Chapter 7—The Work of the Prophets

The life of a prophet was never an easy one. Isaiah was murdered, Jeremiah was put in prison, Daniel thrown to the lions, and Paul endured hardships a lesser mortal wouldn’t have survived. “From the Jews five times I received forty stripes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been in the deep” (2 Corinthians 11:24, 25).GP 65.1

Although Ellen White was not, like Paul, physically assaulted by human beings, on more than one occasion Satan attempted to take her life. In 1858, while Ellen and her husband, James, were returning to Battle Creek after she received the great controversy vision in Lovett’s Grove, Ohio, they stopped in Jackson, Michigan, to visit the Palmer family. The attack came while she was conversing with Mrs. Palmer. Describing what happened, she later wrote, “my tongue refused to utter what I wished to say, and seemed large and numb. A strange, cold sensation struck my heart, passed over my head, and down my right side. For a time I was insensible, but was aroused by the voice of earnest prayer” (LS 162).GP 65.2

Three months later, in a vision given to her in Battle Creek, she was shown who was really behind the distressing experience she suffered in the Palmer home. “In that vision I was shown that in the sudden attack at Jackson, Satan designed to take my life to hinder the work I was about to write; but angels of God were sent to my rescue, to raise me above the effects of Satan’s attack. I saw, among other things, that I should be blest with better health than before the attack at Jackson” (3SM 100).GP 65.3

Besides the illnesses that plagued her from time to time, her life was far from easy. In the early years of her prophetic ministry, she and James were very poor and had to depend on others for living quarters and furniture. Since there was no paid ministry at that time, James worked hard hauling stones for the railroad and chopping wood for fifty cents a day to support his family and further the cause.GP 66.1

Two of the Whites’ four children died young, and James wore himself out with travel, preaching, writing, and guiding the fledgling church from its beginning until 1881, when he died at the age of sixty. For the remaining thirty-four years of her life, Ellen White continued to labor, without her husband’s support, as God’s messenger to the remnant church. In the rest of this chapter, we will look at some of the functions she carried out in fulfilling her work as God’s messenger.GP 66.2