Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Transition From Present to Future Judgment

The Bible prophets often moved quickly from a description of an immediately present incident, such as a war, a plague, or a calamity of some sort, to a description of the last hours of earth’s history and the coming of Christ. In one sentence they may be speaking of the judgments of God upon the present inhabitants of the land, and in the next, the final judgments of God upon sinful men. They may speak of the “sinners in Zion”—men living at that very hour—only to follow immediately with a description of the cowering wicked at the final day. But we think that the sinners listening at the moment to the prophet’s dire words considered that he was continuing to describe them, which, in a sense, he was, for we shall all stand before God’s judgment bar. This divine unconcern for establishing any sharp division between the immediate and the ultimate that not infrequently reveals itself in the declarations of prophets is a striking feature of the Bible. EGWC 338.1

Devout theologians have explained this by saying that God did not vouchsafe to these prophets any revelation as to the time that was to elapse between the present event that they witnessed and the final day of vengeance to which their minds so repeatedly turned. Thus the discussion of an immediate judgment, such as hurricane, pestilence, or war, would present to their minds striking similarities to the final scenes that had been revealed to them of the judgment plagues and the destruction of the wicked. And thus they would merge the two in their descriptions. The result is not a deception upon the hearers but a solemn reminder that all earth’s present calamities are but harbingers of the ultimate destruction awaiting the ungodly. EGWC 338.2