The Gift of Prophecy (The Role of Ellen White in God’s Remnant Church)

Messenger to the remnant

William Foy (1818-1893), a black Freewill Baptist preacher, received at least three—possibly four—visions during the years 1842-1844. His first vision dealt with the reward of the righteous and the punishment of sinners, and the second with the coming judgment. At first he wasn’t willing to relate to others what had been shown to him, but eventually he delivered the messages over several months in various churches. Young Ellen Harmon heard him speak once, at Beethoven Hall in Portland, Maine. GP 116.2

In Foy’s third vision, given sometime during the summer of 1844, he saw a sequence of three platforms on which multitudes of people were gathered. The third platform extended to the gates of the Holy City. In his vision, he saw some people fall through the first and second platforms and disappear. These people, he was told, had apostatized. Foy stopped telling what he had been shown in this third vision—perhaps because he didn’t understand what it meant. ^* GP 116.3

Just before the time of the Great Disappointment in 1844, God selected another man as His spokesperson—a young Advent believer by the name of Hazen Foss, whose older brother had married Ellen Harmon’s older sister Mary. Foss was shown the experience of the Advent people and their ultimate triumph, a vision similar to Ellen White’s first one. After the Disappointment, he was bidden to relate to others what he had seen; but because of his discouragement that Christ hadn’t returned as expected, he refused to accept the commission. Then he was told the burden would “be given to one of the weakest of the Lord’s children, one who would faithfully relate what God would reveal.” ² When he changed his mind and wanted to relate what he had been shown, he could no longer remember the vision’s content. A few weeks after the Great Disappointment, in December of 1844, Ellen Harmon received her first vision; and for the next seventy years she related to the members of the fledgling Seventh-day Adventist Church what God showed her in about two thousand dreams and visions. GP 117.1