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Testimonies for the Church Volume 8
“To such communion God is calling us. As was Enoch’s must be
their holiness of character who shall be redeemed from among men at
the Lord’s second coming.
Experience of John the Baptist
John the Baptist in his desert life was taught of God. He studied the
revelations of God in nature. Under the guiding of the Divine Spirit,
he studied the scrolls of the prophets. By day and by night, Christ
was his study, his meditation, until mind and heart and soul were filled
with the glorious vision.
He looked upon the King in His beauty, and self was lost sight of.
He beheld the majesty of holiness and knew himself to be inefficient
and unworthy. It was God’s message that he was to declare. It was in
God’s power and His righteousness that he was to stand. He was ready
to go forth as Heaven’s messenger, unawed by the human, because he
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had looked upon the Divine. He could stand fearless in the presence
of earthly monarchs because with trembling he had bowed before the
King of Kings.
With no elaborate arguments or finespun theories did John declare
his message. Startling and stern, yet full of hope, his voice was heard
from the wilderness: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.”
Matthew 3:2
. With a new, strange power it moved the people.
The whole nation was stirred. Multitudes flocked to the wilderness.
Unlearned peasants and fishermen from the surrounding country;
the Roman soldiers from the barracks of Herod; chieftains with their
swords at their sides, ready to put down anything that might savor of
rebellion; the avaricious taxgatherers from their toll booths; and from
the Sanhedrin the phylacteried priests—all listened as if spellbound;
and all, even the Pharisee, and the Sadducee, the cold, unimpressible
scoffer, went away with the sneer silenced and cut to the heart with
a sense of their sins. Herod in his palace heard the message, and the
proud, sin-hardened ruler trembled at the call to repentance.
In this age, just prior to the second coming of Christ in the clouds
of heaven, such a work as that of John is to be done. God calls for
men who will prepare a people to stand in the great day of the Lord.
The message preceding the public ministry of Christ was: “Repent,
publicans and sinners; repent, Pharisees and Sadducees; ‘repent ye: for