The Visions of Mrs. E.G. White

OBJECTION 45. — SEVEN DAYS ASCENDING

“We all entered the cloud together, and were seven days ascending to the sea of glass.” Experience & Views, page 12. Yet Christ on the day of resurrection, ascended and returned in a part of a day. Here, says the objector, one vision teaches that it takes seven days to make the journey to the New Jerusalem, or fourteen days to go and return, and another vision teaches that Christ performed this fourteen days’ journey in less than one day. The two visions, he is very confident, cannot be harmonized. We reply, the vision does not say that it takes on every occasion seven days to ascend to the city. It only states that on one particular instance, when Christ takes up the redeemed hosts, this length of time, for what reason we know not, was occupied in the ascension. There is nothing in this to show that celestial beings, Christ and his angels, may not accomplish the distances in an instant. In Daniel’s prayer recorded in Daniel 9, which would occupy but a few moments in delivery down to the 20th verse, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and said that at the beginning of his supplications the commandment came forth, and he was then come to show him; that is, when he commenced to pray, Gabriel was ordered to go to him; and when he had prayed but a few minutes at longest, there stood Gabriel before him in fulfillment of his mission, having accomplished the distance from Heaven to earth, in the short time that it took Daniel to utter a few words of prayer! This objection is simply a silly quibble. We feel like the reader’s pardon for noticing it. We should not have done so, had it not been urged with ridiculous gravity as a proof that the visions are unreliable. VEGW 114.1