EASILY SATISFIED | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 30, 1879

EASILY SATISFIED.

JOSEPH COOK, in his lecture on “Trades Unions,” published in the Independent of Jan. 16, 1879, refers to the prophecy of Daniel 2, as follows:—

“I open a book three thousand years old, and I read that the stone cut out of the mountain shall fill the whole earth. That prophecy has come to pass.”

The italics are our own. The prophecy states that the stone was to smite the image upon its feet, dashing it to atoms, the wind was to blow away the debris like the chaff, so that no place could be found for it, and then the stone was to become a great mountain and fill the whole earth. The interpretation given by Daniel was that in the days of the last earthly kingdoms the God of Heaven should set up a kingdom which should never pass away nor be left to other people, but, having broken in pieces and consumed all these earthly kingdoms, it should stand forever.

“That prophecy,” says Mr. Cook, “has come to pass”!! All earthly kingdoms, then, are destroyed! The saints of the Most High, as expressed in Dan. 7:18, 27, have taken the kingdom. We have reached that which is to last forever. Nothing better is to come.

Such is the teaching of Mr. Cook; and a Boston audience greets it with applause. Is he, are they, satisfied with the present condition of the world as the accomplishment and fulfillment of God’s best promises? Is there nothing better to come? Then how easily are they satisfied. It would be nothing to write prophecies for such people. Whatever might be written, all they would have to do would be to sit down complacently and say, That has come to pass; and it would be just as true of that as of this.

But we cannot be satisfied with any such view. Nothing will satisfy us but to have, according to the prophecy, all these worldly mis-governments come to an end; to have wickedness and oppression cease; to have the saints possess the kingdom; to have the righteous dead awake in their Saviour’s likeness; to have the meek inherit the earth; to have evil, pain, sickness, and death done away; to have the tears dried from every mourner’s eye; and to have the whole earth glow with more than Edenic life and loveliness and beauty, as the holy mountain of God.

When all this has come, as it must come to fulfil the prophecy, and as it will come, for God has said it, then in deed and in truth can it be said, “The book said that the stone cut out of the mountain should fill the whole earth. That prophecy has come to pass; and the book has kept its promise with the nations.”