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The Great Controversy
The beast with two horns “causeth [commands] all, both small and
great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right
hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save
he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his
name.”
Revelation 13:16, 17
. The third angel’s warning is: “If any man
worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead,
or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God.”
“The beast” mentioned in this message, whose worship is enforced by
the two-horned beast, is the first, or leopardlike beast of
Revelation
13
—the papacy. The “image to the beast” represents that form of
apostate Protestantism which will be developed when the Protestant
churches shall seek the aid of the civil power for the enforcement of
their dogmas. The “mark of the beast” still remains to be defined.
After the warning against the worship of the beast and his image
the prophecy declares: “Here are they that keep the commandments of
God, and the faith of Jesus.” Since those who keep God’s command-
ments are thus placed in contrast with those that worship the beast and
his image and receive his mark, it follows that the keeping of God’s
law, on the one hand, and its violation, on the other, will make the
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distinction between the worshipers of God and the worshipers of the
beast.
The special characteristic of the beast, and therefore of his image,
is the breaking of God’s commandments. Says Daniel, of the little
horn, the papacy: “He shall think to change times and the law.”
Daniel
7:25
, R.V. And Paul styled the same power the “man of sin,” who was
to exalt himself above God. One prophecy is a complement of the
other. Only by changing God’s law could the papacy exalt itself above
God; whoever should understandingly keep the law as thus changed
would be giving supreme honor to that power by which the change
was made. Such an act of obedience to papal laws would be a mark of
allegiance to the pope in the place of God.
The papacy has attempted to change the law of God. The second
commandment, forbidding image worship, has been dropped from
the law, and the fourth commandment has been so changed as to
authorize the observance of the first instead of the seventh day as
the Sabbath. But papists urge, as a reason for omitting the second
commandment, that it is unnecessary, being included in the first, and
that they are giving the law exactly as God designed it to be understood.