Seal-of-God Vision

Ellen White did not write out her Seal of God vision, November 17-19, 1848. ^{38Joseph Bates printed his notes of her comments during that vision in his A Seal of the Living God, cited, in part, in Bio., vol. 1, p. 150.} However, while she was in vision at the Otis Nichols home in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Joseph Bates took notes of what she was saying. This vision stirred the Sabbatarian Adventist group, greatly widening their vision as to their tremendous missionary responsibility to proclaim the messages of Revelation 14’s three angels. ^{39“Sabbatarian” refers to Adventists who then worshiped on the seventh day of the week, differentiating them from “First-day” Adventists.}MOL 505.2

This vision described the events since 1844 as light breaking out “in the east,” then “one light after another,” as each new truth was “linked together; they cannot be separated” all truths that were related to the sealing work. She also assured her hearers that “the time of trouble” had not broken out, even though some saw a possible fulfillment in the then current European unrest.MOL 505.3

The most dramatic part of this vision was Ellen White’s emphasis on publishing the “things that thou hast seen and heard” (that is, the salvation implications of the Sabbath as connected to the sanctuary doctrine and the sealing work). That challenge seemed, at first, to be staggering, almost beyond belief. But the prophet had spoken: The results of the publishing venture (that is, emphasizing the Sabbath as the seal of God connected with the sanctuary truth) would be like the “rising of the sun [as it] keeps on its course ... but it never sets.... The rising is in strength and grows brighter and brighter.”MOL 505.4

Bates was so impressed with this vision that he asserted that the Sabbath truth should be published at once and sent to such places as France, Britain, Russia, and the Middle East. ^{40A Seal of the Living God, pp. 4, 35, 40, 45. Many years later Ellen White recalled this Dorchester vision and her words to her husband: “From this small beginning it was shown to me to be like streams of light that went clear round the world” (Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 125). In 1887 she recalled that in her “very girlhood” [most probably before her marriage in 1846] she saw in vision that commandment-keeping believers in Jesus would be like “jets of light growing brighter ... lighting the whole world.” The Review and Herald, July 26, 1887.}MOL 505.5

In context, this vision-promise was given to a handful of people only four years after their greatest disappointment. Obviously this small group of fewer than one hundred Sabbatarian Adventists had no idea of a worldwide program that would develop in the next fifty years. All they knew was that God had revealed to Ellen White that they were to begin publishing, with the means available, with the light they understood. Their confidence in this 21-year-old woman had been established during the previous three years—they would proceed. ^{41Within the year, James White and company printed the first issue of Present Truth, July 1849, which later became the church paper, Review and Herald, one of the longest, continuously published religious journals in North America. It is now known as the Adventist Review.}MOL 505.6