I once had to explain the diversity to a member of the Uniting Church of Australia. It is no secret that there is a fair bit of diversity in the Adventist church about our relationship to the 2300-day prophecy. What I am saying is that often our arguments come across to other Christians as very egocentric. How then could one be so very wrong and the other so very right? My point is that our perception of certainty and rightness can in fact be skewed, particularly when we apply it to ourselves.Īm I saying the Seventh-day Adventist Church is wrong? No. Both the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Dutch Reform Church use the Bible to support their views and doctrines and both thought they were following the leading of God and indeed had a special mission from Him. In this book, Michener details the theology of the Dutch Reform Church in South Africa and how they used Scripture to justify their position on Apartheid. I have mentioned before that the book, "The Covenant" by James Michener gave me considerable pause in thinking about our special relationship God. We are the right church because we cracked the code - and furthermore it points to us. Part of the problem is that we use this prophecy to justify our position in history. Like Daniel, we try to interpret it with what we currently understand. Like Daniel, many Seventh-day Adventists struggle with the arithmetic involved in these timelines, particularly because the exercise ends in an event that we cannot see or indeed experience in the present.
These diagrams inevitably lead to 1844 and a consequent explanation of the "sanctuary" and the "Investigative Judgement". And I am sure that most of us have seen the timeline diagrams and had them explained to us numerous times. The 2300-day prophecy played a pivotal role in the development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and its doctrinal basis. Why is it significant that the death of Jesus, as revealed in Daniel 9:24-27, is directly linked to the judgment, in Daniel 8:14? What great truth is taught here by this link? In other words, Christ’s death and the judgment are inseparably linked.
The angel Gabriel took Daniel down the stream of time and revealed the truth about the coming Messiah, giving the exact dates of the beginning of His ministry and His cruel death, events that tied directly to the cleansing of the sanctuary, in Daniel 8:1-27. Gabriel amazes Daniel as he reveals an answer to his prayer much broader than he ever imagined. “O Daniel, I have now come forth to give you skill to understand“ ( Daniel 9:22, NKJV). The next chapter, Daniel 9:1-27, records the angel Gabriel coming to explain to Daniel the 2,300-day prophecy. That is, the vision of the 2,300 days (the rest of the vision had been already explained see Daniel 8:19-22). At the end of Daniel 8:1-27, Daniel fainted and exclaimed, “I was astonished by the vision, but no one understood it” ( Daniel 8:27, NKJV).
0 kommentar(er)
