Revelation’s Dark Morning Star Rising is a revised edition (©2023), that is written to a general Christian audience. The theme of the book focuses on two distinct faiths that have an Elijah-like mission and message for the world before the great and awful day of the Lord—Jesus’ Second Coming. As for the book’s content, it is broken into three main sections: The purpose and study of Bible prophecy, end-time events related to the books of Daniel and Revelation, and the Christian’s trial and triumph in the final days of earth’s history.
Chapter One: The Day of the Lord
“Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand.” Joel 2:1
One of the most glorious and heart-stirring events predicted throughout the Holy Scriptures is the great and awful day of the Lord or the second coming of Jesus Christ. For those watching and waiting for His promised return, this will be a great day of rejoicing: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isaiah 25:9). For the rest of the world, it will be a day of dread and terror as they call out to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” (Revelation 6:16-17).
The world today is no more prepared for Jesus’ promised second coming than it was for His first coming when He came in the flesh almost 2,000 years ago. “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:10-11). Like the wise Magi who carefully studied the sacred Scriptures and discerned the time of Christ’s first coming, God’s watchmen today continue to search the sacred Scriptures to discern the signs of the times.
As a fellow watchman, I believe that Bible prophecy in the light of history not only reveals to us that Jesus’ second coming is close at hand, but also sheds light on Satan’s counterfeits and end-time deceptions that will take place before His return. One such counterfeit to God’s final actions in bringing His people back to Himself (Revelation 18:1-4), I believe, will be Satan’s counterwork of false revivals among the Christian churches. If history is any indication of how this may happen, then we only need to look back at America’s “Second Great Awakening” which occurred in the early part of the nineteenth century. [1]
The 1820s and 1830s fostered many evangelical revivals, the organization of Bible and missionary societies, and the growth of various social and health reform movements. It was also during this time that new religious movements sprang up such as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon movement) and the Millerite “Adventist” movement, which were both founded in western New York State.
Many Americans saw these sweeping revivals, temperance movements, and expanding Bible and missionary societies as outward signs pointing to the dawning of a new era (millennium) of spiritual enlightenment and restoration. This expectation was later termed “millennial fever.” The postmillennialists were expecting Christ’s return at the end of this blissful millennium, whereas the premillennialists believed that Christ’s return would usher in the anticipated millennium.
Among the most noted millennial movements, the Millerite movement[2] got its name from a farmer turned preacher named William Miller. The firstborn of sixteen children, William, Jr., started life in the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1782. When he was four, his family moved to a farm just south of Lake Champlain in Low Hampton, New York, where he spent his adolescent years. Having only a rural education, Miller, through the goodwill of some of the learned men in his community, began to further his education by borrowing and reading as many books as he could get his hands on.
In 1803, at age 21, Miller married Lucy P. Smith and soon afterwards took up farming near her hometown of Poultney, Vermont. Having an insatiable appetite for knowledge, Miller often frequented Poultney’s public library, where he got to know and befriend some of the more learned men in the community. Though he had been brought up believing in God and the Bible, Miller’s spiritual beliefs were eventually reshaped by the influences of his more educated friends, who held to a deistic view of the world. Deism teaches that God created the world and its natural laws but plays no active role in its function or the personal welfare of mankind.
After his military service as a captain in the War of 1812, Miller relocated his family to Low Hampton, where he bought a piece of land, built a house, and was planning to live out the remainder of his days in the bliss of being an American farmer. Unbeknownst to him, Providence had a different direction for the remainder of his life. Before too long, Miller’s Low Hampton utopia began to falter and sway under his deistic views, which gave him no hope beyond the grave.
Annihilation was a cold and chilling thought, and accountability was sure destruction to all. The heavens were as brass over my head, and the earth as iron under my feet. Eternity—what was it? And death—why was it? The more I reasoned, the further I was from demonstration. The more I thought, the more scattered were my conclusions. I tried to stop thinking, but my thoughts would not be controlled. I was truly wretched, but did not understand the cause. I murmured and complained, but knew not of whom. I knew that there was a wrong, but knew not how or where to find the right. I mourned, but without hope.[3]
Remembering his miraculous survival without injury in the battle of Plattsburg, Miller began to wrestle with his former biblical beliefs in God. It was this unexplainable event on the battlefield that led William Miller’s soul to finally find rest in God’s assurance, peace, and personal love for him in His Son—the Savior, Jesus Christ.
After his conversion experience, Miller joined the Low Hampton Baptist church, yet he was hard pressed to fully accept the Bible as God’s revelation to man. Knowing that he had taunted others for entertaining a blind faith in the Bible, Miller removed from his mind any preconceived notions about the Bible and began to make a full and methodical study of the books of the Bible using as his guide a Bible concordance and the tested principle of allowing Scripture to be its own expositor. By 1818, almost two years into his studies, Miller had become convinced that the Word of God could be safely trusted. “I was thus satisfied that the Bible is a system of revealed truths, so clearly and simply given that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein.”[4]
His studies also led him to believe that the popular postmillennial view of a temporal millennium of peace upon the earth prior to Christ’s return was in direct violation of what the Scriptures plainly taught. Miller’s studies of the prophetic book of Daniel, especially Daniel’s timeline prophecies, led him to believe that Christ’s return was close at hand and that the earth (commonly thought of at the time as a sanctuary) was soon to be cleansed with holy fire by the consuming glory of Christ’s appearing. “Unto 2,300 days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (Daniel 8:14).
In August of 1831, some fifteen years after starting his Bible study, William Miller finally acted upon his distressing conviction to go and tell the world of its danger.
With the solemn conviction that such momentous events were predicted in the Scriptures to be fulfilled in so short a space of time, the question came home to me with mighty power regarding my duty to the world, in view of the evidence that had affected my own mind.[5]
Having halfheartedly entered into a covenant with God, Miller reasoned with God, “If I should have an invitation to speak publicly in any place, I will go and tell them what I find in the Bible about the Lord’s coming.”[6] Thinking that no invitation would ever come to a lowly farmer, he quickly felt that his burden had been lifted. Yet as Providence would have it, his covenant with the Lord was met that very same day with the invitation brought to his doorstep to come and share his biblical viewpoints on the second advent of Jesus Christ with the Dresden Baptist church.
Now left without excuse, Miller quickly found himself taking refuge in a nearby grove of trees, where he wrestled with God in prayer, asking to be released from his promise. In the end, William Miller surrendered his will to God and emerged from the maple grove with peace in his heart and a message to preach to anyone who would listen.
In the immediate years following his first invitation to preach, Miller and his Advent message were openly welcomed by many ministers in an effort to bring spiritual revival within their congregations as well as attract new converts. As the time grew closer to Miller’s predicted year of Christ’s coming (March 21, 1843, to March 21, 1844),[7] both his message and his Adventist followers increasingly became the subject of ridicule and prejudice among the clergy and parishioners of the various Protestant sects. Joseph Smith, the prophet and leader of the Mormon restoration movement, also publicly rejected Miller’s predictions: “Were I going to prophesy, I would say the end [of the world] would not come in 1844, 5, or 6, or in forty years. There are those of the rising generation who shall not taste death till Christ comes.”[8]
Many who were receptive to the Advent message found themselves either expelled from their church congregations or silenced by the threats of expulsion. In the years just prior to 1844, the Millerite believers moved out of the churches and into tent meetings (adapted from the Methodist camp meetings) as a means of evangelism and giving Bible studies to the masses. It is estimated that as many as 500,000 people attended the 125 Millerite tent meetings that were held from 1842 to 1844.
In March 1844, Joseph Smith again prophesied that Miller’s prediction of Christ’s coming in that same year would fail:
But I will take the responsibility upon myself to prophesy in the name of the Lord, that Christ will not come this year [1844], as Father Miller has prophesied, for we have seen the bow [rainbow]; and I also prophesy, in the name of the Lord, that Christ will not come in forty years; and if God ever spoke by my mouth, He will not come in that length of time. Brethren, when you go home, write this down, that it may be remembered.[9]
When the predicted time period of March 1843-44 passed by without Christ’s return, many, including Miller himself, found their high hopes dashed upon the rocks. For the Millerites who had not lost faith in the movement, August 12, 1844, marked a time of needed revival. On that day Millerite advocate Samuel S. Snow presented at the Exeter, New Hampshire, tent meeting his reasoning for Christ’s return to be on the Jewish Day of Atonement (the tenth day of the seventh month), which was reckoned to occur on October 22, 1844. Snow surmised that the cleansing of the sanctuary (thought to be the earth) at Christ’s coming was to be the antitype fulfillment to the type or symbolic cleansing of the ancient earthly sanctuary on the Day of Atonement or Day of Judgment for the Israelites.
Out of the Exeter tent meeting revival came forth the “midnight cry” proclaimed to the world: “Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him” (Matthew 25:6). As a result of this renewed urgency to prepare a people for the Lord’s coming, it is estimated that as many as 50,000 left their churches to join the Millerite movement. In the weeks prior to October 22, many left their jobs, put off the harvest of their crops, and set aside the mundane and leisure activities of life so as to prepare and warn as many people as possible before the Lord’s imminent return.
Miller himself, who had never set a specific date for Christ’s return, was at first opposed to this new movement, but in the weeks prior to October 22, 1844, he accepted it with the reservation that the specific day of October 22 might or might not be the day of the Lord’s glorious return to earth. In a letter written on October 6, 1844, to his friend and Adventist colleague Joshua Himes, he stated,
I see a glory in the seventh month which I never saw before. Although the Lord had shown me the typical bearing of the seventh month, one year and a half ago, yet I did not realize the force of the types. Now, blessed be the name of the Lord, I see a beauty, a harmony, and an agreement in the Scriptures, for which I have long prayed, but did not see until today. Thank the Lord, O my soul. Let Brother Snow, Brother Storrs, and others, be blessed for their instrumentality in opening my eyes. I am almost home. Glory! Glory! Glory! . . . If Christ does not come within 20 or 25 days, I shall feel twice the disappointment I did in the spring.[10]
For William Miller and the multitudes who had wholeheartedly believed in his message and who were caught up in the rapture of the Midnight Cry message, October 22, 1844, marked the day of most bitter disappointment when Jesus Christ did not come as had been anticipated. Those who had joined the movement mostly out of fear soon renounced their faith in the Second Advent movement and mocked those who still clung to Miller’s message. Some lost faith in religion altogether, whereas others sought to find an answer to their heartfelt disappointment.
Joseph Smith and the Mormon restoration movement never set a date, but Joseph did allude to Christ’s second coming around the years 1890-91, a prediction which history has long since dispelled.
It was the will of God that those who went to Zion, with a determination to lay down their lives, if necessary, should be ordained to the ministry, and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, or the coming of the Lord, which was nigh—even fifty-six years should wind up the scene.
—Address given February 14, 1835[11]
I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following: Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter. I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face. I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time.[12]
In the first statement, 56 years after 1835 would be 1891. As for Smith’s second statement, he was born on December 23, 1805; therefore, had he lived a full 85 years, his 85th birthday would have been on December 23, 1890. However, Joseph was not clear on whether this event would be the second coming, a personal appearance of Christ to him, or his death. Joseph mentions seeing the face of the Son of Man on at least two occasions in his life (Doctrine and Covenants 76:20-24; 110:2-10).
In looking back at the history of the Millerite movement, it is not hard to see that the spirit and fervor that attended the movement not only stirred up many hearts to anticipate Jesus’ return, but also brought ridicule and strong opposition from Protestant ministers and parishioners who had to openly defend nonbiblical teachings such as postmillennialism that they held in common with Roman Catholicism.[13] Will the same spirit of fervor and animosity attend the great and final spiritual awakening? For sure! As Christians, it is important to be watching with anticipation for Jesus’ coming, but at the same time, watchful to not fall prey to Satan’s snares—false revivals, signs and wonders, or even date-setting, which is bound to disappoint! Instead, let our blessed hope of His return be founded upon the Word of God and set within our heart.
Summary:
In the early nineteenth century, the United States of America was quickly growing and expanding westward. It was also during this time that America witnessed a spiritual awakening or what was later termed “the Second Great Awakening.” During this awakening, there were many spiritual revivals, new Bible and missionary societies, various social and health reform movements, and new religious movements such as the Mormon (Latter-day Saint) and the Millerite (Adventist) movements. For many, these outward signs pointed forward to a new Christian era (millennium) of spiritual enlightenment and restoration. This expectation was later termed “millennial fever”.
Both the Latter-day Saints and Seventh-day Adventists are premillennialists. Where they differ is where they anticipate spending the millennium with Jesus. Latter-day Saints believe they will reign with Jesus upon the earth for 1000 years (millennium) before the time of final judgment. Seventh-day Adventists believe the righteous (living and resurrected) will be gathered up to Jesus in the air and thereafter spend a millennium in heaven with Him. After the millennium, they will return with Jesus to the earth for the time of final judgment of the wicked.
[1] The first spiritual awakening in America occurred during the mid-eighteenth century in the then English-controlled colonies.
[2] The Millerites came out of the “Burned-Over District” of western central New York, an area where many spiritual revivals and reform movements took root, thus leaving the area exhausted or “burned over” of new converts.
[3] Sylvester Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller (Boston, MA: Joshua Himes, 1853), 65
[4] Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller, 70
[5] Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller, 81
[6] Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller, 97
[7] These dates marked the Jewish calendar year of 1843.
[8] Joseph Smith and George Albert Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, vol. 5 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1950), 33 https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/volume-5-chapter-17
[9] Smith, History of the Church, vol. 6, 254 https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/volume-6-chapter-10
[10] Jerome L. Clark, 1844: Religious Movements, vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Assoc., 1968), 48
[11]Smith, History of the Church, vol. 2, 182 https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/volume-2-chapter-13
[12] The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981), section 130:14-17; see an alternate and extended version in History of the Church, vol. 5, 336
[13] St. Augustine in his fifth-century book, The City of God, laid much of the framework for the ideology of postmillennialism in nineteenth-century America.