The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 668
mob; the fearful events of that night of horror—the unresisting prisoner,
forsaken by His best-loved disciples, rudely hurried through the streets
of Jerusalem; the Son of God exultingly displayed before Annas,
arraigned in the high priest’s palace, in the judgment hall of Pilate,
before the cowardly and cruel Herod, mocked, insulted, tortured, and
condemned to die—all are vividly portrayed.
And now before the swaying multitude are revealed the final
scenes—the patient Sufferer treading the path to Calvary; the Prince of
heaven hanging upon the cross; the haughty priests and the jeering rabble
deriding His expiring agony; the supernatural darkness; the heaving
earth, the rent rocks, the open graves, marking the moment when the
world’s Redeemer yielded up His life.
The awful spectacle appears just as it was. Satan, his angels, and
his subjects have no power to turn from the picture of their own work.
Each actor recalls the part which he performed. Herod, who slew the
innocent children of Bethlehem that he might destroy the King of Israel;
the base Herodias, upon whose guilty soul rests the blood of John the
Baptist; the weak, timeserving Pilate; the mocking soldiers; the priests
and rulers and the maddened throng who cried, “His blood be on us, and
on our children!”—all behold the enormity of their guilt. They vainly
seek to hide from the divine majesty of His countenance, outshining the
glory of the sun, while the redeemed cast their crowns at the Saviour’s
feet, exclaiming: “He died for me!”
Amid the ransomed throng are the apostles of Christ, the heroic
Paul, the ardent Peter, the loved and loving John, and their truehearted
brethren, and with them the vast host of martyrs; while outside the
walls, with every vile and abominable thing, are those by whom they
were persecuted, imprisoned, and slain. There is Nero, that monster of
cruelty and vice, beholding the joy and exaltation of those whom he once
tortured, and in whose extremest anguish he found satanic delight. His
mother is there to witness the result of
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