The Lord cannot force nor conquer by fear what He would win only by love. This provides the supreme reason for His continued patience during the long delay.
What else can He do but await our disillusionment? This is the wisdom of His love, a truly divine strategy. Our sin of rejecting the light of the loud cry can never be overcome truly until our motives in all our hearts are laid bare to our consciousness. This searching work certainly must be included in the cleansing of the sanctuary. What we failed to believe a century ago we must learn through traversing a devious detour of our own devising. Our history is the outworking of principles divinely ordained to lead us to reconciliation with Christ our Saviour.
A detour is always an inconvenience, even a trial, but in the end the destination is always reached. In the meantime, impatience and spiritual immaturity in our midst has produced an array of mini-organizations, distributing thousands of books and periodicals, tapes and videos, and promoting various theologies. In some cases the confusion is so great that it has even been suggested that Israel can become Babylon, indeed has become Babylon and therefore "home churches" should be established. But such a course is a denial of faith and an abortion of God's plan for His church. The record is clear:
"Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. ... Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. ... And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." (Gal. 3:7, 16, 29)
The body of Christ is one and therefore cannot be fragmented. God's promise to Abraham will never be disannulled or made of none effect. The long delay may seem to be an insufferable trial but the "detour" will end and no amount of apostasy will nullify the power of the gospel to accomplish God's purposes. The many promises to this end that have been given to the remnant church dare not be ignored. Here is one such assurance of deep significance:
"Unless the church, which is now being leavened with her own backsliding, shall repent and be converted, she will eat of the fruit of her own doing, until she shall abhor herself. When she resists the evil and chooses the good, when she seeks God with all humility, ... she will be healed. She will appear in her God-given simplicity and purity, separate from earthly entanglements, showing that the truth has made her free indeed. Then her members will indeed be the chosen of God, His representatives. ... When this reformation begins, the spirit of prayer will actuate every believer, and will banish from the church the spirit of discord and strife ...: There will be no confusion, because all will be in harmony with the mind of the Spirit. ... God's servants will speak the same things."[1]
She will be healed! A positive promise. The truth will make her free! All of God's people will be in harmony with the mind of the Holy Spirit. God's servants will not be fragmented by an array of sun-dry teachings. Pluralism will die. All this will happen when she "shall repent and be converted." To repent means to look back and understand the present in the light of our past experiences. There can never be any repentance without that enlightened looking back.
No Hebrew in all the world can be an heir of the promise except by looking back to the true history of Calvary, and with repentance understanding what happened there. Just so surely the call for repentance which the True Witness makes to the seventh church demands that we look back and appreciate the honest truth of our own history. Thirteen years after Minneapolis Ellen White sensed that we failed to recognize what the Lord wanted to do in that era. In 1901 she wrote:
"The people who had great light did not have corresponding piety, sanctification, and zeal in working out God's specified plans. ... Man cannot possibly stretch over that gulf that has been made by the workers who have not been following the divine Leader. We may have to remain here in this world because of insubordination many more years, as did the children of Israel, but for Christ's sake, His people should not add sin to sin by charging God with the consequence of their own wrong course of action."[2]
And now more than ninety years later, it is apparent that those "many more years" because of insubordination have been fulfilled. Integrity demands that we review and appreciate our history.
Notes: