Exposing Adventism - Hermeneutics - Revelation 20 and the year-day principle

Seventh-day Adventists are quite emphatic about the importance of using the year-day principle to successful identify the Seventh-day Adventist Church as God's "remnant people".

They maintain that this principle is essential to "correctly" interpret the 70 weeks of Daniel 9, in order to "arrive" at 1844, thereby somehow "proving" that the Seventh-day Adventist Church arrived on the scene at just the right time (in spite of the fact that the SDA Church began in 1863, not 1844!)

Early Adventist leader, Uriah Smith, explains,

As we enter upon the study of the seventy weeks, or 490 days, it will be well to remind ourselves of the fact that in Scripture a day represents a year....But what is more conclusive than all else is the fact that the prophecies have actually been fulfilled on this principle - a demonstration of its correctness from which there is no appeal. This will be found in the prophecy of the seventy weeks throughout, and all the prophetic periods of Daniel 7 and 12, and Revelation 9, 12, and 13. Thus, the events of the seventy weeks, calculated in this rational way, furnish a key to the whole vision. (Uriah Smith, The Prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation, pp.204-205)