In this message Pastor Clark traces the prophetic understanding of the William Miller as he began his journey of prophetic study. Hear the incredible evidence of a global, simultaneous explosion of understanding of Daniel and Revelation in the early 19th Century!

<p>In this message Pastor Clark traces the prophetic understanding of the William Miller as he began his journey of prophetic study. Hear the incredible evidence of a global, simultaneous explosion of understanding of Daniel and Revelation in the early 19th Century!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

Discovering the Prophecies

Last time we were together we talked about the second great awakening and how God moved through events that were taking place to remind the world that we were coming up to the time of the end, the end of time.

And Just as a little bit of review, remember, there were 3 main things that affected the Great Awakening and led to what would become 1 of the outcomes of the Great Awakening was the Second Great Advent Movement.

Remember, at the beginning of this period, the late 18th century, the late 1700s, there was only about 5 to 7% church attendance in the United States.

We tend to think of America as being this Bible-thumping, you know, really religious, early American society, but in the end of the 18th century, it wasn't.

By the end of the second great awakening in the mid-1840s, over 70% were attending church.

That's quite a shift, isn't it, in just a generation or 2.

And so what we see happening is there were these signs that were taking place in the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Jesus predicted it in Matthew, in Mark, in Luke.

The gospel, John doesn't record it, but John the Revelator does record it in the book of Revelation.

The same sequence of events, the great tribulation, then signs in the sun, the moon, the stars, and then the second coming.

And so people studied these prophecies and we talked about these signs that took place.

The Lisbon earthquake in 1755, the dark day in May 1917, the falling of the stars in November 13, 1833.

We talked about these different signs that took place.

People looked around at the society around them and they said, this is 1 of the things Jesus said would happen before he came.

That as it was in the days of Noah, so it would also be in the coming of the Son of Man.

And so people looked around the world around them and they said it's a sign of the end.

But the greatest factor that led people to a revival of studying prophecy was the fact that according to the book of Daniel, the book of Daniel was sealed until the time of the end.

And now we were living in the time of the end.

And so there's an explosion in the study of prophecy, in the study of the books of Daniel and Revelation.

So these 3 factors led to this second great Advent movement.

Now, I want to just share with you 1 thought.

Some people say, yes, but those signs, you know, 1755 is a long time ago, the dark day of May 1917-1880, or the falling of the stars November 13 of 1833, That's so long ago.

How could those really be the signs that Jesus said would precede the second coming?

Well, I think part of the reason that we have these questions is because we look at time from a fairly limited perspective, don't we?

We look at it from a perspective of our short life spans.

We live 70 or 100 years, and so 150 years ago sounds like a long time ago, doesn't it?

But it's really not that long ago from God's perspective.

And so just a little illustration here, if we were to have a timeline from creation to the present.

We have a member here, Jonathan Bershkin.

Someday he's going to bring his timeline.

He's created a timeline that's like 40 feet long And he'll enjoy studying those timelines.

But just a simple 1 here, Jonathan, and from creation to 2014.

If we were to talk about the flood, the flood is about a third of Earth's history, 1700 years or so into the beginning.

The little horn predicted in Daniel chapter 7 would have risen 538 AD.

And then you notice when we come down here to the last few inches of our chart, you notice how everything is sort of squished together?

That's because everything is squished together.

In the last couple hundred years, we had the dark day, we have the time of the end beginning, 1798, we have the stars falling in 1833, we have the sanctuary cleansing or the judgment beginning right here at the very end of time.

It's not…when you see it this way, you realize that these signs are at the end of time.

Now we're going to be studying these things more in the future, and I realize some of these dates we've never…we haven't really talked about here.

We talked about the dark day and stars falling, but as far as the time at the end, we haven't proven that from the Scripture or the sanctuary being cleansed.

But as we continue to study the Millerite movement and the early Advent movement, we're going to explore more of that.

So 1 of these gentlemen who began studying the books of Daniel and Revelation particularly was William Miller.

Now William Miller became 1 of the leaders of what would become the Advent movement.

In fact, it was sometimes called the Millerite movement, or they were called Millerites.

William Miller was a man of great reputation, of great respect, living there in New York.

In fact, in 1812, some years before he started studying prophecy, there was a group of 47 men whose names have been recorded, 47 men who volunteered to serve in the War of 1812, provided that William Miller was their captain.

By the way, he was involved in the War of 1812 and the Battle of Plattsburgh and the victory that the colonists achieved there.

He became involved in politics and was elected year after year as the magistrate of the local Justice of the Peace.

His neighbors respected him very well, and in a day of very partisan politics in which he lived, he was well respected by people in his own party as well as the other party.

And in fact, the story is told of 1 day, his own party came to him and they said, we want to have a patriotic picnic on the 4th of July.

We want to use your farm as a place to have our picnic.

And William Miller said, sure, you're welcome to use my farm.

But in the process of talking to them, he convinced them to not just have the party for their political group, but to invite the opposing party to join them with the picnic as well.

That's just the kind of person William Miller was, very respected.

He read Voltaire and Thomas Paine and others, and he began to question Scripture, became skeptical of Scripture.

This was the day in which for the first time the educated or the intellectual began challenging the ideas of inspiration and revelation in Scripture.

Up to this time, the great intellectual giants had generally, you know, believed in Scripture, Newton and others.

But now he's reading Thomas Paine and Voltaire and others.

In fact, when he got married, he moved to, he moved across the state line to where his wife was from, the little town his wife was from.

And 1 of the reasons that William Miller moved was because he wanted to take use, to be able to make use of the library that was in his fiancé's town and his little town that he came from across the border didn't have a library.

And upstairs in that library the men would gather and read and discuss, and this is where he began to have some of his doubts about Scripture.

He was raised in a good Baptist background, and his family had a number of ministers in the family.

They were very churched people, very, very faithful Christian people.

Now a deist is someone who is not an atheist.

A deist believes that there is a God, but that God somehow put the universe on autopilot and walked away.

And so there's no interface between God and humanity.

The stories in the Bible, well, you know, they were fanciful, they were allegorical, they were, you know, cultural tales.

Miracles don't actually happen, at least not from divine power of God intervening, maybe from some natural power that happens, you know, but that's the way a deist looks at the Bible.

God existed, He got things started here in this life, and then he has very little to do with us or with our needs or with our lives.

And he avoided church after this time, except when he was constrained by family.

In fact, his religious people, his religious family members, especially his mom, would ask him to come to church, and sometimes she would prevail, and he would accompany them to church.

There was a problem, though, because often the churches didn't have a pastor who was there every week.

The pastors in those days were generally itinerant, and so they had a territory they covered, and they might only come every, oh, a few months or something, and between on Sundays, an elder would read the sermon.

They would find 1 of Spurgeon's sermons or 1 of Wesley's sermons or, you know, 1 of an early Anabaptist sermons, they would read those sermons.

And William Miller, being an educated man, was a little annoyed because some of these elders who were reading in the Baptist church on Sunday morning, they didn't know how to read very well.

And they would sort of stumble across the words and not know some of the vocabulary and he would find this sometimes rather annoying.

And so he actually complained to his mom and his mom said, well then why don't you read them yourself?

And next time they needed someone to read the sermons, she said, well William will read it.

And so William began reading sermons on Sunday morning, sermons he didn't really believe about a God he didn't really believe in.

And 1 Sunday, the Holy Spirit was working on his heart as he was there, and 1 Sunday he began reading a sermon, and the sermon was entitled, The Duty of Parents to Their Children.

And somehow, I don't know if it was because of his mother's love and what he reflected on as his parents had raised him, but as he's reading this sermon, William Miller, proud, respected, honorable citizen, justice of the peace, well-to-do farmer, William Miller began to find himself strangely choked up.

And he actually had to sit down in the middle of the sermon.

Someone else had to finish reading that sermon that Sunday.

Back to Menu

Discovering the Prophecies

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

17 The Judgment and 1844

1h 8m

God is Love?

05-Watch Out

1h

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Sanctuary

18 When the Day of Atonement Ends

1h 3m

To Know and Be Known

God Still Speaks

58m

The Return

29m

Revelation Today Crusade

2. The End Of the World: Near or Just Fear?

54m

Lets go Home

37m

The Experience of God’s Prophetic Movement

45m

Prophecy and Church History

A Great Awakening

50m

Last Day Events

A World in Crisis

1h 4m

What Are You Looking For?

1h 5m

Prophecies of Hope

5. UFOs, the Occult, and Christ’s Coming

48m

Sound Doctrine