p. 4 | A PROPHETIC WARNING by G.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Jul 26, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 30.

A PROPHETIC WARNING.

By G.

THE result of church and state union is most vividly portrayed in Revelation 17. There is presented a woman (church)—a harlot, therefore an apostate church—and she “sitteth upon many waters” (peoples, verse 15). And the kings (or governments) of the earth commit fornication (have illicit connection) with her. She is carried by a scarlet-colored beast with seven heads and ten horns. Upon all the seven forms—seven principal jurisdictions in the history of this beast principle, represented by the heads—the woman sitteth, and controls them. But at last there comes a time when all the various governments composing this “beast” in its last phase, represented by the horns, are stirred up against her, and combine to destroy her.

It is not necessary here to designate what church especially fills the specification of controlling and corrupting the governments of

earth could have any union with her at all. And all action by the state tending to enforce the doctrines of any church is an adulterous connection with her.

Any church that assumes to control the secular government, that resorts to the power of such government for the furtherance of her work, will eventually find that power acting as a boomerang against her. God has provided that His Spirit through His Word, shall endow the church with all the power she needs, and whenever she becomes dissatisfied with that power, and seeks instead the power of human government, she courts alliance with that which will sometime destroy her. God has so ordained (verse 17) that the power which the harlot corrupts to the extent of illicit connection shall be the instrument of her utter destruction.

This prophecy ought to be a warning to any church, or to any people assuming to act in the name of the church, that any demand upon the state for power to carry on the work which God has given to the church, is a virtual rejection of the power of the Spirit, the consequence of which means ruin at the hands of the power that is sought in its stead. Will the professed Christian people who are now so prone to seek the assistance of the secular power in this, that, or the other project for so-called reform, pause and reflect, and heed the divine warning? G.