What do we know about the pioneers of the Advent faith? Many of them started of as young missionaries in the movement. They will be sealed among the 144,000 and come up in the special resurrection of Daniel 12:2 during the sixth plague.  We are to stand united with them on the sea of glass. They are our counsellors and brethren.

Revelation  14:12 Here is the patience of the saints: here [are] they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. 13 And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed [are] the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.

“Along the way there are people since the judgment hour commenced in 1848 who die.  They are blessed, they will see Jesus coming in the clouds after coming up in the special resurrection.  The work of the three angels is to identify these people.  The first, second and third angel and another angel.  Under this other angel, there are a people that are called to constitute the 144,000.

They are a people who have settled into the truth and their works follow them.  When Jesus comes, they will see Him coming.  They will be those who have died under the three angels messages who have been sealed but died in their process.” 

They are part of the 144,000 who we are called to stand upon the sea of glass with. They established the truth’s we hold today as historic Adventists.

The preachers of the 1800’s were singular. Adventists were regarded as singular. They were attacked by all the different schools of thought, but they stood very firm and notice what Sr White is writing in reference to unadulterated pure truth:

With the great work before us of enlightening the world, we who believe the truth should feel the necessity of thorough education in the practical branches of knowledge, and especially our need of an education in the truths of the Scriptures. Error of every character is now exalted as truth, {CE197.3}

Let Pioneers Identify Truth.–When the power of God testifies as to what is truth, that truth is to stand forever as the truth. No aftersuppositions, contrary to the light God has given are to be entertained. {CW 31.2}

In other words, what has firmly been put in place we aren’t to go back afterwards and examine and say maybe, is this 100% correct? It is an absolute that you can hang on to.

Men will arise with interpretations of Scripture which are to them truth, but which are not truth. The truth for this time, God has given us as a foundation for our faith. He Himself has taught us what is truth. One will arise, and still another, with new light which contradicts the light that God has given under the demonstration of His Holy Spirit. {CW 31.2}

A few are still alive who passed through the experience gained in the establishment of this truth. {CW31.3}

This statement was written in 1905. She says a few are still alive who have passed through the establishment of this truth.

God has graciously spared their lives to repeat and repeat till the close of their lives, the experience through which they passed even as did John the apostle till the very close of his life. And the standard-bearers who have fallen in death, are to speak through the reprinting of their writings. {CW 32.1}

We are to take the writings of those who have passed away under this platform of truth and they will continue to speak to us.

I am instructed that thus their voices are to be heard. They are to bear their testimony as to what constitutes the truth for this time. {CW 32.1}

We are not to receive the words of those who come with a message that contradicts the special points of our faith. They gather together a mass of Scripture, and pile it as proof around their asserted theories. This has been done over and over again during the past fifty years. And while the Scriptures are God’s word, and are to be respected, the application of them, if such application moves one pillar from the foundation that God has sustained these fifty years, is a great mistake. He who makes such an application knows not the wonderful demonstration of the Holy Spirit that gave power and force to the past messages that have come to the people of God.– Preach the Word, p. 5. (1905.) {CW 32.2}

In the book “Origin and History of Seventh Day Adventists”, there are many stories bout their experiences. Here are some photos and explanations of their early experiences.

William Farnsworth makes known his decision to keep the sabbath. His brother Cyrus also decides and Rachel Oakes weeps for joy.

After the disappointment of 1844 hiram Edson and his associates met for prayer. The next morning while he was crossing the cornfield, there opened to his understanding the meaning of the sanctuary service in heaven. He saw a picture in the sky of Jesus in the holy of holies.

In Paris Maine young Oswald and Marian Stowell after reading Prebles treatise on the seventh day sabbath. Here J N Andrews is returning the tract and promising to keep the sabbath also.

Adventists doctors including doctor Kellogg who invented Kellogg cornflakes.

  William Miller possessed strong mental powers, disciplined by thought and study; and he added to these the wisdom of heaven by connecting himself with the Source of wisdom. He was a man of sterling worth, who could not but command respect and esteem wherever integrity of character and moral excellence were valued. Uniting true kindness of heart with Christian humility and the power of self-control, he was attentive and affable to all, ready to listen to the opinions of others and to weigh their arguments. Without passion or excitement he tested all theories and doctrines by the word of God, and his sound reasoning and thorough knowledge of the Scriptures enabled him to refute error and expose falsehood.  {GC 335.2}

Let Pioneers Identify Truth.–When the power of God testifies as to what is truth, that truth is to stand forever as the truth. No aftersuppositions, contrary to the light God has given are to be entertained. {CW 31.2}

The Great Disappointment

PORT GIBSON, New York, is a little town on the Erie Canal, about midway between Syracuse and Buffalo, and some thirty miles east of Rochester. In the early history of the canal it was the main shipping point for a large terri-
tory that reached down to the Finger Lakes and up to Lake Ontario; but when the railroad came through, it declined. Nevertheless, in the 1840’s it still had extensive docking facilities for the freight boats, passenger packets, and combination freight and passenger line boats that plied the then narrow and shallow canal.

It was the post office for the little company of Advent believers, mostly farmers, who looked to Hiram Edson as their leader. He owned a good farm a mile south of town, and his house was commonly their meeting place. A close friend and associate of Edson’s was a physician, Dr. Franklin B. Hahn, who lived in Canandaigua, on the lake of the same name, about fifteen miles southwest of Port Gibson. Between them they provided a home for a young man who had engaged their sympathies as an orphan boy a few years before; his name, Owen R. L. Crosier. Now he was in his early twenties, and showing marked powers of mind as a student and budding writer.

During 1844 Edson and Hahn had published at Canandaigua, rather irregularly, a small sheet they named The Day Dawn. It was one of scores of Adventist papers which sporadically appeared in many cities as the mouthpieces of the Advent believers. Edson and Hahn prepared it themselves, and they invited Crosier to write for it: With what he produced they were well pleased, having regard more to the cogency of his reasoning than to the charm of his style. But the fashions of the day in literature and in homily ran to the discursive and lengthy.

This company of believers on the twenty-second day of October met at Hiram Edson’s to wait for Christ to appear in glory. With hymns of thanksgiving .and fervent expectation, with exhortation and review of evidences, they passed each hour in momentary hope that the Lord would come. Would it be in the morning? The frost of the dawn melted under the rising sun. Might it be at noon? The meridian was reached, and the sun began to decline. Surely the evening! But the shades of night fell lowering. Still there was hope: “For ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at mid- night, or at the cock crowing, or in the morning.”

But midnight passed. There was prayer, there was appre- hension, there were glistening eyes. The cock crowed; but, announcer of the coming day, he made no heraldry of the Advent. At last the morning broke; no more could they pretend the twenty-second day. That day was past. Christ had not come. In Hiram Edson’s farmhouse there was weeping, as in thou- sands of other meeting places on that day. They questioned one another: Had the Scriptures failed? Was there no reward of saints? Was there to be no judgment day? Was the Bible false? Could it be there was no God?

“Not so, brethren,” spoke Hiram Edson. “There is a God in heaven. He has made Himself known to us in blessing, in forgiving, in redeeming; and He will not fail us now. Some- time soon this mystery will be solved. We shall know what God’s purpose is, and this dark secret shall be made as plain as day.”

As the dawn came most of the believers slipped away to their now desolate homes. To those who remained, Hiram Edson said, “Let us go out to the barn and pray.” They went out and entered the almost empty granary; for the corn had not been husked, and yet stood in shocks in the fields. They entered and shut the door behind them. There in the crisp air of that late October morning they poured out their souls in anguished supplication that God would not desert them and their fellows in this hour of trial, nor hide from them His face and His design. They prayed until they felt the witness of the Spirit that their disappointment would be explained.

After breakfast Edson said to one who remained (some say it was Crosier),2″Let us go out to comfort the brethren with this assurance.” Perhaps because it was a short cut to their first destination, perhaps because they shunned the road, where they might meet mocking enemies, they struck back through the farm, crossing a field where Edson’s corn still stood in the shocks. About midway across the field Hiram Edson stopped as if a hand had been placed on his shoulder.

As he lifted his face to the skies, there flashed upon his understanding the meaning of the sanctuary in heaven. Recalling the arrange- ment of the Mosaic sanctuary, he saw it as a type of the sanctuary in heaven, and realized that as Christ was the minister of the heavenly sanctuary, His ministration would change in due course of time from the holy place to the most holy. He wrote of this occasion: “I saw distinctly and clearly that instead of our High Priest coming out of the most holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth on the tenth day of the seventh month, at the end of the 2300 days, He for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary; and that He had a work to per- form in the most holy before coming to this earth.”

His companion, not noticing his pause, had reached the other side of the field. At the fence he turned, and seeing Edson far behind, he called, “Brother Edson, what are you stopping for?” And Edson replied, “The Lord was answering our morning prayer.” Then, rejoining his friend, he told him of his conviction. They went on their way, discussing the subject, recalling what little study they had made of the sanctuary, and shaping up the Bible evidence of the revelation.

Without doubt Edson and his company had received the new view of the sanctuary, as being in heaven, which came with  the seventh-month movement. They were subscribers to some, at least, of the principal Advent publications, including probably Snow’s True Midnight Cry, which he issued when he thought the established periodicals were too slow in taking up his message. They were not far from Buffalo, which in the summer of 1844 was the eastern perimeter of the personal ministrations of Charles Fitch, who was also publishing in Cleveland a paper, The Second Advent of Christ. It was at Buffalo, but little more than a week before the disappointment, that Charles Fitch had laid down his life,’ the victim of his exhausting, selfless sacrifice in the cause of Christ. Edson and his friends were doubtless in great debt to Fitch, Snow, and others who had begun to study the sanctuary question and who had led in the great step forward of correctly identifying the sanctuary. With the background of this advanced position, the gap between the early Adventists’ understanding of the sanctuary and that revealed in Edson’s vision, which became the Seventh-day Adventist position, was lessened.

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