Adventist Teaching: Yes
Biblical Teaching: No
A common claim you will hear the Adventist Church make regarding the 10 Commandments is that they are eternal because God wrote them with his own literal finger on stone, not paper, which shows the eternality of them.
But that isn’t what Exodus 31:18 is saying. God does not have fingers (John 4:24) as “spirits do not have flesh and bone” (Luke 24:39). The phrase “finger of God” simply refers to the authority by which the commands were given.
This same phrase is used in Exodus 8:18-19 by the Egyptian magicians who rightly acknowledged that the plagues that had come upon Egypt were a result of the “finger of God.” They weren’t saying God’s literal finger was causing the plagues, but that the plagues were taking place by God’s authority. This is simply Hebrew idiomatic language, not a literal description. The same phrase is used of Jesus in Luke 11:20 to denote that He casts out demons by Gods authority. It wasn’t to say that God has literal fingers.
The 10 Commandments are not eternal. It is the underlying morality of them that are. They reflect the character of God, the root of morality (ie: God is not a liar, therefore, lying is wrong), and God is eternal. But the 10 Commandments were formally given at Sinai as the words of that covenant (Deuteronomy 4:13; Exodus 34:27-28). Prior to the giving of the Law, humanities conscience served to either convict or excuse them (Romans 2:14-15) and when the Law was given, the knowledge of sin increased (Romans 3:19-20).
The Adventist Church needs the 10 Commandments to be eternal for their Great Controversy worldview to work. They need them to exist prior to creation of earth because the Law is what Lucifer supposedly started attacking in Heaven long before the creation of the earth—claiming this Law isn’t fair and God is a tyrant. So they claim that since the Law reflects God’s character, that means it is eternal and Heavenly beings and other unfallen worlds have been observing it before even the earth was created.
The problem is, none of this is found in scripture.
