“NOT EVERY ONE THAT SAITH, LORD, LORD.”
By Helen L. Morse
WHAT a fearful thing it is to go up to the Judgment deceived! Many feel secure because they make a profession of service to God. But the warnings, entreaties, cautions, exhortations, and admonitions of God’s word are mainly addressed to believers. The Bible is made up largely of records of those who have been God’s professed followers in the past, and of instruction to such as may be in all future time. Little reference is had to those who have not even professed to seek the Lord. Those who walk in open unbelief or defiance of God, are of no esteem in his word; and while they thus continue, their part of God’s message is “the terror of the Lord,” the threatenings and the condemnations. The words of sweet counsel, cheering encouragement, loving kindness, and tender mercy, with the precious promises, are nothing to them. They are not entitled even to a part in the Judgment: “For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God; and if it first begin at us, what shall be the end of them that obey not the gospel of God? For if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” They are condemned already. Thus those who feel rich and increased with goods because they have the form, and turn the Bible with its searching and solemn admonitions over to those outside, are depriving themselves of what God expressly designs for724 and addresses to them. They were all the children of Israel who had seen God’s power exercised in their behalf, whom God addressed through Moses when he said, “He that is on the Lord’s side, let him come over to me,” and, “Separate yourselves from among this congregation that I may consume them in a moment.” Num. 16:21. All the children of Israel came out of Egypt, and beheld God’s wonderful providence in delivering them from their enemies, and all joined in the song of triumph and praise to God. Only two, however, endured to the end, and reached the promised land. Christ performed works of mercy to arrest the attention and teach the ignorant, but his sermons were all addressed to believers or seekers. It was God’s chosen people, those who made the highest profession and occupied the most prominent position, who rejected and crucified our Saviour; and this profession they continued to make after “the veil of the temple was rent in twain,” after the solemn declaration had gone into effect, “Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” It was those who had “a name to live,” and who represented the church militant, who imbrued their hands in the blood of upward of fifty millions of the saints of the Most High, who stoned Stephen, crucified Peter, beheaded Paul, and afterward attempted to quench the light of the Reformation by stopping the voices of Huss, Jerome, Wickliffe, and many messengers whom God sent to warn them. It is those who have a form of godliness in these days who will make an image to the beast, “and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed;” and, sadder than this, it is those who have the light of this last truth and a knowledge of the perils and dangers of these last days, who are “wretched and miserable, and poor and blind and naked,” and know it not. But the saddest of all is, that many in the full light of our gospel privileges and in sympathy with the work of God,—who have committed themselves to it, and are associated with his people,—are failing to have that individual experience in the things of God, that deep, thorough work, that aims at perfect purity of thought and motive, and that high standard of Christian character required in God’s word. So in self-deception they are swept along in the broad current, past the privilege of choosing whom they will serve, past the opportunity to be overcomers, past the solemn warnings and searching tests, past the time when their lives can produce fruit, or repentance can avail them, to the close of probation, to cry in vain in the Judgment, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name done many wonderful works?” to hear, “Depart from me ye that work iniquity,” and to see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom and themselves thrust out. Who will not rather welcome chastisement, reproof, humiliation,—anything that will show them their need, cause them to realize their danger, enable them to have their sins go before them to Judgment, and thus avert this fearful doom, and save them from the bitter lamentation, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”