Joseph Bates

A man named Thomas Motherwell Preble learned of the Sabbath from Wheeler, and he wrote a tract on the subject called Tract, Showing that the Seventh Day Should Be Observed as the Sabbath.

Somehow a retired sea captain named Joseph Bates who lived in Fairhaven, Massachusetts got hold of that tract and he was so moved by it that he traveled from his home 60 miles south of Boston to meet with Frederick Wheeler here in Washington, New Hampshire, a distance of at least 160 miles.

The men studied all night long and by the time they were finished, Joseph Bates was a Sabbath-keeping Adventist.

And he was committed.

While heading back from Washington, New Hampshire to his home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Bates was crossing a bridge near his home when a man named James Madison Monroe Hall called out to him.

If the father favors one son above the other, both sons leave damaged.

And Joseph enjoys wearing the coat of many colors because it makes him feel special, but he doesn't realize, and of course his father doesn't realize how damaging this is for Joseph and how difficult will be his future life because he will need to deal with this and how important it is when there is a level of shalom and reconciliation at the end in the family.

Sean?

It seems the rigors of dysfunction and individuality are ever more destructive and energy consuming than, and hear me right when I use this word, than communal living, than approaching our togetherness as a community that we care for.

Now, early Adventism, or let me put it this way, two out of three pioneers of Adventist movement came from the denomination or the group Christian Connection, which was a 19th century anti-Trinitarian restorationist movement.

So the idea, because the Trinity was introduced in later centuries where the church was already apostate, It's something that true Christians need to fight against.

And so Joseph Bates and James White came from that connection.

Interestingly enough, Ellen Harmon came from a Methodist tradition.

So I'd like to organize our conversation today around this dynamic development of Sabbath thinking within the Seventh-day Adventist community.

Famously, Joseph Bates embraced the seventh day Sabbath in 1845.

An acquaintance hailed him on the bridge between Fairhaven and New Bedford saying, what's the news Captain Bates? To which he responded, the news is the seventh day is the Sabbath and we ought to keep it.

This initial recognition of the seventh day came from the Seventh-day Baptists, not from a Jewish influence.

But you know what? We did not have any internet or texting to distract us.

And I find it difficult to quite recapture that same magic of Sabbath now that so many things, including going to Sabbath school sometimes, are tied to electronic devices.

So beginning with Joseph Bates, the two emphases with respect to Sabbath were the fact that it was the correct day, so correctness of the day, and a growing eschatological significance of that correctness, which was developing along with a new understanding of the great disappointment.

Could I get the two of you to comment on that?

It wasn't just James White who was anti-Trinitarian either.

So were Joseph Bates, J.N. Andrews, for whom the flagship Adventist seminary was named, R.F. Cottrell, and most of the founding Seventh-day Adventists.

Ellen White even wrote that God exalted Jesus to be equal with himself, and this exaltation is what triggered Lucifer's jealousy that yielded the great controversy between Christ and Satan.

the central paradigm that shapes Adventism.

Then last evening, we were having a family life weekend at our church.

We were looking at Adventist history and looking at the families of, last night I talked about Joseph Bates, one of the early Advent pioneers and talked about Ellen White, the vision that she had with great controversy and how the devil tried to destroy her.

This morning, I taught Sabbath school at our church.

This afternoon, we're doing this program for Hope Lives 365.