Seventh-day Adventists would have taken a great step forward in their dogma if they had carefully studied Dr. Francis Pieper's reviews as well as the teachings of the Christian church over the past two thousand years. Most importantly, Adventists must carefully read the teaching of God the Word that the soul of a person, regenerated or unregenerated, continues to exist after physical death. The divine judgment that establishes eternal punishment for the unborn again and eternal life for the saved are two sides of the same coin—divine justice and divine love. We believe that the Bible clearly teaches that there is no reason to believe that the doctrine of conditional immortality and annihilation is consistent. The Lord has given in the fullness of His Wisdom the knowledge that none of His children will persist in setting their own criteria and standards for determining His perfect righteousness. I believe that Seventh-day Adventists have done this because, first, by predicting that the God of Love will not endlessly torment conscious beings, and second, by trying to fit Scripture into the narrow confines of their teaching, ignoring the principle of contextual interpretation. Their Christian brethren can only pray that sooner or later the Adventists will come to realize their great error and the contradiction of the Church's historical position in preaching the doctrine of the sleep of the soul and the destruction of sinners.

Old Testament Saturday, Sunday and the Number of the Beast

Without a doubt, the most definite doctrine promulgated by Seventh-day Adventists, and one of those that have entered the name of the organization itself, is the doctrine of the Seventh-day Sabbath. Adventists have come to the conclusion that the Sabbath is the true day of worship of God, and so the resolution of the question of why they continue to defend this concept and zealously insist on their rightness against Sunday-believers may be the key to understanding their psychological and theological premises.

I. Saturday or Sunday?

Seventh-day Adventists, almost from their inception, have tried to associate the Sabbath with the Lord's day. Their principal underlying method for proving their case is to try to establish a relationship between the Gospel of Mark 2:28 and the Revelation of St. John 1:10 in order to cut off one of the main arguments against their position, i.e. the Lord's day (Sunday) as opposed to the observance of the Old Testament Sabbath.

Their position is based on the conclusion that if "the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27-28) and the Apostle John says that he "was in the Spirit on the Sunday day (a day for the Lord [note 2:27-28]). translator])" (Rev. 1:10), therefore, the Sabbath and the day are one and the same day for the Lord! The weakness of this position is that they draw their conclusion based on the English translation instead of the original Greek. If you read the second chapter of the Gospel of Mark and the first chapter of Revelation in the New Testament in Greek, you can see a completely different meaning of these passages, based on their grammatical structures. In the Greek version of Mark 2:28 it is clear that Christ did not mean that the Sabbath was something He possessed (which the Adventists are trying to establish), He simply said that as Lord of all things, He could do whatever He saw fit on the Sabbath as well. The Greek version of Scripture is very definite at this point.

Nothing could be clearer and more understandable in contextual and grammatical terms. The Greek version of Revelation 1:10 does not establish the concept of "possession," which required the use of the word te-kuriake (the Lord's) in conjunction with the word hemea (day). John does not mean that the Lord's day is the "property" of the Lord, but that this day is consecrated to Him by the earthly church, not according to the law of Moses, but in accordance with the observance of God's commandment of love.

We can draw the definite conclusion that if the Sabbath had meant so much to the New Testament writers, and if, as the Adventists insist, it had been widely considered in the early centuries of the Christian church, then John and the other evangelists would have equated it with the Lord's day, the first day of the week. Scripture and subsequent history testify that the New Testament writers did not have such an effect, and therefore the Adventists received little justification in their "Sabbath" from Scripture.

A. The Doctrine of the Holy Fathers