Ellen White’s Integrative Themes

The Third Angel’s Message And Adventist Mission

Revelation 14:6-12, with its description of the messages of the three angels, stands at the very heart of Seventh-day Adventist identity as Ellen White saw it. She held from the beginning of her ministry to its end nearly 71 years later that God had especially commissioned Adventism to preach the message of the third angel. EWIT 120.3

Catch the sense of mission in her words: “In a special sense Seventh-day Adventists have been set in the world as watchmen and light bearers. To them has been entrusted the last warning for a perishing world.... They have been given a work of the most solemn import—the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages. There is no other work of so great importance. They are to allow nothing else to absorb their attention. EWIT 120.4

“The most solemn truths ever entrusted to mortals have been given to us to proclaim to the world. The proclamation of these truths is to be our work. The world is to be warned, and God’s people are to be true to the trust committed to them.”—Testimonies for the Church 9:19 EWIT 120.5

Like the other Seventh-day Adventist leaders, Ellen White viewed the three angels’ messages as a “perfect chain of truth” (Early Writings, 256) that extended from the 1840s to the end of time. The first message (the hour of the arrival of God’s judgment), they concluded, had been initiated by the preaching of William Miller in the 1830s and 1840s, while the second (the fall of Babylon) began to be preached in 1843 when the Advent believers were being expelled from their churches for believing in the Bible doctrine of the premillennial Second Coming. EWIT 121.1

Those two messages were important, but they merely paved the way for the preaching of the third angel’s message. It is in the third message that Seventh-day Adventism found its commission and unique identity. Ellen White and the other Sabbatarian believers held that “when Christ entered the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary [in October 1844] to perform the closing work of the atonement, He committed to His servants the last message of mercy to be given to the world. Such is the warning of the third angel of Revelation 14. Immediately following its proclamation, the Son of man is seen by the prophet coming in glory to reap the harvest of the earth.”—The Story of Redemption, 379 EWIT 121.2

Ellen White repeatedly taught that “this [the message of the third angel] is the last message” for a world soon to be destroyed. “There are no more [messages] to follow, no more invitations of mercy to be given after this message shall have done its work. What a trust!”—Testimonies for the Church 5:206, 207 EWIT 121.3

Mrs. White taught that the preaching of the third angel’s message (along with the first two) would be worldwide. It is that firmly held belief, rooted in Revelation 14:6-12, that has literally driven the Seventh-day Adventist Church to the ends of the earth with its evangelistic message. EWIT 121.4

The third angel’s message, Ellen White declared, was not only to be global, but to draw out and test human beings. “The third angel’s message must do its work of separating from the churches a people who will take their stand on the platform of eternal truth.” It is a “life-and-death message” (Testimonies for the Church 6:61). Again, she penned, “the Lord has been pleased to give His people the third angel’s message as a testing message to bear to the world. John beholds a people distinct and separate from the world, who refuse to worship the beast or his image, who bear God’s sign, keeping holy His Sabbath-the seventh day.... Of them the apostle writes, ‘Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus’ [Revelation 14:12].”—Evangelism, 233 EWIT 121.5

Thus we find the perpetuity of the law of God and the restoration of the Biblical Sabbath at the heart of the Adventist understanding of the third angel’s message. Early Seventh-day Adventists had no problem seeing those elements in the third message. They were also quick to grasp the great controversy aspect of Revelation 13 and 14 that pitted those who had the mark of the beast against those who kept all of God’s commandments. EWIT 122.1

But what many failed to see in the third angel’s message was the meaning of “the faith of Jesus.” That is a point that Ellen White sought to clarify for her fellow church members at the 1888 General Conference session at Minneapolis. The faith of Jesus (which can be translated from the Greek as faith in Jesus), she emphasized, means “Jesus becoming our sin-bearer that He might become our sin-pardoning Saviour.... He came to our world and took our sins that we might take His righteousness. Faith in the ability of Christ to save us amply and fully and entirely is the faith of Jesus” (The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, 217). Thus she could say in another connection that “justification by faith.... is the third angel’s message in verity [truth].”—Selected Messages 1:372. EWIT 122.2

From Ellen White’s perspective, the third angel’s message combined law and gospel. As long as the Seventh-day Adventists overemphasized the law and the Sabbath to the detriment of the gospel of grace, they were not preaching the full third angel’s message. That was the denomination’s weakness before 1888. But beginning with 1888 and Adventism’s fuller understanding of the third angel’s message, Ellen White could claim that Adventists then had the full message and that “the loud cry of the third angel [had] begun in the revelation of the righteousness of Christ, the sin-pardoning Redeemer.”—Selected Messages 1:363. EWIT 122.3

The centrality of the third angel’s message with its imperative to worldwide mission stands at the very center of Ellen White’s thought as a foremost interpretive theme. And like the other interpretive, integrating themes, it networks with the other six. EWIT 122.4

Before we move away from the theme of the third angel, it should be pointed out that not only were Ellen White’s extensive writings on the law, Sabbath, righteousness by faith, the great controversy, and other topics directly related to the third message, but so were her voluminous comments on education, health, publishing, and the gospel ministry. EWIT 123.1

Adventist education was to train people to spread the third angel’s message. The health message (the right arm of the third angel; see Testimonies for the Church 1:486) was to provide people with better health so that they could more adequately preach the Advent message, and to lead others to the truth through the witness of Adventist health institutions. The publishing and ministerial programs were also to spread the last message to the world before the final harvest of Revelation 14:14-20. EWIT 123.2

The third angel’s message is also directly related to the final Ellen White theme that we will examine in this short overview—everyday Christian living and character development. EWIT 123.3