The European Union in Prophecy The EU in Prophecy I | Page 21

The European Union in Prophecy
gratitude for God's mercy and long-suffering in holding in check the cruel, malignant
power of the evil one. But when men pass the limits of divine forbearance, that
restraint is removed. God does not stand toward the sinner as an executioner of the
sentence against transgression; but He leaves the rejectors of His mercy to themselves,
to reap that which they have sown. Every ray of light rejected, every warning despised
or unheeded, every passion indulged, every transgression of the law of God, is a seed
sown which yields its unfailing harvest. The Spirit of God, persistently resisted, is at
last withdrawn from the sinner, and then there is left no power to control the evil
passions of the soul, and no protection from the malice and enmity of Satan. The
destruction of Jerusalem is a fearful and solemn warning to all who are trifling with
the offers of divine grace and resisting the pleadings of divine mercy. Never was there
given a more decisive testimony to God's hatred of sin and to the certain punishment
that will fall upon the guilty.
The Saviour's prophecy concerning the visitation of judgments upon Jerusalem
is to have another fulfillment, of which that terrible desolation was but a faint shadow.
In the fate of the chosen city we may behold the doom of a world that has rejected
God's mercy and trampled upon His law. Dark are the records of human misery that
earth has witnessed during its long centuries of crime. The heart sickens, and the
mind grows faint in contemplation. Terrible have been the results of rejecting the
authority of Heaven. But a scene yet darker is presented in the revelations of the
future. The records of the past,--the long procession of tumults,
conflicts, and
revolutions, the "battle of the warrior . . . with confused noise, and garments rolled in
blood" (Isaiah 9:5),-- what are these, in contrast with the terrors of that day when the
restraining Spirit of God shall be wholly withdrawn from the wicked, no longer to hold
in check the outburst of human passion and satanic wrath! The world will then behold,
as never before, the results of Satan's rule.
But in that day, as in the time of Jerusalem's destruction, God's people will be
delivered, everyone that shall be found written among the living. Isaiah 4:3. Christ
has declared that He will come the second time to gather His faithful ones to Himself:
"Then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming
in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He shall send His angels with
a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four
winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Matthew 24:30, 31. Then shall they that
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