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THE LORD SPEAKS

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 19, 1877

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 49, No. 16.

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THE LORD SPEAKS.

By J. M. Gallemore

“How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?” Ex. 16: 28.
The above is the language of the Lord addressed to his chosen nation, after he had led them out of that Egyptian bondage under which they were held, and had commenced to feed them with that spiritual bread that came from heaven. The occasion of this language by the Lord to his people, all are familiar with. Having led them out of their state of bondage, and brought them where they could keep his commandments, he is now ready to test them, and this he does on the Sabbath commandment. See Ex. 16: 4, 5.
God is leading his people to-day through a wilderness of woe, trials, and troubles. Like the children of Israel, they are traveling to a better land. And now that the salvation of the Lord is near to be revealed; now that the people of God are beginning to look up, knowing that their redemption is near, knowing that the promised return of their absent Saviour is close at hand, and viewing as they do, by an eye of faith, the promised rich inheritance, is it at all strange that God is again applying his test, and proving his people, before they are permitted to enter upon the promised inheritance? His test is the same,—his holy Sabbath. He again speaks, and his language is the same: “How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?”
The fourth commandment, the one that enjoins God’s Sabbath, the one that bears the seal of God, the commandment that says the seventh day is the Sabbath (or rest) of the Lord God, is the only one that the professed people of God are particularly rebelling against, and for which they are offering a substitute. And now that they are from under the iron heel of that presuming and exacting power which most certainly invented this substitute (the papacy) and in a land where they can worship God without fear or molestation, God is surely testing them as he did his people of old. The testing time has come, though many of God’s people, who are dull of hearing, and hard to understand, have not yet realized it. But is it not time they were awakening, and opening their eyes to the light that is in this day being shed upon God’s revealed will?
May the veil of darkness be torn away, and may the light of truth shine in. We are living in an especially testing time. God’s Sabbath is his test. How many will stand the test we cannot tell. But we know that not all who came out of Egypt were found worthy to enter Canaan. We know that the narration of the journeying of the children of Israel to the promised land was given for our benefit, upon whom the ends of the world are come. The things that befell them are for our admonition. Will we profit by them?
May the Lord help us to do so. May he help us to keep his commandments; and may we keep them in spirit as well as in letter, a thing which we shall not be able to do until we are brought from under the bondage of sin, until we have become dead to sin and alive to Christ. When this is accomplished, then shall we be enabled to exclaim with the psalmist David, “I delight to do thy will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart.”
J. M. GALLEMORE.