Forces in Training by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Mar 9, 1911

Forces in Training

By C. M. S.

We are in a wonderful world. We see on every hand the operation of two mighty forces. One is continuously and persistently active in the production of light and life and beauty; the other just as continuously and persistently active in the production of darkness and death and decay.

We have no difficulty in accomplishing what the physicist calls the “resolution” of these forces; for they originate at the very extremes of creation; they have no fellowship the one with the other; and they meet only in conflict. We read that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” But that force which has opposed the purpose of the Almighty since before the earth was brought forth, and which smote the very Son of God himself, is spoken of by our Lord as the “power of darkness” and the “rulers of the darkness of this world.”

This conflict of forces that we see all about us from the death of a clover blossom to the death of the king of the mightiest nation of earth, is a conflict that is not circumscribed by the latitudes and longitudes of this world. It reaches from the humblest home of the human family right up to the throne of the Deity, and spreads blight or blessing, mildew or scented blossoms, hate or charity, misanthropy or philanthropy, loyalty or treason, on either side of its pathway.

One writer speaks of the conflict of these forces of good and evil in these words:—

What strange contrasts this earth of ours presents! Noonday and midnight are not more opposite than the scenes which are constantly passing before our eyes. Truth and falsehood walk side by side through our streets, and vice and virtue meet and pass every hour of the day. The hut of the starving stands in the shadow of the palace of the wealthy, and the carriage of Dives every day throws the dust of its glittering wheels over the tattered garments of Lazarus. Health and sickness lie down in the same apartment; joy and grief look out of the same window; hope and despair dwell under the same roof. The cry of the infant and the groan of the dying arise together from the same dwelling. The funeral procession treads close on the heels of the bridal party, and the tones of the lute and viol have scarcely died away before the requiem for the dead comes swelling after. O the beautiful and deformed, pure and corrupt, joy and sorrow, ecstasies and agonies, how strangely blended together on this our restless planet! O how good and evil, light and darkness, chase each other over the world!

We, in our day, have seen mighty forces arraying themselves for a last mighty conflict to decide the question of the supremacy of truth or falsehood, love or hatred, life or death. We have watched them from afar, and we are seeing them now close at hand, marshaled and mobilized for the culmination of the conflict which God foretold when he declared that the seed of the woman should “bruise the serpent’s head.” The purpose of the Almighty is being wrought out by the forces trained under the influence of the Holy Spirit; and the purpose of the adversary is progressing through forces trained under his supervision and direction.

Some of our college graduates are required in their final examinations to figure out the final direction of a group of forces moving upon a body from various individual directions; in other words, to find the “resultant,” the final direction, of the combined forces or of the body moved upon by them. The matter of their examination-standing depends upon their ability to find out what that “resultant” would be. We have spoken of the multifarious forces operating upon the human family for good or ill. The “resultant” of those forces thus operating spells the destiny of the redeemed and the certainty of the triumph of God’s purpose for his children. The forces of evil are many, and their unopposed influence and power would push us and our world over the precipice of eternal ruin. But that our God will not permit. “They that be with us are more than they that be with them.” Mighty angels are commissioned to aid those who have a set purpose to be “heirs of salvation.” “Ministering spirits” are they all. Against the confederated powers of evil are pitted the forces of heaven, the forces of our God; and concerning the “resultant” of the meeting of those forces, the inerrant Word of God has fully apprised us. For we read: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. . . . He must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. . . . And when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all.”

That speaks the accomplished purpose of Jehovah, the final result when the conflict of opposing forces has been decided for eternity. Intensity is indeed taking hold of all things earthly. A few days ago Theodore Roosevelt, in his lecture on “The World Movement” at the University of Berlin, said:—

The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole world the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring quickening the whole world movement of constantly accelerating velocity. In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill.

Notice his reference to “new forces,” to “forces for good and forces for evil everywhere evident,” and to his declaration that they are “acting with a hundred- or a thousandfold the intensity with which they acted in former ages.” The forces of evil, with their six thousand years of invention and experience, are focusing their powers upon the one great purpose of God and Christ, to defeat that purpose, and overturn the government of God. Six thousand years of plotting, six thousand years of ingenious deception, six thousand years of working with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, are focused upon the people of this generation. Is it not significant that even discerning men of the world, who know nothing of this message we hold so dear, are recognizing these conditions, and proclaiming them to the world? It is significant; and if they see them, shall we permit our eyes to be blinded to such facts and their significance?

But we are not dependent upon men of the world for such observations. One who speaks to us as the servant of God has told us of these things. She says:—

Every movement in the universe of heaven is to prepare the world for the great crisis.

Intensity is taking possession of every earthly element. While a new life is being diffused and is springing up from beneath and taking fast hold of all of Satan’s agencies, preparatory to the last great conflict and struggle, a new light and life and power is descending from on high, and taking possession of God’s people who are not dead, as many now are, in trespasses and sins. The people who will now see what is soon to come upon us by what is being transacted before us, will no longer trust in human inventions, and will feel that the Holy Spirit must be recognized, received, presented before the people, that they may contend for the glory of God, and work everywhere in the byways and highways of life, for the saving of the souls of their fellow men. The only Rock that is sure and steadfast is the Rock of Ages. Those only who build on this Rock are secure.—Special Testimonies (An Appeal

to Our Ministers and Conference Committees), page 39.

We hardly need to have our attention called to these things to recognize that what the servant of God has said concerning them is true. Every work of evil is intensified to-day. A force is laying hold upon the hearts of evil men that is making them a mighty force for wickedness; but in the power of God do the servants of God go in among them, rescuing here a brand and there a smoking branch to quench in them the consuming fires of evil, and make of them trees of righteousness to be planted in the gardens of God.

We can not even name all these various forces of evil in the space we have, to say nothing of commenting upon their ways of working, and the results they reap in the ruin of souls; but they are attacking the work of God all along the line and at every outpost.

A most insidious assault is being made upon the Word of God, where rests our faith, our hopes,—to destroy the faith of the Christian in that Book as the mouthpiece of the Almighty, and to sow through the entire world the seeds of doubt as to there being any Almighty, any Redeemer, any redemption, any Rock of refuge, any haven of rest for weary pilgrims and storm-tossed voyagers. And that campaign of blasting and blighting the buds of faith, and of grafting doubts upon the main branches of our trust, is not confined to the lecture halls of secularists and infidels. It has been established in the general curriculum of the public school system, almost from the kindergarten up, where the inventions of the geologist and the evolutionist are made to contradict the teachings of the Word of God from its first proposition,—the creation of the universe,—to its final declaration in reference to the return in glory of the Son of God to destroy a world of sin, and save a righteous remnant out of it.

That Genesis record the evolutionist utterly discards and repudiates. In the place of the fiat of the Almighty in the creation of man, the evolutionist puts a protoplasmic cell, a speck of jelly, to grow into a man through a succession of ages and a succession of impossible animal transformations; but he does not tell us who made the jelly, or put into it that marvelous principle of life, which no one but God himself can explain. At the door of that mystery even the evolutionist is compelled to pause in wonder and acknowledge defeat. The Word declares, “He spake, and it was: . . . he commanded, and it stood fast.” “Impossible,” say the evolutionist and the geologist; but, say they, out of a fire-mist in space a ball was formed; and as it revolved upon its own axis, it wound about its own core successive rings of earthy matter attracted to itself out of the dust in the sky. But we ask: “Who created the fire-mist? Who put the fire in the mist? Who set the ball revolving and speeding in its changeless orbit around its central sun? Whence came the dust in the sky?” He has no answer. Only God can answer, and he has done so in his Book.

The geologist tells us that the story of a universal flood is impossible; that it is a pure fabrication, or a greatly enlarged tradition of some local occurrence; and the mighty tracings of that tempest of waters upon the earth the geologist attributes to the slow action of glaciers. And yet in his search for material with which to prove his contention, he finds the buried victims of that very catastrophe in regions which could not have been their habitat. Their lifeless bodies, borne far from the tropical clime in which they lived, testify that his premise is untrue.

Likewise the scientist denies the possibility of any such miracle as the sun standing still at the command of Joshua, and the story of Jonah and the great fish is discredited by the scientist and the Higher Critic. The truth of the Holy Scriptures, the veracity of God himself, are made to depend upon the size of a whale’s throat and the ability of a man to hold his breath three days and nights. The absurdity of such doubtings ought to be apparent to any one who believes in the almighty power of God,—his ability to prepare what the Word says he did prepare, a “great fish,” to do his bidding; and his ability to preserve a man alive, with breath or without it, for any length of time he might choose.

It would not be so serious did these doubtings stop with the scientists, or even with the curricula of the public schools; but they do not. A worldly clergy has taken them up; and the pulpit, consecrated to the service and worship and teachings of God, is being to-day, in thousands of cases, prostituted to this propaganda of doubt, disbelief, and infidelity, while souls hungering for the truth of God are being fed upon such husks of death. So cunning has been the work of the deceiver that many good people to-day smile when you speak to them of these wonderful works of our Creator. The devil has succeeded in making them believe that these records of the doings of God are fabulous human creations.

But that these things are vital to the gospel, is shown in our Saviour’s attitude toward them. He utilized no fabrications on which to build the structure of the gospel; but he did indorse the record of the flood, and used it as a warning of the final destruction of the world. He did indorse the record of Jonah and the great fish, and showed Jonah’s experience to be a type of the resurrection of the dead, and a prefiguring of his own experience in the grave. If these records are to be consigned to the limbo of fabulous human creations, then the gospel goes with them, and with that goes the veracity of our divine Saviour. And when that is gone, all is gone, hope is lost, and we are lost.

If we deny the power of God in creation, we deny his power in recreation and regeneration also, and salvation is impossible; for there is no one able to accomplish it, no matter how much we desire it. But the apostle says: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation.” The psalmist prayed (and we pray with him), “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” Says the inspired apostle Paul: “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” And again: “Put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.” That work God promises to do for us; and because he is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, he is able to accomplish it, and will accomplish it if we will put ourselves into harmony with the process of his purpose. The forces of evil may fulminate against it; but in the face of the forces of our Almighty God, their disloyal and deceptive purposes shall come to naught. C. M. S.

(To be continued)