The Great Controversy Season 2 | Episode 20
There is one book that almost cost Ellen White her life,
and that book today is entitled the Great Controversy.
The origins of this book come to this rural area here,
just outside the town of Bowling Green in the state of Ohio.
Ellen and James White had been traveling across the state
visiting various families,
and they were in this area for the funeral of a young child.
The funeral took place on March the 14th, 1858
in the Lovett's Grove schoolhouse,
which would have been located just across the road from here.
During the funeral sermon,
Ellen White received a vision that lasted two hours.
Receiving a vision during the funeral of a grieving young family
is not the ideal timing,
but the truth that this vision would share would be vitally important to us today.
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The following day, James and Ellen were traveling home by train
and she relayed to him what she had seen
and they discussed plans for writing out the vision.
It was decided that when they reached home this would be her first work.
Yet on that train,
there was what one author has described as an unseen, unpaying passenger
who was determined that the world should never know the truth about himself,
that it [the book] should not get published and see the light of day.
Arriving in Jackson, Michigan, they went to the home of Dan Palmer
and as Ellen White was conversing with sister Palmer
she suffered a cold, strange sensation pass over her right side and heart.
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Those present earnestly prayed for her,
and with a partially restored strength
she was able to continue her journey here to Battle Creek.
Arriving back here in this house, she began to write, but it wasn't easy.
Initially, she only had enough strength to write barely one page
and then she had to rest for three days afterwards.
But as she continued to write and her strength increased,
she was able to progress and finish the book.
In June of that year, she received some light
as to what happened in Dan Palmer's home, and she wrote:
'I was shown in vision that in the attack at Jackson,
Satan had intended to take my life
in order to hinder the work that I was about to write:
but angels of God were sent to my rescue.'
The unseen, unpaying passenger on that train
did not want the world to know
that he had been an angel in heaven, that he had fallen into sin,
and that he was the cause of the misery in this world.
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The first published account of this vision would be this book right here,
the 1858 edition of Spiritual Gifts, Volume One.
This would later be enlarged
into the Spirit of Prophecy, Volumes One to Four,
and then eventually to what we have today,
a five-part series entitled the Conflict of the Ages,
of which the book Great Controversy is the last in the series.
The great controversy between Christ and Satan
would be a major theme in the writings of Ellen White,
and also the motif
which Seventh-day Adventists would understand as key to unlocking Scripture.
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This book, the one that almost cost Ellen White her life,
has changed lives all around the world
and is the one that we should seek to share as much as possible.
Ellen White herself said,
'The Great Controversy should be very widely circulated.
It contains the story of the past, the present, and the future.
In its outline of the closing scenes of this Earth's history,
it bears a powerful testimony in behalf of the truth.
I am more anxious to see a wide circulation for this book
than for any others that I have written,
for in the Great Controversy, the closing scenes of this world's history
are given more distinctly than in any of my other books.'
If you have never read the book the Great Controversy,
then I would invite you to do so;
and if you have, then pray and ask God for wisdom
on whom to share copy with.