NO TIME TO SET | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, December 2, 1884

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 61, No. 48

NO TIME TO SET.

AFTER the angel of Revelation 10 has uttered his solemn oath that “time shall be no longer,” meaning prophetic time and bringing us to the close of all prophetic periods, all efforts to set definite time then are outside the Scriptures, and are simply time and labor wasted.

The position of S. D. Adventists is that we are far this side the utterance of that message. At the close of the longest and latest prophetic period, the 2300 days, in 1844, we believe the announcement of that mighty symbolic angel was made, and that we have no definite prophetic periods to be computed now, and no data from which to determine a definite period for any of the closing events of time.

Under these circumstances, it is not a little surprising to find some laboring under a seemingly resistless desire to fix some definite time for something. For instance, we have just received from a correspondent the following:—

“As in the yearly round of service in the earthly sanctuary one 360th part of that service was in the most holy, would it not appear reasonable that one 360th part of Christ’s ministration would be in the second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary?”

As our readers are well aware, this is not the first time this hypothesis has been suggested. But if the writer had thought a little further, he would have seen that that theory broke down of itself years ago. Thus, allowing that Christ commenced his ministry in the holy place at his ascension in A. D. 31, and entered the most holy at the close of the 2300 days in 1844, we have 1813 years for his ministry in the holy place. Now according to the theory suggested this was 359 parts of the 360 of which Christ’s entire ministry is to be composed. Dividing 1813 by 359 would therefore give us the remaining part, or the time for Christ to minister in the most holy place. But how much time does that give us?—A trifle over five years. According to this, therefore, Christ should have finished his work in the sanctuary above, before the year 1850.

There is another flaw in this argument. The actual work of atonement in the type did not occupy the entire tenth day of the seventh month. What proportion of the day it did occupy we do not know. Therefore, while we may say that Christ is now doing the antitypical work of atonement, there is no antitypical “day” to be assigned to it, and hence no data for any definite time in connection with this work.