Through the two great errors, the immortality
of the soul, and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his
deceptions. While the former lays the foundation of Spiritualism, the latter
creates a bond of sympathy with Rome. The Protestants of the United States will
be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of
Spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman
power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will
follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.
As Spiritualism more closely imitates the nominal Christianity of the
day, it has greater power to deceive and ensnare. Satan himself is converted,
after the modern order of things. He will appear in the character of an angel
of light. Through the agency of Spiritualism, miracles will be wrought, the
sick will be healed, and many undeniable wonders will be performed. And as the
spirits will profess faith in the Bible, and manifest respect for the
institutions of the church, their work will be accepted as a manifestation of
divine power.
The
line of distinction between professed Christians and the ungodly is now hardly
distinguishable. Church-members love what the world loves, and are ready to
join with them; and Satan determines to unite them in one body, and thus
strengthen his cause by sweeping all into the ranks of Spiritualism. Papists,
who boast of miracles as a certain sign of the true church, will be readily
deceived by this wonder-working power; and Protestants, having cast away the
shield of truth, will also be deluded. Papists, Protestants, and worldlings
will alike accept the form of godliness GC 589
- without the power, and they will see in this union a grand
movement for the conversion of the world, and the ushering in of the
long-expected millennium.
Through Spiritualism, Satan appears as a benefactor of the race, healing
the diseases of the people, and professing to present a new and more exalted
system of religious faith; but at the same time he works as a destroyer. His
temptations are leading multitudes to ruin. Intemperance dethrones reason;
sensual indulgence, strife, and bloodshed follow. Satan delights in war; for it
excites the worst passions of the soul, and then sweeps into eternity its
victims steeped in vice and blood. It is his object to incite the nations to
war against one another; for he can thus divert the minds of the people from
the work of preparation to stand in the day of God.
Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of
unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and
he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows. When he was
suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks and herds, servants, houses,
children, were swept away, one trouble succeeding another as in a moment. It is
God that shields his creatures, and hedges them in from the power of the
destroyer. But the Christian world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah;
and the Lord will do just what he has declared that he would, he will withdraw
his blessings from the earth, and remove his protecting care from those who are
rebelling against his law, and teaching and forcing others to do the same.
Satan has control of all whom God does not especially guard. He will favor and
prosper some, in order to further his own designs, and he will bring trouble
upon others, and lead men to believe that it is God who is afflicting them.
While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal
all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities
are reduced to ruin and GC 590 -
desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by
land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hail-storms, in
tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in
a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening
harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint,
and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more
and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast.
"The earth mourneth and fadeth away," "the haughty people . . .
do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because
they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting
covenant."[1 ISA. 24:4, 5.]
And
then the great deceiver will persuade men that those who serve God are causing
these evils. The class that have provoked the displeasure of Heaven will charge
all their troubles upon those whose obedience to God's commandments is a
perpetual reproof to transgressors. It will be declared that men are offending
God by the violation of the Sunday-sabbath, that this sin has brought
calamities which will not cease until Sunday observance shall be strictly
enforced, and that those who present the claims of the fourth commandment, thus
destroying reverence for Sunday, are troublers of the people, preventing their
restoration to divine favor and temporal prosperity. Thus the accusation urged
of old against the servant of God will be repeated, and upon grounds equally
well established. "And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab
said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he answered, I have not
troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the
commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Baalim."[2 1 KINGS 18:17,
18.] As the wrath of the people shall be excited by false charges, they will
pursue a course toward God's ambassadors very similar to that which apostate
Israel pursued toward Elijah.
The
miracle-working power manifested through Spiritualism will exert its influence
against those who choose to obey God rather than men. Communications from the
spirits will declare that God has sent them to convince the rejecters of Sunday
of their error, affirming that the laws of the land should be obeyed as the law
of God. They will lament the great wickedness in the world, and second the
testimony of religious teachers, that the degraded state of morals is caused by
the desecration of Sunday. Great will be the indignation excited against all
who refuse to accept their testimony.
Satan's policy in this final conflict with God's people is the same that
he employed in the opening of the great controversy in Heaven. He professed to
be seeking to promote the stability of the divine government, while secretly
bending every effort to secure its overthrow. And the very work which he was
thus endeavoring to accomplish, he charged upon the loyal angels. The same
policy of deception has marked the history of the Romish Church. It has
professed to act as the vicegerent of Heaven, while seeking to exalt itself
above God, and to change his law. Under the rule of Rome, those who suffered
death for their fidelity to the gospel were denounced as evil-doers; they were
declared to be in league with Satan; and every possible means was employed to
cover them with reproach, to cause them to appear, in the eyes of the people,
and even to themselves, as the vilest of criminals. So it will be now. While
Satan seeks to destroy those who honor God's law he will cause them to be
accused as law-breakers, as men who are dishonoring God, and bringing judgments
upon the world.
God never forces the will or the conscience; but Satan's constant
resort--to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce--is compulsion
by cruelty. Through fear or force he endeavors to rule the conscience, and to
secure homage to himself. To accomplish this, he works through both religious
and secular authorities, moving them to the enforcement of human laws in
defiance of the law of God.