(See for the Scripture Basis the Bible Reading in this issue.)
The Moral Demand
Surely there is a demand for such a message. There is a demand for it morally. Despite the great fact that Christianity has spread over the world as it never has before, morality has not kept pace with it. We freely admit that there are many outward customs that have changed for the better; but the real inward morality, the vital principle that holds one from doing what conscience condemns as wrong, has been rapidly fading away, and more, perhaps, than in all other places in the world, in this country, where the greatest light of the gospel has shone.
Think of this,—that in the United States, from 1885 to 1912, inclusive, there were 202,679 murders and homicides, in a so-called Christian land! For the last ten years the annual average has been 8,818. No other civilized country shows any approach to the figures above given, says the Hon. Andrew D. White. The American Prison Association's Committee on Criminal Procedure declares that 10,000 homicides are committed in this country every year—more than the aggregate number for any ten civilized nations, exclusive of Russia.
One of the judges of Georgia, according to Josiah Strong’s new book “Our World,” “has declared from the bench that there are more homicides committed in that one state than in the whole British Empire, with its population of four hundred millions.” The same book cites a governor who defends lynch law; and when it was intimated to him that his state guaranteed to every man accused of crime a trial, he cried, “To hell with the constitution!” And this, said Dr. Strong, “was not said to a company of ‘lewd fellows of the baser sort,’ but to the House of Governors; and this teacher of anarchy goes unimpeached.” Again:
“A candidate for Congress asks for the suffrages of his fellow citizens explicitly on the ground that he stands on the platform of lynch law, which is treason to democracy. Think of it! A man asks to be elected to the highest law-making body of the land, on the ground of his contempt for law. A man could adopt such a political platform only in the belief that a majority of his constituents had a like contempt for law. And most atrocious of all, a clergyman prostitutes the pulpit to incite the people to mob violence, and later, from the same pulpit, justifies the appalling crime of which they have been guilty. What blasphemy, to add divine sanction to the violation of divine law! . . . And yet, so far as I know, that man could remain in the ministry unchallenged.”
One other quotation from this chapter on “Lawlessness and Legislation”:
“The annual report of the police commissioners of New York City informs us that during 1912, 18,556 criminals were let off under suspended sentences; that of these, 417 had been convicted of burglary, 548 of petty larceny, 346 of grand larceny, and 18 of rape, which in several of our cities is punishable by death or life imprisonment. We are further informed that the ‘judges restored to the proprietors of gambling houses [illegal institutions] 39 roulette wheels, 36 roulette tables, 16 faro tables, 36 crap tables, . . . 11 steel doors designed to defend the places against police raids, 67,000 poker chips, . . . and other paraphernalia necessary for gambling.’”
This is only one phase of the immorality that is sweeping over the world. Read in another column the article on “the great red plague,” and learn from that the awful tide of immorality that is sweeping men down to6destruction. Surely there is need of some message that will take hold of hearts and reform them.
A Theological Demand
There is a demand for it theologically, or doctrinally. The great Christian world is a perfect “Babylon” of creeds. God so denominates it, not because of its immorality, or its sinfulness, but because of the confusion that exists. Take the great Christian doctrines,—the virgin birth of Jesus, His deity, the vicarious atonement, the resurrection, are set aside by thousands of teachers. Look at the differences that exist concerning them. Take the teaching of the Word regarding the immutable law of God. It is openly taught that the law is not obligatory. What wonder that we see the lawlessness in human jurisdiction, when the law of the eternal God is set aside! Take the Sabbath day. To some there is no Sabbath. To others it is any seventh portion of time. To others it is a counterfeit Sabbath, of which the word of God knows nothing.
The great fact and hope in the resurrection of God’s children is set aside by the unscriptural doctrine of the immortality of the soul. There is no unity or harmony regarding the priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and His second coming is made to mean almost anything but a second personal, visible coming, which is promised over and over in the Scriptures of truth.
Granted that the world is striving after unity; granted that mighty effort is being put forth by men who stand at the head of the Federation of Churches, and other associations and organizations to unify the Christian church. But the sad fact is that in all this effort at union, union regarding the teaching of the Word is made secondary, or not even mentioned at all. It is avoided in every way; and the great effort at federation, or union, is regarding practical things in politics almost wholly, rather than the union which our Lord Jesus Christ prayed for—union in spirit, union in truth. All these remedies are demonstrating their ineffectiveness over and over.
Has God Forgotten?
Has He no message to meet these fearful conditions of the present time? He has pointed out the conditions. He has told us through the apostle Paul, in 2 Tim. 3:1-5, that in the last days there will be among even those who have the “form of godliness,” who profess the religion of Jesus Christ, not less than eighteen different sins,—the very sins that you expect to be developed in the world,—but that the power of God will be lacking. Has He forgotten the remedy? He has pointed out the disease over and over and over. He has told us that the primal cause of it all is sin, the transgression of His holy law. The various manifestations of wickedness that we see at the present time are all different manifestations of that awful thing spelled by the three simple letters s-i-n.
God had a remedy in the past when conditions were similar to what they are now. It is Jesus Himself who tells us that the condition of the last days will be as it was in the days of Noah; but God had a message for the days of Noah. True, the great mass of the world rejected His message, but it was potent nevertheless. Those who received it were saved, and the directions given in the message connected the world that then was with the world that now is, in the divinely protected ark and the divinely justified people who made passage in it. That message was a reform message. It called men back from the awful sins of the time to the One who was able to save from sin.
God had a message at the time of the exodus. He sent Moses His servant with a clear, definite message to Pharaoh the oppressor, and to the children of Israel the oppressed; and that message took them from the darkness of Egypt and its oppression to the light of the promised land and its freedom.
God had a message for the first advent. The dead formalism of the Pharisees and the Sadducees had crushed out all spiritual life in the chosen people. Immorality was at its height. Tradition had made void the word of God. Seven hundred years before, a message for that very time had been predicted. When the time came, John the Baptist bore the message, effective for that day; for all who accepted it, demonstrated its power in their own lives.
Every one of those messages was a TIME message. Noah proclaimed TIME in connection with his message, at the end of which that cosmos should come to an end. John the Baptist and our Lord Jesus Christ at the first advent preached that the TIME was fulfilled; and the very middle of the year itself was foretold by the prophet Daniel concerning our Lord’s death upon the cross and the time that His servants should turn to the Gentiles.
GOD HAS NOT FORGOTTEN; He has a Message for this time also. That Message is threefold in its giving, altho to us it is one Message; but it is a Message that bears a threefold significance. It is found in various scriptures, but more explicitly than anywhere else in the 14th chapter of Revelation, verses 6-14:
“And I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, having eternal good tidings to proclaim unto them that dwell on the earth, and unto every nation and tribe and tongue and people; and he saith with a great voice, Fear God, and give Him glory; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made the heaven and the earth and sea and fountains of waters.”
“And another, a second angel, followed, saying, Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, that hath made all the nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”
“And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a great voice, If any man worshipeth the beast and his image, and receiveth a mark on his forehead, or upon his hand, he also shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is prepared unmixed in the cup of His anger; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment goeth up forever and ever; and they have no rest day and night, they that worship the beast and his image, and whoso receiveth the mark of his name.”
“Here is the patience of the saints, they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. . . . And I saw, and behold, a white cloud; and on the cloud I saw one sitting like unto a son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.”
The first part of that Message presents before us God’s effective Message for all time, the gospel the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth. He desires to emphasize that point for those who live in the last days,—that it is not a new Message in the sense that it is different from all the messages which have been given before. It is not a Message which states a new method of serving God. It is not a Message which saves men in a mass, in contradistinction to the saving of the individual. It is the same gospel Message that was preached by Noah, by Moses, by John the Baptist, by Jesus Christ, by Paul. It is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,” but it has a point of emphasis in the last days,—nay, four points of emphasis, as given in the passage that is quoted. Like all the other messages
sages, it is a TIME Message. It is a time Message in the sense that it is a fulfilment of prophecy. It is a time Message in that it meets the needs of THIS day. “The hour of His judgment IS come,”—not that it will come, as predicted by Jesus and all the prophets before Him. The apostle Paul declared, in his preaching of the gospel, that God had appointed a day “in the which He WILL judge the world.” The same apostle reasoned before Felix of “judgment TO come.” But when this Message shall be delivered to the world, it will be preached that the hour of His judgment IS come; that it is court week in heaven; that all the records of all the past will be brought before that higher court, and decision will be rendered, so that when Christ comes, His people will not be raised from the dead, and then judged, and then made immortal; but that they shall be raised to immortality directly, by the voice of God (1 Cor. 15: 51-54); those that have part in that first resurrection shall be “accounted worthy,” according to the words of our Saviour (Luke 20: 35). Judgment has passed upon their cases before, and the Message which God is sending to the world is the Message of the gospel, with the added thought of the present judgment. Noah’s gospel message had the emphasis, for that time, of a coming deluge. Moses’ gospel message carried with it the deliverance from Egypt, according to the prophecy which God had given to Abraham. John the Baptist’s gospel message bore with it the emphasis, for that day, that the kingdom of God was to appear in the person of Jesus Christ. And the message of the apostles was that Christ had come and was raised from the dead, and was then seated as effectual High Priest at the right hand of the throne of God. And the Message which shall precede the second coming of our Lord is the Message that declares the hour of His judgment IS come, the ending of the two thousand three hundred years pointed out in Dan. 8: 14, which ended in 1844; and since that time, God’s Message has been going to the world, and men have been yielding to its mighty claims.
The Message emphasizes another point needed in these days,—“FEAR GOD.” “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The generation of to-day is fearing men. It is looking to men. Human philosophy is setting aside, in the minds of men, through the infidel teaching of those who ought to have taught better things, the divine philosophy of the gospel of Christ. Human science—so called—has set aside the knowledge of the Word. Men are looking to men rather than to God, and consequently are becoming weak. They are following men; and men are fallible, and men unregenerated by God are immoral, and consequently the world is drifting down in its immoral way to the great cataclysm of destruction. God would have strong men, men who do not fear the face of man, men who have so stood in God’s presence and have so by faith looked into God’s face that they fear but one Being in all the universe, and that is God; and the fear of Him is not the fear of punishment, but the fear so coupled with reverence that they will do His will above all things else.
The third thing that is emphasized, “GIVE GLORY TO HIM.” God is worthy of all glory, all praise. Men are glorifying self, glorifying their fellow men, lauding them to the skies, as tho they themselves were divine. From the human laudation, God calls men to the praise of Him from whom we receive all and must expect all.
The fourth point of emphasis is, “WORSHIP HIM.” That to which a man bows down daily, and to which he gives himself and his talents and his time and his strength, is the god which he worships. Sometimes it7is self; sometimes it is Mammon, the god of riches; sometimes it is Bacchus, the god of pleasure, or Venus, the goddess of lust. Sometimes it is one thing, and sometimes it is another, that the great mad world is following, the worship of all of which destroys soul and body, and gives no hope for the after eternity. There is one Being that is worthy to be worshiped, the great I AM, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the One whose holy law would keep men from sin and teach them the right way, and whose mighty gospel, received, would enable men to obey the law—nay, more, would write it in their hearts, so that they would love to obey it.
He who demands the worship is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and the Re-creator and the Regenerator of all those who would yield to Him, the One who has left us His own holy Sabbath as the token of His creatorship, the remembrancer of His almighty power, the covenant-sign that He is able to re-create, regenerate, and save, all those who will trust in Him. That is God’s Message. That Message received will save men, not only from past sins, but save men from sinning,
will make dishonest men honest, will take from the heart the hatred of murder, and place within the love of Christ, will change the lewd and bestial to those who love purity. It is able to save even to the uttermost all those who will accept it. It would tear men away from the creeds written by dead hands, or modified infidel-wise by modern science, to the simple word of God.
So has the Message taken hold of thousands of hearts in all parts of the world. To it have come those from every religious persuasion and no persuasion, from every belief and no belief, from every nation and tribe and tongue and people, just as far as it has gone on this inhabited earth; and it has brought them into union with God and union in His word. That is the great, positive part of God’s Message for this time. Prophetically, the Lord declared through Jeremiah, “We would have healed Babylon.” God loves His children wherever they are. He would call them out from the confusion to the unity of His blessed truth.
But if Rejected
To reject God’s message, in all the ages past, has meant loss, and if persisted in, loss of eternal life. It was to the antediluvians; it was to the Jews at the first advent. Can it be less than that at the second advent? The results of the rejection of that Message which has been sounding out through the world for the last sixty years, has been a moral fall, and this is announced in the second part of the Message,—this condition of confusion in the professed church of Christ,—“Babylon is fallen.” Instead of turning to the cool fountains of God from the Lebanon of His holiness, they have turned to broken cisterns of worldly fornication, to the mixture of error and truth which came in through the Dark Ages and subverted the word of God. In consequence of this, Babylon has fallen. It is recognized. We are not bringing it to condemn any churches, any bodies, any people. We are only voicing a sentiment that is taking hold of devoted, earnest, faithful hearts in all Christendom, that the great, high standards of Christianity held aloft a century ago are trailing in the dust, that men and women everywhere are drifting, drifting, away from God and light and hope and salvation.
What follows then? Just such will follow then as followed the rejection of the message at the first advent, the rejection of the message at the time of the Reformation. When God’s people lose power in departing from Him, the great tendency is not to turn from their backslidings, but to lay hold of some substitute. It was the saddest thing of all sad things that while the Jews themselves demanded freedom from every nation, and felt that they themselves were children of freedom because children of Abraham, and were never in bondage to any, they were even willing to stoop to that low conception of what freedom was in order that they might put the Messiah to death, and declare, “We have no king but Cæsar.” When the Reformation lost its power, it turned from the word of God, from Jesus Christ as King, and connected with the state. And out of it have grown the formal churches that have been no strength to Christendom. That is what the church is doing to-day.
“If the Lord be God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow him.” I Kings 18:21. The two altars, or the Elijah call to God's people to-day. Taking God's Census. A name in the “book of life” is more than aught that earth can give. “For I have much people in this city.” Acts 18:10.
We admit that there are earnest, godly, devoted men in these movements for church federation, in these movements for Sunday laws, in these movements for the enforcement of “civic righteousness,” human schemes to do what the gospel of Jesus Christ alone can do; but all efforts of this kind will be just as ineffective as they have been in the past. Such movements will make hypocrites—they can never make Christians. Against this we are warned in the third part of this Message of Revelation 14. “The beast” stands for that system of church and state government which has cursed the world from the days of Babylon to the present; the “image” stands for developments of that same union, especially manifest in the New World in the last days; and “the mark of the beast” stands for that special thing which the beast sets up as the sign and badge of his authority. (See the Bible reading in this number, and other articles that will follow.)
Dear reader, of whatever belief you are, do you wish to unite, however outwardly promising it may seem, with any movement whatever that does not have within it the free, voluntary yielding to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you wish to unite with any movement that has within it the coercion of the individual to that which is contrary to his conscience? For that very thing the beast has stood, and stands for it still. All that men are seeking to bring into that union of church and state, and enforce on men’s consciences by law, is a part of the beast system, and the very center and core of it all is found in the universal Sunday movement by which men are endeavoring to force upon the consciences of humanity a false sabbath, a counterfeit day, which is not recognized in the Scripture, and was not known to prophet or apostle, or to our Lord Himself.
On the other hand, God presents the claims of His holy law through the gospel, and pleads with mankind to accept that, because in that alone there is life. He does not wish that one soul shall be compelled to serve Him. The words of Jesus Himself are, “IF ANY MAN HEAR MY WORDS, AND BELIEVE NOT, I JUDGE HIM NOT: FOR I CAME NOT TO JUDGE THE WORLD, BUT TO SAVE THE WORLD. . . . The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” John 12: 47, 48. And so it is not God that wishes to condemn. He gives us the Word which will save, and if we refuse the Word which He gives us, we are already condemned by our attitude toward Him, and are unworthy of a place in His kingdom. But he who receives it as from a heavenly Father, who accepts it as “the power of God unto salvation,” will find the gospel writing within his own heart God’s holy law in its fulness, written there so that he can indeed say with the psalmist, “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day;” and with the apostle John, “This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous.”
The Results
There are two, always, in every message of God. The one we will not dwell upon. It is set forth in the warning of the third angel,—the final wrath of God, from which the wicked themselves have extracted the last drop of mercy. Under that last Message there are “multitudes in the valley of decision.” You,8reader, as well as all others, will aline yourself on the one side or the other of the Message. You will either identify yourself with sin or with Christ, and he who identifies himself with sin must perish with the sin. That is all that the Message teaches. That is the punishment that is set before us. See little tract No. 111 Bible Students’ Library, “Tormented Forever and Ever.”
Christ our Lord is coming. We are told this in the verses following, and when He comes He will find one class of people whom He will welcome home to mansions of glory. He Himself gives us the descriptions. He does not say that they are the rich, or the powerful, or the great of earth. He does not say that they are working mighty signs or miracles. He does not say that the world is bowing before them in fulsome laudation. But He does say that the greatest of all miracles has been wrought in them, the miracle of regeneration, the miracle of transformed character. “Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.”
The above is a painfully brief setting forth of God’s Message for to-day. Compare it with the Bible reading that is found on another page. Read over and over the scriptures there given. Study them, and know for yourself where you stand in this great crisis of the ages.
