GYC SE 2013: Called Apart

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2013: What is Adventism?

Chester Clark

Those Foolish Adventists

Father in heaven, thank you for giving us this chance to study and to learn.

You have told us that we have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way you've led us in the past.

We just want to pray that today, This time of contemplating your leading in the past might give us greater confidence in the future and might make us more the men and the women that you want us to be.

Well, I start with the thought of those foolish Adventists because that's sort of what, that's the sense of identity from which Seventh-day Adventism was born.

You remember the Millerite movement, right?

The Millerite movement was just perhaps the more visible of the many different movements we could combine into calling the great second advent movement around the world simultaneously without collaboration.

Men and women studied their Bibles, particularly the prophecies, and came to the conclusion that Jesus was coming again sometime around 1840s, in the early 1840s.

This was not just the Millwright movement.

And in the Adventist Heritage class that I teach, we explore some of those other movements around the world.

1 of the most fascinating to me was a story told by a Irish priest who went to what we would call sort of like the Eastern Soviet Union, Southern Soviet Union I guess, more like the Stans, that area, the regions.

And there was a, the Irish missionary met an Orthodox priest and when the Irish missionary met the priest, the priest asked him the question, so when do you think the Lord is going to come?

The Orthodox priest was quite puzzled by this, since he was coming as a missionary, how he wouldn't know when the Lord was going to come.

And he actually asked, he actually commented, I thought that everyone with a Bible should know when the Lord is going to come.

And he went on to explain to this Roman Catholic Irish priest, missionary, that he believed that the Lord was going to come, the world was going to end around 1843.

Now what's interesting about this story is it was published in an Irish magazine in 1821, long before William Miller was up for preaching.

And it's just 1 story out of many, many stories that we can look to to recognize that God was working around the world simultaneously, William Miller just happens to be the name that's attached to the movement today.

And so we call it the Millerite Movement, particularly here in North America, the Millerite Movement.

Now, I want us to just share a little bit of an insight into what the Millerite movement was like.

What would it have been to go to a Millerite meeting?

And this was a report from the pastor of the local Christian Connection Church in Portland, Maine.

Now this is of interest to us because this is the same meetings that Ellen White went to as a young girl.

And when Miller came to the Portland church, it was actually the Methodist church that he spoke at.

He continued there for 13 days, and then this pastor is writing him, Lorenzo Fleming is writing him a report of what's going on.

"'The good work has been progressing firmly.

"'I should think somewhere near 200 have professed conversion in our meetings since you left, and the good work is spreading all over the city and in the country all around the city.

A number of grog shops have been broken up and converted into little meeting houses.

1 or 2 gambling establishments have also been broken up.

Little prayer meetings have been set up in almost every part of the city.

Many opposers begin to acknowledge that there is a work of God here.

There can be many other accounts we could read similar.

They would almost sound the same, described in the same situation.

When William Miller came to town it wasn't as though they just got a doctrinal, you know, debriefing from William Miller on what the doctrine of the Second Advent was.

No, there was a spiritual revival that was going on that was the core of the Millerite movement.

And that's something I think we need to make very, very clear.

Anytime you see bars being turned into meeting houses, theaters being turned into churches, other gambling establishments and others, This was simply a moving of the Holy Spirit.

Now some might say, well, was it just out of fear?

I'm supposing some may have been just out of fear.

But many people were coming to a closer knowledge of Jesus.

Many people were being drawn closer to Jesus and we can just read that throughout the different reports.

Ellen White says in Life Sketches, page 60, My heart was full of glad expectation.

With diligent searching of heart and humble confessions, we came prayerfully up to the time of expectation.

Every morning we felt that it was our first work to secure the evidence that our lives were Do you understand what's going on here?

Do you understand how these people are looking to the second in the advent?

And again, Some people might criticize and say, well, they're just because they're afraid Jesus is gonna come.

No, maybe some of them have that original motivation.

But what I see as I read these types of passages is they had come to love Jesus.

And they wanted nothing more than to have a right relationship with him and to be ready for him when he comes.

You see there's a difference between being an Adventist because you're afraid that Jesus is coming soon so you better get ready and being an Adventist because you love Jesus and you're hoping he's gonna come soon.

Do you understand the difference between those 2 groups of Adventists?

The Adventists, or the Millerites I might say, at this point in our discussion, the Millerites, I believe for the most part, love Jesus and long for his quick return.

And there's a couple of reasons why I believe that.

We'll look at that a little later when we look at Revelation chapter 10.

But Revelation chapter 10 describes this Millerite period as a sweet-in-the- mouth experience.

If it was just out of fear or dread of the second coming, I don't think it would be a sweet-in-the-mouth experience.

This was a time when people drew very close to Jesus.

The hope was that Jesus was coming very soon, not the fear, the hope.

And so when an Adventist minister, compelled by a group of believers who wanted to be ready for the October return of Jesus.

And he went, and just a few weeks, 10 days, 12 days earlier, before the greatest appointment, he was constrained by these individuals to baptize them.

They cut that hole in the ice, you know, 2 or 3 feet of ice on the river, and they baptized these individuals.

And of course, they were in and out pretty quickly.

He spent an extended amount of time there, and he very quickly got deathly ill and died.

And his little kids, of course, they were sad, but they weren't really sad because they had the blessed hope.

They were looking forward to Jesus coming and it was just a few days, just a week or so now, and we'll be reunited with our loved ones.

There was a positive optimism in the Millerite movement from everything that I can gather, a positive optimism.

So if we were to explore or try to define the identity of the Millerite movement up to this time, up to 1844, it's largely a revival based on the study of prophecy.

William Miller was not just someone who preached the prophecies of Daniel.

I mean, we're familiar with his charts and all that, So we tend to think of him as a sort of a scholar, academic guy that's up there, you know, explaining the different symbols of Daniel and Revelation.

But he was someone who appealed to hearts.

He was called affectionately by many who came to his meetings, Father Miller.

Because of the way, if the meeting house was full and there was only a seat here on the front, he saw some elderly person coming in, he would go down and he would help them in and help them find their seats.

And everyday people listened to him and he pled with them, pled with them and made these appeals that were so heart-stirring for them to give their hearts to Jesus.

And so it's, I think it's only fair that we characterize the Millerite movement as a revival and that's a revival that yes was based on the study of prophecy, but there was a focus on spiritual preparation and the confession of sin.

You remember what Ellen White's account was?

We wanted every day to make sure that our hearts were right with Jesus.

Before we went to bed we wanted to make sure we had made our made anything right with our friends or with our neighbors with Jesus and even when we got up we wanted our assurance of salvation from God's Word.

So there's a focus on spiritual preparation and the confession of sin.

There wasn't a lot of, besides the prophecies, besides the idea that Jesus was coming in 1843 or 1844, there was not a lot of new theological ideas.

The Millerite movement largely was influenced by a number of other movements, of course the Protestant Reformation, it was influenced by the Pietist movement largely, and it was influenced by Charles Finney and his revivals.

But this was the type of atmosphere in which it was being accomplished.

1 of the things that they did see very clearly is that they came to see themselves as typified by the parable of the 10 virgins.

We're not gonna go into great length in studying it here today.

But they began to see themselves as being typified by the 10 virgins.

And there was a tearing time, remember that?

And while the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

And as they in their experience first expected Jesus to come in the beginning of the 2300th year, sometime in the fall of 1843, and then the spring of 1844, and then finally the fall of 1844, there were these tearing times where they believed they were being prophesied, I guess you might say, They were fulfilling the parable of the 10 virgins.

And the message was, the message was, the bridegroom is coming, go out to meet him.

So in their understanding, their work was about over.

Tell the World: Say What?

So, these scriptural discoveries really altered the developing identity of the Adventist faith and they began to recognize they had been called to continue giving a prophetic message to the world.

The work of Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary was preparatory to His return.

Their message had a singular present truth significance.

We'll talk about more that in a in a little while.

And they've been called out of Babylon in a continuation of the Reformation.

These were all concepts now that were gathering in the minds of these people.

Now I don't want to give you the wrong impression here.

At this point there is no organized Adventist group of believers.

This is a very, very scattered helter-skelter, you can't even call it a movement yet.

We're talking about a handful of people that were getting this type of a self-identity.

Imagine You being the only 1 or only 1 in your county or state that is getting this idea that, man, this is the message for the world.

And the rest of the Adventists are sort of like, ho-hum.

Let's just stop here and back up a little bit, if I can sort of paint the picture for you.

We know why the Protestant Reformation came out of the Christian church at large, right?

Christianity fractured, at least Western Christianity fractured with the Protestant Reformation.

We know that there was a coming out, right?

And the Protestant Reformers left the Church on issues that were, you know, significant issues.

There now has been, in the Millerite movement, another coming out now of the, really of the Reformation, of Protestantism.

Because the churches of Protestantism, where these believers largely came from, rejected the idea that the world was gonna get worse until Jesus came to save us.

They were in love with the idea that the world was gonna get better until we had a millennium of peace here on earth.

And if you read the story of the Harmon families being disfellowshipped from the Methodist Church, the Casco Street Methodist Church in Portland, Oregon, in Portland, Maine, you will see that this idea of the second coming was just intolerable to them.

I'm not sure exactly why, except it wasn't common.

And that story has all the intrigue of any church politics today.

How the leaders of the church didn't tell the rest of the church.

They just sort of told a few select leaders to come to the church for the meeting and they had the business meeting and they voted everyone out and then they didn't want to tell anybody because they knew the Harmon family had a lot of influence.

And this is the experience that over and over was repeated across the Millerite scene as people were kicked out of their church for simply believing in the second coming of Jesus.

If you wanna see the impact that Adventism has had today, 1 of the significant impacts is that it's no longer in Christianity that form of a concept that Jesus is going to come to end the world.

I mean a lot of Christians today accept that.

Now they may have some interesting futurist versions of it that we don't have, but The Christian world has changed in a great degree since that time.

So the Millerites now come out of the Protestant world.

So it's sort of like a second coming out.

Some people have even suggested that this, the expression in Revelation 14, where it says Babylon is fallen, is fallen, was denoting the 2 falls of Babylon.

1, the fall where in the Reformation came out of the church, the mother church, and the second, the fall, wherein the children of the mother church rejected the biblical message, and there was another coming out in the Millerite movement.

Okay, So we know it's a fairly small group of people that comes now out of the Christian world.

They have no organization, no structure, no paid clergy, none of those things, nothing.

Then October 22 happens, the final disappointment.

A few of them still keep saying, well, we're going to keep studying the prophecies.

And by this time that we're talking about, and we're talking maybe about 1845, 1846, this period of time when there was a lot of development going on of these doctrines and these teachings.

By this time, the vast majority of them have decided that October 22 was a mistake.

The vast majority are going to never accept the visions of Ellen White as being accurate.

The vast majority are never going to accept the sanctuary message as an explanation of what happened on October 22.

And they're not going to accept the Sabbath as a message for God's end time people.

They're sometimes later in Ellen White's writings referred to as First Day Adventists.

Of course that would be after we became Seventh Day Adventists.

At this point they're just the Advent believers.

And where there might be 1 or 2 or 3 people, Edson, Bates, Ellen Harmon, James White, a small handful, literally a handful.

There's probably about 25, 000 active Adventists that are not in this category.

Most of the Adventists would go on to form what we think we know today as the Advent Christian Church, which today doesn't have very many more members than it did then.

And this group of 4 or 5 or 6 people, sort of with this idea over here and that idea over there, would eventually become the seventh-day Adventist Church, which would, in fact, be the 1 fulfilling Revelation 10 and Revelation 14 and would grow to be the fastest growing Christian denomination because it's God's message.

But anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

I just want you to sort of see what's going on.

This isn't like there's a great big group of people that are getting this identity.

These are a few people that are starting to recognize their place on God's stage.

1 time I was in Ellen White's home in Battle Creek, a historic Adventist village.

And as I was looking at the house and grounds and just reflecting on the life of Ellen and James White, there's 1 thing that came across very powerfully to my mind.

That is that the Advent movement did not become a great movement because these were so extraordinary people.

Rather they became extraordinary people because the message they had was God's message.

And as I sat there, I was just like, wow, like God doesn't need extraordinary, gifted, talented, you know, all the superlatives people.

The message was not made great by great people being attached to it.

The people attached to the great message became giants because the message is that great, that powerful.

Sometimes we think that it's all a movement, it's about maybe charisma and abilities, and certainly God gave them many abilities and there were many miracles, but what was really important was the message.

This small group of people, 4 or 5 people, in the face of the rest of the Millerites who were not ever going to accept it, this small group of people would end up with a worldwide impact that still continues today.

So their sense of identity continued to be shaped by Scripture as they began to see who they are.

They had been called to continue giving a prophetic message to the world.

Their message was of singular, present truth significance.

They had been called out of Babylon in a continuation of the Reformation.

Now what are they going to tell the world though?

So you get to Revelation chapter 10 and you decide this means us, But what are we supposed to tell the world?

Are we just supposed to repeat again in October 22, 1844?

Are we supposed to repeat the prophecies?

You know, that's what the message had been up to that time, right?

For the most part, the message had been an exposition on Daniel chapter 2, Daniel chapter 7, Daniel chapter 8 and 9, Right?

Is that what we're supposed to tell the world?

Well, that's part of it, but God would give them a lot more to say than just what had been given up to 1844.

Most of the Adventists, like I was just saying, most of the Adventists are in a different camp, still expecting the end of the 2, 300 days.

In other words, they think that Christ did not leave where he was on October 22.

But there's a small group, growing group, That's beginning to have some sort of traction among themselves.

About the same time that Edson gained this new view of the sanctuary cleansing, just after the disappointment, an important theological change was taking place in a company of Adventists in Washington, New Hampshire.

A number of them, under the endeavors of Rachel Oakes, a Seventh-day Baptist, began to keep the Seventh-day Sabbath.

Now, some of you have probably heard the story of how Rachel Oaks, you know, the Adventist minister was preaching that day in the little church and Frederick Wheeler and Much like they still do today, you know, the church members would greet the pastor after the service, right?

And as Rachel Oaks was leaving after the service, she basically confronts Pastor Wheeler and says, yeah, but what about the Sabbath?

I'm paraphrasing the conversation, but you know, why don't you teach the Bible Sabbath, essentially?

And Frederick Wheeler began to study it and very quickly determined that in fact, the Sister Oaks was right, that there was something to this Sabbath truth.

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GYC SE 2013: What is Adventism?

Those Foolish Adventists

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Those Foolish Adventists

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Tell the World: Say What?

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