PROPHECY OR POLITICS—WHICH?
From 1120 B. C. to 800 B. C. a mighty empire was built up by the kings of Assyria. Many nations were overrun, plundered, and laid under tribute. Thus vast sums of treasure were brought into the coffers of the kings of Assyria and into the hands of the Assyrians, especially in the capital city—Nineveh. This long-continued flow of wealth carried in its train corresponding luxury. With luxury came love of ease. With luxury and love of ease inevitably came vice. And at last their wickedness became so great that it reached to heaven and deserved vengeance. The Lord sent Jonah to warn them of the coming destruction. “And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” And in that proud city,—the leading city of the world,—wicked as it was, and though the word came to the king upon the throne, Jonah was not accused of disturbing the peace; he was not put in the lock-up; he was not taken to the station-house—not even to “protect him from the mob;” he was not accused of inciting insurrection; he was not charged with being an enemy of the country. Instead of any such thing as that, “the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?” And nobody has ever charged that in this procedure Jonah was taking part in politics, nor that he was speaking against the government, nor that he was in any way disrespectful to the authorities. And if anybody had ever charged him with any of this, it would have been false; and by it the one making the charge would have shown that he did not know any distinction between religion and politics: and in that he would have shown that he did not know anything in reality of religion, but only politics. Later, Israel itself became a kingdom, and the leading world-power; and it went in the same course precisely as that which had been taken by Assyria. Again and again God sent to them his messengers the prophets, even “rising up early and sending them.” But, unlike Nineveh, the words were unheeded. When the iniquity had grown so great that it was about to culminate in the ruin of the nation, one prophet who bore the message of warning was put to death by the king and the people. And when the evil had grown so that the time had actually come when the ruin was to be wrought, and the forces by which that ruin was to be accomplished were around the capital city and actually besieging it, the prophet who was then in the city delivering daily the message of God to the people—that the city was doomed, and the only escape was to surrender to the besieging army—was accused of treason: he was charged with aiding and abetting the enemies of his country, especially doing this by weakening the hands of his own people, through his preaching that the people should not fight, but should surrender. Here is the record:— “Thus saith the Lord, He that remaineth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live; for he shall have his life for a prey, and shall live. Thus saith the Lord, This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s army, which shall take it.
“Therefore the princes said unto the king, We beseech thee, let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of this people, but the hurt. Then Zedekiah the king said, Behold he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do anything against you.”
“Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelach, that was in the court of the prison: and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.” Jer. 38: 2–6.
Yet all that Jeremiah had said was the truth: it was the message of God to the people. And in delivering that message he was not guilty of treason: he was not an aider and abetter of the enemy. He was, indeed, in the fullest sense of the word, seeking the welfare of that people, and not their hurt. And all those who listened to his words, and disregarded the pleas and charges of the politicians against him, found it to be well with them; while all those who disregarded the message that he gave, and the warnings that he urged, perished in the ruin that he proclaimed would certainly come upon them as the inevitable consequence of the course the nation was pursuing. In the same course of conquest, wealth, luxury, ease, and vice, even to the danger of ruin, Babylon followed. One day a man walked into the broad street of Babylon, and took a position on the bank of the Euphrates, which flowed through the midst of the city. And there, as the vast crowds of the busy and pleasure-loving city passed and repassed, he read, with a loud voice, a long arraignment of Babylon for her pride, her oppression, and her great wickedness; and also the doom of destruction that certainly would come. When he had read the whole account, he tied a stone to the scroll of what he had read, and plunged it into the river, and exclaimed, “Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her.” And in that proudest and wickedest of cities the man was not arrested nor charged with anarchy nor with any other disturbing practices or mischievous intent. But, unlike Nineveh, Babylon paid no attention to the warning. In a few years her doom came, in all that the man had read from the book. In the midst of a drunken and lascivious feast the judgment was written, and spoken, “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. . . . Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. . . . Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” And before the judgment was spoken, he who interpreted it said to the king,—citing the example of the king’s grandfather, how he was taught “till he knew that the most high God ruleth in the kingdom of men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will,—And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this; but hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; . . . and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified: then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written.” And instead of that man being punished as a disturber of the peace, or as an inciter to insurrection, or being charged with meddling in politics, he was rewarded with the highest honors a king could possibly bestow. The Lord Jesus himself came and lived among his own people, and sought to bring them to God. They rejected his counsel, and would not receive his message. He knew that national ruin could be the only result. And he told them so: woes that would reduce them to ruin and bring them even down to hell, he proclaimed against Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. He declared that Jerusalem should be compassed with armies; that she should be laid low, even in the dust, and her children within her; and that the temple, which was their pride and their trust, should be so ruined that not one stone would be left on another. He was charged with high treason. In the condemnation proceedings, his saying that the temple should be ruined was produced against him and perverted, by a false witness, into the charge that he had said that he would destroy the temple. Yet at the time, everybody knew, and ever since everybody has known, that the charge of high treason, or treason of any other kind, was false, as well as every other charge. And these charges of treason, although made by the chief religionists, were in reality made only by the chief politicians; which is to say that their religion was only politics. His disciples went everywhere, preaching the word of the gospel. Paul reasoned with the people out of the Scriptures, “opening and alleging, that Jesus must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ.” And in so doing he told them of the certain ruin of the Roman Empire; of the establishment of ten new kingdoms in its place; then the coming up of another, which would destroy three of the ten, and establish itself “the man of sin,” “the son of perdition,” “the mystery of iniquity;” and that in the time of this one and of the remaining seven of the ten, Christ would come the second time, and the world would end. And when Christianity had been spread throughout the Roman Empire, the Christians were always expecting the fall of Rome, and were talking of it, and were prepared for it when it came. It is true that the early Christians and the later Christians in the Roman Empire were charged with undermining the state; and, like Jesus, were condemned and put to death upon the charge of high treason. But everybody knows that all these things that the Christians said were coming on the Roman Empire were true; and that to be faithful to their trust in the world, and to their fellow men, the Christians must say these things. And God’s word stands to-day with instruction and warning to the nations of to-day, as truly as it ever did to Assyria, Babylon, Judea, and Rome. That word will be spoken to the nations of to-day as really as it ever was to those of old. The United States to-day is a subject of prophecy as really as was Babylon, Judea, or Rome; and in the same way and for the same reasons precisely. The United States is to-day in full career on a course that leads inevitably to ruin, as certainly as ever was Babylon, Judea, or Rome. This is distinctly a matter of prophecy: and it is not politics, but prophecy, to proclaim it as the message of God in the word of God. Fifteen years ago the very Spirit of Prophecy itself wrote of the apostasy of the United States from every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government. That was prophecy, and not politics, then; and it is prophecy, and not politics, now. For thirteen years it was prophecy, and not politics, to proclaim it; for the last two years it has been, and it now is, prophecy, and not politics, to proclaim that this was and is steadily being done; that now it is prophecy being actually turned into fact. And now what follows? This prophecy, even the Spirit of Prophecy, says:— When . . . our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan, and that the end is near.
As the approach of the Roman armies was a sign to the disciples of the impending destruction of Jerusalem, so may this apostasy be a sign to us that the limit of God’s forbearance is reached, that the measure of our nation’s iniquity is full, and that the angel of mercy is about to take her flight, never to return.
And as this was prophecy, and not politics, when, fifteen years ago, it was published, it is prophecy, and not politics, now, to-day, to proclaim it while it is steadily being turned into fact before the eyes of all people. It is true that now, as in the days of Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul, and the later Christians of the Roman Empire, the politicians, even among the professed people of God, will charge with “disrespect of authority,” “treason,” “meddling with politics,” etc., etc., those who proclaim that the prophecy is being fulfilled. Nevertheless the truth of God will be spoken, the prophecy will be proclaimed, the message will be given, the people will be warned; and those who listen and heed the warning will escape.10 Yet there is a striking contrast between the treatment of the messengers in Nineveh and Babylon, and of those in Judea and Rome and the United States. However, as in the United States is to be found the Image of the Beast, it can not be expected that the messengers and the message of God should be treated differently than they were treated in Rome. The world is not better than it was, nor is it getting better.