Control of Appetite
113
sins that brought judgments upon the world in the days of Noah, exist
in our day. Men and women now carry their eating and drinking so
far that it ends in gluttony and drunkenness. This prevailing sin, the
indulgence of perverted appetite, inflamed the passions of men in the
days of Noah, and led to widespread corruption. Violence and sin
reached to heaven. This moral pollution was finally swept from the
earth by means of the flood. The same sins of gluttony and drunkenness
benumbed the moral sensibilities of the inhabitants of Sodom, so that
crime seemed to be the delight of the men and women of that wicked
city. Christ thus warns the world: “Likewise also as it was in the days
of Lot: they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted,
they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained
fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even thus
shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”
Christ has here left us a most important lesson. He would lay
before us the danger of making our eating and drinking paramount. He
presents the result of unrestrained indulgence of appetite. The moral
powers are enfeebled, so that sin does not appear sinful. Crime is
lightly regarded, and passion controls the mind, until good principles
and impulses are rooted out, and God is blasphemed. All this is the
result of eating and drinking to excess. This is the very condition of
things which Christ declares will exist at His second coming.
The Saviour presents to us something higher to toil for than merely
what we shall eat and drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed.
Eating, drinking, and dressing are carried to such excess that they
become crimes. They are among the marked sins of the last days, and
constitute a sign of Christ’s soon coming. Time, money, and strength,
[147]
which belong to the Lord, but which He has entrusted to us, are wasted
in superfluities of dress and luxuries for the perverted appetite, which
lessen vitality, and bring suffering and decay. It is impossible to present
our bodies a living sacrifice to God when we continually fill them with
corruption and disease by our own sinful indulgence.—[
Christian
Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 11, 12
]
Counsels on Health, 23, 24,
1890
231. One of the strongest temptations that man has to meet is upon
the point of appetite. In the beginning the Lord made man upright. He
was created with a perfectly balanced mind, the size and strength of
all his organs being fully and harmoniously developed. But through