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Testimonies for the Church Volume 6
exercised. Man’s depravity is to be met by the love, the patience, the
long-suffering of God. My work shall be to save those who are under
Satan’s rule.”
Through Christ, God works to bring man back to his first relation
to his Creator and to correct the disorganizing influences brought in
by Satan. Christ alone stood unpolluted in a world of selfishness,
where men would destroy a friend or a brother in order to accomplish a
scheme put into their hands by Satan. Christ came to our world, cloth-
ing His divinity with humanity, that humanity might touch humanity
and divinity grasp divinity. Amid the din of selfishness He could say
to men: Return to your center—God. He Himself made it possible for
man to do this by carrying out in this world the principles of heaven.
In humanity He lived the law of God. To men in every nation, every
country, every clime, He will impart heaven’s choicest gifts if they
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will accept God as their Creator and Christ as their Redeemer.
Christ alone can do this. His gospel in the hearts and hands of His
followers is the power which is to accomplish this great work. “O the
depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” By
Himself becoming subject to Satan’s misrepresentations, Christ made
it possible for the work of redemption to be accomplished. Thus was
Satan to show himself to be the cause of disloyalty in God’s universe.
Thus was to be forever settled the great controversy between Christ
and Satan.
Satan strengthens the destructive tendencies of man’s nature. He
brings in envy, jealousy, selfishness, covetousness, emulation, and
strife for the highest place. Evil agencies act their part through the
devising of Satan. Thus the enemy’s plans, with their destructive
tendencies, have been brought into the church. Christ comes with
His own redeeming influence, proposing through the agency of His
Spirit to impart His efficiency to men, and to employ them as His
instrumentalities, laborers together with Him in seeking to draw the
world back to its loyalty.
Men are bound in fellowship, in dependence, to one another. By
the golden links of the chain of love they are to be bound fast to
the throne of God. This can be done only by Christ’s imparting to
finite man the attributes which man would ever have possessed had he
remained loyal and true to God.