52
Counsels on Diet and Foods
and crimes reached to heaven, and God washed the earth of its moral
pollution by a flood.
The same sins of gluttony and drunkenness benumbed the moral
sensibilities of the inhabitants of Sodom, so that crimes seemed to be
the delight of the men and women of that wicked city. Christ thus
[61]
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 does not in
His teaching encourage indolence. His example was the opposite of
this. Christ was an earnest worker. His life was one of self-denial,
diligence, perseverance, industry, and economy. He would lay before
us the danger of making eating and drinking paramount. He reveals
the result of giving up to indulgence of appetite. The moral powers
are enfeebled, so that sin does not appear sinful. Crimes are winked
at, and base passions control the mind, until general corruption roots
out good principles and impulses, and God is blasphemed. All this is
the result of eating and drinking to excess. This is the very condition
of things which He declares will exist at His second coming.
Will men and women be warned? Will they cherish the light,
or will they become slaves to appetite and base passions? Christ
presents to us something higher to toil for than merely what we shall
eat, and what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed.
Eating, drinking, and dressing are carried to such excess that they
become crimes, and are among the marked sins of the last days, and
constitute a sign of Christ’s soon coming. Time, money, and strength,
which are the Lord’s, but which He has entrusted to us, are wasted in
needless 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 they are filled with
corruption and disease by our own sinful indulgence.—
Testimonies
for the Church 3:163, 164, 1873