A Great Deception Culminating in Our Day by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 28, 1911

A Great Deception Culminating in Our Day

By C. M. S.

God has warned us to beware of the deception-working power that is to be manifest in these last days. He has told us that Satan would be working with “all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish.” So we need not expect to see all his power of deceit manifest in the creation and promulgation of false religions and isms. Every snare that Satan can invent to destroy souls will be in good working order to catch man in this generation.

It is Satan’s plan to crush out of the heart of man all desire to know the truth of God, all love for his Word. He will do that by creating a love, or passion, for other things; and it is of this very snare of the evil one that Christ speaks in Matt. 13:22: “The care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word.” And the man out of whose heart the word has been choked or smothered is thrown into the very arms of Satan. God will not compel man to return; will not compel his love. There is no more dangerous condition for any person than that condition in which he has lost all love for God and God’s Word. There is nothing to hold him, and Satan can use him as he will.

“The care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches” are doing their work now as never before. The great money-mad and pleasure-mad world has no time to give to the study of God’s Word, and one by one its principles are being crowded out of the heart. When that snare has fully done its work, the victim has no desire to hear even the last and most solemn message that God has ever given to this world. With the deceitfulness of riches and the cares of this world Satan is steeling the hearts of men against the only message that can save them.

There is more money in circulation and in vaults to-day than at any time in the history of the world, and the desire for wealth has become an almost universal mania. The man of great wealth has a passport into the presence of royalty, dines at the king’s table, and enters the circles of the most exclusive aristocracy. In fact, so numerous have millionaires become within the last few years that they form an exclusive aristocracy of their own, and their sons and daughters are eligible to marriage in the families of nobility.

To-day the men whom the world considers great are the multimillionaires, the great captains of industry, the rulers of mighty corporations. The great nations are the wealthy ones; and wealth more than education, more than statesmanship, more than considerations of high morality, is guiding the ship of state in the nations that are considered great to-day. In Congress, while the question of the retention of the Philippines was being discussed, the one speech that was given most attention and given the widest circulation in the press was the speech which dwelt upon the commercial advantage to the United States in the retention of those islands. But “the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches,” the desire to be great among the nations, in the way that they consider great, have made possible the strange position taken and the strange work done by this country in the last days of its history. When the people of this country see, in its fullest extent, the result of that act, in the grip which it has given Catholicism upon the government, it is possible that then they may realize something of the meaning of the “deceitfulness of riches.”

But America serves only as an illustration in this matter. The other “great nations” have done their part in this same work, and are reaping and will continue to reap a similar harvest; and that spirit in the governments has been reproduced in the people themselves. It is a corrupting example, and hearts are being corrupted by it. In the service of these governments frauds and embezzlements are being unearthed. One writer says: “Our country is being corrupted, so that the financial sin, fraud, is becoming a national vice.” He then goes on to give instance after instance of great frauds that have been worked upon the people, principally upon people who were eager themselves to get rich quick. The press teems with the records of frauds, embezzlements, forgeries, burglaries, highway robberies, insurance murders, and petty theft.

Speaking of this same condition, the Herald of Gospel Liberty says: “Ministers sell their doctrines for gold. Many a preacher is silent as to truth, or doctrines disputed, lest his way to a better-paying pulpit may be hedged up by his utterances. One of the brutalizing effects of the acquisition of great wealth is seen in the effort that is being made for the establishment of an aristocracy

in our country, an aristocracy of wealth, the lowest form known. Religion under its influence becomes cant; education, piles of bricks with high salaries; charity, a fad; statesmanship, managing a machine and being a boss; business enterprise, getting control of competing corporations. Our country, instead of becoming more refined, is becoming coarser, so that lynchings and burnings at the stake are attended by women, and special trains to the lynchings are run by the railroad companies.”

All these things are true, sadly true; and the people are rushing on in the belief that we are acquiring greatness as we pile dollar upon dollar; as we consolidate our great institutions; as we invade other countries with our commerce; as we become the creditors of the world; and those who enter that race are striving for that kind of greatness as they strive for affluence and gold. The presence of that spirit in the heart is a great mist that shuts out the shining of the Sun of Righteousness; shuts out the love of God; shuts out the entrance of truth; shuts out salvation.

Babylon was nearest her fall when wealth and luxury were at their highest in that great empire. Her gardens are now a desert, and her wonderful walls are now level with the drifting sand. Persia reached the same pinnacle, and fell with the same fall, and her greatness has dwindled into a history and a name. Wealth and luxury shattered Greece in the heyday of her glory, and her temples and her gods have been strewn upon the ground. So with Rome and her palaces and her marble statues. They all tell us of the deceitfulness of riches. They tell us that wealth and luxury are not the certificates of greatness, but rather symbols of decay. It is the lapse of centuries alone that hides the ugly results of the worship of mammon. But with that same age-old deception Satan is to-day leading the world on to its ruin. It is not now the overthrow of a nation, but the overthrow of a world, in which the “deceitfulness of riches” is playing so loud a part. In that almost universal mania Satan hopes to hide from the world God’s last message of warning and so hold in his clutches the souls of the millions. Those who refuse to throw off the yoke of that bondage will go down with the money they have piled upon their souls; go down as victims of that working of deception.

But the Christian’s duty is plain. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” 1 John 2:15-17. C. M. S.