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What Really Happened in 1844?
by Nic Samojluk
Introduction. On October 22, 1994, the 150th anniversary of the Great Disappointment, a large group of SDA believers met at the William Miller Farm, in Low Hampton, N.Y., to commemorate the event. In his address, Robert Folkenberg, the president of the General Conference of SDA, had some harsh words for those SDA holding a divergent interpretation of what happened in 1844. He did not limit himself to the suggestion that they were defending doctrinal error, but rather accused them of lacking the moral integrity to admit that they were not true SDA believers. Here is what he said:
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| “Brethren and sisters, the Judgment, the 2300 days, the Sanctuary—those are the key to our unique identity as a movement. Pull those away and we cease to exist. Due to their critical nature and their import, they are a special focus for attack by the Evil One and the Evil One rarely uses attacks from outside. They are too easily identified. He would rather bring the undermining of these critical beliefs dressed in the trustworthy garb of fellow saints who present themselves as fellow members, as local church leaders, pastors, teachers and leaders who dressing themselves in the modern regalia of pluralism, saying ‘I am a good Seventh-day Adventist, but I can define that in any way I want to.’ Beware of the devil’s minions dressed as loyal Seventh-day Adventists who feel perfectly free to set aside the Sanctuary, to define the 2300 days in other irrelevant terms, as far as we are concerned, and to make of none effect the message of the Sanctuary. The problem is, they are not Seventh-day Adventists. They simply have not had the integrity to admit it.” |
Is It a Damnable Sin To Be Among the Minority? A few years ago, the majority of SDA’s voted to retain the traditional view of the Sanctuary and the Investigative Judgment. Did that vote automatically turn those SDA holding a divergent view of this doctrine into damnable heretics deserving outright condemnation? Did they become overnight bereft of moral integrity? Does it require less moral stamina to go against the majority opinion? Does it take less moral courage to swim against the current? Does the Lord require from every believer to join the majority regardless of conviction and in the absence of “Thus said the Lord”? Perhaps, if the church is really serious about the General Conference president charge, it should issue an order to refuse the tithes and offerings of those who hold a divergent opinion about what happened in 1844! Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen!
What Is The Essence of Adventism? If the belief in the Investigative Judgment is so essential to our Adventist faith, why was it not reflected in the church’s name? Why did the founders of the church select rather the Advent and the Seventh-day Sabbath as the main doctrinal features of our denomination? Must those who hold these basic truths dear to their hearts be required and forced to renounce them just because they hold to a different view of what happened in 1844? Is the belief in the significance of 1844 the essence of Adventism, or is it rather the expectation of the soon coming or our Lord to judge the living and the death? The Second Coming has survived two millennia. Can we be sure that the belief in the sacredness of the 1844 date will survive as likewise as long? Is Adventist tradition more sacred than the inspired record found in the Bible telling us that Jesus after his ascension sat on the right hand of God, instead of waiting 1800 hundred years to present the merits of his sacrifice on the cross before God?
Why Do Some SDA’s Reject The Traditional View of The Sanctuary? The reasons why some SDA believers reject the traditional interpretation of Daniel 8:14 are simple and straightforward. The traditional teaching:
Is unscriptural. The New Testament portrays Jesus entering the immediate presence of God the Father following his ascension to heaven. We say that this happened in 1844.
It does violence to the text. As we examine the prophetic statement found in Daniel 8:14, we discover that the context describes the contamination of the Jewish earthly sanctuary and the interruption of its daily service. There is no contextual reference to the heavenly sanctuary.
It is out of focus. The vision describes a foreign power desecrating the Jewish sacred temple. The logical expectation would be to infer that, if the sanctuary is to be cleansed, said alien power must be dealt with. We conclude instead that the saints are investigated.
It is anachronistic. The vision in Daniel 8 starts with Alexander the Great. We set the starting point centuries earlier with the order to rebuild the Jewish temple, and actually eleven centuries before the advent of what we identify as the “Little Horn.”
It places the wrong emphasis on what Jesus is doing. The earthly sanctuary was given that God might dwell among his people. Jesus came for the same reason. Our traditional teaching keeps him up in heaven.
It is unconvincing. Most or our unique doctrines-- including the Sabbath, and the State of the Dead--are shared by some Christians belonging to other denominations. Nevertheless, no other group of believers has ever held such strange and unbiblical dogma as our 1844 teaching.
Did Not Ellen White Endorse Our Traditional Teaching on the Sanctuary? She did indeed! She also supported other doctrinal positions, which she later renounced. Good examples are the Shut Door, the old view of the “Daily,” the King of the North, the time to commence the Sabbath, and so on. She consistently and persistently warned the brethren not to use her writings in order to settle doctrinal disputes, but rather encouraged them to go to the Bible--If you dare to rely solely on the Bible today, you are labeled as a heretic. When confronted with a clear “Thus said the Lord,” she quite often yielded her personal opinion to the authority of the Scriptures. I believe that if she were alive today, she would repeat what she did in 1888, by rejecting what she had previously endorsed regarding the correct interpretation of what happened in 1844.
Is Not The Messianic Prophecy of Daniel 9 Anchored in Daniel 8? Definitely not. Daniel 9 is not dependent on Daniel 8. It does not require the conversion of prophetic days into literal years. The Jewish system had two kinds of weeks, the literal week and the week of years, which is where we get the expression: “I am taking my sabbatical.” The context insinuates that the reference is to seventy weeks of years. Daniel 9 can stand on its own without the need of ill-designed doctrinal crutches.
What Really Happened in 1844? The answer is very simple. William Miller ignored Jesus’ warning about setting the date for his return and predicted both the wrong event and the wrong date for it. His error was predicted in the book of Revelation. The prophet was admonished that the book he was ordered to swallow would be sweet in his mouth but bitter in his stomach. This is a fit description of what happened in 1844. Yet our forefathers preferred to describe the event as bittersweet when they asserted to the unbelieving world that they had been right all along on the date of the event but only wrong on the event.
How Do We Explain Daniel 8:14? There is a logical answer to this question: We let the vision explain itself. The question asked was “How long shall be the vision?” If the vision starts with Alexander the Great, it is only logical to start counting the 2300 prophetic days with him, instead of eleven centuries earlier with the order to rebuild Jerusalem. There is no need to repeat William Miller’s mistake! Alexander’s first great victory over Persia took place at Granicus in 334 BC. If we add 2300 years and allow for the lack of a year zero between BC and AD, we arrive at 1967, the year the Jews recovered Jerusalem from the Arabs, following the Six Days Jewish-Arab War. Several centuries ago, John Newton, Isaac Newton’s brother, predicted the event based on his study of Daniel 8.
Remember that Daniel the prophet was concerned about the earthly Jewish sanctuary and not the heavenly one. Jesus had the same in mind in Luke 21:24. There is no need to take Daniel 8:14 out of context. The prophecy is very plain, and accurate as well. A little child can understand this without anybody wrecking his brain in the process with convoluted out of context explanations.
This is my humble opinion! What about yours?
January 1995
We Need to be Humble!
by Nic Samojluk
Have you considered that 1844 was the year we knew more than Jesus Christ himself? Indeed, because Jesus stated that he had no advance knowledge about the precise timing of his Second Coming, yet we had access to said knowledge back in 1844: We knew the exact date of his return to this earth, and we waited for this to take place that year. When it didn't happen, then we proclaimed that the date was correct, although the event prophesied in Daniel 8:14 had taken place in heaven instead of the earth.
We asserted that at that moment in history Christ had moved from the Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary into the immediate presence of God the Father in the Most Holy Place, this in spite of the fact that in the book of Hebrews we find a clear reference to Jesus' entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary in the past tense (Hebrews 9:12). Then we proceeded to assert that those Christians who had rejected this unique knowledge we had, had refused God's last message to the world.
What can we do with this checkered history of ours? We should treat it the same way we deal with the erroneous beliefs Jesus' disciples had regarding the popular Jewish expectation that Christ was going to deliver them from the Romans instead of dying on a cross. Jesus' disciples suffered a terrible disappointment. They were forced to admit that they had misinterpreted the messianic prophecies contained in the Holy Book.
This is exactly what we need to do with our 1844 experience. We need to humbly admit that we had equivocated in our prediction, both in the date and the event. So what happened in 1844? A new Christian movement was born inviting everybody to worship the Creator at a time when the entire world was mesmerized with the theory of evolution. This is my humble opinion! What is yours?
A Strange Coincidence!
by Nic Samojluk
We Seventh-day Adventists are aware of the special significance of the 1844 date for the church, the date when the forerunners of the SDA movement expected with great anticipation the return of Jesus Christ with great power and glory to the earth and thus put an end to suffering and pain. It didn't happen, and those whose hopes were dashed to the ground, soon realized that they needed to start all over the task of preaching the Gospel to a perishing world.
What most SDA's do not know is that the same year something else happened of major significance: Amariah Brigham, a renowned American physician, founded the Journal of Insanity, which eventually became the American Journal of Psychiatry, the official publication of the American Psychiatric Association. A strange coincidence indeed! And we need to remember that those Christians who rejected William Miller's prediction thought that he might be mentally unbalanced to predict the exact date of Jesus return, since Jesus himself had warned us that nobody except God was privy to such knowledge.
The SDA church has grown and prospered beyond the wildest dream, but we should be humble and ready to admit that there is nothing to be proud about the way our movement started. Religious zeal must always be tempered with wisdom and a complete trust in what has bean clearly taught by our Lord regarding the setting of dates for the glorious return of our Lord and Saviour. Those who rejected William Miller's prediction had a right to do so, and on solid Biblical grounds!
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