I need to apologize to everyone. I delayed the Coming of the Lord. I'm sorry. It was those cursed earrings!
I am not exaggerating. My Sabbath School teacher warned me against them. I put them on anyway. It's all my fault.
Heaven was ready. The white horse was saddled. The angels were crying out, "get ready, get ready, get ready...time is almost finished." The only thing standing between humanity and eternal glory was a twelve-year-old SDA girl who wanted to wear her grandmother's silver studs to her sister's quinceañera. My lack of perfection was ruining everything. Later, my disobedience intensified. I snuck out on Saturday night to watch "Back to the Future" in a theater! Forgive me for delaying the Second Coming.
Yes, that's what I used to believe. My guilt-ridden soul believed that my behavior, my lack of perfection, was delaying Christ's return. I was groomed to believe this cockamamie idea: that the Second Coming of Christ is on hold until a few million Seventh-day Adventists get their act together. The idea deserves every bit of the mockery it is about to receive.
The Doctrine, for Those Who Mercifully Missed It
The teaching is simple. Jesus is not coming back until His people are ready. (By "His people" Adventism means itself. The rest of Christiandom is under "Satan's banner.") Ellen White put it this way in Christ's Object Lessons:
Christ is waiting with longing desire for the manifestation of himself in his church, when the character of Christ shall be perfectly reproduced in his people, then he will come to claim them as His own.1
Picture the scene. The Lord of Glory is peering down upon the earth to check if Adventists have gotten their act together, and He sees a church committee debating whether black pepper should be placed on tables next to the salt shakers at church potlucks. Everything could hinge on the decision they make.
The Blame Memo
Ellen White did not merely teach against jewelry, theaters, and black pepper. She blamed Adventist insubordination for delaying the return of Christ. In 1883 she explained that the delay was their own doing:
Had Adventists, after the great disappointment in 1844, held fast their faith and followed on unitedly in the opening providence of God, receiving the message of the third angel and in the power of the Holy Spirit proclaiming it to the world, they would have seen the salvation of God… and Christ would have come ere this to receive His people to their reward… It was not the will of God that the coming of Christ should be thus delayed.2
She says, Christ would have come. It was not the will of God that He be delayed. And the party responsible is a specific group of people who, in 1844, were mostly trying to figure out how to survive now that their farms were gone. So, four decades later, she places the blame not on herself for being a bad prophet. She blames the Adventist people for delaying Christ's return. Their sin? The vast majority of Millerite Adventists rejected her as a crackpot. If they had united under her guidance, they'd all be playing harps in heaven by now.
By 1903 she was even more specific. She told the General Conference:
I know that if the people of God had preserved a living connection with Him, if they had obeyed His word, they would today be in the heavenly Canaan.3
What a grotesque failure. The "people of God" (aka the SDA cult) didn't have a "living connection" with God and didn't obey His word (aka Ellen White's commands). And they say that we are under the banner of Satan? It has now been 123 years since she said it. When, if ever, are SDAs going to get their act together so Jesus can return?
Meanwhile, Everyone Else Is Stuck in the Lobby
Here is the part that should bother every Christian on earth.
Billions of Christians have prayed Come, Lord Jesus for two thousand years. Martyrs prayed it. Missionaries prayed it. The grandmother in my neighborhood who prayed it every night, in Spanish, over a pot of beans — seasoned with black pepper. According to this doctrine, God was listening the whole time, was entirely willing, but was waiting on a few million cult members to finish their homework.
And what, exactly, is on the homework list? Adventist teaching, assembled from the quotes above and about a century of sermons, includes:
Become perfect. Not improved. Not forgiven in Christ. Character "perfectly reproduced." Good enough to stand without an intercessor.
Finish the work. This means delivering the "third angel's message" (aka Sabbathkeeping and veganism) to the entire world. Which means the other Christians, the ones who have been praying for the Lord's return, have to be persuaded by Adventists to become Adventists, perfect Adventists, before their prayers will be heard. Think about that logistics chain. Non-Adventists are holding the door shut, and the SDA evangelism plan is to show up at our door with pamphlets explaining that our failure to listen to them is holding up Christ's return. What?
Obey every Testimony. All of them. Even the contradictory ones. Good luck.
Go vegan. Entirely. Forever. Before the Second Coming, so that you can be translated, so that you can eat the fruit of the tree of life, which presumably does not need black pepper.
Throw away the jewelry. Every ring, every pair of earrings, every little silver stud. And while you're at it, get rid of those photographs on your mantle.
If you're an Adventist and this strikes you as absurd, congratulations: your cognitive dissonance is dissipating.
The Annual Council Panic of 1973
Now, don't get me wrong, because I know a lot of Adventists are sincere. I once was. I sincerely thought my failures were delaying Christ's return. So did General Conference leaders in the fall of 1973. They held an Annual Council that went down in Adventist memory as a spiritual earthquake. Elder Robert Pierson, then president of the General Conference, later described it like this:
As leaders we recognized that as a church we had come far short of our Master's desires and expectations, and we searched our souls in an effort to discover what could be done to end our Saviour's delay and hasten the coming of Christ.4
I have no doubt Pierson was a sincere soul. He sounds like a man who lay awake at night worried that he had personally postponed the return of Christ, and that is exactly the point. I question the theology that made a sincere man lose sleep over whether his brief, lustful thought about the attractive woman he saw walking down the street earlier that day was holding up the end of the world. A year later he was asking his fellow leaders:
Did our wives, our husbands, our children, notice a change? Are you nearer God's ideal this year because you attended the Annual Council last year? … Are you kinder, more thoughtful now? Have you gained victory over impurity, over that temper, that unruly tongue of yours?4
Devastating. The second coming of the Son of God, in this framework, depends on whether the administrators of a denomination got kinder and more thoughtful to their spouses. It all hinges on this: Did they buy their spouse flowers on Valentine's Day? Oh wait, that would be a waste of money that could've gone into "finishing the work." Let me rephrase that: Did they buy their spouse the latest compilation of Ellen White's writings?
Insubordination
The 1973 Council published an "Earnest Appeal" on the front page of the Review. It reads like a performance review for the Second Coming:
Every member must recognize that he has a part in either hastening or delaying the coming of Christ… there are inconsistencies between the church's preaching and its practices, and to allow these inconsistencies to continue will automatically delay the completion of the church's mission and the coming of Christ… If we ignore or reject God's counsels, this may well be defined as an act of insubordination, which will affect our relation to the coming of the Lord.5
Insubordination. Against whom? Ellen White? The same Council's follow-up urged the faithful to "forsake the spirit of insubordination that too long has influenced individual and church decisions."6 Again, we're told Adventists are insubordinate. So, whose banner are these insubordinate people under?
SDA theologian Dennis Priebe, in his article "What Might Have Been," carried the logic to its endpoint:
Our repentance is not primarily for the sins of a hundred years ago, but because we today are continuing in the same sins of stubbornness and pride, and we are delaying God's plan even more. As of yet, we have not repented.7
SDAs are delaying God's plan. Even more. Their stubbornness and pride is delaying the return. When an SDA member reads this, imagine the load of guilt they have to bear for keeping Jesus away from the entire planet.
What the Bible Says About the Delay
The argument that Christ's return is delayed because a specific group has failed to achieve character perfection or completed its self-proclaimed mission to tell everyone about the Sabbath turns Biblical timing on its head. It replaces a sovereign, God-centered timeline with a human-centered performance metric. When Scripture addresses the timing of the end, it consistently anchors the schedule in the fixed authority of God, not human attainment.
First, Scripture explicitly states that the judgment and the return are set on a fixed divine calendar. In Acts 17:31, Paul declares that God "has set a day when he will judge the world with justice." A day that is already "set" by God is not a moving goalpost held hostage by human imperfection. Jesus reinforced this sovereign boundary in Acts 1:7 when asked about the restoration of the kingdom: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority." The timeline belongs exclusively to the Father's authority, not to human performance.
Second, redemptive history reveals that God operates according to His own predetermined schedule, not human readiness. Galatians 4:4 notes that Christ came the first time "when the set time had fully come." God did not wait for ancient Israel to achieve flawless character perfection or unanimity before sending His Son to Bethlehem. He acted at the exact moment planned from eternity. The prophet Habakkuk affirms this principle: "For the revelation awaits an appointed time... Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay" (Habakkuk 2:3). From God's perspective, there is no structural delay—only the unfolding of an appointed schedule.
Third, when the New Testament directly explains why the end has not yet arrived, it points to divine mercy, not human shortfall. In 2 Peter 3:9, Peter writes: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." Notice the focus. The cause of the wait is God's patient desire to gather lost sinners across the earth, not His frustration with a denomination's slow character development. The wait is driven by mercy toward the lost, not a compliance audit of the saved.
Finally, claiming that human character perfection or activity is the final key to unlocking the Second Coming creates a theological paradox. If human failure can delay Christ's return, then human effort can compel it. This effectively makes humanity, rather than God, the master of cosmic history. Yet Jesus stated plainly in Matthew 24:36 that no one knows the day or hour, "not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Grounding the timeline in human achievement subtly attempts to take the authority of that day out of the Father's hands and place it into our own.
Who Actually Needed a Delay?
So where did this idea of delay come from? Follow the timeline.
In 1856, at a conference in Battle Creek, Ellen White reported a vision about the people in the room. The angel, she said, told her:
Some food for worms, some subjects of the seven last plagues, some will be alive and remain upon the earth to be translated at the coming of Jesus.8
A careful reader will notice that one of those fates had a biological deadline: some of you will be alive when Jesus comes. Adults at that conference were born before the Civil War. By 1883, twenty-seven years later, the people in that room were dying off. The prophecy was approaching its expiration date, and the Lord had not appeared.
Look what happens next. In 1883 — the same year as the passage quoted above — she writes that the Lord has not failed, because "the promises and the threatenings of God are alike conditional."2 Then comes the diagnosis: it is not that the prophecy was wrong. It is that you did not do your part. The Lord would have come. It was not His will for Him to be delayed. You, the congregation, blew it.
That is not a discovery. It is a patch. It is the oldest trick in the failed-prophecy handbook: when the event does not happen, the prophet stays right and the audience becomes guilty. Every missed date gets converted into a moral failing in the pews. Heads, I'm a prophet. Tails, you're a sinner.
So here is my message to the denomination that has spent 182 years apologizing for the delay: you may believe that all of Bible prophecy orbits you. It does not. You may believe God's eternal timelines depend upon your attainment of perfection. They do not. Relax, you didn't screw up the Second Coming. You didn't delay the universe. You inherited a fake deadline set by a false prophet, and then you were taught to feel guilty for the fact that it did not happen. Christ is returning on his sovereign schedule and that has nothing to do with your performance.
