Scripture and Chronology

These and other scriptures clearly proved to Miller that the universal reign of peace and God's setting up His kingdom on the earth would come after Jesus’ second advent. Further, the condition of the world around Miller matched the prophetic description of the last days. He was forced to conclude that time was almost over for the earth as we know it.LF 136.5

“Another kind of evidence that vitally affected my mind,” he says, “was the chronology of the Scriptures.... I found that predicted events that had been fulfilled in the past often happened within a certain stated time.... Events ... that were once only a matter of prophecy, ... were fulfilled in harmony with the predictions of time.”^{2S. Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller, pages 74, 75.}LF 136.6

When he found time periods in the Bible that extended to the second coming of Christ, he could not avoid seeing them as the “preappointed times” (Acts 17:26), which God had shown to His servants. “Those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” The Lord declares that He “does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.” (Deuteronomy 29:29; Amos 3:7.) People who study God's Word may confidently expect to find the Bible clearly pointing out the greatest event in human history.LF 137.1

“I was fully convinced,” says Miller, “that all Scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable; that it ... was written as holy men were moved by the Holy Spirit, and it was written ‘for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.’ ... I therefore felt that in trying to understand what God in His mercy had seen fit to reveal to us, I had no right to ignore the prophetic periods.”^{3S. Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller, pages 74, 75.}LF 137.2

The prophecy that seemed to reveal the time of the Second Advent most clearly was Daniel 8:14: “For two thousand three hundred days; then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.” Making Scripture its own interpreter, Miller learned that a day in symbolic prophecy represents a year (see Appendix). He saw that the 2,300 prophetic days, or literal years, would extend far beyond the close of the Jewish era, and so it could not refer to the sanctuary of that time.LF 137.3

Miller accepted the widely held view that in the Christian age the earth is the “sanctuary,” so he thought that the cleansing of the sanctuary that Daniel 8:14 predicted represented the purifying of the earth by fire at the second coming of Christ. He concluded that if he could find the correct starting point for the 2,300 days, it would reveal the time of the Second Advent.LF 137.4