Review and Herald for 1967

The Inclination Forget' God * Loma Linda and La Sierra Unite Modern Miracle in Puerto 0 CONCEPCION t CNC Z CNA* Lif II SAME N “.111 Mal HIP NO1111311 F PM N N By J. H. FIGUEROA, JR. President Puerto Rico Conference Af. INIIRIO • t. ..,-- warms: EIALCISDO BO TINED MIMIC NINO t C CUR pD TAL TRIM $7 $1 ' TOTALES Jose H. Figueroa, Jr. (right), the president of the Puerto Rico Conference, hands the shoe box containing $48,802 to Hector J. Brignoni, conference secretary-treasurer. H e'_ ou MODERN miracle p e(1 ttan, opened t "epac age . t 1)14exto Itieo, oil.. tcsdayt ,April 18. AVe at fifty , and hundred-dollar bills amounting to a total tltv co l'!cit. prq,aredJor.... of $48,802. the surprise (ha opci'ted a pack- There was also a handwritten letter that began: "I age that arrivP.( ,.1. ,iwthe.roaIrdtlt4t' morl'ing. Books are am sending $48,802. This is all that I have available• )34.1c -4 Sonletitliesi-etuzrte d tO the 9 "( 1 Bible flouse,, and, now. When I began to save this, money I thought at *fix st Nse, ,toctk/this- to t. a age of books. it se as about building a house, because the one ;I have is IVA not ittstir not -was :itr r stet' 1. Iltit when we very good. Out (To page 5) Vol. 144 No. 22 A Study of the Sabbath-1 HRIST declared: "This ,is life The eternal, that they might. know C thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast. sent" (John 17:3). Certainly if God iis the source and sustainer of all life, then a true knowledge of Him and fellow- Inclination ship with Him are vital to meaningful living. If God is the source of all life, then we must be in contact with that Life. But if God be a hard, even venge- ful, being, as some people picture Him, how can we have fellowship? to Forget Cod Again, the Scriptures declare that we should seek to be like unto God in our ideals and ways of life) that, indeed, two cannot walk together un- By FRANCIS D. NICHOL less they be agreed. Hence, if likeness to God is the goal of life, we must have a correct idea of the nature of God. If God be conceived of as gross, then how devastating the effect on the chil- dren of men who use that grossness as the measure and justification of their living. time of the Flood until the time of our steeped in idolatry those words were The long record of sinful mail is a Lord may well be compassed in meaningless. record of conflict between God's en- Isaiah's words that darkness covers the When we come to the Christian Era deavor to reveal Himself in His true earth and "gross darkness the people." we find Christ setting forth as one of light, and Satan's endeavor to cari- The most notable thing, perhaps, con- the main reasons for His coming to cature Him. The conflict began in cerning the very people whom God earth His desire to show unto us the the Garden of Eden, where the ser- chose to be His own during those long Father in His qualities of compassion, pent sought to insinuate that God was centuries was the fact that they so mercy, holiness. But the Christian selfishly holding back something; from frequently "forgat God," and turned religion had hardly been launched man. So successful was the devil soon to idols, even to the point of becoming when the apostles faced a strange to become in turning men away. from worse than the heathen round about heresy known as Gnosticism. It was a God, that we find in the sorrowful them. weird mixture of Greek and other record in the first chapter of Romans God brought Israel into the Prom- Eastern speculative philosophical ideas how rapidly men deteriorated as they ised Land, whose inhabitants were so about God and the universe. At the turned from Him. They "changed the depraved that the land spewed them heart of the speculation was this idea, glory of the uncorruptible God into an out. Yet, instead of driving out the that matter is inherently evil. In other image made like to corruptible man." vile inhabitants, Israel copied their words, the very ground under our feet, From that they sank to the still lower ways, raised altars to Baal and Ashte- the earth which God had made, is level of picturing God as like ' unto roth and to other of the degraded gods essentially evil. There followed logi- "birds, and fourfooted beasts, 1, and of the heathen. Too often Jehovah cally from this the view that the Being creeping things." The result was that seemed to them nothing but one more who made this earth was not the true, they "worshipped and served. the god in a pantheon and a fierce, venge- ultimate God, but some inferior be- ful god at that, tainted in the same ing called a demiurge. Hence to look creature more than the Creator" (Rom. 1:23, 25). vile ways that marked the heathen upon the material world was not to The degradation that followed this gods. The Hebrew prophets cried out look upon the handiwork of the great was also plainly marked out. Wrote for reform, particularly for holiness and ultimate God, but only on the Paul: "For this cause 'God gave them- and sanctification, but to a people baleful labors of some secondary, mali- up unto vile affections" (verse 26). Their depravity was accompanied, fi- nally, by a complete repudiation of God, for Paul adds these fateful ONE YEAR ago this Thursday—June 2, 1966—the late editor' words: "They did not like to retain God in their knowledge" (verse 28). in chief of the REVIEW AND HERALD brought a long and Depravity, polytheism, and virtual abundantly fruitful ministry to the Advent people to a close, and atheism—that is the picture of man in the following day fell asleep in the blessed hope of our Lord's antediluvian days, so that every iinag- soon return. The accompanying article is the first in a series ination of his heart was only; evil of editorials he had prepared on the significance of the Sabbath continually. today which was awaiting publication at the time of his death,, Nor were conditions any better after the Flood. The story of man from the 2 REVIEW AND HERALD, June 1, 1967 cious god who sought, not to benefit, of a great machine, each interlocked, The Theory of Inevitable Progress but to damage mankind. and each moving in unison with all At the same time there began to This great heresy spread rapidly the rest. Thus it was easy for skeptical flourish a wide-sweeping theory, over the church, tainting it in endless men to focus simply on the machine though only a philosophical theory, ways. One great historian, Adolf von and hurry to the conclusion that the that a certain law controls the whole Harnack, well observed that in Ca- whole universe is merely a mechanical universe, the law of inevitable prog- tholicism, Gnosticism gained half a device that runs of itself. ress, as though the whole universe victory. Probably we never will know There were those who, refusing to were on some kind of cosmic escalator the extent to which Christianity was go the whole distance to stark atheism, that inevitably lifts everything ever affected' by this prime heresy that in- adopted a view known as deism, which upward to higher levels. It was a pleas- volved the very nature of Him who is held that though God made the uni- ing theory, not at all difficult to accept. the Creator of this earth. verse, He did no more than that. Somehow it was companion to the Modern Science and Skepticism Their view was that He made it, false idea of the irrelevance of God wound it up, as it were, and then re- But let us move quickly on through in the universe. Why do we need God tired into the vastness of space, leav- if the universe is controlled by a law the Dark Ages when various evil forces ing the universe to run on its own. worked to obscure the light of God, that steadily lifts all things onward The net result of all this Was that to and upward? Our ultimate destiny is and come down to the sixteenth cen- a great majority of intellectuals God assured, the future is ours. Who needs tury. We think of that century as the either was farther removed than ever time of the great spiritual revolution, to trouble about an end to the world, the Reformation. What we often for- from the affairs of men, and uncon- with its judgment bar and a holy God cerned about them, or else that there seated there? The idea of progress is get is that that century was also the was no God at all. time of the great scientific revolution, a contradiction of the idea of an end which was to have a tremendous effect upon religion. Living at the same time as Martin Luther was a man named Copernicus, an astronomer who was forever to change the picture of the universe that had dominated men's minds for long ages, a picture of this little world of ours as the center, and all the other stars around it simply as ornaments, with only heaven itself as greater.

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