The Purity of Present Truth
By E. Jones
BRO. WHITE: I have deep feelings of gratitude to God that I have ever been brought to see the glorious light of present truth. I was brought up to believe in and look for a time of peace, or spiritual reign of Christ of a thousand years before his personal appearing. But when I take heed to the sure word of prophecy, I learn that in the last days we shall see some of the characteristics of the days which preceded the flood. Then they were eating and drinking and giving in marriage, which implies that the world was more wicked just before Noah entered the ark, than they were in any former age. And so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of man. And while the evidences are thickening around us, and these evidences are being presented before the world, the messenger and his message, are treated just as the world treated Noah and his message. This annihilates the idea that the world is growing better. We are now having a comparatively pure gospel preached to the world, and because of its purity the nominal church and the world have united in rejecting it. So it was when Christ taught some of the humiliating truths of the gospel. Some said, This is a hard saying who can bear it? and they went away, Jesus turned to his disciples and asked, Will ye also go away? This shows that however humiliating any truth may be, we should never reject but love and cherish it in the heart. Paul was persecuted for his preaching that the Christian received his reward at the resurrection. The doctrine is equally discarded now. But by whom? By the stoics and philosophers of nominal professors. It would seem that they would be compelled to believe the plain words of Jesus when he says, "For they cannot recompense thee, but thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." But this testimony is rejected with the rest. The Catholic and Protestant world have both got a track laid from death to Paradise upon which the majority of the world is traveling. But brethren and sisters, let us choose the highway of holiness which the Lord has marked out for us to walk in, feeling an assurance that as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father even so them which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. Let us all be faithful and immovable always abounding in the work of the Lord inasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Yours waiting for the return of the Lord,
E. Jones.
Dryden, Mich.