SECOND QUARTER 2018
SABBATH SCHOOL INSIGHT #10
JUNE 9, 2018
"AMERICA AND BABYLON"
SABBATH SCHOOL INSIGHT #10
JUNE 9, 2018
"AMERICA AND BABYLON"
And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever. Revelation 11:15
The Deadly Wound Healed
In their protest of Papal authority, Protestant princes exercised and established a measure of civil and religious liberty, both principles of which they recognized were founded on the Word of God. However, civil and religious authority were not separated as they should be. There was not a complete break from the principles of the Papacy which placed tradition over the Bible. The Sabbath, a sign of liberty from the world and freedom in Christ, was overlooked, if not rejected. Thus was left an opening for the restoration of the power and influence of the Papacy.
The French Revolution more directly challenged Papal authority, exercising civil liberty to attack the abuses of the Papacy, and thus separating civil and religious authority. By rejecting the Word of God as the foundation of liberty the revolution ended in chaos and anarchy. Out of this anarchy came Napoleon, whose autocratic rule included the wounding of the power of the Papacy.
The healing of the deadly wound involves a willingness of both the civil and religious powers of the United States to undermine both civil and religious liberty and will eventually result in combining the civil and religious powers of America to enforce both civil and religious law. The Sabbath is the barrier to the culmination of healing the deadly wound and thus the final focus of the attack.
"'And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads; and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.' It is easy to show by the Scriptures, as Romans 4:11; Revelation 7:3; Ezekiel 9:4-6, etc., that sign, seal, and mark are used as equivalents, in the Bible. God gave the Sabbath as a sign of His work of creation, and of Himself as Creator. Exodus 31:13-17. Ezekiel 20:11, 12, 19, 20. In six days the Lord made heaven and earth: the seventh day-the rest day or Sabbath-commemorates that work. It is a sign of the Creator; a perpetual reminder of His power; a safeguard against heathenism, if observed by the nations. Had not man turned away from the Sabbath he could not have forgotten God. 'The things that are made' attest 'His eternal power and Godhead.' Romans 1:20. He Himself gave the Sabbath as a sign of this. How presumptuous is feeble man to treat with contempt this God-given sign and displace it by another sign without a sentence of Scripture to warrant the action." (December 22, 1881 EJW, SITI 571.11)
The United States in Prophecy
The United States arose in power with an attempt to assimilate the best of Protestantism (religious liberty) and the French Revolution (civil liberty). The fundamental principle undergirding the United States Constitution is that all governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. And because the founders recognized that all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it follows that they affirmed this principle of rulership by consent of the governed as how God rules His Universe.
This principle of the consent of the governed is the outworking of free will and the reason for the great controversy between good and evil. We might say it is the essence of the Faith of Jesus. God exercises authority by His creative faith in humanity - expecting a freely chosen faith response to His love and goodness. He speaks the Word, and this word has non-coercive power to create. The whole creation witnesses to His motives and methods.
"In the Kingdom of God, on the part of the Governor the principle of the government is, Government with the consent of the governed. 'Choose you this day whom ye will serve.' 'Choose life that ye may live. . . He is thy life.' 'Whosoever will, let him come.' 'Behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in.' Among all the infinite numbers in the kingdom there will never be one there other than with his own consent. When all shall be finished pertaining to the kingdom, and 'every creature that is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them' shall be heard saying, 'Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever,' among them all there can not he found one intelligence who is there without his own consent, in the exercise of his own free choice of the faith of Christ the rightful king." (April 14, 1909 ATJ, MEDM 291.3)
Worship and Babylon the Great
The core of false worship is a false conception of God and how He rules His dominion. This Babylonian "spirit of antichrist" is revealed in the rejection of the biblical account of creation and the embrace of evolutionary thought by the Papacy, recently confirmed in a documentary interview with the Pope (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-shares-candid-thoughts-in-new-documentary/). It is also revealed in the Protestant embrace of Spiritualism in the Emergent Church movement with its evolutionary view of personal and corporate spiritual development and its focus on the senses and experience over against the plain reading of Scripture.
"We have outlined in Revelation 13 the work of the Papacy, something just like it, though distinct from it, even as that action of professedly Protestant peoples in enforcing an institution of Rome in an exact reproduction of the workings of the Papacy. And in connection with this, the prophecy speaks of the wonder-working power by which the people are deceived and led to the bitter end in the fight against God and truth.
The miracle-working power of Satan has always been manifested in sustaining his deceptions. Wherever in ancient times we find sun-worship and idolatry, there also is found witchcraft, sorcery, etc. It was one of the sins of Nineveh and of Babylon. It is not surprising, therefore, that this is the agency employed in the gathering of forces for the last conflict. The Papacy was the result of the corruption of the church by the errors which prevailed in ancient Babylon, and which spread from Chaldea into all the heathen world. Along with these errors come the old error which is the foundation of Spiritualism-the belief in the conscious state of the dead.
Thus, Rome and the great body of Protestantism are ready for the doctrines of Spiritualism; in fact, they are already thoroughly permeated with them, unconsciously often, but none the less really. One may hear purely Spiritualistic teaching from the pulpits on every side. And when Rome and Protestantism join hands in setting aside the Word (and it is beginning to be done in earnest over the Sabbath question), it awaits only the full manifestation of the third partner, Spiritualism, and then under the influence of this three-fold confederacy the forces of the world will unite against God. Revelation 16:14." (December 12, 1895 EJW, PTUK 788-9.)
Come Out of Her, My People
Coming out of Babylon involves more than rejecting the spurious Sabbath and the dangers of spiritualism in an understanding of the state of the dead. It must include a restoration of the true gospel in which the creative and recreative power of God was and is manifest in the sinful humanity which Christ took upon Himself. The Faith of Jesus through which the remnant keep the Commandments of God is contingent on believing this gospel, which must be proclaimed as part of the Loud Cry Message of Revelation 18:1.
"In the counterfeit gospel, the perversion of the true, we have the self-styled 'representative of Christ on the earth, who as God sitteth in the temple of God showing himself that he is God.' While assuming the titles and prerogatives which belong only to the divine Author of our salvation, he yet denies to the Christ whom he pretends to represent that very experience which alone constitutes Him the Saviour of a fallen race, the incarnation in sinful flesh. Here is the crucial test. Here is where the counterfeit reveals itself. Here is where the divinely-appointed detector will show that not the Spirit of God but the spirit of Satan is working under this mask of a pretended gospel. 'Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh [or confesses Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh, all flesh, and therefore in sinful flesh] is of God: and every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God and this, is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.' 1 John 4:2-3. 'For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.' 2 John 7, R.V. In its doctrine of the immaculate conception, which is 'the Catholic belief that the Blessed Virgin was, by a special privilege, preserved Immaculate, that is, free from the stain of original sin, from the first moment of her conception,' the papacy denies that Jesus of Nazareth 'took human nature from a corrupt, source,' and asserts that 'God the Son, by assuming this perfect human nature, which He took from the Blessed Virgin, was born in the flesh.' But this separates the Divine Redeemer so far from the sinful flesh in which we live that the whole human scheme of priests, saints and the Blessed Virgin with good works of many kinds become necessary in order to have communion with the Divine life. In other words, man is effectually cut off from the only saving power, the only real means of salvation, the Divine life working in sinful flesh to give victory over sin. Such is the terrible, outcome of this counterfeit gospel. Changing the law of faith into the law of works is simply the introduction of paganism under the form of Christianity. And the natural result of this change, as shown in the last study, has been to substitute by the authority of this counterfeit church the observance of the first day of the week, Sunday, the chief mark of paganism, for the observance of the seventh day of the week, commonly called Saturday, the true Sabbath of the Lord, the sign of His creative power, the sign of the true Gospel that really saves from sin. Such is the work of the papacy, modern Babylon. 'Come out of her, My people that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.' W. W. PRESCOTT . (June 14, 1900 WWP, PTUK 374.5)
~Todd Guthrie
