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Testimony Studies on Diet and Foods
reached to heaven. This moral pollution was finally swept from the
earth by means of the flood. The same sins of gluttony and drunkenness
benumbed the moral sensibilities of the inhabitants of Sodom, so that
crime seemed to be the delight of the men and women of that wicked
city. Christ thus warns the world: “Likewise also as it was in the days
of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted,
they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained
fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus
shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”
Christ has here left us a most important lesson. He would lay
before us the danger of making our eating and drinking paramount. He
presents the result of unrestrained indulgence of appetite. The moral
powers are enfeebled, so that sin does not appear sinful. Crime is
lightly regarded, and passion controls the mind, until good principles
and impulses are rooted out, and God is blasphemed. All this is the
result of eating and drinking to excess. This is the very condition of
things which Christ declares will exist at His second coming.
The Saviour presents to us something higher to toil for than merely
what we shall eat and drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed.
Eating, drinking, and dressing are carried to such excess that they
become crimes. They are among the marked sins of the last days,
and constitute a sign of Christ’s soon coming. Time, money, and
strength, which belong to the Lord, but which He has intrusted to
us, are wasted in superfluities of dress and luxuries for the perverted
appetite, which lessen vitality, and bring suffering and decay. It is
impossible to present our bodies a living sacrifice to God when we
continually fill them with corruption and disease by our own sinful
indulgence.
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Christ began the work of redemption just where the ruin began.
His first test was on the same point where Adam failed. It was through
temptations addressed to the appetite that Satan had overcome a large
proportion of the human race, and his success had made him feel that
the control of this fallen planet was in his hands. But in Christ he
found one who was able to resist him, and he left the field of battle a
conquered foe. Jesus says, “He hath nothing in me.” His victory is an