The Great Visions of Ellen G. White

A Significant Vision

In early 1847 the Whites accepted an invitation from the Stockbridge Howland family to come and live on the top floor of their spacious, well-constructed home. Topsham was some 35 miles north of their former residence at Gorham. It was here, on Sabbath, April 3, before a small group of assembled fellow Sabbathkeepers, that 19-year-old Ellen was given one of her most important visions. GVEGW 41.2

This vision is recognized as significant by the church today for at least three reasons: GVEGW 41.3

1. It repeated, and enlarged upon, the content of a vision given four weeks earlier, on March 6, in which the existence and reality of the heavenly sanctuary inside the New Jerusalem were revealed in major, substantive detail for the first time. ⁷ GVEGW 41.4

2. These two visions confirmed James and Ellen’s prior Bible study that the Saturday Sabbath was still binding upon New Testament Christians. They came six to seven months after the Whites had accepted and begun to observe this day. (The Whites did not keep the Sabbath because the visions told them to do so; the visions came after Bible study, serving only to confirm it—Seventh-day Adventists did not get their doctrines from the visions, but rather from hard, diligent Bible study and earnest prayer!) GVEGW 41.5

3. Ellen’s theological understanding was enlarged by these two visions when, for apparently the first time, she grasped the truth that the Sabbath has eschatological implications and significance. Now she tied it to the end-time “mark” of the “beast” of the third angel’s message of Revelation 14:9-11. (Joseph Bates had made the linkage a little earlier, and incorporated it into the second edition of Perpetual Sign, published in August 1846. ⁸) GVEGW 41.6