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When the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. Matt. 22:11, RSV.
Yesterday we saw that Enoch Jacobs, Apollos Hale, Joseph Turner, and William Miller had by late 1844 and early 1845 tied the October date and the sanctuary doctrine to the heavenly pre-Advent judgment of Daniel 7. Thus those non-Sabbatarians had begun to see such central Millerite texts as the judgment of Daniel 7 and the arrival of the bridegroom at the wedding as being the coming of Christ to the pre-Advent judgment rather than His return in the clouds of heaven. That same rationale applied to the cleansing of hte sancturay of Daniel 8:14 and the judgment hour of Revelation 14:7.
But what about the Sabbatarian leadership? How did they stand on the teaching of a pre-Advent judgment in the late 1840s?
Joseph Bates was quite positive on the topic. "Respecting 'the hour of God's judgment is come,'" he penned in 1847, "there must be order and time, for GOd in His judicial character to decide the cases of all the righteous that their names may be registered in the Lamb's Book of Life, and they be fully prepared for that eventful moment of their change from mortality to immortality." And in late 1848 he claimed that 'the dead saints are now being judge." Bates was probably either for salvation or destruction"(EW 36).
So far so good. Bates and Ellen White seem to be in harmony on the topic. But not James. As late as September 1850 he would openly and aggressively didagree with Bates on the topic of a pre-Advent judgement. In that month he wrote that "many minds have been confused by conflicting views that have been published on the subject of the judgment." "Some [meaning Bates] have contended that the day of judgment was prior to the second advent. This view is certainly without foundation in the word of God."
A side lesson here is that even the Seventh-day Adventist pioneers differed with each other on important topics, yet they wtill managed to respect each other. We need that spirit in our own day.
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