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Calamities Blamed on God’s People, June 17
Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come
down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath
but a short time.
Revelation 12:12
.
As men depart further and further from God, Satan is permitted to have
power over the children of disobedience. He hurls destruction among men.
There is calamity by land and sea. Property and life are destroyed by fire
and flood. Satan resolves to charge this upon those who refuse to bow to
the idol which he has set up. His agents point to Seventh-day Adventists
as the cause of the trouble. “These people stand out in defiance of law,”
they say. “They desecrate Sunday. Were they compelled to obey the law for
Sunday observance, there would be a cessation of these terrible judgments.”
Calamities will come—calamities most awful, most unexpected; and
these destructions will follow one after another. If there will be a heeding
of the warnings that God has given, and if churches will repent, returning
to their allegiance, then other cities may be spared for a time. But if men
who have been deceived continue in the same way in which they have been
walking, disregarding the law of God and presenting falsehoods before
the people, God allows them to suffer calamity, that their senses may be
awakened.
The judgments will be according to the wickedness of the people and
the light of truth that they have had. If they have had the truth, according to
that light will be the punishment.
Satan puts his interpretation upon events, and they [leading men] think,
as he would have them, that the calamities which fill the land are a result of
Sunday-breaking. Thinking to appease the wrath of God, these influential
men make laws enforcing Sunday observance. They think that by exalting
this false rest-day higher, and still higher, compelling obedience to the
Sunday law, the spurious sabbath, they are doing God service. Those who
honor God by observing the true Sabbath are looked upon as disloyal to
God, when it is really those who thus regard them who are themselves
disloyal, because they are trampling under foot the Sabbath originated in
Eden.
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