THE APPEARING OF ELIJAH; THE “IMAGE OF THE BEAST”
C. W. Sadler of Connecticut asks for an understanding of the appearing of Elijah, foretold in prophecy; also an explanation of the “image of the beast.” I cannot tell “how long before the second coming of Christ Elijah will appear.” As M. C. Wilcox gives a clear exposition of this prophecy of Malachi 4:4-6, I shall quote him: “The prophecy of Malachi is of twofold application. One of these applications was met in John the Baptist. The angel said of John, in Luke 1:17, ‘He shall go before His [Christ’s] face in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to walk in the wisdom of the just; to make ready for the Lord a people prepared for Him.’ In Matthew 11:14, Jesus expressly says of John, ‘And if ye are willing to receive it, this is Elijah, that is to come.’ Yet John was not the actual Elijah, as he expressly tells us in John 1:21, but he was Elijah in the sense of the fulfillment of that prophecy at the first advent of our Lord.” “But that which was fulfilled in a single individual then, takes a great deal wider scope in the last days. One individual could go to the Jewish nation and bring before all the people of that nation God’s message concerning Christ’s first coming. But there is to go to the world a message concerning His second coming. (Revelation 14:6, 7.) No one man can bear that message to the world; and so Elijah and John the Baptist are types of the people whom the Lord calls to bear His last message to the world.” “Conditions in the world will be the same as Elijah and John the Baptist found. For instance, there was the strongest kind of union of church and state, contrary to God and His truth, in the days of Elijah. We have Jezebel, the corrupt, idolatrous, sun-worshiping queen, urging on Ahab to the persecution of the Lord’s people. We have, in the days of John the Baptist, Herod, influenced by Herodias, the wicked woman whom he had married. In Elijah’s day, we have the backsliding of Israel and their turning away from the true God to sun worship. So it was in the days of John the Baptist; God’s people had departed from Him, and were sunken in cold, dead formalism, making void the commandments of God by their traditions.” “Those are the conditions that exist to-day; and God is asking His faithful people to give to the world the great threefold message of Revelation 14:6-12. That message meets all the conditions that are in the world, and that message will go and is going with ‘the spirit and power of Elijah,’ just as John the Baptist went. Consequently the antitype of Elijah is not some man who may call himself Elijah; it is not vested in one individual, but in the whole people that will carry God’s message to the world.” “Another thought: the important thing is not the messenger, but the message. This has been true in all ages. The important thing was not Elijah—the mere man; it was the message from Jehovah which he bore to Ahab. John the Baptist, as a man, was not the important thing; and when the Jews asked him who he was, he declared, I am not this, and I am not that! but when they demanded who he was, he said, ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.’ The important thing was to be the voice of God. And so in the last message that shall go to the world, the important thing is the message, and not the persons that give it; but it will be given by an entire people, in the spirit and power of Elijah.”—Questions and Answers, vol. 2, pages 154-156. In the final stage of apostasy, just before the return of our Lord, there will be in the New World, according to Revelation 13:11ff., an oppressive union of church and state, similar to and an “image” of, the persecutional ecclesiastico-political system of the papacy in the Old World. This New World counterpart of the Old World apostasy is termed, prophetically, the “image of the beast.” [The subject is more fully treated in The Pope King Again, and Daniel and the Revelation, published at this office.—EDITORS.]