To Correspondents

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 9, 1868

To Correspondents.

J. CHASE, of Wis.: We think the person to whom the word, “coming,” refers in 2 Thess. ii, 9, is Christ, and that the coming is his second advent, now near at hand. This event is to take place “after,” or, as the original word signifies in some other places, “during,” or “at the time of,” the working of Satan with all power. The commencement of this working, we see in modern Spiritualism.

T. P. McREYNOLDS, of Iowa: Your difficulty on Gen. vii, if we understand it, we think arises from the use of the word, “selfsame,” in verse 13: In the selfsame day entered Noah, &c., into the ark. Does this assert that the very day that Noah entered into the ark, the flood came? We think not. Verse 10 plainly states that it was seven days after Noah and the animals were duly installed in the ark, before the rain came. Verse 11 gives the day when the fountains of the great deep were broken up; and verse 12 carries us forward through the period during which the rain was descending upon the earth. In verse 13 we are again taken back; but to what point? Not necessarily, we think, to the day mentioned in verse 11; for the context requires that it should be referred back to verse 9. Hence there is no contradiction between verse 13, and the first part of the chapter.