Untitled article by R. F. COTTRELL.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · July 23, 1867

DEATH-BED REPENTANCE.

By R. F. COTTRELL.

The Lord is merciful to all that call upon him in truth. When the evidences of God’s mercy and truth are caused to dawn upon the mind in the closing hours of life, as in the case of the penitent thief, the heart truly given, (and God knows the heart,) will not be rejected. But those who trust that God is so merciful, that they may, with the light of the plan of salvation beaming on them, go on in sin, disregarding their obligation to God and slighting his mercy, and at the very last, if perchance they may have time to say, Lord, remember me, or God be merciful to me a sinner, they will finally see the gates of the city of God thrown open to them, and hear the Redeemer’s voice, saying, Well done! are in the deepest deception possible. Supreme love of self has deceived them, and caused them to vainly trust that God has so great a respect for them that he will accept of the last end of a life spent in the service of self, sin and Satan, and crown them with saints and martyrs, who have spent their lives in the service of God and willingly yielded themselves a sacrifice in attestation of the truth.

God is merciful; and often when the sinner is brought down to the gates of death, and penitently begs for mercy, he grants him a new trial. He raises him to health and thus gives him an opportunity to prove his loyalty, and the sincerity and constancy of his love. Then if he “only do in health what he promised to do when he was sick,” it is well. He may hope that his conversion is genuine—that it will be acknowledged and approved at the court of heaven. But if he lightly esteem and disregard the vows that he made in the anguish of his soul; if he can knowingly and deliberately violate the solemn covenant he then entered into before God; he may know of a certainty that his heart is not right with God—that he is still “in the gall of bitterness, and the bond of iniquity;” and that his hope of salvation, if he indulges any, is deceptive and false, and utterly worthless, unless he can see his lost condition, repent and be converted to God.

It is not reasonable to suppose that he, who knowing the truth, deliberately chooses to spend his life in sin, and then, in the last extremity, offers himself to God, will be accepted and saved. No. If he hear his prayer at all, instead of accepting him in the moment of death, covering him with the “robe of Christ’s righteousness” of which some speak, he raises him up from the gates of death and gives him a chance to “wash” his robe and make it “white in the blood of the Lamb.” He gives him a lengthening out of probation; and if he prove his penitence genuine by words of reformation, fulfilling his vows and serving the Lord faithfully, in the end the Master will say, Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord. But if returning health finds him in his course of sin, as he was before, as it sometimes happens, his repentance is not only worthless, but his abuse of mercy will bring greater condemnation. “He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”

R. F. COTTRELL.