Four things separate us, and everything else follows from them: which day Christians gather, whether any writing after the New Testament carries prophetic weight, what happens to a person between death and judgment, and who governs a congregation. Both groups read the same Bible and confess Jesus as the Son of God, so this isn't a quarrel about whether He saves. It's a question of what He left His church to follow.
How Seventh-day Adventists Describe Themselves
Any church deserves to be heard in its own words first. Adventists summarize their faith in a list of 28 fundamental beliefs. One of those is that the fourth commandment has never been set aside, so the seventh-day Sabbath, Friday sunset through Saturday sunset, is still the day God appointed for rest and worship. They hold that the Creator "instituted the Sabbath for all people" at creation, before there was a Moses or a Sinai.
Another belief is that the gift of prophecy reappeared in the ministry of Ellen G. White (1827-1915). In their words, "Her writings speak with prophetic authority," though they add that the Bible remains "the standard by which all teaching and experience must be tested." They also hold that Christ is carrying out a ministry in the Most Holy Place of a heavenly sanctuary, and that no soul is immortal on its own. That is why they conclude the dead aren't conscious right now.
That's their position as they state it, and we've tried not to shade it. There is some real common ground. They baptize believing adults by immersion, not infants by sprinkling. (They describe baptism as a symbol of forgiveness. We read Acts 2:38 as baptism for forgiveness, but on the act itself we agree.)
The Day We Gather
We meet on Sunday, and the reason has nothing to do with relocating a Sabbath. The first Christians met on the first day of the week for a specific purpose: "On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight" (Acts 20:7). Breaking bread there most likely refers to the Lord's Supper, and Paul told the Corinthians to lay money aside on that same day, every week (1 Corinthians 16:2). By the end of the first century, John could simply call it "the Lord's day" (Revelation 1:10).
A note on the Greek: Luke's phrase "gathered together to break bread" is synēgmenōn hēmōn klasai arton, and klasai is an infinitive of purpose. The gathering existed in order to break bread. Luke doesn't say the church happened to eat together on a Sunday. He says why it met. Some argue that under Jewish reckoning this was Saturday evening. Even if so, it was already the first day of the week by that reckoning, and the purpose of the assembly stays the same.
We don't bind Sabbath keeping on anyone, and we don't fault a Christian who rests on Saturday (Romans 14:5-6). Paul settled that one: "Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17). A shadow is always pointing at something solid. The same goes for the "food and drink" in that verse. Adventists ask members to avoid the meats Leviticus 11 calls unclean, but Jesus "declared all foods clean" (Mark 7:19; see also 1 Timothy 4:4-5). What a person eats is his own decision. It isn't a covenant requirement.
Where the Old Covenant Ended
Underneath the calendar sits a larger question, and it's the one that really has to get settled. The law delivered at Sinai either had an end point or it did not. The Hebrew writer answers without hedging: "In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13).
Adventists answer by dividing that law in two. On their view, the ceremonial law passed away at the cross, but the Ten Commandments are God's unchanging moral law, so the Sabbath command still stands. The trouble is that Scripture never divides the covenant along that line. It points to the Ten Commandments as the heart of the covenant itself.
A note on the Hebrew: When Moses came down the mountain the second time, the text names what was on the stones: "the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments" (Exodus 34:28, diḇrê habbərîṯ ʿăśereṯ haddəḇārîm). Deuteronomy says the same: "he declared to you his covenant... that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone" (Deuteronomy 4:13). The ark held "the tablets of the covenant" (Hebrews 9:4; 1 Kings 8:9, 21). So when Hebrews calls the first covenant obsolete, the tablets are included. Paul says as much, calling the ministry "carved in letters on stone" one that was "being brought to an end" (2 Corinthians 3:7, 11).
That doesn't make lying or stealing permissible. Nine of the ten commands are restated in the New Testament as part of Christ's law. The Sabbath is the one that never is. So we don't sort the commands given at Sinai into the ones that still bind and the ones that don't. The Old Testament is open here every week, written as it was for our instruction (Romans 15:4). We simply don't live under its law.
Adventists also hold the Sabbath to be a creation ordinance older than Moses. That is where the two readings separate most sharply.
A note on the Hebrew: Genesis 2:2-3 says God "rested" (the verb šāḇaṯ) and blessed the seventh day. But no one in Genesis is told to keep it, and no patriarch is recorded doing so. The noun šabbāṯ first appears in Exodus 16:23, in the wilderness, and Nehemiah says God "made known to them your holy Sabbath" at Sinai (Nehemiah 9:13-14). God calls it "a sign between me and the people of Israel forever" (Exodus 31:13, 17), and Deuteronomy 5:15 ties the command to Israel's rescue from Egypt. The day is rooted in creation. The command to keep it was given to Israel.
Did Revelation Continue After the Apostles?
Of all of it, this one runs deepest, and the rest follow from wherever you land on it. Jude says the faith showed up finished: "Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Once for all. If that's the case, then nothing written after the apostles can be prophetic or binding on us, and no later book gets to settle what a passage has to mean. Scripture already makes the man of God "complete, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
A note on the Greek: "Once for all" translates hapax, the same word Hebrews uses for Christ's single, unrepeatable sacrifice (Hebrews 9:26-28). The participle "delivered" (paradotheisē) is aorist, describing a completed act of handing over. Jude isn't describing a faith that is still being added to. He's describing one that has been handed over in full.
To be fair about it, Adventists are careful to say Ellen White's writings never stand in for Scripture. But they do receive them as prophetic counsel to the church, and we have no shelf to put that on.
The heavenly sanctuary shows why the question matters. The movement Adventism grew out of expected Christ to return on October 22, 1844. When He didn't, early Adventists concluded instead that on that date Christ had moved from the first room of the heavenly sanctuary into the Most Holy Place, beginning a final phase of His work. Ellen White's writings affirmed that understanding. Yet the book of Hebrews says Jesus entered behind the curtain as our forerunner long before 1844 (Hebrews 6:19-20). He entered "once for all into the holy places" and then "sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 9:12; 10:12).
A note on the Greek: Hebrews 6:19 says our hope enters "into the inner place behind the curtain" (eis to esōteron tou katapetasmatos). That exact phrase comes from the Greek Old Testament of Leviticus 16:2, 12, and 15, where it names the Most Holy Place on the Day of Atonement. The next verse says Jesus "has gone" there (eisēlthen, aorist), a completed entrance, as our high priest. To the writer of Hebrews, Jesus was already in the Most Holy Place in the first century.
Start from a different authority and you land somewhere different, no matter how honest the reading.
The Question of the Dead
On the Adventist view, no one is conscious between death and the resurrection, and those finally lost are destroyed instead of punished without end. They point to passages like Ecclesiastes 9:5 ("the dead know nothing") and to the way the New Testament calls death "sleep" (John 11:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:13). Those texts are real, and they deserve a real answer. "Sleep" describes how death looks from this side, the body at rest and waiting for the resurrection. Other passages speak plainly about what the person experiences. Jesus told the thief, "today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Paul wanted "to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better" (Philippians 1:23), and he wrote that to be "away from the body" is to be "at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). John saw the souls of martyrs crying out to God before the final judgment (Revelation 6:9-10).
On final punishment, our answer is narrower on purpose. We hold to what Jesus said the judgment produces, and we don't push past His sentence: "And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46). Both destinations get the same adjective there. We can't work around that.
A note on the Greek: The adjective in both halves of Matthew 25:46 is aiōnios: kolasin aiōnion ("eternal punishment") and zōēn aiōnion ("eternal life"). Some Adventist writers argue that "eternal punishment" means a punishment eternal in its result, like "eternal redemption" in Hebrews 9:12. But Jesus sets the two phrases side by side in a single sentence, and no one reads "eternal life" as a life that ends while its results last. Whatever aiōnios does to one half of the verse, it does to the other.
Who Governs a Congregation
Adventists answer to a worldwide General Conference, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, and there are several levels of organization between a member and it (local conference, union, and division). We have nothing of the kind. Here at Christians In Honesdale we're simply Christians, not tied to any denomination or group. We belong to Christ and to no one else, as the churches of the New Testament did (Romans 16:16). This congregation is self-governing, overseen by its own men and by no office anywhere else (Acts 14:23; Acts 20:28; Titus 1:5; 1 Peter 5:2). No headquarters writes our teaching. Nobody mails us a program.
Our worship follows the pattern we find in the New Testament: singing without instruments, prayer, and the Lord's Supper every first day of the week, preaching that stays with the text, and a collection taken from the members (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16; Acts 2:42; Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). That's where a visitor would notice the difference most. An Adventist service usually includes instruments, and most Adventist churches take the Lord's Supper about four times a year, together with foot washing. When somebody believes and is immersed, that's where forgiveness lands and where a person comes into Christ (Acts 2:38; Romans 6:3-4; 1 Peter 3:21).
Weigh It in the Text
Don't take a comparison like this as the last word on either group. Read Acts 20 and Colossians 2, then Hebrews 8 and Jude, and see whether the case holds up where it counts. Add Exodus 34 and Hebrews 6 to the stack if you want to see the covenant and sanctuary points for yourself. Worth knowing as you do: we're an independent congregation with no denomination or headquarters behind us, so we answer for nobody but ourselves. What's written above is our own conviction out of the New Testament, and we'd want it tested the same way (Acts 17:11).
Ask Us the Hard Ones
Comparing two churches usually goes better sitting down with one of them, Bible open, a question at a time. We'd be glad to do that with you. Ask us for a free Bible study, read about who we are, or reach out before you stop by.
Our schedule:
Look for Suite D at 416 Main Street in Honesdale, PA 18431. Swing around back to park, and the door back there is the one to come through.