Chronicled by the Recording Angel

While preaching a sermon titled “The Pre-Advent Judgment” at a camp meeting in Australia, I glimpsed a woman storm out when I quoted the following lines from The Great Controversy. “Every man’s work passes in review before God and is registered for faithfulness or unfaithfulness. Opposite each name in the books of heaven is entered with terrible exactness every wrong word, every selfish act, every unfulfilled duty, and every secret sin, with every artful dissembling. Heaven-sent warnings or reproofs neglected, wasted moments, unimproved opportunities, the influence exerted for good or for evil, with its far-reaching results, all are chronicled by the recording angel.”[1]

Left to themselves, these words could be very discouraging—precisely why they must be read, and understood, in the context of the gospel (otherwise I too would have done as that woman did).

To begin, Ellen White is saying nothing that Scripture hasn’t already said. You know: “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” (Matt. 12:36, KJV); or for God “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts” (1 Cor. 4:5, KJV); or “For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (Eccl. 12:14, KJV)—texts (along with others) that she quoted immediately before writing about the “recording angel.”

And God, so immanent and so close that He not only could give a pagan king a detailed dream but then tell Daniel in “a night vision” (Dan. 2:19) what that dream was and what it had meant—He doesn’t already know every one of our darkest, dirtiest secrets, and your “every artful dissembling”? Are you kidding?

How did we take a teaching dedicated to atonement—atonement!—and turn it into such a calamity that people flee from before it?

Sure, I’ve met pure souls who, at least from appearances, put me to shame. I’ve met saints who’d rather die than eat a fruit and vegetable together or let a crumb enter their mouth between meals. But does not the Bible say, “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10)? How could anyone be deemed “righteous” when every wrong move is marked? What saint could have any hope before such scrutiny?

None—which is why we need a Mediator in heaven, Jesus, who appears “in the presence of God for us” (Heb. 9:24), and who “is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25). Intercession for us now—and in the judgment, when we need Him the most. Otherwise what? We stand in our own righteousness, even though, with “terrible exactness,” every wrong deed is judged?

No wonder that later in The Great Controversy, when talking about the judgment, Ellen White says that Satan accuses God’s people, pointing to their “defects of character, the unlikeness to Christ. . . . Jesus does not excuse their sins, but shows their penitence and faith, and, claiming for them forgiveness, He lifts His wounded hands before the Father.” And, she writes, Jesus then clothes His “faithful ones with His own righteousness.”[2] Who else’s righteousness? Our own?

The key text is Daniel 8:14: “And he said to me, ‘For two thousand three hundred days; then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.’ ” First, the “sanctuary” is where the gospel, salvation by faith alone, was taught. Second, the sanctuary was “cleansed” on the Day of Atonement, and atonement is about what God does to save us, through the blood, because we cannot save ourselves. It is Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, not Yom HaMtizvot, Day of the Commandments.

How did we take a teaching dedicated to atonement—atonement!—and turn it into such a calamity that people flee from before it?

[1] Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1911), p. 482.

[2] Ibid., p. 484.