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Selected Messages Book 2
deception, when they should become weary of it, would be inclined to
doubt all visions.
After a very solemn meeting with these deceived ones, confessions
were made that they threw themselves into attitudes resembling Sister
White, as nearly as they could. It was all a farce, a deception. Yet
many things they told came to pass as they predicted.
I was asked how this could be if the visions were all false. I told
them that it was Satan’s purpose to mingle truth with error, that through
these deceptive exercises he might make of none effect the genuine
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work of God. From that time all their many visions ceased. What
has become of those who had the visions, and those who encouraged
them? Several now living are skeptics, have no belief in the gifts of
the church, no faith in the truth, no religion at all. Such, I have been
shown, is the sure result of spurious visions.
The manifestations of your daughter are a similar deception. And
your encouraging these things in her will prove her ruin, and the ruin
of others, unless something breaks the deception. You called these
false visions and meaningless dreams the wonderful light of God, but
it is like the chaff to the wheat. This is a serious matter. It will have a
decided influence upon your family. While you regard your daughter’s
words as spoken under the influence of the Spirit of God, it will be the
same to you as though they were true. You are under strong delusion
of Satan. You will claim to credit them, and thus your confidence
in the veritable, genuine messages from God will be uprooted. And
so will it be with all who believe as you do. This is why Satan is so
constantly pressing in the spurious—to lead away from the truth.
The very last deception of Satan will be to make of none effect the
testimony of the Spirit of God. “Where there is no vision, the people
perish” (
Proverbs 29:18
). Satan will work ingeniously, in different
ways and through different agencies, to unsettle the confidence of
God’s remnant people in the true testimony. He will bring in spurious
visions to mislead, and will mingle the false with the true, and so
disgust people that they will regard everything that bears the name
of visions as a species of fanaticism; but honest souls, by contrasting
false and true, will be enabled to distinguish between them