IS GOD DEAD? by S. B. Whitney

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 3, 1881

IS GOD DEAD?

By S. B. Whitney

BY ELD. S. B. WHITNEY.

THIS question, once propounded by Sojourner Truth to Mr. Douglass when he gave evidence of declining faith in Providence, was recently suggested to my mind by a very different circumstance, as the following will clearly show:—

A few days since, while in conversation with a no-day Adventist upon the law and covenants, the seventh chapter of Romans was alluded to, and I asked him what he understood the first husband to be. He replied, "God; for he says he was an husband unto them." Now Paul says, "For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband." Rom. 7: 2. Then if God was the first husband, and we are loosed from the law by the death of the first husband, it follows that God is dead. This is a new way of proving the abolition of the law of God, but it shows the terrible extremity to which the opponents of that law are driven to find something with which to support their theory.

Another evidence on the same point is the contradictory nature of the positions taken by them. For instance, one man in this place says, in opposing the Sabbath, that the ten commandments are so strict that no man can keep them an hour. Another says they are so slack that they were designed, and were only fit, for a civil code for the Jews, and were altogether of too low a type as a rule for the Christian. Thus it would almost seem that the opposers of God's law are bereft of their reason, and in their insane attacks upon it are left to devour one another's positions. At least, the lovers of that law have nothing to fear from such efforts, and may labor with courage and earnestness for the propagation of its principles, and wait patiently for God to vindicate his own cause.