Date-setting 2300 evenings and mornings of Daniel 8:14

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD), Visiting Professor, Department of Liberal Arts Education, Kyungpook National University, Sangju Campus, South Korea, Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College, Australia.

Adventist Today journalists and article contributors are doing their best to termite-eating Adventist foundations targeting William Miller and his date-setting of the 2300 interpretation of Daniel 8:14 ending in 1843 or 1844. This is not an attack of this journal since my own article supporting 1798 as the termination of the 1260 evidenced by Napoleon’s artist daring to sketch the CEO of the Catholic church naked.

William Miller is joked about, satirized, downplayed, minimized, mocked for his concept of Christ coming in 1843 or 1844. It is not only the date of William Miller or his method that is under attack by these contributors in our day and age, but their own lifestyles of permissiveness, broken families and remarriage, either smoking or drinking or other moral problems, that fills their epistemology with negativeness viewing anything proper as fingers of God pointing at their own conscience. Like Charles Bradford said in the Youtube sermon “Buy the land” the African Tribe queen took the only extant mirror from the businessman, looked at herself, and with shock she threw it on the ground, step on it and said: “Now I am still the most beautiful queen in the land”. As he emphasized so eloquently, you do not solve the problem by attacking or ignoring it. The Law of God contains the Sabbath rest of His day but it also is the Torah of God which touches every fiber of our being in literally every aspect of our brain, physical, spiritual and other levels of existence. If one rejects the Torah of God by a skew lifestyle it is natural to be involved in contra-engineering and R&D trying to break that which points to the heart of one’s problem.

Date-setting. Yes, Adventists are date-setters. Every true Adventist. They set the date for the first Coming of Christ in the prophecies of Daniel 9:24-27. They set the date for the rise and fall of the Papacy as persecuting Antichrist between 538-1798. They set the date for the start of the Investigative Judgment in heaven in the High-priestly role of Christ in the Heavenly Sanctuary typified in the Old Testament and based on Daniel 8:14. Yes, they are date-setters. Do Adventists set a date for the coming of Christ? No. No one knows the day and hour of his coming.

William Miller set a date for the coming of Christ. He was one of the first Adventist Pioneers. After 1844 when Christ did not come, Miller became apparently very depressed and wrote a personal letter to the Hebrew scholar at the New York University, George Bush asking him if he did the right thing to set dates for the coming of Christ? Bush responded with a very insightful answer and it is printed in George Butler’s book Signs of the Times in 1886. Paraphrased from memory, Bush said “with such a long line of academic divines in the past who all set dates like Mede, Newton, et al. [and the list included more scholars] how could you have done otherwise? I do not think you need to regret what you did”.

What was Bush talking about? Who are these date-setters? What dates did they set and how did they influence Miller so naturally?

This is the point that Adventist Today editorial staff and many Seventh-day Adventists around the globe are not familiar with. Adventist today is not an official Seventh-day Adventist mouth-piece and praise God for that. It is a private enterprise to debunk Adventism. Unless they repent and turn around in their agenda, they are bound to be a destructive force working on the wrong side of God’s work.

Then I ran online into some online old books. Jewels for Adventists. In fact, these were the Adventists before the Adventists.

Isaac Newton was born in 1674 in the year that Galileo died. He wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation which is in the Hebrew University in Israel. His commentary is also online. Newton interpreted the 1260 days of Revelation or the 3 and a half days or 42 months are the same number and insisted that the year-day principle should be used. It is the beginning and end of the persecution time of the Antichrist. He said that in order for primitive Christianity to be set up [if Adventist start is that primitive Christianity or true original Christianity in my perspective] then the only force that can bring down the Antichrist power or give it a deadly wound, is an infidelity force [in our perspective now the French Revolution]. He said this to dr. Clark who reported it and it was written down by Whiston in his book in 1744.

Robert Fleming was a Scottish pastor who lived between 1630-1716. His father was a pastor in Rotterdam and he attended himself the University of Leyden and other Universities in the area. While his classmates were reluctant to accept everything that the lectures offered them, he was not the same. He went to the library to study very diligently and sought answers for his many questions. Online is his book Eschatological Key of 1701 which is a jewel for Adventists. He argues for the 1260 years with the year-day principle. He predicted that if he knows the date of the start of the Papacy he will be able to predict its fall. He did. In fact the newspapers of around 1793 was publishing chapters from this book to illustrate how the papacy would fall. The editor to his book, published in the online edition in 1843 and probably James Campbell, wrote these facts about Fleming.

Fleming insisted that the 1260 days of Revelation should be interpreted as years (Fleming 1843: 30). He based it on the appearance of 1260 in three forms (42 months, 3 and a half years, 1260) as synchronic. Also on biblical passages in Ezechiel 4:5-6 and Exodus 23:10-11 compared to verse 12. Daniel 4:32, 34 where Nebuchadnezzar’s seven years madness are called days or times. In Luke 13:32 Christ is said to talk in day for year principle. Daniel 9:24 is considered by Fleming the most remarkable evidence of the year-day principle. Also in Numbers 14:32 God punished Israel with 40 years for the 40 days spying. The example of Christ is very fresh for modern Adventists. One notices that when God punishes Israel it was done with a year-day principle in mind like the case in Numbers.

“Though I confess Justinian’s conquest of Italy laid a foundation for the Pope’s rise, and paved the way for his advancement, both by the penal and sanguinary laws which he made against all those that dissented from the Romish Church, and by the confusions that followed upon Narses his bringing in the Lombards; during the struggles of them and the Exarchat, the Pope played his game so, that the Emperor Phocas found it his interest to engage him to his party, by giving the title of Supreme and Universal Bishop” (Fleming 1843: 37-38). He did not select himself a date during Justinian’s reign for the start of the 1260 years but it was high on his list of options and the above citation proves that.

Another jewel is the book of James Bicheno in Signs of the Times in 1807/1831. He explained that if the papacy started in the time of Justinian in 529 then he would fall in 1789 and if the year 481 BCE is selected for the beginning of the 2300 days or years, then Christ would come in 1819 (Bicheno 1807: 88). He predicted the coming of Christ a number of years later than writing the book. He also predicted the fall of the papacy as early as 1793 as he explained through his memoirs of that time, although published after the event. Date-setter for the coming of Christ? He just did. So did Fleming and so did others before them.

It was a fashion to set a date for the fall of the papacy and also for the coming of Christ or the end of the 2300 years. The year-day principle was already a given.

The famous Lutheran scholar Hengstenberg interpreted in 1836 in his commentary on Daniel the 2300 years to end in 1881 as the coming of Christ or the cleansing of the Sanctuary.

Indeed, William Miller was in good company with his calculations since calculations of the prophecies was done one every continent by many scholars. Bush indeed was correct with his letter to William Miller.

These are the data that Adventist Today editorial staff are not interested to get their hands involved with. While unfaithful forces are brooding around us, we can accept the prophecies of the Scriptures as a save guide to our faith and a sure word of God. Adventists set these dates of Christ’s first coming, the rise and fall of the papacy and the start of the Investigative Judgment because others through the centuries have done that. Just the Second Coming, they do not set any dates and if people individually do, it is mere unofficial guessing.