The Ruin Wrought by Satan
[
The Great Controversy, 589, 590
(1888).]
Through spiritualism, Satan appears as a benefactor of the race,
healing the diseases of the people and professing to present a new and
more exalted system of religious faith; but at the same time he works
as a destroyer. His temptations are leading multitudes to ruin. Intem-
perance dethrones reason; sensual indulgence, strife, and bloodshed
follow. Satan delights in war, for it excites the worst passions of the
soul and then sweeps into eternity its victims steeped in vice and blood.
It is his object to incite the nations to war against one another; for he
can thus divert the minds of the people from the work of preparation
to stand in the day of God.
Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of
unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of
nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as
God allows. When he was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks
and herds, servants, houses, children, were swept away, one trouble
succeeding another as in a moment. It is God that shields His creatures
and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer. But the Christian
world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah, and the Lord will
do just what He has declared that He would—He will withdraw His
blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those
who are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to
do the same. Satan has control of all whom God does not especially
guard. He will favor and prosper some, in order to further his own
designs; and he will bring trouble upon others and lead men to believe
that it is God who is afflicting them.
[461]
While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who
can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until
populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is
at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great
conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests,
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