268
Testimonies for the Church Volume 4
so high that the inspired apostle, failing to find language in which to
describe it, calls upon the church and the world to behold it—to make
it a theme of contemplation and admiration.
I presented before my hearers the sin of Adam in the transgression
of the Father’s express commands. God made man upright, perfectly
holy and happy; but he lost the divine favor and destroyed his own
happiness by disobedience to the Father’s law. The sin of Adam
plunged the race in hopeless misery and despair. But God, in His
wonderful, pitying love, did not leave men to perish in their hopeless,
fallen condition. He gave His well-beloved Son for their salvation.
Christ entered the world, His divinity clothed in humanity; He passed
over the ground where Adam fell; He bore the test which Adam failed
to endure; He overcame every temptation of Satan, and thus redeemed
Adam’s disgraceful failure and fall.
I then referred to the long fast of Christ in the wilderness. The
sin of the indulgence of appetite, and its power over human nature,
can never be fully realized, except as that long fast of Christ when
contending single-handed with the prince of the powers of darkness is
studied and understood. Man’s salvation was at stake. Would Satan or
the Redeemer of the world come off conqueror? It is impossible for us
to conceive with what intense interest angels of God watched the trial
of their loved Commander.
[294]
Jesus was tempted in all points like as we are, that He might know
how to succor those who should be tempted. His life is our example.
He shows by His willing obedience that man may keep the law of
God and that transgression of the law, not obedience to it, brings him
into bondage. The Saviour was full of compassion and love; He never
spurned the truly penitent, however great their guilt; but He severely
denounced hypocrisy of every sort. He is acquainted with the sins of
men, He knows all their acts and reads their secret motives; yet He
does not turn away from them in their iniquity. He pleads and reasons
with the sinner, and in one sense—that of having Himself borne the
weakness of humanity—He puts Himself on a level with him. “Come
now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool.”
Man, who has defaced the image of God in his soul by a corrupt
life, cannot, by mere human effort, effect a radical change in himself.