What About Date Setting?-2

April 7  What About Date Setting?-2

 


Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. Matt. 24:42, RSV.

Is Jesus really sure about that? Surely there must be some way to determine the time, at least by us faithful Adventist.

At least Joseph Bates thought that in 1850. The passage of time must have been getting him down. After all, it had been six long years since the Millerite disappointment. He could certainly discover the date if he worked at it hard enough. And by 1850 Bates was quite sure that he had.

In that year he wrote that "the seven spots of blood on the Golden Altar before the Mercy Seat, I fully believe represents the duration of the judicail prodeedings on the living saints in the Most Holy."

Most of us have heard about the quite valid year-for-a-day principle of prophetic interpretation. But Bates had a new one: the spot-of-blood-for-a-year principle. Using his "new light," Bates had concluded that the pre-Advent judgment would last seven years and would conclude in October 1851, at which time Christ would come.

Given his stature in Sabbatarian circles, Bates soon gathered a following for his new scheme. But both of the Whites would vigorously resist him.

In November 1850 Ellen publicly claimed that "the Lord showed me that TIME had not been a test since 1844, and that time will never again be a test"(PT, Nov. 1850).

Then on July 21, 1851, as excitement on the topic mounted, she wrote in the Reveiw and Herald that "the Lord has shown me that the message of the third angel must go, and be proclaimed to the scattered children of the Lord, and that it should not be hung on time; for time never will be a test again. I saw that some were getting a false excitement arising from preaching time; that the third angel's message was stronger than time can be. I saw that this message can stand on its own foundation, and that it needs not time to strengthen it, and it will go in mighty power, and do its work."

The church today needs to listen to these insights. As I look at Adventism, I see it as a people who have forgotten the power of their message. I still remember how the forcefulness of the flow of Revelation itself struck me when I first grasped it nearly 50 nearly years ago. The years have not diminished that power. One of the great needs of Adventism today is to recover its message.

        

No man who has the true ideal of what constitutes a perfect character will fail to manifest the sympathy and tenderness of Christ. The influence of grace is to soften the heart, to refine and purify the feelings, giving a heaven-born delicacy and sense of propriety(TFMB, 135).