Basic HTML Version
Second Angel’s Message to be Repeated, June 12
There followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that
great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath
of her fornication.
Revelation 14:8
.
The second angel’s message of
Revelation 14
was first preached in the
summer of 1844, and it then had a more direct application to the churches
of the United States, where the warning of the judgment had been most
widely proclaimed and most generally rejected, and where the declension in
the churches had been most rapid. But the message of the second angel did
not reach its complete fulfillment in 1844. The churches then experienced a
moral fall, in consequence of their refusal of the light of the advent message;
but that fall was not complete. As they have continued to reject the special
truths for this time they have fallen lower and lower. Not yet, however, can
it be said that “Babylon is fallen,... because she made
all nations
drink of
the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” She has not yet made all nations
do this.
God still has a people in Babylon; and before the visitation of His
judgments these faithful ones must be called out, that they partake not of
her sins and “receive not of her plagues.”
This is the same message that was given by the second angel. Babylon
is fallen, “because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her
fornication.” What is that wine?—her false doctrines. She has given to the
world a false sabbath instead of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment,
and has repeated the falsehood that Satan first told to Eve in Eden—the
natural immortality of the soul. Many kindred errors she has spread far and
wide, “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”...
In the last work for the warning of the world, two distinct calls are made
to the churches. The second angel’s message is, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath
of her fornication.” And in the loud cry of the third angel’s message a voice
is heard from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not
partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins
have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”
[172]
175