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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
It was by falsifying the character of God and exciting distrust
of Him that Satan tempted Eve to transgress. By sin the minds of
our first parents were darkened, their natures were degraded, and
their conceptions of God were molded by their own narrowness and
selfishness. And as men became bolder in sin, the knowledge and the
love of God faded from their minds and hearts. “Because that, when
they knew God, they glorified Him not as God,” they “became vain in
their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”
At times Satan’s contest for the control of the human family ap-
peared to be crowned with success. During the ages preceding the first
advent of Christ the world seemed almost wholly under the sway of
the prince of darkness, and he ruled with a terrible power as though
through the sin of our first parents the kingdoms of the world had be-
come his by right. Even the covenant people, whom God had chosen
to preserve in the world the knowledge of Himself, had so far departed
from Him that they had lost all true conception of His character.
Christ came to reveal God to the world as a God of love, full of
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mercy, tenderness, and compassion. The thick darkness with which
Satan had endeavored to enshroud the throne of Deity was swept away
by the world’s Redeemer, and the Father was again manifest to men as
the light of life.
When Philip came to Jesus with the request, “Show us the Father,
and it sufficeth us,” the Saviour answered him: “Have I been so long
time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? he that hath
seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us
the Father?” Christ declares Himself to be sent into the world as a
representative of the Father. In His nobility of character, in His mercy
and tender pity, in His love and goodness, He stands before us as the
embodiment of divine perfection, the image of the invisible God.
Says the apostle: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
Himself.” Only as we contemplate the great plan of redemption can
we have a just appreciation of the character of God. The work of
creation was a manifestation of His love; but the gift of God to save
the guilty and ruined race, alone reveals the infinite depths of divine
tenderness and compassion. “God so loved the world, that He gave His
only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life.” While the law of God is maintained, and its
justice vindicated, the sinner can be pardoned. The dearest gift that