First Quarter 2005 Adult Sabbath School Lessons:
"His Wondrous Cross"
The Story of Our Redemption

Insights to Lesson 1:
The Provocation and Provision
December 25-31

(Produced by the Editorial Board of the 1888 Message Study Committee)

Let’s begin our new Quarter by noting where our overall Lesson topic has come from—“His Wondrous Cross, The Story of Our Redemption.”

It came from Isaac Watts! His hymn has been said to be the most profoundly beautiful one in the English language:

“When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.”

The Holy Spirit gave Watts a glimpse into what the cross means, a foretaste of what must be the heart of the message that will yet lighten the earth with glory when the fourth angel of Revelation 18:1-4 is at last given freedom to proclaim what he wants to proclaim.

An undistorted, unconfused vision of what happened on the cross will be the heart of a message that delivers every believing heart from the captivity of self-love—which is our greatest problem worldwide. It’s possible for devotion to self to flourish in the heart and not be recognized either by the subject himself or by others around him. It’s possible even in clergymen and teachers. As a consequence of “our” resistance to the message of that fourth angel in the 1888 era, Ellen White said that “the religion of many among us will be the religion of apostate Israel [Baal worship as in the days of Elijah],” for Baal worship is the worship of self disguised as the worship of Christ. Here’s what she said:

“The prejudices and opinions that prevailed at Minneapolis [1888] are not dead by any means. … The tops have been cut down, but the roots have never been eradicated, and they still bear their unholy fruit to poison the judgment, pervert the perceptions, and blind the understanding of those with whom you connect, in regard to the [1888] message and the messengers. …

“With many the cry of the heart has been, ‘We will not have this man [Jesus] to reign over us.’ Baal, Baal, is the choice. … What kind of future is before us if we shall fail to come into the unity of the [1888] message?” (Testimonies to Ministers, pp. 467, 468; 1890).

The answer to her question is (simply put) where we are today.

Israelites by the many thousands thronged the slopes of Mt. Carmel when Elijah summoned them; their “membership” was huge. The devotee-priests of Baal and Ashtoreth numbered nearly a thousand. The Lord told Elijah that “7000 had not bowed the knee to Baal,” but not one of them dared step out of the closet and identify boldly with Elijah. Ellen White has often said that in our brief denominational history we have repeated the history of ancient Israel; thoughtful people have often prayed, “O Lord, when will Mt. Carmel come again?” There has to be an answer: only when “Elijah” comes again.

“Mt. Carmel” will not come until the cross of Christ again becomes the central message of our pastoral and evangelistic ministry. In sending to “us” the “most precious message” of 1888, the Lord intended that every Seventh-day Adventist church in the world should become the place where people would want to go to hear the sacrifice of Christ proclaimed in His love:

“The theme that attracts the heart of the sinner is Christ and Him crucified. On the cross of Calvary Jesus stands revealed to the world in unparalleled love. Present Him thus to the hungering multitudes, and the light of His love will win men from darkness to light, from transgression to obedience and true holiness. Beholding Jesus upon the cross of Calvary arouses the conscience to the heinous character of sin as nothing else can do” (Review and Herald, Nov. 22, 1892, the same article where the author identified the 1888 message as the “beginning” of the message of that fourth angel of Revelation 18).

With her word “beholding,” Ellen White explained Isaac Watts’ word, “When I survey the wondrous cross …” Like a surveyor carefully measuring a tract of land, it was God’s intention that the Seventh-day Adventist Church should, in a way no corporate body of God’s people had ever yet done, proclaim the measurements of the “breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the agape displayed openly at Calvary. This finally totally honest appraisal of what it cost the Son of God to save the world will motivate the hearts of honest people worldwide to prepare for the final scenes of earth’s history and the personal return of Jesus in that same generation. She later declared that the world gospel commission could have been completed by 1893 if that fourth angel had been permitted to proclaim his message unresisted and unfrustrated (General Conference Bulletin, 1893, p. 419).

But what was so special about the 1888 proclamation of the cross that was not also proclaimed by the Sunday-keeping Evangelical Protestant (and even Roman Catholic) churches? Surely, the Protestant churches of the 1890s were proclaiming Luther’s understanding of the cross! Doesn’t that fulfill Ellen White’s criteria? Seriously: is there a unique Seventh-day Adventist grasp of the truth of the cross of Christ? Are we arrogant to say so?

Yes, there is a unique understanding of the cross God has given us!

And it’s not sinful for us to say so clearly. The two unworthy “messengers” to whom God entrusted the 1888 message discovered the light by the simple process of joining together the corporate justification by faith idea that Paul taught in Romans and Galatians together with the unique Seventh-day Adventist idea of the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary (that began in 1844). Voila! There was the beginning of the light of the latter rain message. The two had stumbled on the discovery of the ages. New spiritual surveyance wonders were seen in “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love [agape] of Christ revealed in His atoning sacrifice.

But after all these decades, the world has yet to understand even where Jesus is —in the Most Holy Apartment. The whole Christian world must understand what happened at the end of the 2300 years. They may reject but they must see. No one else but Seventh-day Adventists can proclaim that message, and our combined “loud voice” is still but a whisper.

The world also must understand what Jesus is doing in that final work of atonement. We have been having difficulty understanding the dynamics of the final message that must yet go to all the world, just as the Jews of Christ’s day couldn’t comprehend what He wanted them to understand. These weekly INSIGHTS are to remind us that “the beginning” of that wondrous ministry came in the message of 1888 as humbly as the Birth came in Bethlehem.

And the message when it comes in its fullness is not to be legalistic, theologically boring theory; it’s to be a heart-gripping truth that even Muslims and Hindus can grasp when it is rightly presented. And our youth!

Thank God we can spend three months studying that “wondrous cross.”

—Robert J. Wieland

Read the study notes for lesson 2