30
The Great Controversy
trampled upon His law. Dark are the records of human misery that
earth has witnessed during its long centuries of crime. The heart
sickens, and the mind grows faint in contemplation. Terrible have
been the results of rejecting the authority of Heaven. But a scene yet
darker is presented in the revelations of the future. The records of the
past,—the long procession of tumults, conflicts, and revolutions, the
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“battle of the warrior ... with confused noise, and garments rolled in
blood” (
Isaiah 9:5
),—what are these, in contrast with the terrors of that
day when the restraining Spirit of God shall be wholly withdrawn from
the wicked, no longer to hold in check the outburst of human passion
and satanic wrath! The world will then behold, as never before, the
results of Satan’s rule.
But in that day, as in the time of Jerusalem’s destruction, God’s
people will be delivered, everyone that shall be found written among
the living.
Isaiah 4:3
. Christ has declared that He will come the
second time to gather His faithful ones to Himself: “Then shall all the
tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming
in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He shall
send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather
together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the
other.”
Matthew 24:30, 31
. Then shall they that obey not the gospel
be consumed with the spirit of His mouth and be destroyed with the
brightness of His coming.
2 Thessalonians 2:8
. Like Israel of old the
wicked destroy themselves; they fall by their iniquity. By a life of sin,
they have placed themselves so out of harmony with God, their natures
have become so debased with evil, that the manifestation of His glory
is to them a consuming fire.
Let men beware lest they neglect the lesson conveyed to them
in the words of Christ. As He warned His disciples of Jerusalem’s
destruction, giving them a sign of the approaching ruin, that they
might make their escape; so He has warned the world of the day of
final destruction and has given them tokens of its approach, that all
who will may flee from the wrath to come. Jesus declares: “There shall
be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the
earth distress of nations.”
Luke 21:25
;
Matthew 24:29
;
Mark 13:24-26
;
Revelation 6:12-17
. Those who behold these harbingers of His coming
are to “know that it is near, even at the doors.”
Matthew 24:33
. “Watch
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ye therefore,” are His words of admonition.
Mark 13:35
. They that