Adam and Eve, at their creation, had a knowledge of the law of God. They were acquainted with its claims upon them; its precepts were written upon their hearts. When man fell by transgression, the law was not changed, but a remedial system was established to bring him back to obedience. The promise of a Saviour was given; and sacrificial offerings pointing forward to the death of Christ as the great sin-offering, were established.
Adam taught his descendants the law of God, and it was handed down from father to son through successive generations. But notwithstanding the gracious provision for man's redemption, there were few who accepted it and rendered obedience. By transgression the world became so vile that it was necessary to cleanse it by the Flood from its corruption. The law was preserved by Noah and his family, and Noah taught his descendants the Ten Commandments.
As men again departed from God, the Lord chose Abraham, of whom He declared, “Abraham obeyed My voice, and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws.” To him was given the rite of circumcision, which was a sign that those who received it were devoted to the service of God,—a pledge that they would remain separate from idolatry, and would obey the law of God. The failure of Abraham's descendants to keep this pledge, as shown in their disposition to form alliances with the heathen and adopt their practises, was the cause of their sojourn and bondage in Egypt.
The Written Law
In their intercourse with idolaters, and their forced submission to the Egyptians, the divine precepts became still further corrupted with the vile and cruel teachings of heathenism. Therefore when the Lord brought them forth from Egypt, He made known to them once more the requirements of His law. The law was not spoken at this time exclusively for the benefit of the Hebrews. God honored them by making them the guardians and keepers of His law, but it was to be held as a sacred trust for the whole world.
The precepts of the Decalogue are adapted to all mankind, and they were given for the instruction and government of all. Ten precepts, brief, comprehensive, and authoritative, cover the duty of man to God and to his fellow man; and all based upon the great fundamental principle of love. They stand forth alone, bearing the distinct, awful significance of their supreme importance. They mean life to the obedient, and death to the disobedient.
The law of God is as sacred as Himself. It is a revelation of His will, a transcript of His character, the expression of divine love and wisdom. Through the ages that law has been preserved as the highest standard of morality. Not all the inventions of science or the imaginations of fruitful minds have been able to discover one essential duty not covered by this code.
God's law is the security of life and property, of peace and happiness. It was given to secure our present and eternal good. A thoughtful kindness runs through every enactment. Each commandment is an enactment of mercy, love, and saving power.
When the new-found “Book of the Law” was read to King Josiah it led to exaltation of the law and reformation of life. How many in these days hide from themselves God's law and exalt sin.
The Sabbath Not New
The Sabbath institution originated in Eden, and is therefore as old as the world itself. In six days the great work of creation had been accomplished; and God “rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested.” The Sabbath was observed by all the patriarchs, from creation down. During the bondage in Egypt, the Israelites were forced by their taskmasters to violate the Sabbath, and to a great extent they lost the knowledge of its sacredness. When the law was proclaimed from Sinai, the very first words of the fourth commandment were, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” showing that the Sabbath was not then instituted; we are pointed back for its origin to creation.
Before the law was given from Sinai, God wrought a miracle each week to impress the people with the sanctity of the Sabbath. He rained manna from heaven for their food, and each day they gathered this manna; but on the sixth day they gathered twice as much, according to the directions of Moses: “The Lord hath given you the Sabbath, therefore He giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days; abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. So the people rested on the seventh day.”
“The children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; . . . unto the borders of the land of Canaan.” Thus for forty years God worked each week a miracle before His people, to show them that His Sabbath was a sacred day.
A Sign of God's Law
God gave the Sabbath to His people to be a continual sign of His love and mercy, and of their obedience. As He had rested upon this day and been refreshed, so He desired His people to rest and be refreshed. It was a continual reminder to them that they were included in His covenant of grace. Throughout your generations, He said, the Sabbath is to be My sign, My pledge, to you that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you; that I have chosen you, and set you apart as My peculiar people.
When the Sabbath was changed, the seal was taken from the law. Now the disciples of Jesus are called upon to restore it, by exalting the Sabbath of the fourth commandment to its rightful position as the Creator's memorial and the sign of His authority. The prophet Isaiah thus points out the ordinance which has been forsaken: “Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord.”
This prophecy also applies in our own time. A breach was made in the law of God6when the Sabbath was changed; but the time has come for that institution to be restored. The breach is to be repaired, and the foundation of many generations to be raised up. The Lord has His messengers, whom He bids to proclaim His law to be changeless in its character, as enduring as eternity.
Thus the Sabbath is a token between God and His people. It is God's holy day, given to man as a day on which to rest and reflect upon sacred things. God designed it to be observed through every age, as a perpetual covenant. His people are to regard the Sabbath as a peculiar treasure, a trust to be carefully cherished.
As we observe the Sabbath, let us remember that it is the sign Heaven has given to man that he is accepted in the Beloved; that if he is obedient, he may enter the city of God, and partake of the fruit of the Tree of Life. As we refrain from labor on the seventh day, we testify to the world that we are on God's side, and are striving to live in perfect conformity to His commandments. Thus we recognize as our Sovereign the God who made the world in six days, and rested on the seventh.
From beginning to end, God's law is a law of love. John says: “I rejoiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in truth, as we have received a commandment from the Father. And now I beseech thee, lady, not as tho I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk after His commandments.” “Hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth His Word, in him verily is the love of God perfected.”
Our Bible Reading
The Great Threefold Message
1. What great healing message is God sending out to this generation?
“And I saw another angel flying in mid heaven, having eternal good tidings to proclaim unto them that dwell on the earth, and unto every nation and tribe and tongue and people.” Rev. 14: 6.
2. What is the burden of that healing message?
“And he saith with a great voice, Fear God, and give Him glory; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made the heaven and the earth and sea and fountains of waters.” Rev. 14: 7.
NOTE.—There are three important points in the above message applicable to the very age in which we live. Remember it is the Gospel message, but the Gospel message has special burden and special present truth for every generation. The three points emphasized in this message are
(1.) “Fear God and give Him glory.” The fear and worship of humanity are to be abjured. Men are to turn from giving glory to men, from worshiping the works of their own hands, from exalting mere human science above the Word of God. To God are they to give glory. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do His commandments.” God will not give His glory to another; He demands that men shall honor Him, and the truest honor that men can render to God is to listen to what He has to say.
(2.) “The hour of His judgment is come.” Paul preached of a judgment to come, and this message goes to the world that judgment is impending. “The hour of His judgment is come” is the last great message which goes to the world.
(3.) Worship the Creator. The world has gone mad after evolution, human attainment, human salvation. God calls men away from all this; pleads with them to yield themselves to Him who made the heaven and the earth, the sea and the fountains of waters; brings men back to God’s creative power, to His holy law, for the highest worship is service—Matt. 4:10—and to the Sabbath a memorial of His creative power. That message if accepted would have healed every division in Christendom; would have obliterated church creeds, broken down the unholy idols which men have erected in the place of God, and would have presented to a darkened and sin-loving world such a majestic front of righteousness and power that nothing could have stood before it.
3. How did ancient Babylon respond to God’s message?
“We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed: forsake her, and let us go every one into his own country: for her judgment reacheth unto heaven, and is lifted up even to the skies.” Jer. 51: 9.
4. How does modern Babylon respond to this healing message?
“And another, a second angel, followed, saying, Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, that hath made all nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” Rev. 14: 8.
5. What does God call those who unite with the world, and what is their attitude to Him?
“Ye adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore would be a friend of the world maketh himself an enemy of God.” James 4: 4.
6. What is the duty of the Christian in the Christian church regarding the world?
“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” 1 John 2:15-17.
7. To whom alone is God’s church lawfully united?
“Return, O backsliding children, saith Jehovah; for I am a husband unto you.” Jer. 3:14.
“I espoused you to one husband that I might present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” 2 Cor. 11: 2.
8. What does God call a union of His church with the world?
9. What has always been the tendency of a church backslidden from God?
“Wo to the rebellious children, saith Jehovah, that take counsel, but not of Me; and that make a league, but not of My Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; that set out to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at My mouth.” Isa. 30:1, 2.
“Wo to them that go down to Egypt for help, and rely on horses, and trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong, but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek Jehovah! . . . Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh, and not spirit: and when Jehovah shall stretch out His hand, both he that helpeth shall stumble, and he that is helped shall fall, and they all shall be consumed together.” Isa. 31:1-3.
NOTE.—Egypt and Assyria are types of civil powers. The principle is always the same whatever the nation or government; and history is one constant demonstration of the fact that when God’s church departed from Him and refused His healing messages, she has always united herself with the world, or committed spiritual fornication.
10. What will be the final result of such union?
“Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the refuge in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.” Isa. 30: 3.
11. What will inevitably follow when modern Babylon chooses her own way instead of God’s way?
“After these things I saw another angel coming down out of heaven, having great authority; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried with a mighty voice, saying, Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become a habitation of demons, and a hold of every unclean spirit, and a hold [a prison, literally] of every unclean and hateful bird. For by the wine of the wrath of her fornication all the nations are fallen; and the kings of the earth committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth waxed rich by the power of her wantonness. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come forth, My people, out of her, that ye have no fellowship with her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues: for her sins have reached even unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.” Rev. 18:1-5.
NOTE.—Never were sadder words penned than the messages of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and John, depicting the awful fate of God’s children who departed from Him. It is infinitely sadder to think of a church of God to whom has come great light and privilege, through whom God has worked mightily in the salvation of souls, turning from her trust, her opportunities, her privileges, from the great message which made her all that she is, and trusting in herself and her own charms, her own riches, her own beauties, in union with the world, go down to destruction. When that time comes God’s plea comes not to the church but to each individual alone. “If any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with Me.”
Recorded in God’s Book
By Butler
God harkens to hear, records, and remembers all that the righteous say. Every word of encouragement spoken to a weary fellow toiler, every word of quickening to diligence and activity in the Christian life, every kind, generous, loving word that has helped and cheered a struggling, tempted fellow soul, is heard, remembered, and recorded, and one day shall be disclosed again to the mutual, grateful joy of the helper and the helped. So, too, every good word spoken in season to him who owns no Saviour, who has no hope, who is without God and yet is journeying to an eternal world where trust and hope in a God and Saviour are the conditions of happy existence — every such word will be found on record, too; it will contribute to the lasting joy of its utterer and of him that has heeded it.—Butler.
The Ultimate Nation
By Richard Benton
By Richard Benton, in “Century”
ONE Babylon, by beauty tenanted,
In pleasure palaces and walks of pride,
Like a great scarlet flower reared her head,
Drank in the sun and laughed and sinned and died.
Where Tyre and Sidon teemed with ships afloat,
The wharves are idle and the waters lone;
And to the temple that was His abode,
In vain Jerusalem recalls her own.
Brooding the bygones from her sculptured seats,
In living rock her mighty memories hewn,
Along the Nile, wonder of water streets,
Old fertile Egypt is a stranger’s boon.
Mark Athens, breathed upon by breath of gods,
With bards and sages to reveal her signs,
Leap like a flame above life’s iron clods,
To fall in ashes upon vacant shrines.
And Rome, firm founded in a wide emprise,
Her laws and legions, her imperial goal,
Avail not when her sometime honor dies,
Smothered in shows that kill the mounting soul.
Such names of pride and power have been brought low,
Lapsing alike into the cavernous years;
Out of the grayness of the long ago
Their ghosts flit homeless and we guess their tears.
The destiny of nations! They arise,
Have their heyday of triumph, and in turn
Sink upon silence; and the lidless eyes
Of fate salute them from their final urn.
How splendid sad the story! How the gust
And pain and bliss of living transient seem!
Cities and pomps and glories shrunk to dust,
And all that ancient opulence a dream.
Must a majestic rhythm of rise and fall
Conquer the people once so proud on earth?
Does man but march in circles, after all,
Playing his curious game of death and birth?
Or shall an ultimate nation, God’s own child,
Arise and rule, nor ever conquered be;
Untouched of time, because, all undefiled,
She makes His ways her ways eternally?
An Ancient Prediction Concerning the United States
By A. O. Tait
By A. O. Tait
The United States has made a history that is the marvel of the whole world; and it has made this history in a most incredibly short time. When we take into account the colossal proportions to which it has grown, the extreme youth of the country is one of its greatest wonders.
Those who have the good fortune to live in a country like this, are fond of expressing the desire that the nation may stand forever. And truly a nation with such basic principles as those possessed by this great republic, could do nothing else than stand, provided it always adhered to the justice and truth that are its groundwork.
America has given to the world a democracy that has been the admiration of even her enemies, and at the same time a beacon of hope to every down-trodden and oppressed soul on the face of the earth. And this same America, standing firmly upon her unsurpassed Declaration of Independence and just and reasonable Constitution, might go on amid a blaze of ever-increasing glory, peacefully to teach and completely revolutionize the world.
The ancient prediction, however, of the seer of Patmos, shows that this nation will depart from its solid principles of righteousness and liberty. The thirteenth chapter of Revelation, verses eleven to eighteen, are a prophecy of this country. This scripture presents this nation under the symbol of a beast that “had two horns like a lamb.” These lamb-like horns represent the perfect freedom in both civil and religious matters that was established in this new nation. All the countries of the Old World have always had their state religions; and religious tyranny, as well as civil despotism, has been exercised. But not so with this New-World power. Equality was recognized as an “inalienable right,” and that governments are established to secure these rights and not to grant them.
A New Order
Such a government was a new thing among the nations of men. The founders of this republic abandoned the “divine right” of rulers as it had been taught to, and received by, the majority of mankind; they bade adieu to the “recognized and established principles of government,” leaving behind them the persecutions and oppressions of the past; they said that since God has created men “equal,” and endowed them with certain “inalienable rights,” let us recognize those facts, and not fly in the face of Providence by opposing them.
Such, in brief, is a statement of the lamb-like principles upon which this Government was founded. And every American can read them in full in the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
But, according to the prophecy under consideration, these mild yet eternally solid principles of civil and religious freedom will be abandoned. The sure Word of God says of this great nation, “And he spake as a dragon.” It is sad to contemplate it. But to controvert it, is to controvert the words of God. It is not mere men who have made the prediction, but God Himself has declared it. He has not decreed that it should be so; but knowing beforehand what would take place, He has simply announced to all who can be led to believe His Word, what will be the end of this nation.
Like all the great nations of antiquity, this country will go down. But when this country falls, all the world will go with her. This nation has afforded an asylum for the oppressed. The cruel tyrant saw his victims escaping to this city of refuge, and stopped to consider what would be the outcome of this “new experiment of democracy.” The lamb-like power grew and increased in might and influence. The deriding world began to wonder, then to admire, next to court, and finally to follow the great and glorious and free and liberty-loving republic of the western world. And with the world thus admiring and following, it is perfectly plain that all will fall into the same destruction that shall finally engulf the beloved America.
Some may question the fact of America’s leadership in the world; but if you question, we pray you, be careful to recognize the facts. For the questioning of facts does not change them in the least. It only changes our attitude toward them, and may possibly throw us where we will go down in the oncoming destruction. “And he spake as a dragon.” What are the indications to-day that this nation will so far forsake its principles that it will speak as a dragon? Let us consider a few points and see.
Some of the Evils
This country, especially during the last twenty-five or thirty years, has shown an unparalleled amassing of wealth in the hands of a few individuals. Already the principles of equality and freedom are so fully out of sight that a small minority of men hold every commodity of commerce and industry within their grasp. Everything now must be subordinated to the accumulation of money. And the influence of money is that which sways and moves the world. The money power has an iron grip on everything that pertains to this present world. Legislatures, city councils, and public officials in general are corrupted and controlled by the relentless tyranny of wealth.
These corrupting influences of the money power are destroying the consciences of men, and the money god is made paramount in every mind.
And to make the struggle for wealth all the more intense, this age has adopted a very extravagant manner of living. The simple and satisfying conditions of our fathers will no longer suffice. The glitter of the luxuriant enjoyments that may be purchased with gold, is constantly before the attention. We meet it everywhere. And so every energy must be fully exerted to get money, and still more and more money.
And now it seems that America is not large enough. New territory must be conquered and colonies must be formed in order to widen commerce and give opportunity, so it is averred, for the business of the nation to be enlarged and extended.
But this will only serve to increase the strength of the money power, and render the slavery of the individual all the more complete.
And the saddest feature in all this incoming condition of things is the fact that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are thrown down and trodden underfoot. America is listening to the voices of those who desire religious legislation.
America, the beloved America of freedom, the haven for the oppressed of every clime, has reached the parting of the ways. A siren’s voice is enticing her adown the evil road. The plunge over the precipice into the vortex of eternal ruin can not be far off. And the whole world is following her, and all will be engulfed together. These are ominous times! The very air is surcharged with the awful portents of the world’s overhanging doom.
