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The Great Controversy
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.
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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floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a
thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the
ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a
deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations
are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction
will be upon both man and beast. “The earth mourneth and fadeth
away,” “the haughty people ... do languish. The earth also is defiled
under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws,
changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.”
Isaiah 24:4,
5
.
And then the great deceiver will persuade men that those who
serve God are causing these evils. The class that have provoked
the displeasure of Heaven will charge all their troubles upon those
whose obedience to God’s commandments is a perpetual reproof to
transgressors. It will be declared that men are offending God by the
violation of the Sunday sabbath; that this sin has brought calamities
which will not cease until Sunday observance shall be strictly enforced;
and that those who present the claims of the fourth commandment,
thus destroying reverence for Sunday, are troublers of the people,
preventing their restoration to divine favor and temporal prosperity.