Stephen
Terry, Director
The
Hour of His Judgment
Commentary
for the May 6, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson
"Seventy 'sevens' are decreed for
your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin,
to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up
vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place." Daniel 9:24, NIV
Since the mid-nineteenth century
when the Great Disappointment took place and the early founders of Seventh-day
Adventism were beginning to discover the biblical sabbath, a charismatic faith
healer, Hiram Edson, suggested to the disappointed believers a solution for their
shame. As followers of William Miller, they had fully committed their faith to
Jesus returning in 1844. (This was not the first date for Jesus return that
Miller had taught.) But that faith became an embarassment when those who
preached it were scorned by those who had not fallen for the hoax. They were
desperate for any way to save face before their accusers and naysayers. Edson's
idea was that the math still worked but instead of Jesus coming to the earth to
claim his followers, he went into the Holy of Holies in heaven to cleanse the
sanctuary there, a sanctuary that was the real one modeled by the tabernacle
Moses constructed.
While I understand desperate
people, not wanting to admit error, would cling to any life saver tossed to
them, Edson's idea is questionable on several levels. And those questions have
only gotten louder over time as Adventist leaders have offered contrived apologetics
to prop up the rickety structure with what they feel to be a stone foundation.
Unfortunately, the stones themselves are cracked. All of this derives from a vain effort to force the idea of the Investigative Judgment onto
the Book of Daniel which was actually written to try to make sense of the
events of the Maccabean Revolt during the intertestamental period and not as a
way out for date-setting followers of William Miller almost two thousand years
later. I have written extensively about this in my book, "Daniel - Stranger in
a Strange Land," avaialble as an e-book from Amazon, for those who want more than
this brief commentary on the subject.
The first question that arises
is about the whole idea of cleansing a heavenly sanctuary. In the Old Testament
the cleansing of the sanctuary was an annual event to remove the sins of the
people that had accumulated through the year, by placing them on the head of a
goat that would be taken out into the wilderness. Those sins had been symbolically
placed in the sanctuary by the blood of the sin offering that was sprinkled on
the altar throughout the year.[i] For
this yearly cleansing, the high priest had to come into the Shekinah presence
of God, risking his life in no less a sense than did Uzzah who dared to reach
out and touch the ark of God and died for his impertinence.[ii]
Uzzah's death and the danger to the high priest highlights the contrast between
sin and holiness. How did a holy, heavenly sanctuary become polluted with sin so
that it needed cleansing? And how could sin even exist in such a holy place?
But these are not the only questions.
The date setting is also
problematic. Even if we accept the improbability of pollution in such a holy
place as heaven as somehow accounted for, why would the date of the cleansing
matter? Why would 1844, or 1910, or 2023 be any differnt for the start of that
process? We are given no timeline for its completion so there is nothing to be
gained by knowing when it began. The only understandable explanation is to
provide an out for those who claimed that Jesus would come in 1844. This way
out did not become immediately apparent, for Joseph Bates was promoting a seven-year
theory that the actual second coming would occur seven years after 1844, in October
1851. Ellen White wrote a confirming statement in the summer of 1850 indicating
that only a few months remained for people to prepare.[iii]
As a result of her support for Bates' date setting, her husband James stopped
publishing her visions in the "Review" in 1851, a hiatus that lasted until Uriah
Smith took over as editor. It was only after the failure of the 1851 date that
the founders began to seriously consider the ideas of Hiram Edson, and they
gradually became integral to Adventist dogma. Unfortunately, this also brought
with it the heresy of perfectionism. This is because Jesus cannot simply be
left in the Holy of Holies, he must return for his followers. Part of the idea
of the Investigative Judgment is that Jesus' ministry in the sanctuary is
intercessory and therefore his followers will need to be without an intercessor
between the time he leaves the sanctuary and his arrival and their
transformation. The reasoning therefore is that Jesus' followers must become
perfect before he arrives to stand without an intercessor during that vulnerable
time. This is an example of one error necessitating another and then another
until everything devolves into a house of cards should the first error ever be
challenged. In a sense the idea of perfectionism derived from an error, an imperfection,
and the attempt to deny that imperfection. Ironic, isn't it?
Another problem with the
Investigative Judgment commencing in 1844 is that some have realized the frailty
of the underlying 1844 date, a frailty highlighted by Desmond Ford, who was
viciously defrocked for daring to question the doctrine. To harmonize the
commencement of the Investigative Judgment with 1844, some have insisted that
the Hebrew verb in 9:24, נֶחְתַּ֥ךְ means "cut off" and therefore
must be referring to being severed from a larger time line, the closest
physically within the text of Daniel being the 2300 days of Daniel 8:14.
However the word properly means "decreed" or "determined"
as is correctly rendered in practically all translations, including the King
James Version. This is also the translation given in William Holladay's
authoritative work, "A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old
Testament." The realization that the Hebrew does not really support the idea
of a smaller timeline cut off from a larger one is devastating to the 1844
dogma, and as expected, brings into question the whole process that brought
about Seventh-day Adventism.
This is not to say that much
good has not been accomplished by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Its educational
and medical work has changed the lives of many for the better. Adventist
Development and Relief Agency has done amazing things for those suffering from
hunger and distress. It is understandable why no one would want to sacrifice
these great works by allowing them to be threatened by "nonbelievers." But
perpetuating errors is not the way to do it. Eventually the error will out,
even as it is already doing, and when the abscess is drained it will not only
leave an ugly pit, but it will become a scar upon the denomination that will
ever remind us and the rest of the world of the danger
of defending error. The longer the error is allowed to persist, the larger and
uglier the scar that remains when it is finally dealt with. It should have been
dealt with in the nineteenth century instead of passing it on from generation
to generation as a poisonous legacy to innocent generations to come. How much
different Seventh-day Adventism would be today if they had simply admitted they
made a mistake to get involved with date setting in the first place instead of
doubling down with the Investigative Judgment doctrine.
Had we been more honest from the
beginning, we would not now be dealing with a perfectionism heresy and its evil
offspring, Headship Theology. This would also have made the biblical Sabbath a
beacon of grace instead of an enforcement tool for legalism. Generations of
children would not have had to suffer an ecclessiastical frown for daring to go
swimming on a hot, summer day. And pastors would not have to devote their time
to parsing out for their flock what is and is not acceptable Sabbath behavior.
With less time teaching sacrifice, they would have more time for teaching
mercy.[iv]
As I said, the relevant passages
cited in our sabbath school quarterly were written within and to the millieu of
the Maccabean Revolt and were not written to save face for a small band of
ninetennth century date setters. I have written more about this in my book, but
it is too much to present in this brief commentary on the sabbath school
lesson. Hopefully, if nothing more, what I have presented here will at least
start some thinking about what is important for salvation and what is not.
While the church may be deeply concerned about whether we accept the 1844
Investigative Judgment doctrine, I doubt that one of the questions God will ask
the saved on that day is, "Did you believe that Investigative Judgment doctrine?"
Perhaps Jesus said it best in quoting Isaiah, "These people honor me with their
lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their
teachings are merely human rules." (Matthew 15:8-9) It is time we stopped
making such doctrines a matter of life and death.