To understand Scripture rightly, we must bring correct meanings to the words we read and understand each part in relation to the whole. Infinite examination of roots cannot explain a tree, let alone a forest. Roots are foundations whose ultimate function and meaning are explained by the forest. So, individual Bible passages can only be rightly interpreted or understood in the context of all Scripture.

The proof text approach to Bible study runs the same risk as studying a root to explain the forest. We may think a part explains the whole. We can err badly if we use our understanding—or possible misunderstanding—of the sanctuary to try and explain Jesus’ sacrifice, rather than setting Jesus and his life in the context of the universe-wide great controversy over the character and government of God and using them to explain the sanctuary. Using type to explain antitype apart from the whole of history has lead many to miss the essence of God and the atonement.

Perhaps no doctrine generates more heated debate among Christians than the atonement. Some think sin creates a legal debt that separates us from God and that the Son (God) paid the debt so that the Father (God) could reconcile us to himself. Some say that the cross has changed God or otherwise enabled him to be merciful, which implies that God, like a pagan deity, must be appeased so that he won’t be obliged to pour out his wrath upon us.

In contrast, the first edition of the authorized Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary originally made statements in three places that it was man who was estranged from God and in need of reconciliation with him, not the other way around. Before the second printing, someone, without authorization, secretly changed the wording in sections on Romans 5:10, 2 Corinthians 5:18, 19, and Colossians 1:20 to state the opposite. The publisher denies authorizing changes, but it has not restored the original wording in printed English versions. Test all the spirits. Be careful what you read and whom you trust.

How can we reconcile a belief that the cross changed God with the statement that "I am the LORD; I do not change" (Mal. 3:6 NASB, margin); or with James’s statement that God is "the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shadow of turning" (James 1:17 NASB, margin); or with Jesus’ own statements that he can do nothing, say nothing, accomplish nothing unless it is the words and actions of the Father? "The Father abiding in Me does His works," reads John 14:10 (NASB). Did the Father work in Jesus to change himself? Did he cause his Son’s suffering and death to change himself?

Webster’s 1989 Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary states that "a-tone-ment" means "satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends," and that an "archaic" meaning is "reconciliation; agreement," from "the phrase at onement, at unity." Vine’s prestigious Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words reads parenthetically, "(the explanation of this English word as being ’at-onement’ is entirely fanciful)." Unfortunately, the author was not familiar with the English language of 1611, when the King James Version was printed. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) indicates one English word then in use was the verb "one," meaning to unify or reconcile. If you reconcile two estranged persons, you "one" them. Similarly, the word "atone," from that same period, often meant to "at-one," to "set at one, bring into concord, reconcile, unite in harmony." The word "atonement" appears only once in the King James Version of the New Testament (Rom. 5:11), and there the original Greek word is katallage, translated all other places in the same version of the New Testament as "reconciliation."

What did the Word of God (Greek: logos-theos) say about the theo-logy of at-onement? Jesus’ longest discourse, spoken in the upper room and recorded almost exclusively by "the disciple whom [Jesus] loved," is in John 13–17. With obvious urgency, Christ gave this final message to his disciples to strengthen and prepare them for events ahead so that when they happened the disciples would not lose faith but increase it.

Jesus never says "Cheer up men, I’m going to pay your debts." Rather, he speaks again and again about the disciples being one with him. He desires them to "have a part" with him, follow his example, share his suffering, receive him and the Father, and love one another as he loves them. Saying he and God are one, Jesus tells Philip, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (14:9). Jesus continues: we are to be at-one in working the works of God in union with the spirit of truth. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments" (14:16). "Because I live, you will live also. In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you" (14:19, 20).

He invites you and me to abide in him and his words in us, that we may be at-one in abiding in his Father’s love and share in their joy. Wondrously, we are to be servants no longer, but friends and intelligent coworkers as he has shared with us "all" he has heard from his Father (15:15). He beckons, follow me, share the world’s hatred and persecution of me and share my glory, as well. He is saying, "Unite, one with me."

Jesus, the Father’s mediator to bring us to himself, next says something hard to accept for those who insist he must plead with the Father on our behalf. Heretofore I spoke to you in figures of speech, he says, but there is an hour coming when I will tell you plainly of the Father. "In that day you will ask in My name; I do not say to you that I will request the Father on your behalf; for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me" (John 16:26, 27). Here the verbs "loves and loved" are the familiar, horizontal, Greek phileo of brotherly love. Sermons preached on this verse often leave out the "not." If Father and Son were, are, and always will be "one," isn’t it nonsense to think one changes the other?

Jesus invites you and me to be one with him in his prayer:

I do not ask in behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me. And the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given to them; that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and didst love them, even as Thou didst love Me. (John 17:20–23)

Of course, no one is literally inside another, but we are to be united, harmonious, one in character and action.

Too often we forget that the cross was intended to "one" the universe, not simply redeem fallen humans. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me" (John 12:32 KJV). Men is italicized because it is supplied; the word does not appear in original manuscripts. Ellen G. White originally quoting this verse in Desire of Ages wrote "all" and not "all men," as in current printings (626). She recognized that the cross reveals and vindicates the character and government of God, reveals Satan’s character, demonstrates the perpetuity of the law, and explains Jesus’ statement in Eden that living unlawfully results in death. She also understood that the cross reveals sin—not God—as the cause of the final death for sin and sinners and that it will protect sinless angels and unfallen worlds from apostasy for eternity.

In an article rarely quoted, probably because it does not fit in with the now-popular forensic philosophy of the atonement, Ellen G. White wrote the following:

The only way in which he [Christ] could set and keep men right [justify and sanctify] was to make himself visible and familiar to their eyes.…Christ exalted the character of God, attributing to him the praise, and giving to him the credit, of the whole purpose of his own mission on earth,—to set men right through the revelation of God.…In his prayer just before his crucifixion, he declared, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." When the object of his mission was attained,—the revelation of God to the world,—the Son of God announced that his work was accomplished, and that the character of the Father was made manifest to men. (Signs of the Times, Jan. 20, 1890)

Elsewhere, she writes, the law of the mind is that we become like the one we worship and admire. As Paul put it, "But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:18). Or as John wrote, "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is" (1 John 3:2).

When we see him just as he is, admire and worship him, we become like him. We are one.

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