The Seventh-day Adventist Great Controversy
During the month of August 2015 Fox29 News reported the following:
PHILADELPHIA (WTXF)-A religious book is showing up in mailboxes across Philadelphia and most residents are finding it pretty mysterious. The book is called ‘The Great Controversy.’ Most people who’ve gotten it say they have no idea why it was sent to them…read more
The Great Controversy is a book authored by Seventh-day Adventist “prophetess” Ellen G. White. The book is about the Past, Present and Future. You can find more about it HERE
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is steeped in prophecy. Prophecy is its pedigree beginning with William Miller back in the 1840s. Those interested in prophecy may also have come across various books written by Adventist authors. The popular Amazing Facts website is run by Adventists. They often host prophecy seminars in districts without always advertising who they are.
The most popular contemporary Adventist writer is Steve Wohlberg. We previously wrote about his books End Time Delusions and Exploding the Israel Deception. While he’s written on a range of issues, he mostly takes aim at the dispensational, pretribulational view of eschatology. For example, some of his other titles are: The Antichrist Chronicles, the Rapture Delusions, Truth Left Behind and The Rapture Deception. One of his books is titled The Great Controversy Ended, which is an allusion to White’s materials. He also runs a website called White Horse Media.
In End Time Delusions, Wohlberg associates the dispensational “Left Behind” view with the third frog of false prophecy:
Contrary to the all-pervasive teaching of the third frog, these words clearly describe divine wrath upon spiritual Babylon and a global slaughter that reaches far beyond the Middle East…Who is the gathering at Armageddon really against? Literal Jews? No! It is a gathering of the world forces of Mystery Babylon against the Warrior on the horse and against His army.
And this:
The third frog of false prophecy is now teaching a secret rapture, seven year tribulation, futurist antichrist, literal drying up of a literal Euphrates, and a literal Middle-East Armageddon involving literal armies attacking literal Jews. Dear friend this is all false prophecy…. (p 192)
Adventists do not take prophetic texts as literally as dispensationalists do. They will often talk about “types and antitypes” and use these ideas to overcome problem texts. In their view, the Adventist Church is true Israel. The 144, 000 of Revelation 7 are symbolic of the Sabbath-observing Adventist Church, the Antichrist is the Roman papal system and the Mark of the Beast is Sunday worship. For Adventists, Sabbath observance is essential to salvation. This departs from the plain meaning of the passages yet this is fundamental to their teaching.
If Revelation chapter 13 states one thing about the Beast and its worship and Wohlberg says another, then one should ask what informs this interpretive difference. Why do Adventist teachers like Wohlberg go to extraordinary lengths to explain how some passages mean something other than the plain sense? Didn’t Paul expect his audience to be as the Bereans and check what he taught against Scripture (Acts 17:10-11)? Adventists appear to have it the other way around. To begin to understand how they interpret Scripture, and why, we need to go back to William Miller and the Adventist prophet Ellen G. White.
Phil Johnson helps us HERE. Note that the transcript at the site hasn’t been edited well so that the words sometimes run into each other. However, you shouldn’t have any problem following along.
Essentially, Miller read the book of Daniel and concluded that Jesus Christ would return in 1844. To do this he had to take the 2,300 days of Daniel 8:13-14 and transpose them into years. According to Johnson:
…William Miller had no training, no qualification to teach, and no real skill in theology, Bible history, or hermeneutics. William Biederwolf, an early 20th-century Presbyterian evangelist, wrote a book on Seventh-Day Adventism, and he says Miller “was as ignorant of Hebrew as a Hottentot is of the Klondike.”
William Miller read that passage from Daniel and decided that the 2,300 days in verse 14 really stand for 2,300 years and the cleansing of the sanctuary, he said, refers to the judgment of the world by fire at the second coming. Miller also decided that the place to start counting was 457 B.C., the date of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem by Artaxerxes I of Persia. If you subtract 457 from 2,300 you get 1843. It’s that simple, he said. Christ will return sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844.
Of course, Jesus Christ didn’t return in 1844. The failure of that prophecy led to the Adventist teaching of the Investigative Judgment (IJ) which was embraced by Ellen White. Ultimately, IJ is a heretical teaching which conflates works and grace in the process of salvation. IJ found favor as an innovative way to explain the failure of Miller’s original prophetic expectation.
As Johnson says:
As the priest in removing the sins from the sanctuary, confessed them upon the head of the scapegoat – so Christ will place all these sins upon Satan, the originator and instigator of sin. The scapegoat, bearing the sins of Israel, was sent away “unto a land not inhabited”(Leviticus 16:22); so Satan, bearing the guilt of all the sins which he has caused God’s people to commit, will be for a thousand years confined to the earth, which will then be desolate, without inhabitant, and he will at last suffer the full penalty of sin in the fires that shall destroy all the wicked. Thus the great plan of redemption will reach its accomplishment in the final eradication of sin and the deliverance of all who have been willing to renounce evil.
So Satan, not Christ, is the ultimate sin-bearer.
That, of course, nullifies the biblical teaching that the work of Christ on the cross resulted in full atonement for the sins of His people. Seventh-Day Adventists are forced to reinterpret Christ’s statement in John 19:30: “It is finished.”
They can’t make good sense of Hebrews 10:12: “When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”
In fact, the central, distinctive (and most novel) doctrine of Seventh-Day Adventism is the idea Ellen White concocted to explain the Great Disappointment. She claimed that on October 22, 1844, Jesus began a whole new phase of His atoning work. Here’s how the Seventh-Day Adventist doctrinal statement says it:
“In 1844, at the end of the prophetic period of 2,300 days, [Christ] entered the second and last phase of His atoning ministry. It is a work of investigative judgment which is part of the ultimate disposition of all sin, typified by the cleansing of the ancient Hebrew sanctuary on the Day of Atonement.”
Adventists will link the Old Testament scapegoat (Azazel) to Satan. This is what drives the idea that Satan’s abyss-prison is a desolate millennial earth prior to the Eternal State. In Adventist eschatology, Satan becomes the sin-bearer – just like Azazel – and roams a desolate earth for a thousand years as punishment for deceiving us. Yet they misunderstand what was going on in the OT example of the scapegoat. As Michael Heiser notes:
The point of the goat for Azazel was not that something was owed to the demonic realm, as though a ransom was being paid. The goat for Azazel banished the sins of the Israelites to the real outside Israel. Why? Because the ground on which Yahweh had his dwelling was holy. Sin had to be “transported” to where evil belonged – the territory outside Israel, under the control of the gods set over the pagan nations. (The Unseen Realm pp 177-178)
Heiser’s premise is that pagan nations were under the control of rebellious angels-demons-gods. Whatever the case, the OT pre-Atonement example was instructive to Israel regarding the eviction of sin from their nation. This was not meant to be applied after Christ’s atonement for our sins, especially not some 1,900 years after the event.
One major contributing factor for these unbiblical teachings is the Adventist reliance on Ellen G. White’s personal interpretation of scripture. Johnson notes that the first of her many serious contradictions:
…came with her very first vision in 1844. She claimed that the door of mercy was now shut for everyone outside the original Millerite sect. Even the Millerites who abandoned their hope after the Great Disappointment would now be permanently shut out of heaven. In effect, Ellen White (and most of the original Adventists) were saying that no one who was outside their sect could ever be saved. The door of salvation was permanently closed…Of course, the more time that passed, the more that prophecy put them in an awkward position. The group needed to add followers, and they couldn’t do that if the day of grace had passed. In an article written in 1883, she made this admission: “I did hold, in common with the advent body, that the door of mercy was then forever closed to the world….But, she said, it had now been revealed to her that the way of salvation was still open.
Adventist scholars vigorously defend Ellen White against accusations of contradictions, mistakes and plagiarism. One publication (Is the Bible Our Final Authority?) subtly suggests that the New Testament writer Luke may be accused of plagiarism having borrowed materials for his gospel version. While they defend Luke, this is an obvious defense of White. Later on, the article calls to question the possibility of a literal understanding of Scripture without the guidance of a prophet (in this case, White).
Note carefully these selected comments:
To this point Ellen White’s guidance has received only passing notice. We have noted her ringing endorsement of the truthfulness and authority of Scripture. A more careful study makes clear that for her the Scriptures remain the final authority, not only where they touch religious matters, but in their report of events as well.
However Mrs. White is not where Evangelicals are. While affirming the Bible’s authority, she recognizes in far higher profile the human element in Scriptures. We review in brief excerpts what she has to say about the language and thought patterns in the Bible:
“Don’t you think there might have been some mistake in the copyist or in the translators?” This is all probable. . . . All the mistakes will not cause trouble to one soul, or cause any feet to stumble.-Selected Messages, Bk. 1, 16.
The writers of the Bible had to express their ideas in human language.-Ibid. 19.
There is not always perfect order or apparent unity in the Scriptures.-Ibid. 20.
The Bible must be given in the language of men. Everything that is human is imperfect.-Ibid.20.
The Bible is written by inspired men, but it is not God’s mode of thought and expression. It is that of humanity. God, as a writer, is not represented.-Ibid. 21.
The writers of the Bible were God’s penmen, not His pen.-Ibid.
It is not the words of the Bible that are inspired, but the men that were inspired. Inspiration acts not on the man’s words or his expressions but on the man himself, who, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, is imbued with thoughts.-Ibid.
With the immense advantage of the gift of prophecy in modern times [meaning White], Adventists are prepared for a genuinely integrated understanding of revelation, inspiration, and preservation of authority in the Word while others explore box canyons in search of understanding. But we will fall short of God’s plan unless we allow the Holy Spirit to both interpret the Word and move it into proclamation.
So Adventists do not ultimately rely on their own study of Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Ellen White informs their understanding via her writings, and they see this as a distinct advantage. She is the last word. This is why they hold a different view to the plain meaning of selected scriptural passages. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself who to trust – the word of God or someone else?
If you’re an Adventist, you’ll trust White. This is the mark of a cult.
You can listen to and audio of Phil Johnson discuss these serious issues surrounding the Seventh-day Adventist Church HERE. At some points his personal observations about White should have been better expressed. Nevertheless he hits the targets. It is recommended listening for anyone who is interested or caught up in this group.
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