p. 10 | The One Great Issue

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 18, 1907

The One Great Issue

_Temptations to Side Issues—An Appeal_

[The writer of this article is one who has been long connected with this cause, and writes from the view-point of personal experience concerning the matters under consideration. His temptations to do the very things which he herein counsels against should give the more weight to the admonition.—Eds.]

WILL not the editor of our good REVIEW suffer a word from one who has given at least a veteran’s time of service in this cause, though not an old-time pioneer?

There are many evils in this world, many snares and traps and pitfalls which the devil has set for the unwary and sin-loving. Intemperance in eating and drinking is a fearfully blighting cause. Alcohol, absinthe, opium, and tobacco are destroying their millions, old and young, the last named especially among the young. The papacy in its mighty progress looms a gigantic evil. Unhealthful dress is a curse to womanhood, to mothers and future children. The grinding power of wealth, the tyranny of labor unions, the constant incentive to world-wide war and militarism, and other things which will occur to the reader’s mind, are all fearful evils, and work great ills to various classes.

There are many noble souls who see these evils, sometimes in legion, sometimes in pairs, sometimes singly; and their whole being cries out against them. Some of the stronger ones organize political parties. Hence we have the Prohibition party, the Socialist party. Some organize societies; therefore the anti-tobacco league, the hygienic dress reform league, the peace societies, the anti-vice propagandas, etc. Others start journals, and wage war with more or less ability against some one or more of these evils. We will not deny—we gladly acknowledge—that many of these earnest reformers do some good in temporary ways. They help in warning some, in bringing to others a moral uplift, but they bring few if any staying qualities into the body, political or social. Some of them are efficient on an outwardly moral plane for a time, but they are not sufficient to save.

Yet the constant plea is made to believers in the great threefold message to give their strength and influence to these things. And the temptation is strong, if we focus our mind upon the one evil and our heart upon its victims, to join in some one of these reform movements. Hence we find earnest Seventh-day Adventists throwing their whole energy into political prohibition, publishing papers, making speeches, and lamenting that their brethren can not see “the issue”

as they do. Hence we have Seventh-day Adventist societies to whom the evil of the money power eclipses all other evils. Hence we have anti-papal, anti-tobacco journals, and anti-other things, to meet these living issues; and precious time, talent, energy, and means are used, divided, lost, swallowed up in insufficient remedies. In a little time either the enterprise fails, or the ardent soul draws away from his brethren.

God sees all the ills of the world. He sums them all up in the one word sin, so small, yet so comprehensive, because the transgression of his all-comprehending law. All the evils are but the outcropping, the various manifestations of the many-shaped, many-sided, all-devouring sin. God sees not one, but all, in their true relation, in their true bearing, in their proper setting, in their awful evil.

The Great Remedy

God, too, has given us the true, all-comprehending, all-sufficient remedy, the great threefold message of the everlasting gospel. In that blessed message is the balm for every bruise, the healing for every hurt, the panacea for every ill. And that message demands the whole-hearted consecration of all the ability, the talents, the devotion, the time, the means, the undivided loyalty of every believer.

Such servants of God will herald the divine remedy. They will advocate true temperance reform, but will not tear it from its place in the message. They will warn against Roman encroachments, but it will be in the love of God from the prophetic word. They will show the great evils and futilities of great combinations and confederations of wealth and men, but from the “more sure word of prophecy.” They will endeavor to help the youth, the needy, the drunkard, but they will not wrench from the crowning message of God the jewels by which they would seek to win home the wanderer. They will not separate from his structure of truth the pillars by which they hope to stay the steps of the unsteady, or establish the young in the paths of integrity and uprightness.

The half-secular way may promise better results; the slice from the message may seem better if detached from the loaf, the effort to pose as an advocate of the particular reform may seem wiser, but, brother, it is not God’s way. The jewels torn from their settings lose beauty. The pillars broken from their support become powerless. Man gets the glory, God’s cause is the loser, because the Lord’s whole message for this time is discounted. We become judges of his wisdom, and choose a divided Christ.

No, brethren, let us hold to the message. Do we preach religious liberty? let it be known that God’s great message teaches it. And so with every other reform. We ought to look upon them all as God sees them, in all their evil, the manifestations of sin, iniquity, unrighteousness; and the only thing which will meet sin is the great threefold message of God’s everlasting gospel with all it means. The problem of world-enflooding sin is the issue; God’s last all-comprehending message is the all-sufficient remedy in Christ Jesus.