FROM YOUR PASTOR’S DESK:
WILL LIFE ‘RETURN TO NORMAL’ IF AND WHEN THE PANDEMIC ENDS? (Part V)
We often forget that Satan is at least six thousand years older than any mortal, was next to Christ in heaven, that is, among the angels who were created before man was. Lucifer was made as a covering cherub of “great white throne” of the invisible Father. Through his unparalleled wisdom, beauty and endowments that somehow got corrupted by “the mystery of iniquity,” he succeeded in convincing, through his consummate cunning and subtlety, one third of the angels IN HEAVEN to join his rebellion against Christ and the law of God.
Cast down to yet-unfallen EARTH after his defeat, Lucifer-now-turned-Satan (“that dragon and serpent of old called the devil”) proceeded to tempt Eve, in her perfect, sinless state in Eden using the same deadly cunning he used on the angels. All too sadly, he succeeded. Since that fateful day of the fall in perfectly beautiful Eden, the history of mankind and the earth fearfully and graphically reveals his work of devastation and ruin, and how man seems to have never learned to this very moment that “the enemy of God and man” is the mastermind and central power, working unseen in the spirit world on earth, working the ruin of man and God’s creation—but only as far as God allows.
We now read a revelation of what God’s commandment-keeping people should expect and be braced for spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically (which the rewards of faithfully practicing the true health and diet reform, will prove invaluable.:
“While appearing to men as a great physician [in his many disguises and impostures wrought through his agencies of both spirits and modern-day counterfeit faith and natural-remedy healers, etc.] who can heal all their maladies, he will bring DISEASE and DISASTER, until POPULOUS CITIES are reduced to ruin and destruction.
“Even NOW he is at work. [How? Where?] In ACCIDENTS (so they are not after all really “accidental] and CALAMITIES BY SEA AND LAND, IN GREAT CONFLAGRATIONS, IN FIERCE TORNADOES AND TERRIFIC HAILSTORMS, IN TEMPESTS, FLOODS, CYCLONES, TIDAL WAVES [tsunamis], 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.”
If you think this is terrible news, see what follows:
“The visitations are to BECOME MORE AND MORE FREQUENT AND DISASTROUS. Destruction will be both upon men and beast. ‘The earth mourneth and fadeth away,’ ‘the haughty people…..do languish. The earth is also defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have TRANSGRESSED THE LAWS, CHANGED THE ORDINANCES [of God, not of man or the Church], and BROKEN THE EVERLASTING COVENANT [The Ten Commandments, Deut. 4:13]. Isa. 24: 4,5, KJV.”- Great Controversy, E. G. White,(1911 ed.), pp. 589, 590.
To be continued. Bless all, NMF