people’s dead loved ones. This belief leads them to ignore and argue with the words of Scripture assuring us that believers will be present with the Lord when they die.
To sustain their argument, they insist that humans are merely bodies plus breath, that a breathing body IS a living soul. They argue that people do not HAVE souls, they ARE souls. When the body ceases to breathe at death, the soul ceases to exist. The person’s life and being are extinguished by the cessation of breathing, just as a TV turns off when the switch is turned off (Seventh-day Adventists Believe, ed. 2, Pacific Press Pub. Assoc., 2005, p. 94).
Adventism insists that man is material; humans do not have immaterial spirits that separate from the material body at death. To bolster this belief, it has taught its members that Christians who believe their spirits go to be with the Lord as well as pagans who do not claim Christ are vulnerable to demonic harassment.
In fact, in this Adventist Review article, none of the authors ever state what Christians believe about death. Instead, a false foundation is established by comments such as this one by Lael Cesar: “Multiple world philosophies answer Job and their own soul with a blank stare, or with fantastic and interminable scenarios of going and coming again and again in one form and yet another.”
Christians are neither blank about death nor do they believe in reincarnation. Neither do Christians believe that the deceased is “walking around grieving for our losses or thrilling at our gains,” as article co-author Adrienne Benton assumes? Furthermore, Christians do not believe that the dead “can communicate with us.”
In order to make their point that the dead “know not anything” and that no part of them survives the death of the body, Adventism misrepresents the Christian, biblical doctrine of death and scornfully teaches its members that those who believe people go to be with the Lord also believe those dead can look down on them and watch them make bad choices.
Christians, however, do not believe the dead can communicate with the living. They go to be with the Lord, but they do not have access to us on earth. The argument that they would suffer if they could see the sin and mistakes of their loved ones alive on earth is an invented fable.
Paul says that to be absent from the body and present with the Lord is a condition that is “very much better” (Phil. 1:22-23) than remaining on earth. It is not a situation where one suffers from afar while watching hapless loved ones destroying their lives.
What about Samuel?
The story of the Witch of Endor conjuring Samuel when the wicked King Saul asked to speak to him has been explained within Adventism as a manifestation of an evil spirit. Lael Cesar referenced that story in his portion of the article in the Adventist Review. Interestingly, he even misidentified the spirit who spoke:
In the political, economic, literary, and entertainment world dramatic events pretend: miracle-working “demonic spirits,” unseen but surely felt, some of the very ones who have masqueraded in the past as the conscious, communicating “soul” of some dead person—King Saul or your departed grandma (see 1 Sam. 28:7–19; 1 Chron. 10:13,14)—now hasten “the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty” (Rev. 16:14). This is the battle of Armageddon—not a conflict of human armies engaged against each other, but the united forces of spiritual deception engaged against the King of righteousness and Lord of glory.
It must be noted that Cesar got the departed spirit wrong. It wasn’t King Saul who appeared; rather, it was King Saul who asked for Samuel, and Samuel was the dead person who appeared.
This story, however, demands a closer look. Here is 1 Samuel 28:8–19:
So Saul disguised himself and put on other garments and went, he and two men with him. And they came to the woman by night. And he said, “Divine for me by a spirit and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you.” The woman said to him, “Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the necromancers from the land. Why then are you laying a trap for my life to bring about my death?” But Saul swore to her by the LORD, “As the LORD lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing.” Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” He said, “Bring up Samuel for me.” When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice. And the woman said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.” The king said to her, “Do not be afraid. What do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a god coming up out of the earth.” He said to her, “What is his appearance?” And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped in a robe.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and paid homage.
Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Saul answered, “I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answered me no more, either by prophets or by dreams. Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do.” And Samuel said, “Why then do you ask me since the LORD has turned from you and become your enemy? The LORD has done to you as he spoke by me, for the LORD has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, David. Because you did not obey the voice of the LORD and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek, therefore the LORD has done this thing to you this day. Moreover, the LORD will give Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me. The LORD will give the army of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.”
Adventism teaches that this manifestation of Samuel was an evil spirit. If they were to admit it could have been Samuel, they would contradict their fundamental belief that man is merely material and ceases to exist at death. Their doctrine requires this story to be describing an evil spirit.
Yet the passage clearly says it was Samuel. Moreover, the witch, who made a living conjuring apparition and fortune telling, was shocked and immediately recognized the spirit as Samuel. She realized immediately that King Saul had deceived her. Conjuring an apparition or an evil spirit would not have given her clarity about the identity of the disguised Saul. Furthermore, the appearing of Samuel 60-[ caused her fear.
The study notes in the English Standard Version Study Bible say this about this passage:
1 Sam. 28:15–19 Then Samuel said to Saul. The character of this event has long been debated—whether the spirit was really Samuel, or how the medium could command the spirit of a holy prophet. As far as the narrator is concerned, this really is the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. He is called “Samuel” in vv. 15–16. He speaks much as he had spoken to Saul during his lifetime (cf. vv. 16–18 with 15:18, 26–28: in both places, Samuel describes David as Saul’s “neighbor”). He uses the name of the LORD seven times and adds the true prophecy that Saul and his sons will die. It is hard to think that the narrator thought this was a deceptive illusion performed by the woman or some demonic spirit deceiving Saul. An evil spirit would not deliver a true prophecy or true words to Saul, as Samuel does in 28:16–19. That the woman’s actions brought Samuel up is implied by v. 15, Why have you disturbed me? So whatever the limits on a medium’s power normally were, in this case, the Lord let her rouse the spirit of Samuel himself.
Adventism cannot entertain the idea that God allowed Samuel to come and give Saul a true prophecy about his imminent demise. In spite of the tone and clarity of the passage, Adventism must have the dead being gone, non-existent until the resurrection when God repackages new bodies with the personalities and memories of the departed ones.
Evidence for more than materialism
The Bible is full of evidence that human beings are more than material bodies. Moreover, as medical interventions and imaging have advanced over the past few decades, more and more clinical stories have confirmed what Christians have always known: humans are more than the function of the electrochemical processes of their brains.
This week (September 18, 2018) Christianity Today posted an article by Christian neuroscientist Michael Egnor in which he describes evidence from his own caseload as well as from the experiments of other neuroscientists that reveal evidence for human “mind” and “will” that cannot be explained from a materialistic point of view. The article, entitled More Than Material Mind, was reposted with permission from Plough Publishing House. It is worth reading in full.
In short, Egnor described a patient he followed from birth onward. A fraternal twin of a normal sister, this particular girl was born with “only thin slivers of brain—a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water…she had little chance at a normal life…[She had] only a third of the brain her sister had…At every stage of [her] life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.”
Egnor describes other patients of his who have had partial brains who have nonetheless thrived academically and physically.
Especially interesting was his recounting of studies done with patients treated for severe epilepsy by having the two hemispheres of their brains separated by surgery. In short, patients with separated hemispheres experienced altered sensations. For example, “sensations—elicited by touch or vision—could be presented to one hemisphere of the brain, and not be experienced in the other hemisphere.” Most remarkably, however, “the person’s intellect and will—what we might call the soul—remained undivided.”
In fact, Wilder Penfield, one of the pioneers of “corpus callosotomy”, the procedure that separates the hemispheres, insisted near the end of his career “that there is an aspect of the self—the intellect and the will—that is not the brain, and that cannot be elicited by stimulation of the brain.”
Conclusion
Adventism’s understanding of death is unbiblical and grows out of its persistent belief in a material reality. The belief that humans are merely physical bodies that breathe, that they die like animals except that God remembers their details, is a belief nowhere taught in Scripture.
In spite of Adventism’s plethora of out-of-context proof texts, Scripture does not teach that man ceases to exist at death. Moreover, it is important to remember that, with the doctrine of investigative judgment as the central pillar of Adventism—the belief that Jesus is judging the records of all believers right now, determining who has kept the law and has overcome sin thus being ready for heaven—the biblical doctrine that God’s people go immediately into the presence of the Lord when they die is contradictory. If Jesus is now determining who will be saved, there cannot be saved people’s spirits already living in the presence of Jesus.
We close this response to the Adventist belief about death by directing you to one more article, this one from the July-August, 2008, issue of Proclamation! entitled “Are Humans More Than Living Bodies?” In this article, we share the biblical evidence that we are more than material beings. We are created by God in His image, and that image includes our having an immaterial spirit—the essence of ourselves that is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3), and which is made alive eternally the moment we believe in the Lord Jesus and His finished work of atonement (Jn. 5:24).
We are not defined by our bodies alone. Our “personhood” is defined by something intangible but real. Adventism’s material view of the nature of man obscures the astonishing reality that in Jesus, we have eternal life already, and nothing, not even death, can separate us from His love (Rom. 8:38–39) or snatch us out of His and the Father’s hands (Jn. 10:27–29).
Very clear, informartive and Biblically grounded!
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