Objection 58: Seventh-day Adventists claim they are a prophetic movement raised up by God to preach God’s final message to the world before the Second Advent. At the same time, they admit that their movement grew out of Millerism, whose leaders taught that Christ would come in 1843, and then in 1844. Is God the leader of a movement that preached error, and suffered great disappointment and confusion as a result of that error?
If we had no record of God's dealings with man other than the Millerite episode we might be embarrassed by this question. But we have the Scriptural record.
When Jesus’ disciples went out to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand, both they and their hearers understood this to mean that Christ was about to set up His kingdom on earth. Christ did not rebuke the crowd in Jerusalem that cheered his triumphal entry, thinking he was a king coming to deliver them from the Romans. Mat. 21:9.
Matthew noted that Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem fulfilled a prophecy: “Tell you the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King comes unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass." Matt. 21:5; Zech. 9:9. But neither the multitude, who had this prophecy in mind, nor Jesus’ disciples, who were arguing about who should have the highest place in Christ’s kingdom, realized that the King riding in apparent triumph was soon to suffer the ignominy of the cross. It is true that Christ spoke to His disciples of His coming death, but it is equally true that the disciples did not really grasp what He meant.
How completely those disciples were disappointed! How completely disillusioned! Their distress was heightened by the fact that they would stand exposed before the world as the disciples and promoters of a deceiver. Those were their feelings when Jesus was lifted up on a cross instead of a throne.
Jesus clearly explained the Messianic prophecies to His disciples only in retrospect, only after they had suffered their own great disappointment!
It was on the road to Emmaus, after the crucifixion and resurrection, that Jesus began to explain to His disciples how His death fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies. The two disciples told their unrecognized Lord: “We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” Luke 24:21. And Christ responded: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Luke 24:25-27.
The Adventists who on October 22, 1844, had expected Christ to come to rule the world could not possibly have suffered greater disappointment than Jesus’ disciples when their Master was crucified. The disciples’ misinterpretation of the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament was at least as comprehensive as the Millerites’ misinterpretation of Daniel 8:14. If the reasoning of our critics is correct, and God cannot therefore be in our movement, then God could not be in the primitive Christian movement, either.
But of course it would be sacrilege, if not blasphemy, to say that God was not with the apostles who proclaimed the Gospel. We do not doubt for a moment the divine call of the apostles, nor the divine character of the message they preached.
When the disciples had preached, before Jesus’ crucifixion, that the kingdom of God was at hand, they were certainly preaching the true word of God, even though they did not properly understand what they preached. And after their disappointment, when they at last understood the Messianic prophecies, how great and Spirit-led was their movement.
Even so with Seventh-day Adventists: After 1844, when we came to understand the correct meaning of Daniel 8:14, and other great truths that had eluded the Millerites as a body, how great and Spirit-led was our movement! Other than primitive Christianity, history provides no other instance of a religious movement so definitely and directly led of God.
In view of this inspired history, how pointless is the objection before us?