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Why I Believe in Mrs. E. G. White

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    Background of Seventh-day Adventists

    A separate, small segment of the Millerites, which numbered in its ranks only one of the leaders, Joseph Bates, reevaluated its position and concluded that the basic Millerite preaching as to the Second Advent was truly Biblical. However, in their re-examination of the prophecy of Daniel 8:14 they could see that it described, not the great act of Christ’s coming to this world, but His coming to the Most Holy Place in the heavenly sanctuary, there to do a final priestly work ere He returned to the earth. As the little group took hold of this new interpretation of Daniel 8:14 it became increasingly a sharp dividing line between them and the other, much larger, group of remaining Millerites, who kept setting one date after another, only to be increasingly disappointed and disillusioned. Ultimately this major group tended largely to disintegrate and disappear.WBEGW 11.2

    Indeed, why did not every trace of the Millerites—composed of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other Christian people—disappear? They lived in a doctrinally hostile religious world. Other Christian people, as already noted, no longer believed even the basic idea of a literal coming of Christ, quite apart from the matter of a date for such coming. Besides, all who believed Miller’s preaching were under a cloud of ridicule. Few of them were in the higher levels economically or socially, which might have helped them, in part, to weather the storm.WBEGW 12.1

    These handicaps were strikingly evident in the little group who had in their midst only one of the Millerite leaders. On their right was poverty, on their left, derision. They might have been well described as a little ragtag end of a raveled out movement—and all because they had the moral and spiritual courage to re-examine the Bible, particularly its prophecies, and return to the apostolic teaching of the personal, literal coming of Christ. To make their way even more impossible and their extinction apparently certain, some of them, even before the disappointment of October 22, 1844, had begun to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. They found that also plainly taught in the Bible. But in the 1840’s there was small hope of holding a job if one were not willing to work from Monday morning to Saturday night.WBEGW 12.2

    Yet this little Sabbathkeeping group did not quickly disappear from the religious scene, as all the laws of probability demanded. Nor did they linger on, as some religious groups have done, in a kind of fragile, anemic, pathetically reduced fashion. On the contrary, they began erelong to build strategically important institutions—publishing houses, hospitals, schools—and from there went on to develop a worldwide mission work. Their present million and a half close-knit members over the world are often the subject of comment by religious and secular writers who note the efficiency and the effectiveness of the institutions and the program that Seventh-day Adventists carry on. What explains this amazing and incredible phenomenon in the religious world?—for that is exactly what it is.WBEGW 12.3

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