Chapter 8—Diet and Morals
Testimonies for the Church 3:163-164
Jesus, seated upon the Mount of Olives, gave instruction to His
disciples concerning the signs which should precede His coming. He
says, “But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the
Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were
eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day
that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and
took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
The same sins exist in our day which brought the wrath of God
upon the world in the days of Noah. Men and women now carry their
eating and drinking to gluttony and drunkenness. This prevailing sin,
the indulgence of perverted appetite, inflamed the passions of men in
the days of Noah, and led to general corruption, until their violence
and crimes reached to Heaven, and God washed the earth of its moral
pollution by a flood.
The same sins of gluttony and drunkenness benumbed the moral
sensibilities of the inhabitants of Sodom, so that crimes seemed to be
the delight of the men and women of that wicked city. Christ thus
warns the world: “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did
eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but
the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone
from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day
when the Son of man is revealed.”
Christ has here left us a most important lesson. He does not in
His teaching encourage indolence. His example was the opposite of
this. Christ was an earnest worker. His life was one of self-denial,
diligence, perseverance, industry, and economy. He would lay before
us the danger of making eating and drinking paramount. He reveals
the result of giving up to indulgence of appetite. The moral powers
are enfeebled, so that sin does not appear sinful. Crimes are winked
at, and base passions control the mind, until general corruption roots
out good principles and impulses, and God is blasphemed. All this is
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