Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.”
A second angel followed and said, “‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great,’ which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”
A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.” This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.
The first of these messages is a call to special urgency and attentiveness in worshipping God, because the second coming is near. This message is to be carried to everyone on earth. The second message is that faithful believers should separate themselves from the fallen churches who no longer follow God.
The third message requires more background in order to be understood. We start with Revelation 12:7-9:
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
The point we need to glean from these texts in order to understand the third angel’s message is that within Revelation Satan is referred to as “the dragon.” In order to understand the beast, its image, and its mark, we move forward to Revelation 13:1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 14-17:
The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. …The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast?
Who can wage war against it?” All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast… Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast… The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who
refused to worship the image to be killed. It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
Now we see that the beast is an entity which is empowered by the dragon (Satan). We also see that at the end of time all the world’s population will be divided into two groups: those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life and those who worship Satan’s instrument, the beast. The third angel’s message, then, is a warning of the consequences of choosing to follow Satan rather than God.
These three angels' messages are cumulative; each one is added to the one before it to be preached together until the second coming. The whole message which emerges is that we are to instruct the entire world to worship God and free themselves from “fallen” religious practices before the second coming, because at that time all those who have rejected God will be destroyed.
The articles quoted in Our Roots, Pt. 4 also referred to the scriptural explanation of the Great Disappointment. What was discovered by the pioneers of Adventism was that the Disappointment itself was actually predicted in Revelation 10:1, 2, 5-11:
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land… Then the angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised
his right hand to heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, “There will be no more delay! …the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.”
Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once
more: “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.”
So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but ‘in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’” I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.”
This experience of John the Revelator eating the scroll was symbolic of the events of the Disappointment. First, the timing is established by the angel’s announcement that the time had come for the mystery of God to be accomplished. The mystery of God is the redemption of the human race through the sacrifice of Christ, and its completion, or “accomplishment,” would be the final cleansing of the world from sin at the second coming. We are, then, dealing with the events which begin the processes of the second coming. Second, the scroll represents Scripture and the eating thereof represents intense study, or “ingestion,” of its contents. This took place when William Miller (and later the Millerites) became intensely interested in the prophetic messages of Scripture and studied them in such great detail. Third, the message they found there (which they believed to be an announcement of the imminent second coming) was a sweet message, like honey. But, fourth, when it didn’t turn out as they thought it became a very bitter thing to accept.
However, the experience doesn’t end there. After eating the scroll that was bitter in the stomach John the Revelator was told that he “must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.” In other words, the work of spreading the three angels’ messages didn’t end at the Great Disappointment. In fact, at the time of the disappointment the Millerites had only taken up the first two of the three messages. The Advent believers realized they still had a work to do. They had to take the three messages together to the entire world.
The obvious question that comes to mind after all this is, Why would God intend for His people to go through an experience like the Disappointment? The Disappointment separated the sincere believers from those who had joined the movement out of either excitement or fear. When preaching a message like the imminence of the second coming you are bound to attract, in addition to those who love the message because they love God, those who are in it just to be part of the big, happening thing and those who are just being good because they want to avoid eternal punishment. Only the true believers stuck with the message even after the Disappointment, and those were the people God needed to pull together into a usable organization. Having the insincere participants along would have impeded the effectiveness of the work.
That’s the short version of the explanations. We could go into a whole slew of additional details on this stuff, but as they aren’t essential to our primary topic of church organization we are going to stop here.
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