The Keynote Of Sabbatarian Adventist Self-Understanding

March 17  The Keynote Of Sabbatarian Adventist Self-Understanding

 


Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps: set thine heart toward the highway. Jer. 31:21.

Jeseph Bates never separated history and theology. Rather, in his mind they were two aspects of the same topic. That unity shows up in the titles of most of his books, including his two editions of The Seventh-day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign (1846, 1847), which carry the subtitle of From the Beginning to the Entering Into the Gates of the Holy City, According to the Commandment. That same historical bent appears most explicitly in his 1847 Second Advent Way Marks and High Heaps: Or a Connected View, of the Fulfilment of Prophecy, by God's Peculiar People, From the Year 1840 to 1847.

For Bates Sabbatarian Adventism was a movement and a message ancored in prophetic history. The "waymarks and high heaps" is an obvious takeoff of Jerimiah 31:21, which speaks of them as guides for God's people on their homeward journey. Back on January 1 we saw in our first reading (Joshua 4:20-22) how God used a pile of stones of remembrance to help His people not to forget how He had guided them in the past. Bates employed the same metaphor to indicate that God is still leading His people.

James White was excited about Bates' Second Advent Way Marks and High Heaps. He praised it to a friend a month after its publication, noting that "Brother Bates is out with a book on our past experience." Three months later James wrote that Bates' "works on the Lord's Sabbath and our past experience are very precious to us in this time of trial." He went on to "thank God for qualifying our Brother Bates so that he has so clearly harmonized our past experience with the Bible, and also so clearly defended the Sabbath question."

In White's mind Bates' central contribution was what James would later describe as the "chain of events" perspective of how God was leading his people as portrayed in Revelation 14. That sequence of events understanding began with William Miller's preaching of the good news of the Second Advent (Rev. 14:6, 7), continued on with Charles Fitch's sounding of the message that Babylon had fallen(verse 8), and was climaxing in the preaching of Revelation 14:12, with its message on end-time commandment keeping. Bates and now the Whites saw that chain leads to the Second Advent.

Thank You, Lord, that You have given prophetic guideposts. Help us to discern their relevance.