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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Chester Clark

Cleansing the Sanctuary

Today we are talking about what I think is a very important topic.

In fact, I would suspect that this is really, in our pioneers' minds, The very essence of Adventism.

You know, there are other parts of our message that are being taken by other people, right?

There are others who believe in the state of the dead as we are.

There are certainly others who believe in the second coming as we do.

There are others who believe in baptism and so forth and so on, but there's very few who have an understanding of the sanctuary message and how it relates to our time as our early Adventist pioneers had.

And so they saw this as being very central to the message of Adventism and to the mission of Adventism.

And that's what we're going to be looking at here this afternoon.

There's about, there's about 2 dozen, between 1 and 2 dozen, depending on what list you look at, of the major challenges to the sanctuary message, the sanctuary doctrine, that have been brought through the years.

And we could spend all 3 hours on probably almost any 1 of those.

We don't have time, obviously, to do that, but there's a lot of good material.

And what I have found as I've read and as I've studied and I've researched and I've taken some classes on this topic, I found that the further you look in digging deeper and deeper in the sanctuary message, the more beautiful it becomes and the more more firm it becomes in its biblical basis.

And it's not something that that Ellen White simply invented.

That would be an accusation that is heard at times, but it's 1 that comes out of the ignorance of history because every major position in our sanctuary message was advanced by someone before Ellen White ever wrote on it or spoke on it.

It was not, there was, there's nothing that I'm aware of that I've ever been shown in our sanctuary message that came first from Ellen White.

But anyway, we're going to be talking about the sanctuary, we're going to be talking particularly about the cleansing of the sanctuary, what it means, how it is that it is to be cleansed, and how we can be a part of that process, how we're intended to be a part of that process.

We're going to be looking at that this afternoon for the first section.

So let's just bow our heads for a word of prayer as we begin.

Father in heaven, we thank you that you've given to us your word.

Thank you for giving us, well, you've given each generation a message which is present truth for that time, and you've given us a message as well.

And I just wanna pray that as we have a few minutes to share here today, that you'll send your spirit to enlighten our minds, to open our hearts, to help us to understand the things of your word, especially as it relates to October 22 and what took place at that time, and what is taking place now, in our behalf.

Briefly, I'm sure that most of you are aware that in 1844, the message was preached that Jesus was coming again.

That was based on Daniel chapter 8 and verse 14.

Under 2, 300 days and then the sanctuary will be cleansed.

We're going to look a little more at that in the next hour but suffice to say that by comparing Daniel 8 and chapter 9 and seeing the links between the 2 chapters, the Adventist pioneers, the Millerites as they were called then, largely because they were followers of William Miller, they came to the conclusion that the first 70 weeks that we find in Daniel 9 was cut off of the beginning of the 2300 day of prophecy of Daniel chapter 8 and having reached that conclusion they began to look at how the 70 week prophecy was fulfilled during the time of the first advent of Christ.

Those 490 years from the command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem in 457 BC down to the anointing of the Messiah, the end of the 69th week in 27 AD and then in the crucifixion of the Messiah, the Messiah being cut off in the middle of the week, in 31 AD, the spring of 31 AD, and then finally, of course, the gospel going to the Gentiles in the fall of 34.

And so there was this understanding that in the first 70 weeks, we have a whole lot of biblical interpretive principles illustrated.

We have, for example, the day for your principle, right?

And very obvious in the 70 week prophecy.

They assumed and I believe rightly so that that day for your principle continued and it was really became very simple.

If you understood AD 27 and AD 34 all you had to do is add the remaining 1810 years to 34 AD and that brings you down to 1844, right?

Lots of history, it wasn't quite that simple in their understanding at first.

The first they were preaching 1843 and then they were preaching spring of 1844 and Jesus still wasn't coming.

And during the middle, what they understood to be the midnight cry, during the middle of that period, when they were expecting the Second Coming in the spring and it didn't happen, in that summer, there was a man by the name of S.S.

Snow, Samuel Snow, rode into a camp meeting in New Hampshire and he said, I have a message to share.

He began sharing his understanding that actually it would be at the Day of Atonement in 1844 that Jesus would come.

That's what began the midnight cry, behold the bridegroom comes.

For the next several months, there was this message taken with new vigor and new enthusiasm that Jesus would come again in 1844 in just a few months, October 22.

And you remember, I'm sure, some of those stories of how they looked forward to that.

It didn't really matter what else happened.

1 of the Millerite ministers was baptizing individuals in just a few weeks before the expected return of Christ.

And as he was, they cut that ice, there were several feet of ice they had to cut to make access to the river for baptistry.

And of course, those who were baptized were in there rather briefly, you can imagine.

He was in there longer and he got pneumonia and died.

And his young kids were comforted by the fact it didn't really matter because just a few more days, Just a few more days, we're going to see Daddy again.

But as you know, Jesus didn't come on October 22.

And so that began a period of deep soul searching among the Millerites.

Out of this more than a hundred thousand, There are various estimates of how many people were strong adherents to the Millerite teachings, but at least 100, 000 from all denominations across America.

There are many others in other countries that were also studying and coming to similar conclusions.

So from about 100, 000 to about 50, it's not a very large group, is it?

And then they began to try to understand what they had misunderstood.

Now if you look at the history, if you look at the history of Adventism and the Millerite movement, you will find that repeatedly they made mistakes in their calculations, as far as, you know, the fall of 1843, spring of 1844, eventually the fall of 1844, eventually October 22nd.

But each time they discovered mistakes that they had made, it's very interesting to realize that their critics were never the ones that pointed out the mistakes.

Their critics weren't studying these things in depth like they were and they didn't have the personal investment that these Millerites had.

And there are no, there are none of the corrections in the Millerite teaching came from mistakes that were pointed out by the critics.

It was all by their own study as they dug deeper, as they continued to understand more and more of the sanctuary message.

Now you had to understand something about the sanctuary message in order to come to October 22, 1844.

Because Daniel 8, 14 says, "'Then shall the sanctuary be cleansed, ' right?

And so the Milrites had this view of the sanctuary.

They believed the sanctuary to be the earth.

And so when Jesus came the second time, the earth was gonna be cleansed by fire, and that would be the cleansing that Daniel predicted, under 2, 300 days then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

And their critics largely disagreed with them on what the sanctuary was.

Most of the critics of the Millerites, early critics, Smith and Campbell and others, they did not have an issue with the time.

The other most common view, because basically all Protestants were historicists, right, you understand that, they had an historicist understanding of Daniel, and we're gonna talk more about that in the next period, but they had an historicist understanding of Daniel which didn't allow them to come up with a very different understanding of the time prophecies.

But they understood, for example, the most common other view, the sanctuary was the old sanctuary, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, literal Jerusalem.

And so they predicted that the Turkish Empire was going to fall and the Christian forces would, or the Jewish forces would have access again to Jerusalem and the Jews would restore their temple.

So there's a big focus in this time in the 19th century.

There's a lot of focus on the Muslim world.

Christians had a lot of interest in Islam and the Turkish Empire and the prophecies of the fifth and sixth trumpet and so forth.

So there's a lot of focus on that and understandably there were those who felt that that was what the sanctuary meant when it says the sanctuary will be cleansed.

Well the reality was that neither were true, right?

Jerusalem wasn't taken from the hands of Islam, and Jesus didn't come and cleanse the earth by fire.

And Most of the Protestant believers who had up to this time taught historicist understanding of prophecy, over a generation or 2, lost their historicist roots and became either preterist or futurist.

And it's because, in my understanding, in my conclusion, it's because if you remain historicist, you have to come to an understanding of what did take place October 22, 1844.

And those, that small group of 50 or so that kept studying this issue and trying to understand it, they were the only ones out of all those Protestants who had looked forward to the Second Coming, they were the only ones who were able to remain, retain their principles of prophetic interpretation, because they came to an understanding of what did in fact take place in October 22, 1844.

And so that's what we're going to look at today.

We're going to look at how the sanctuary service polluted the sanctuary and also how it is after October 22, 1844, the sanctuary is to be cleansed.

Now when we talk about the cleansing of the sanctuary, we recognize that the sanctuary service was a daily service, right?

We had ongoing 365 days a year, 7 days a week, we had services, offerings, sacrifices, ceremonies that were going on in the earthly sanctuary.

And of course this symbolizes the ministry of Christ.

I'm glad that there wasn't, you know, 1 day a week or 1 week out of the year where the priests went on vacation, because we need Jesus every day in the heavenly sanctuary, don't we?

That is a symbol of his work for us and his intercession for us.

But as the daily sacrifice went on, there were those who would come into the sanctuary to confess their sins and to have their sins forgiven.

And there was a process, depending on which sacrifice they were bringing, depending on what type of person they were, if they were a common person, if they were a ruler, if they were 1 of the priests.

There were different processes that happened for each of these different circumstances.

And that was, the sin was symbolically being transferred from the sinner to the sacrifice.

And from the sacrifice, it was transferred also to the sanctuary.

And this happened in a number of different ways, but The most common we think of is the lambs, right?

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Cleansing the Sanctuary

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