Deceivers and Deceived by A. Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 11, 1873

Deceivers and Deceived.

By A. Smith

A PROPHET was once sent from Judah to Bethel, where Jeroboam, king of Israel, was offering sacrifices to Baal.

Having delivered his message of warning from the Lord, and having wrought miracles in attestation of its truthfulness, he was invited by the king to partake of the rites of hospitality at the palace.

But he would not; saying, “For so was it charged me by the word of the Lord, saying, ‘Eat no bread, nor drink water, nor turn again by the same way that thou camest.’”

But the sons of an old prophet at Bethel, having witnessed the above transaction, reported the case to their father, who, thereupon, immediately saddled his ass, and started in pursuit of the man of God.

He found him sitting under an oak, and invited him to go home with him and eat bread, claiming himself to be a prophet, and to speak by inspiration. The argument of the false prophet, added to his own natural hunger and thirst, induced the man of God to believe a lie, and, as the result, he lost his life. Now the man of God ought to have known that the Lord would not give commandment by one, and then by another nullify that commandment.

But those who keep the first day of the week for the Sabbath, fall into a greater error, for God did not intrust the giving of his law to any man, but wrote it with his own finger upon tables of stone. Is it likely, therefore, that any person or church would be authorized to abrogate or change that law? and could any one practically indorse such abrogation or change with impunity?

Some admit that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord; but plead in extenuation of guilt in its violation that many eminent men of God have lived and died in observance of the first day as the Sabbath. But such seem to forget that the advancing light of the “Reformation” did not at once dispel all the darkness of the middle ages, that had covered the earth as with a pall, shutting out the light of revelation; and that papal Rome was to tread down the truth to the ground, was to practice, and prosper, and think to change times and laws, which were to be given into his hands for a stated time, and that at the end of that time, we should certainly expect to see that power removed, and the truth of God emerging from its obscurity. The facts in the case meet the expectation.

The condition of those who in time past ignorantly substituted a strict observance of the first day in lieu of the Lord’s Sabbath, may be pertinently illustrated by the following anecdote:—

A father, on his way to his day’s labor, passed the home of his brother, with whose family he left his little son, with the instruction to remain until called for by him at night, on his return from work.

About the middle of the afternoon, a young man called and said that the father would not return as early as he expected, and had requested him to call for the boy and conduct him home. He succeeded in deceiving the whole family, and the boy, whom, as soon as he had him within his power, he beat unmercifully, telling him that the father had given no command to conduct him home. The father forgave his son because he sinned ignorantly, but held the deceiver accountable. A. SMITH.