Basic HTML Version
Satan’s Attack Against God’s Memorial, May 8
In vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
Matthew 15:9
, NKJV.
The enemy has worked in the religious world to deceive people into the belief
that the law of God can be set aside. He has had long years of experience in this
work, for he began with our first parents, using his powers to cause them to distrust
God. If he could interpose himself between their souls and God, he knew that
he would succeed. The prospect of becoming gods, knowing good and evil, was
pleasing to Adam and Eve, and they yielded to the temptation.
In receiving a knowledge of good and evil, human beings feel that they are
gaining much; but they do not understand the purposes of Satan. They do not
understand that they are taken in his snare when they tamper with the law of God.
The enemy knows that if the church can be controlled by political enactments, if
it can be led to unite with the world, it virtually acknowledges him as its head.
Then the authority of human-made commandments will work to oppose the rule of
the government of heaven. Under the leadership of Satan there are those who will
dispense with the righteous, holy enactments of God concerning the Sabbath, the
observance of which is to be a sign between God and His people forever.
Satan’s plan has taken with the religious world. He has created an order of
things entirely his own, making void the law of God. Through his deceptive working
he has gained in the professedly Christian world that which he thought to gain in
heaven—an abrogation of the laws of Jehovah. Through the Roman power he has
worked to remove God’s memorial, and has erected a memorial of his own to sever
God from His people. Today the Protestant world is estranged from God by its
acceptance of a spurious sabbath. Not one iota of sacred authority can they find for
doing this; yet, full of zeal, they assert that the Lord’s memorial given at creation
should be ignored, despised, trampled upon, and the first day of the week take its
place.
No deeper wound could be inflicted on God than to ignore His holy day, and
place in its stead a spurious sabbath that bears no mark of sanctity. God gave the
Sabbath to the world to be set apart for His name’s glory. He says: “It is a sign
between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the
Lord that doth sanctify you.... Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath
throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant.”—
The Signs of the Times,
November 22, 1899
.
[140]
141