A Satanic Program

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If the written word of the most high God is obeyed, it will educate the believer to cooperate with God in bringing up to a high level the debased and fallen. Then the ignorant will learn that the enactment of God means peace and goodness, mercy and love. Satan [does not want this presentation to be made of God. He desires] selfishness to prevail, the love of money to become the relying element in the heart. He wants that fraud, crime, and injustice prevail in the world. He desires to see the poor suffer from hunger, and for want of food and clothing, and the world today become as full of violence as was the world before the flood. Then he can bring about his ends, charging all the misery upon God.SpM 140.3

To a large extent Satan has carried out his plans. The Lord's property is embezzled; God is robbed. The means that has been lent to man to relieve the necessities of the poor and to uplift and sustain the fallen in righteousness and truth, is used to please and glorify self. From the beginning to the end the crime of tobacco-using, of opium and drug medication, has its origin in perverted knowledge. It is through plucking and eating of poisonous fruit, through the intricacies of names that the common people do not understand, that thousands and ten thousands of lives are lost. This great knowledge, supposed by man to be so wonderful, God did not mean that man should have. They are using the poisonous productions that Satan himself has planted to take the place of the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Men are dealing in liquors and narcotics that are destroying the human family. Deathly mixtures are used, that make men mad, and murder and violence are prevailing everywhere.SpM 140.4

The time is near when all these wicked inventions will come to an end. At the last the passion for obtaining means by fraud will increase. Theft and robbery will become prevalent. The fruit of the tree of knowledge will be greedily eaten. Satan will come down with great power, working with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish. Amusements of every kind will increase, and money, God's money, will be abused and misapplied while thousands are perishing for food in all our cities. The dead will be honored with costly sepulchers and expensive monuments, and attention will be called to those things as something worthy of laudation. The householders will turn away from the real wants of human beings, and glorify Satan in embellishing the tombs of the dead.SpM 141.1

The cries of humanity from India, from Africa, from China and from many places, are going up to God. Misery and anguish and physical suffering are coming up before him, and the Lord will soon sweep the earth of its moral corruption,—not by a sea of water as in Noah's day, but by a sea of fire that can not be quenched by any human devising. Admonitions are given to the inhabitants of the earth who are corrupting their ways before God, who are plucking of the tree of the knowledge of evil to the ruin of human beings. God will avenge his own elect which cry unto him day and night. Yes, he will avenge them speedily.SpM 141.2

Mrs. E. G. White

September 22, 1898