![]() Oh how sweet it will be to meet all the blood-washed throng in the city of our God. The sheep are now scattered, but thank God, they are about to be gathered to a good pasture. Oh how good it would be to meet with a few of like precious faith to exhort and comfort one another with words of holy cheer from the word of God. I know and feel my weakness, but I have laid hold upon the strong arm of Jehovah, and I can say today I know that my Redeemer liveth, and if He lives I shall live also. But thank God, Satan has not got the victory over me yet, and by the grace of God he never shall. I have had many trials of late discouragement at times has laid so fast hold upon me it seemed impossible to shake it off. My faith is still strong that that very same Jesus that ascended up into heaven will so come in like manner as He went up, and that very, very soon. You can find the source I got them from along with the story of how they were obtained HERE.Īs James is at work and sisters are from home thought I would employ myself in writing a line to you. I will provide a transcript of the letter and the photo copies in this blog post. Unfortunately the last few pages of the Elder Bates letter are still missing, but we do have the first three pages. This worked out for SDA until the 1980’s when the oldest letter sealed in the White Estate was discovered and distributed. They taught their laity that Ellen White hadn’t received the shut door in vision, she simply agreed with others in her day and then later corrected them by vision. Notice she is accepting that she held to the doctrine but is clarifying that it was only because the truth hadn’t been given to her in vision yet.įor many years this was the official position of the SDA Church. “This position was taken before my first vision was given me” “I did hold in common with the advent body that the door of mercy was then forever closed to the world.” Ellen White, Later on this page she rebukes it as being error, obviously due to the passage of time since 1844. 22 1847Įven later Ellen White defines the doctrine of the shut door that was held by the early Adventists. She then related her vision to the band, and about sixty confessed their error, and acknowledged their 7th month experience to be the work of God.” James White, A Word to the Little Flock, Pg. It was then that the Lord shew her in vision, the error into which she and the band in Portland had fallen. 1844, she and all the band in Portland, Maine, (where her parents then resided) had given up the midnight-cry, and shut door, as being in the past. “When she received her first vision, Dec. Her husband, James White recounts his experience of the visions Ellen White received in and around 1844 regarding the shut door. Notice above that Ellen White is teaching five years after the closing of the door that those converting to Christianity are simply false converts. I looked, but could not see it, for the time for their salvation is past. ![]() My accompanying angel bade me look for the travail of soul for sinners as used to be. Some appeared to have been really converted, so as to deceive God’s people, but if their hearts could be seen they would appear as black as ever. ![]() The reformations that were shown me were not reformations from error to truth, but from bad to worse, for those who professed a change of heart had only wrapped about them a religious garb, which covered up the iniquity of a wicked heart. I saw that the mysterious signs and wonders and false reformations would increase and spread. “I was shown that the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, relating to the shut door, could not be separated. We see this reflected in the writings of Ellen White even many years after 1844. They must have simply taken a measure of comfort in the idea or hope that they were secretly right all along and that those who had mocked them would be the ones who would truly suffer outside the “shut door”. ![]() ![]() They had nothing except each other and probably developed this view in the face of friends and family who had mocked them during the advent movement leading up to 1844. Many of these poor folks had sold their farms and possessions as a show of faith that the Lord was to return. In my opinion part of their reasoning for doing this was bitterness. To summarize, after Jesus did not return on Oct 22, 1844 many of those who had believed he would then changed their minds and confessed that the “door” to mercy and grace had shut. The Shut Door is a twisted doctrine that defined the first few years of the believers who eventually became Seventh-Day Adventists. ![]()
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