Speedy Triumphant Climax
The Gospel Once Shook the World—By the co-operation of the
divine Spirit, the apostles did a work that shook the world. To every
nation was the gospel carried in a single generation.
Glorious were the results that attended the ministry of the chosen
apostles of Christ....
Not in their own power did the apostles accomplish their mission,
but in the power of the living God. Their work was not easy. The
opening labors of the Christian church were attended by hardship
and bitter grief. In their work the disciples constantly encountered
privation, calumny, and persecution; but they counted not their lives
dear to unto themselves and rejoiced that they were called to suffer
for Christ. Irresolution, indecision, weakness of purpose, found no
place in their efforts. They were willing to spend and be spent. The
consciousness of the responsibility resting on them purified and en-
riched their experience; and the grace of heaven was revealed in the
conquests they achieved for Christ. With the might of omnipotence
God worked through them to make the gospel triumphant.—
The Acts
of the Apostles, 593-595
(1911).
A Firmament of Chosen Ones—Among earth’s inhabitants, scat-
tered in every land, there are those who have not bowed the knee to
Baal. Like the stars of heaven, which appear only at night, these
faithful ones will shine forth when darkness covers the earth and gross
darkness the people. In heathen Africa, in the Catholic lands of Europe
and of South America, in China, in India, in the islands of the sea, and
[707]
in all the dark corners of the earth, God has in reserve a firmament of
chosen ones that will yet shine forth amidst the darkness, revealing
clearly to an apostate world the transforming power of obedience to
His law. Even now they are appearing in every nation, among every
tongue and people; and in the hour of deepest apostasy, when Satan’s
supreme effort is made to cause “all, both small and great, rich and
poor, free and bond,” to receive, under penalty of death, the sign of alle-
giance to a false rest day, these faithful ones, “blameless and harmless,
614