| Not the Mark Yet While millions of honest Christians keep Sunday at the present time, God does not number them with Satan’s camp. However, the time will come when God will call his people out of Babylon[493]. “I heard a voice from heaven, saying, ‘Come out, my people! Come out from her!’ ”[494] At that time, all those who continue to honor Sunday will have received the mark of the beast. It is not about days; there is nothing special about any 24-hour period. God gave us the Sabbath to help us remember and to help us express our conviction of the kind of person he is. When the church employs the state to force the conscience by legislating the observance of the spurious day of rest, the observance of the Seventh-day Sabbath will be a declaration that we believe our God to be a God of freedom, with all that the Sabbath says about him. The keeping of the legally binding Sunday will be a declaration of belief that God is willing to accept obedience based on force, fear and intimidation. Who do YOU Trust? Some day, in response to the messages of the three angels of Revelation 14 and the appeals of the master deceiver, the whole world will be divided into two sides. Everyone on earth will believe in God at this time; the difference will be their picture of God, which will determine what kind of people they are. Those with the seal of God will be willing to die for what they believe; those with the mark of the beast will be willing to kill for what they believe. Just as the angels took their stand—2/3 on God’s side, 1/3 on the Devil’s side, siding with him against God—so on this earth, when the work is finished, there will be two sides. One group, by far the larger of the two it says in Revelation 13, will have chosen to agree with Satan, because of their faith in him. And he comes as Christ; he masquerades as an angel of light. Because of their preference for his way of doing things, they will have become like him in character, for it is a law in this orderly universe that we become like the one we worship and admire. The other group, describe in Revelation as, sadly, the smaller of the two, sometimes described as only a “remnant,” will have rejected Satan’s lies, just as Job rejected the misrepresentation of God that those 3 theologians brought to him. They were wrong. They were religious, they were trying to be helpful! But they were dead wrong. God said, “Job, pray for these three—they were wrong! They haven’t said of me what is right.” That’s a great ending to the book. At risk of life, this smaller group will have persisted in keeping God’s commands and remaining loyal to Jesus[495]. Because of their faith in Christ, their love and admiration for his wise and gracious ways, they will have become like him in character. In that day, and not until that day, the observance of a substitute Sabbath will represent faith in a substitute Christ; the one who all along has sought to take the place of the son of God, both in our affections, and in the government of the universe. This is the usurper who sought to set himself up as God; the one who dared to ask his Creator to bow down at his feet and worship him. But when that time comes, the intelligent, free observance of the Seventh-day Sabbath will represent faith in the true Christ. At that time, the Sabbath will safeguard us from the almost overmastering delusion by helping us remember and help us express our conviction of the kind of person God truly is. It will be public acknowledgment to each other, and the onlooking universe, that we worship Jesus Christ as our Creator, our Savior, and our God, and that we accept as true his testimony about the Father. “The earth is also defiled under its inhabitants, Because they have transgressed the laws, Changed the ordinance, Broken the everlasting covenant.”[496] “It is time for thee, LORD, to work; for they have made void thy law.”[497] Then the end will come. |
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| 493 the counterfeit system of confusion 494 Revelation 18:4 TEV 495 Revelation 14:12 496 Isaiah 24:5 497 Psalm 119:126 |
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