Holy Week | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 13, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 15.

“Holy Week”

From the earliest centuries, possibly from near the time of Constantine, there has been observed what is known as “holy week.” It is the week immediately preceding Easter Sunday. “Holy week,” as well as Lent and Easter Sunday itself, is an institution that has grown up within the papal church. The papal church believes that it is the one true church, and that all other religious bodies represent delusions and heresies. The papal church has been the great leader, in the Christian dispensation, in church-and-state religion. It has held that it was the one right and true church, and therefore was privileged to coerce the actions and the consciences of men by civil enactment.

During the Middle Ages, practically all the civil states were more or less under the dominance of the papal power, and did its bidding. But the Reformation produced the Protestant church. Protestantism taught the great lessons of freedom that are in the gospel. Protestantism taught the right of the individual to study and think for himself. It taught free salvation, and that the individual is responsible to God alone, and not to the church, for his faith and conduct. Protestantism did not ignore the church, for the church is one of the divinely appointed institutions, as the Bible plainly shows. But Protestantism gave the church its rightful place, and showed that God, through His Spirit and His word, was to lead the individual.

But Protestantism, as represented in the great masses of our churches, is shifting. It is drawing closer and closer to the papal power. They are becoming more and more blended into one spirit. Such incidents as the request of the “Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America” that “holy week” be observed, are very large straws that show the trend of the currents.

There are many people who are greatly alarmed about the growing influence of the papacy, and there is an abundance of ground for their anxieties. But equally alarming—yes, we might say, more alarming still—are the evidences which show that professed Protestantism is losing its bearings and is drifting mightily toward the papal church.

Those who are studying the prophecies of the Bible, know that just such a thing is coming. Indeed, we are on the eve of the realization of it. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Revelation, as well as other portions of the Book, show that a religious despotism will come at the end of time, as the climax of apostasy. It will exercise, even to the pronouncing of the death penalty, the fiercest despotic powers of oppression and religious intolerance.

The leaders of religious thought combined, in the time of Christ, to fulfill prophecy by crucifying the Master on a Roman cross. We can see their mistake, and denounce their bigotry and blindness. But the leaders of the religious world are to-day repeating history by departing from the simplicity of the gospel truth, and rejecting gospel power, while they unite in again fulfilling the prophecies that mark the great religious despotism which is formed just prior to the appearing of Christ in the clouds of heaven.

If ever there was a time when men needed to seek God for spiritual enlightenment and for divine guidance, that time is now. We should study the prophecies of His word, so that we may not be, as were many of the Jews of old, among the apostates that would overthrow the true work of Christ and God. Those who remain in such a position, must meet the doom into which the blindness they have selected will plunge them; but as individuals, we should stand in the light, and reap the reward of the righteous, rather than to go down in destruction.