Spending Time with Ellen in Loma Linda

There’s nothing quite like revisiting Adventism with a friend who has never been an Adventist. Recently Richard and I met Jim Baber from Academy Apologia YouTube channel and did a walking tour of Loma Linda. Jim knows much about the doctrines of Adventism and the eye-glazing editions and sources of official Adventist documents, but he had never visited Loma Linda University campus, nor had he experienced the “vibe” of an Adventist campus with its internal artifacts and artwork that describe Adventism subliminally.      

In the Adventist Heritage Room Jim had his first glimpse of the sheer size of William Miller’s original 1843 chart which predicted his original date for Jesus’ return. He sat in a chair designed by John Harvey Kellogg, complete with lumbar support to aid perfect posture and free colonic peristalsis. He took two trips around the “Jesus pictures” in the hospital waiting room. Richard and I remembered that those same pictures caught the attention of Paul Carden from The Centers for Apologetics Research when we first took him on campus. It had never occurred to us before that those “Jesus pictures” revealed the cultic nature of Adventism so clearly.

Paul had been struck by the fact that the pictures, painted by Adventist artist Nathan Greene, portrayed Jesus in a familiar, common, “my buddy Jesus” sort of way that reduced Him from His true identity as Yahweh, God the Son. Jim noticed a detail we had never noticed before: none of the pictures of Jesus showed Him with nail-wound scars in His hands. “This is a different Jesus,” Jim said.

Our last stop was a moment with Ellen White, her son Willie, and John Burden memorialized in a bronze statue commemorating Ellen’s seeing Loma Linda for the first time and declaring, “This Is the Very Place” that the Lord had shown her in vision. 

Jim said that the vibe on campus reminded him of being in the presence of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, but with a hard-to-define difference. He said that in general, he can strike up a conversation about beliefs with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon, but Adventists—at least in a progressive, academic setting such as LLU—are not open to talk. They are convinced they know truth, and discussion with an unknown person would not be an option. 

We left the campus realizing again how great is God’s rescue of us through the blood of Jesus. Only the Lord Jesus can open the eyes of the spiritually blind and eclipse the great controversy worldview that shapes all of Adventism. Going back and seeing the campus where we used to work and worship was a reminder that what we used to see as praise-worthy is really a charade. Reality is found only in the Lord Jesus, and truth is HIM. I thank God for rescuing us from that deep darkness, and I pray that the Lord will open the eyes of those who are mired in deception so they can see the beauty of the gospel and find true rest for their souls.

—Colleen Tinker, Editor, https://blog.lifeassuranceministries.org/ Friday Insider, April 25, 2025