The False Predictions of Jehovah’s Witnesses

And originally they had a very specific idea of just how soon now with the Millerites, this is actually not the first time they’d gotten the date of Christ’s return wrong. Daniel Vinco, who is himself an Adventist pastor, points out that Miller had originally preached that sometime between March 21st, 1843 and March 21st, 1844, Christ would return that year comes and goes and Christ did not return. So then he recalculates and they say, okay, April 18th to 19th, and then eventually they settle on October 22nd, and of course that doesn’t happen and so this creates a lot of mockery from those who are around them who say, oh, even children are described as going up and saying, did you get your ticket to heaven? And just kind of making fun of them for this because they made this very specific prophecy. It was very obviously false, and then the people who invested everything into Christ return on October 22nd, 1844 didn’t know what to do.

And so the official website of the Seventh Day Adventist Church points to this moment as really critical for their history, they explained when Jesus didn’t return on October 22nd, 1844, the Millerites were perplexed. They were so sure God had been leading them. What had they missed in their Bible study? Now I’ll pause and say, well, they were trying to calculate the exact date of Christ’s return, which we’re told not to do, but they’re going to give a different answer. As they studied, they realized that William Miller’s calculation of the 2300 day prophecy, Daniel eight was accurate, but he’d been mistaken about the event that occurred. So in other words, yeah, the 2300 days doesn’t refer to the literal 2300 days in which the temple was desecrated before Hanukkah and the dedication of the temple rather the 2300 days is actually a prophecy of 2300 years. We don’t need to get into all of the details for why the Millerites thought this was going to end in 1844 at exactly this time, but they decide, okay, well clearly they have this reading of Daniel eight that would lead to Christ coming in glory in 1844, and that doesn’t happen.

Now they could say Maybe we’ve completely misread Daniel, but instead they say, no, no, the basic math is right. He must have come in glory in 1844, but not in a way that we saw. And so as the Seventh Day Adventist Church puts it, rather than Jesus returning to earth on October 22nd, 1844, he had begun cleansing the heavenly sanctuary or temple as described in Hebrews 9 23 to 28. Now, I want you to notice a couple things. Number one, in this view, heaven needs to be purified, which already is theologically wonky. I’m just going to say that right? That’s unusual as a belief amongst Christians. Number two, they’re turning this on a reading of Hebrews 9 23 to 28, which as we’re going to see is pretty problematic. Alan Gold White who is considered something of a prophets within seventh Adventism really doubles down on this. She publishes a book Christ in His Sanctuary, and this becomes a really pivotal part of Adventist theology.

Now, there’s several things wrong with this dating. Number one, if you read Hebrews nine, it all happens in the past tense. Now here’s the text beginning in Hebrews 9 23. Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things, meaning the earthly temple to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices in these. Now that’s not referring to heaven being literally impure, but rather that the earthly sacrifice is only a foreshadowing. Everything that happened in the old law and the Jewish sacrifices with animal sacrifice is prefiguring something greater. What is that something greater? Well, according to Hebrews nine, it’s Christ presenting the offering of his sacrifice to the Father. And so verse 24 says, for Christ has entered notice, this is past tense and Hebrews nine, although there’s some debate about the exact date, no one thinks it’s written after 1844, right?

This is clearly about 1800 years before 1844 that this is being written for Christ has entered past tense, not into a sanctuary, into a sanctuary made with hands a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. So what you have the Jewish high priest doing in the Old Testament is a prefigurement on earth of what Christ is doing in heaven right now, interceding for us. So there’s no room for that to start in 1844 that starts after the ascension in which Christ presents his sacrifice to the Father at the right hand of the Father in heaven. That’s very clearly done and over with in the first century means once for all, but I don’t mean done and over with in that sense. I mean he’s already there. He doesn’t show up there on October 22nd, 1844.

The second is the whole October 22nd, 1844 date is ridiculous. Vinco who I had mentioned before is an Adventist pastor acknowledges this. He says, the method by which Samuel Snow, Samuel Snow is a disciple of Miller who comes up with the exact date. The method by which snow and his allies arrived at October 22nd would nowadays be considered exegetical butchery by even traditional Adventist scholars, which may explain why there’ve been no robust scholarly effort in Adventism to revive snow’s predictive methodology. He builds a lot around, for instance, a Kwright Jewish calendar, which isn’t even the mainstream calendar used by Jews then or now. I mean, there’s a lot of things that you have to assume go just right to end up with October 22nd, and you have a speculative interpretation on top of a speculative interpretation, and unless you get all of those predictions right, then the math doesn’t math and you don’t end up with October 22nd, 1844.

And so even today it would be very hard to find modern. Well-read Adventists who would actually robustly defend October 22nd. So why do they continue to hold onto this date? Well, because they’re sort of tied to it as Vinco acknowledges. The only reason that they still have to affirm this date is because one of the early SDA leaders, Hiram Edson claimed to have had a vision on October 23rd, 1844. So he is mourning the fact that he’s invested everything in this millwright movement that turns out to be totally false. It’s a bust, and Miller even admits he got it wrong, but some of the more devoted, we’ll say millerites refuse to just admit, okay, yeah, this is clearly a bust. Instead they’re just like, well, maybe we did get it right and just had the wrong thing we were expecting. There’s this kind of famous line and Brideshead Revisited where they’re trying to quiz Rex who is a Protestant discerning the Catholic church, but only because he wants to get married and they ask him, what if the Pope said it was going to rain in the afternoon and then it was sunny to see if he understands papal infallibility and he doesn’t?

And he says, well, I guess we’d have to say it’s spiritually raining, but we’re all too sinful to see it. And I mean it’s clearly a joke in the book because that’s not how infallibility works, but that’s very much like what Edson comes up with. Christ did return but just spiritually in a way we couldn’t see that kind of cop out we’re going to see is not unique to the Seventh Day Adventist. Jehovah’s Witnesses are going to do a very similar thing when their predictions turn out to be false. And I mentioned this to say, okay, the only reason that they’re trying to do this is because look, he was obviously disappointed and then he claims to have had a vision where he saw Jesus going into the second apartment in heaven and he says, instead of our high priest coming out of the most holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to the earth, that he for the first time instead entered on that day, meaning October 22nd, 1844, the second apartment of that sanctuary.

So he went from into the holy of Holies in heaven. That’s the claim, that’s the description. And this one guy, Edson, is the source for this. This is totally impossible to verify because he just has this vision. It’s totally impossible to confirm if you try to do the math, it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work. So you only have one guy’s kind of witness to go on, and yet this forms a really core kind of foundational part of Seventh Day Adventist theology. What it even means to say that Christ has gone from the holy to the holy of Holies in heaven is not really spent. What are the theological implications for that? What does any of that look like or mean? What does that mean for us here on Earth? Any of that stuff doesn’t really check out. And so Vinco admits, he says, the defense of October 22nd would probably not be necessary if it were not for heron’s claiming Christ transition in the heavenly sanctuary that very day.

So Edson is really the hinge here. First it was Miller and Snow, now it’s Edson. It’s these people making these very specific claims about what was going to happen or what did happen in 1844, none of which by all appearances turned out to be true. As I say, this Seventh Day Adventist story has an interesting parallel in a Jehovah’s Witness story. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses are another of these movements that it’s kind of related as well to the Millerites, and there’s an important figure, I believe he’s the second leader of the Jehovah’s Witness’s judge Joseph Rutherford, who writes a book in 1920 and does a speaking tour in which he insists that millions now living will never die. Now in context, he’s doing biblical exegesis on Matthew 24. In Matthew 24, Jesus has what I think to most of our ears would be a discouragement of trying to get an exact timeline.

He says, you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, see that you’re not alarmed for this must take place, but the end is not yet for nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All this is, but the beginning of the sufferings. Now I read that. I think most people read that as saying, yeah, when you see bad stuff like wars happening, don’t jump to concluding. The second coming is about to happen because that’s just the beginning of the sufferings. That is not a sign that the end is just around the corner or if it is just around the corner. It’s been just around the corner for 2000 years. Wars and rumors of wars have been going on for the last two millennia in a basically uninterrupted way. So Jesus is trying, it seems to me, to affirm them that look, you’re going to see some tumultuous times and it’s easy in those tumultuous times to imagine that the sky is falling, that the world is ending and that Christ return is just around the corner.

I’ve heard it said that as Christians get older and start to near their own death, they tend to become more obsessed with the apocalypse, with the return of Christ when what they should be doing is preparing for their own death. The odds that Jesus is going to come to meet you on earth are way less than the odds that you are going to meet him by dying, right? So far it’s been a hundred percent to just about 0% depending on where you follow in the assumption of Mary. So all of these people predicting very confidently, well, the world is about to end. They’ve been wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong, and that seems what Jesus is warning us against in Matthew 24. But that’s not how Judge Rutherford reads it. He instead says, okay, but clearly the wars and rumors of wars are World War I.

So 1914 thus marked the beginning of the end of world for Jesus said, these are the beginning of the sorrows, so therefore that must mean this is the beginning of the end, and he explains that this is like the worst war ever. He had no idea that in a very short time there was going to be a worse one, but he goes on to say in his book, millions now living will never die. When does this world end? If we can definitely fix this period, then there’s an easy matter to determine when the divine promises with reference to life everlasting will be open to the world in general. Now, that should be an immediate red flag when someone thinks knowing the end of the world is an easy matter, run away because everyone who said that in the past has been wrong and not for lack of confidence.

We saw the millerites, although Miller at least had a little more humility. We’ve seen it with the Seventh Day Adventists and now we’re seeing it with Judge Rutherford and there’s plenty of other groups who’ve done the same thing. If you remember Harold camping with a group called Family Radio in our own lifetime, right? Maybe 15 years ago was saying very much the same thing, and none of this has ever come true, but Rutherford insists it is really easy. He says that the social order of things, the second world, meaning the world of the Gentiles legally ended in 1914. We don’t have to get into all the theology as to what that means to a Jehovah’s Witness. And since that time, the world has been and is passing away and he says the new order of things is coming to take its place, and he says within a definite period of time, the old order will be completely eradicated in the new order in full sway.

So what does that mean? He says, these things are going to take place from the time of the present generation, meaning folks who are alive in 1920 and therefore there are millions of people now living on earth who will see them to whom eternal life will be offered and who if they accepted upon the terms offered and obey those terms will never die. Very specific, very clear prophecy, not as specific as like given a particular date in 1844. Nevertheless, clearly seeing this generation, his own generation, coincidentally enough, these prophets always seem to prophe it’s going to happen in their own lifetime. So this generation won’t die. At least millions of them won’t. Rutherford, of course, did die, and in fact, nearly everyone from that time period is now dead. The best I could find is that there are may be 722,000 centenarians, meaning people who are a hundred or older, but even then that’s people who are a hundred.

It’s now 2024. So they’d be born four years after the prediction about those now living. So you certainly don’t have millions now living, and Christ hasn’t returned yet. So this prophecy was false. The Jehovah’s witnesses continue to defend this timeline. Really late in the game, even as late as 1985, they acknowledge time is running out on this prediction in the Watch Star magazine. They say, we also know that the 1914 generation is well into the evening of its existence, thus allowing only little time for this prophecy yet to be fulfilled. But they doubled down by saying, well, we also know for this, we have Jesus’s own promise that this generation will by no means pass away until all these things happen. Like their reading of Matthew in Revelation 17, in Mark 13 is that it had to be in that generation. Now, obviously all of that was false, but notice that they’re confidently staking upon Christ’s authority rather than their own saying, no, Jesus says it’s going to be this generation.

Well, they were wrong. They were declaring in Jesus’s name on his authority that it would happen within the generation of those alive in 1914, and it didn’t. 1914 was now 110 years ago. There are not millions of people we’re no longer in the evening. We’re past midnight, 10 years later in 1995, they sort of, him and Han try to give themselves a little more wiggle room by redefining what is meant by the term. This generation, and you see this in one of their official articles called The Time to Keep Away, excuse me, a time to keep awake. They say that this generation to Jesus just apparently refers to the peoples of Earth who see the sign of Christ’s presence, but failed them their way. So now generation no longer has a time span attached to it. It just means like the world. In contrast, they say, we as Jesus’ disciples refuse to be molded by the lifestyle of this generation.

In Marks they might know. It’s like, okay, well, you’ve just completely abandoned the timeline. You insisted Jesus was confirming by his own authority, but they insist, no, no, no, they’re not really doing that. So they say, does our more precise, ironic, of course, completely imprecise. Now, does our more precise viewpoint on this generation mean that Armageddon is further away than we had thought? Not at all. Though we at no time have known the day an hour Jehovah God has always known it and he does not change. Well, here’s the thing, that kind of false hood aside, we can clearly see that they made a prediction about the end of the world happening while the generation of 1914 was alive and it didn’t. They’re false prophets as are the millerites, as are the Seventh Day Adventists. So what do we do with those kind of false predictions?

So I want to end with two thoughts. Number one, Deuteronomy 18 gives this really simple test. If you say in your heart, how may we know the word, which the Lord has not spoken, when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken, the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him. In other words, when someone is out there making these predictions about the future, about the end of the world, whatever it is, and you see those predictions do not come true, ignore them. They’re false prophets, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh Day Adventist. You don’t need to seriously consider the rest of their theological claims because they’re demonstrably false prophets. More positively we can say Jesus gives us this admonition of that day, an hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but the Father only.

There’s a whole theological question about what he means by nor the Son. I’m going to avoid that and just say the point of this verse, the point of this reminder from our Lord is to watch out for anyone who tries to give you some timeline of Christ’s return. He talks about his return being like a thief in the night, and he’s going to come at a time when he’s not expected. Our job then is to remain vigilant. As I say, the likelihood that you or I are going to be around for Christ’s return is much lower than the likelihood that you or I are going to die unexpectedly and stand before Christ. So rather than trying to carefully calculate the day and hour, you should be prepared because not when your last day will be. You could die in a car accident tonight. You could die in your sleep.

You don’t know. And so you should be prepared at all times to stand before your maker. That’s the Christian calling, not to try to make this extremely specific methodology. If Christ wanted you to do that, he could have told you the month and year he didn’t do that, because that’s not what you are called to do. You are called to be ready. And so all of these false prophets, Rutherford, Miller, snow, Edson, the Harold Camping, the family radio guy, Ellen White, all of these people are now dead and are standing before God stop falling for false prophecy. Stop trying to figure out something God told you. He’s not going to tell you and just be prepared to meet him whenever he decides he wants to meet you. One-on-one for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.