A Significant Vision

In early 1847 the Whites accepted an invitation from the Stockbridge Howland family to come and live on the top floor of their spacious, well-constructed home. Topsham was some 35 miles north of their former residence at Gorham. It was here, on Sabbath, April 3, before a small group of assembled fellow Sabbathkeepers, that 19-year-old Ellen was given one of her most important visions.GVEGW 41.2

This vision is recognized as significant by the church today for at least three reasons:GVEGW 41.3

1. It repeated, and enlarged upon, the content of a vision given four weeks earlier, on March 6, in which the existence and reality of the heavenly sanctuary inside the New Jerusalem were revealed in major, substantive detail for the first time. ^{7Paul A. Gordon has pointed out that Ellen White initially became aware of the existence of the heavenly sanctuary as a result of three visions (Feb. 1845; Oct. 1845, and sometime between Feb. and Apr. 1846) before the major revelations of March 6 at Fairhaven, Mass., and April 3, 1847, at Topsham, Maine, in which she herself personally visited the temple in heaven and was conducted into the Most Holy Place, among others. Historians are divided upon the year in which the Fairhaven vision took place (Mrs. White herself does not date it): Gordon (in The Sanctuary, 1844, and the Pioneers [Review and Herald, 1983], pp. 27, 28.) and some other scholars tend to date it in March of 1846, because Mrs. White’s reference (Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 95, 96) to it precedes, chronologically, her autobiographical account of her marriage to James White in Aug. 1846. Denominational historian C. Mervyn Maxwell (and some other scholars), however, identify the year as 1847, on the basis of Joseph Bates’s declaration (when he published his “broadside” reporting the April 3, 1847 vision at Topsham) in Bates’s personal postscript to his document—also dated April 3, 1847—where he added: “At a meeting in Fairhaven, 6th of last month, I saw her have a similar vision, which I then wrote down.” Whether the Fairhaven vision of March 6 is to be dated in 1846 or 1847, however, it was this one—together with the Topsham vision of April 3, 1847—which conclusively proved to Ellen White that the sanctuary in heaven is a real, literal place. (Interview with C. Mervyn Maxwell, Jan. 24, 1991.)}GVEGW 41.4

2. These two visions confirmed James and Ellen’s prior Bible study that the Saturday Sabbath was still binding upon New Testament Christians. They came six to seven months after the Whites had accepted and begun to observe this day. (The Whites did not keep the Sabbath because the visions told them to do so; the visions came after Bible study, serving only to confirm it—Seventh-day Adventists did not get their doctrines from the visions, but rather from hard, diligent Bible study and earnest prayer!)GVEGW 41.5

3. Ellen’s theological understanding was enlarged by these two visions when, for apparently the first time, she grasped the truth that the Sabbath has eschatological implications and significance. Now she tied it to the end-time “mark” of the “beast” of the third angel’s message of Revelation 14:9-11. (Joseph Bates had made the linkage a little earlier, and incorporated it into the second edition of Perpetual Sign, published in August 1846. ^{8See C. Mervyn Maxwell, “Joseph Bates and Seventh-day Adventist Theology,” Appendix G in Kenneth A. Strand, ed., The Sabbath in Scripture and History (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1982), p. 356.})GVEGW 41.6