It Has Always Been So

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 17, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 24.

It Has Always Been So

WHEN the attention of certain individuals is called to the fact that this world is becoming exceedingly corrupt, one of the most ready replies is that “things have always been this way.” If we go into particulars, and say that the wealth of the world is being concentrated into a very few hands, we are told that there has always been this grasping tendency for a few men to control the output of gold. If we speak of the vices that are afflicting society through the white slave traffic, etc., we are told that things have always been so. If we speak of the increase in murder, robberies, divorces, and things of this sort, we are again met with the handy expression that things have always been so.

Those who have studied the prophecies of the Bible know that this tendency to wickedness in this time is a definite fulfilment of the Scriptures; and furthermore, the second coming of Christ at no very distant day is that which is betokened. But perhaps there are not very many people who realize that one of the apostles, nearly two thousand years ago, foretold that the people would be saying in this time that “things have always been so.” His words are:

“This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: that ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 2 Peter 3:1-4.

The apostle desires that we should be mindful of the words which were spoken by the holy prophets, and then he wants us to know “that there shall come in the last days scoffers.” He wants us further to understand that these scoffers will walk “after their own lusts.” And he wishes us still further to see that they will sneer at the thought of the second advent, for in derision they will say, “Where is the promise of His coming?” And when the evidences are presented, then they will tell us that “since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” That is, the things that you are pointing to as evidences of the second coming of Christ “have always been so.” Now isn’t it interesting to know that the apostle Peter could tell these people what they were going to say, two thousand years before they said it?

But even granting that these conditions of vice and criminality have existed to a greater or less extent all through the world’s history, we ought to recognize this fact,—that all the historians are agreed in telling us that whenever any nation has become submerged in vices and crimes and idle luxuries, that nation has gone down. Such was the history of Babylon, of the Medes and Persians, of the Phenicians, of Greece and Rome, of Egypt, Assyria, and all the rest of the countries that are nothing more than a memory in the records of time. The prophecy makes it perfectly clear where the world is going. But if we would disregard the prophecy, and take the simple philosophy of history itself, we ought to be able to read the future that lies before this world.