Why Adventism Needs to Preach Jesus Now More than Ever

I'll never forget reading about the 1888 General Conference for the first time.

I can't remember what book it was but I remember thinking Jones and Waggoner were awesome. And Butler? Man, that guy got on my nerves. But what I really loved was the struggle over the centrality of Jesus. I related to this because I had grown up in fundamentalist Adventism and was in the process of healing from perfectionistic, ultra conservative thinking. So a story from our own history that carried a lot of the same tensions immediately grabbed my heart. And as I saw the story unfold, plus Ellen White's reaction after the conference, and the many statements she wrote about the centrality of Jesus, it lit something in me.

It made me want to run out into the world and preach.

What I didn't understand then was just how desperately the world needed exactly this message. And as I survey the landscape of contemporary secularism and its metamodern and posthuman moods, I can't help but return to that simple conviction. That what the world needs now remains what it has always needed: Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.

But to explain why, I need to take you somewhere else first.

The Problem Nobody Has Answered

A philosophical problem traditionally attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus goes something like this:

If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but unwilling, he is malevolent. If he is both willing and able, why does evil exist? And if he is neither willing nor able, why call him God at all? [1]

It is a clean, brutal piece of logic. And it has haunted theological thought ever since. The paradox does not prove God doesn't exist. But it does something almost as destabilising — it makes the existence of a loving, all-powerful God genuinely difficult to reconcile with the world as we actually experience it. Philosophers and theologians have offered sophisticated responses to it across the centuries. But for millions of ordinary people, it has never received a satisfying answer.

For most of history, the paradox remained largely inside the academy. Then came the 20th century. And everything changed.

Two World Wars. The Holocaust. The atomic bomb. Stalin. Mao. The systematic industrial slaughter of tens of millions of human beings — not by natural disaster, not by plague, but by other human beings using the most sophisticated tools that civilised, educated, rational humanity had ever produced. The twentieth century shattered the optimistic belief that scientific and technological progress alone would inevitably produce moral progress.

The problem of evil stopped being a philosophical puzzle and became a lived cultural experience. People didn't need Epicurus to tell them suffering existed. They had watched it happen at industrial scale. And the conclusion that an all-powerful, loving God simply could not exist began to move from the margins of intellectual life to the centre of western culture — intensifying doubts that had been building since at least the 19th century.

Into this moment stepped a new generation of thinkers who took the problem seriously and followed it to its logical conclusion, captured best by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins when he wrote,

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." [2]

Christopher Hitchens. Daniel Dennett. Sam Harris. The New Atheists of the early 2000s made the problem of suffering a central engine of a cultural movement. The argument was simple: look at the world. Really look at it. If there were a God of love behind all of this, the world would look different. It doesn't. Therefore there isn't. And therefore human existence is a cosmic accident in an indifferent universe with no inherent meaning, no ultimate justice, and no one coming to rescue us.

This became one of the dominant stories through which modern western secular culture has interpreted reality.

The Oldest Conclusion in the World

But here’s the thing.

This conclusion — that suffering is evidence of a cosmos that does not care — is not a modern invention. Again and again, human cultures have looked at suffering, death, unpredictability, and catastrophe and allowed those experiences to shape their understanding of ultimate reality.

The ancient Near East did it. The gods of Mesopotamia were not loving. They were powerful, capricious, and fundamentally uninterested in human welfare. The Atrahasis Epic — one of the most important creation texts of the ancient world — says humans were created because the gods were tired of doing their own labor and needed a workforce. [3] You were made to be a slave. Your existence was a solution to a divine convenience problem. And when you died, the suffering didn't end. The Mesopotamian underworld was not paradise. It was a dark, dusty continuation of the misery that had defined life above ground.

These cosmologies can be read as reflecting a world in which human beings experienced nature, disease, warfare, and death as unpredictable and overwhelming. The harsh wilderness, the floods that wiped out entire villages, the famines and warfare — it is not difficult to see how people concluded that whoever made it all was anything but loving, and that humans were anything but desired. Lived reality was projected onto cosmological claims that explained what people already experienced: the gods are indifferent and you don't really matter.

Many other traditional religious systems across history developed elaborate rituals and practices intended to negotiate a world experienced as spiritually charged, unpredictable, and dangerous. The cosmos was alive with power — but that power was not always reliably on your side.

And now secular materialism. Different vocabulary. A similar conclusion about the indifference of the cosmos to human pain.

Why do so many traditions, across such different contexts, share this instinct? Because they started from a similar place. They looked at the experience of being human — the suffering, the randomness, the cruelty, the brevity of life — and they allowed that experience to shape their understanding of ultimate reality.

The cosmos feels brutal. The universe seems indifferent to our pain. If a loving God existed, we wouldn't suffer like this.

It is logic. And if I had nothing but my nerve endings and my observations to work with, I would reach the same conclusion. The world is hard. And taking that hardness and building a story about ultimate reality from it is the most natural thing a human being can do.

The Reality Behind the Reality

And then there's the Bible…

And the Bible does something radical.

It refuses to start with the world as we experience it.

It starts behind it.

Yes, the Psalms are full of lament. Job screams at God for thirty-seven chapters. Lamentations is an entire book of grief so raw it’s hard to read. The biblical writers were not gaslighting anyone about the reality of pain.

But they were insisting on something that the Epicurean tradition, the ANE cosmology, and secular materialism all miss. They were insisting that the world as we experience it is not base reality. Instead, it is filtered through the lens of sin and suffering and death. And this filter, which our senses have immediate access to, is real — but it is not ultimate reality.

Sin did not just damage human behaviour. It damaged human perception. It put blinders on the entire species. Paul writes: "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light..." [4] The darkness is not merely ethical. It is epistemological. It shapes what we are capable of perceiving about the nature of the cosmos.

The prophets were given something different. Not a privileged escape from suffering — they suffered as much as anyone, sometimes more. But a specific kind of knowledge. A revelation of what is behind the curtain. What reality looks like before sin distorted it. What is actually at the foundation of everything.

And what they were shown was not the Mesopotamian underworld. Not the Epicurean void. Not the blind indifference of Dawkins' universe.

They were shown a God of love. Who made us for love. And who built all of reality in and through and for love.

This is not gaslighting. It is not pretending the suffering is not real. It is claiming something specific: that the suffering is an intrusion into reality, not a revelation of its nature. That sin is the curtain, not the room. And that behind the curtain is a God who made us for love.

An Illustration

In case all of this is super hard to picture, allow me to illustrate it.

Imagine you live inside a snow globe. And that snow globe is covered by a towel so that no light gets in. It's dark in the snow globe. Day and night makes no difference. It is always dark.

Now imagine you look at the darkness of your snow globe world and conclude that there is no such thing as light. No such thing as the sun. Reality, as you perceive it, is only ever dark. And because it's dark you develop an entire philosophy that says reality is a dark place, made by dark beings, who want us to wander in darkness forever.

This is what much of human history and even modernity is like.

But suppose one day you were given a glimpse of the world beyond that towel covering your snow globe. And when you peek outside you see sun rays, brightness, blue skies, and flowers. What would that sneak peek do to your nervous system? To your perception of reality? It would completely flip it upside down and inside out. And you are overwhelmed with a desire to tell everyone that the reality of darkness we live in is not actually the realest reality there is. There is a reality that is even more real. It's not that darkness isn't real. It's that something is blocking our access to the light. But if we peer behind that towel, we will see it. And better yet, a day is coming when the towel will be removed entirely and the world will be flooded with light.

This is what the prophets of Scripture experienced.

Faith, in this framework, is not the refusal to look at suffering honestly. It is the decision to trust prophetic revelation, the historical testimony of Scripture, the person of Jesus Christ, over a different source: the projection of unmediated human experience onto the face of ultimate reality.

It is the decision to say, the world as experienced through the lens of a sin-broken cosmos is not the final word about what is real. I am going to trust what was shown to the prophets over what my nerve endings report. I am going to believe that there is a reality that is more real than the reality available to my five senses. And through the eyes of faith, I am going to see that reality.

Why We Need to Say This Now

At least in the United States, there are signs of renewed spiritual openness, particularly among younger adults. Barna's State of the Church 2025 found that commitment to Jesus rose 12 points since 2021, with Gen Z men leading the trend. [5] The secular thesis — that modernity would simply dissolve religious belief — has not held. People are searching. The hunger is real.

But they are searching inside a culture that has handed them the problem of evil as a worldview. That has told them the cosmos is indifferent. That suffering is proof there is nothing behind the curtain worth trusting. That their existence is an accident and their pain is meaningless.

Into that world, Adventism has something extraordinary to offer.

A story.

A story that says the suffering is not the truth about reality. It is the intrusion. The curtain, not the room. And behind it — revealed through the prophets, embodied in Jesus — is a God who made us for love.

Jones and Waggoner saw this in 1888. Ellen White saw it. The message of righteousness by faith was not one doctrine competing with other doctrines. It was the recovery of the centre. Jesus. The only one through whom everything else makes sense.

The world has never needed that centre more than it does right now.

Because the problem of evil is still unanswered for millions of people. Because the conclusion that the cosmos is indifferent is still one of the dominant stories of western secular culture. Because an entire generation has been handed a story about reality that leaves them alone in the dark with their suffering and no one coming.

And we have a different story.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Epicurean Paradox is traditionally attributed to Epicurus (c. 341-270 BC), though no surviving text from Epicurus himself contains the famous formulation. The argument was transmitted through ancient sources and later popularised by David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part X: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

[2] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books, 1995), p. 133.

[3] The Atrahasis Epic (Old Babylonian period, c. 1700 BCE). The creation of humans as a labour force for the gods is one of the most explicit statements of cosmological hierarchy in ancient literature. See W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

[4] 2 Corinthians 4:4, NIV.

[5] Barna Group, State of the Church 2025. The study found that 66% of US adults say they've made a personal commitment to Jesus that remains important in their lives — a 12-point jump since 2021. Among Gen Z men, commitment to Jesus rose 15 points since 2019.