July 1, 1993 - 12:00pm - Clifford Goldstein

Ellen White’s The Great Controversy has epitomized the Adventist mission, message, and purpose unlike any work outside of Scripture itself. Yet today the book is an embarrassment. Look at this reference:

God’s word has given warning of the impending danger; let this be unheeded, and the Protestant world will learn what the purposes of Rome really are, only when it is too late to escape the snare… She is piling up her lofty and massive structures in the secret recesses of which her former persecutions will be repeated [GC, 581].

Who believes like this anymore? Her words sound like rightwing nineteenth-century fundamentalism. With few exceptions the only ones who hold these views are the ultra-right Protestant fringe, kooks who believe that blacks have the mark of Cain and Jews are children of the devil. Rampant anti-Catholicism hasn’t been part of Protestantism for decades, Words like Romanists, papists, and popery went out with the Edsel. Today, even the Ku Klux Klan, founded partially on anti-Catholicism, accepts Catholics as members, which means that Adventists print a book that sounds more bigoted than David Duke in his glory days as a Grand Dragon.

When Roman Catholics make up the largest percentage of senators and congressmen in Washington, D.C.; when Catholics are accepted in every aspect of American society; and when the pope is an honored guest at the White House—is this the time for Adventists to distribute a book saying that “every principle of the papacy that existed in past ages exists today. The doctrines devised in the darkest ages are still held… Her spirit is no less cruel and despotic now than when she crushed out human liberty and slew the saints of the Most High” [GC, 571]?

At a time when John Paul II, one of the world’s most respected men, has stated that “no human authority has the right to interfere with a person’s conscience” and that “a serious threat is posed by intolerance, which manifests itself in the denial of freedom of conscience to others,” Adventists sell, by the millions, a book warning that the Roman Church is a “most dangerous foe to civil and religious liberty” [GC, 566]

When The Great Controversy is displayed before the world, especially when the choice quotes are taken out of context, Adventists will look like bigots and buffoons. We’ve always warned about the shaking, and most think it will be over theology or persecution, but many Adventists will be embarrassed out of the message instead.

What’s the point? Why do these statements in The Great Controversy seem so outdated, so out of touch with reality, and so far removed from modern thought?

Because they have all come true!

If the majority of Protestants still looked at the Catholic church as they did when Ellen White wrote The Great Controversy, the book would be wrong, its predictions false. But because almost nobody holds such views anymore, the book is proven right.

The “embarrassment,” “bigotry,” and “obsolescence” of Ellen White’s words, far from discrediting them, validate them instead, The trends that make the book seem so outlandish actually confirm every page!

Indeed, The Great Controversy is more pertinent, relevant, and crucial now than when scribbled out by the wrinkled right hand of Sister White more than a century ago. Despite attempts by some to dismiss The Great Controversy as nothing but Ellen White’s “eschatological perspective of her time,” the political and religious trends of the past few years have reignited fire into its pages until they bum brighter now than at any time since A. T. Jones battled Sunday-law legislation in Congress.

If you have been reading, studying, seeking to understand the signs of the times, you should see how The Great Controversy has assumed unbelievable relevance. The collapse of Communism, the rise of the papacy, the New Right of the 1990’s, the conservative thrust of the Supreme Court, the guises of modem spiritualism, the political merging of Catholics and Protestants—these are the pieces of a puzzle reproducing the prophetic picture warned about in The Great Controversy.

How do these trends reflect The Great Controversy? What do they mean?

Despite ample opportunity to prepare for the final crisis, many Adventists will be driven away by the coming Great Controversy embarrassment. For others, those with a “love of the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:10), that which pushes out the unfaithful will draw the faithful closer to the One whose Spirit inspired The Great Controversy and whose blood has sealed its every page.

The Great Controversy will, no doubt, unleash a storm of persecution against us. Why? Because the dragon makes war against those who, among other things, have the “testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). And, as worldwide tends confirm more and more every day, that “testimony” is, indeed, “the Spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10).