Mistake Corrected

“While the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight a cry was heard, ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’” In the summer of 1844 the believers proclaimed this message in the very words of Scripture.LF 165.3

The event that led to this movement was the discovery that the decree of Artaxerxes to restore Jerusalem, which was the starting point for the 2,300 days, went into effect in the autumn of 457 B.C. and not at the beginning of the year, as had been believed. Starting the calculation from the autumn of 457, the 2,300 years end in the autumn of 1844. The Old Testament symbols also pointed to the autumn as the time when the “cleansing of the sanctuary” must take place.LF 165.4

The killing of the Passover lamb was a shadow of the death of Christ, a symbol fulfilled, not only in relation to the event, but also to the time. On the fourteenth day of the first Jewish month, the very day and month on which for centuries the Passover lamb had been killed, Christ instituted the Lord's Supper, the feast that was to commemorate His own death as “the Lamb of God.” That same night He was taken to be crucified and killed.LF 165.5

In the same way, the symbols that relate to the Second Advent must be fulfilled at the time indicated in the symbolic service. The cleansing of the sanctuary, or the Day of Atonement, happened on the tenth day of the seventh Jewish month. On that day the high priest, after making an atonement for all Israel and in this way removing their sins from the sanctuary, came out and blessed the people. So it was believed that Christ would appear to purify the earth by destroying sin and sinners and to bless His waiting people with immortality. The tenth day of the seventh month—the great Day of Atonement, the time of the cleansing of the sanctuary, which in 1844 fell on the twenty-second of October—was thought to be the day the Lord would come. The 2,300 days would end in the autumn, and the conclusion seemed irresistible.LF 165.6