Dear Friends of “Dial Daily Bread,”
If your house is below a killer volcano that hasn’t erupted for over a hundred years, you go to bed at night feeling quite secure, don’t you? But suppose you know that suddenly it has started rumbling, wouldn’t common sense tell you to get out and live somewhere else? Or to change the metaphor, say you live beneath an avalanche that hasn’t moved for over a century; you don’t worry. But then you learn that very recently it has suddenly moved a foot or two, then what? Once that huge mass begins to break loose, you know it’s going to roll.
Daniel and Revelation tell us of future developments that will be cataclysmic. In particular, Revelation tells of two great world powers symbolized as the first “beast,” and then “another beast” (13:1, 11). The first has always “blasphemed” God’s “name” and made war with His true people and persecuted them for 1260 years of real time (in Bible prophecy, a day is symbolic of a literal year; cf. vs. 5; 12:6, 14; Num. 14:34; Ezek. 4:6).
The second starts off totally different from the first. He comes up out of a comparatively uninhabited wide expanse of land and conspicuously teaches liberty of conscience (has “two horns like a lamb”). He grows phenomenally into a world power greater than anything since the Roman Empire.
Over a century ago Senator H. W. Blair of New Hampshire introduced a bill that would have abandoned our religious liberty and forced the observance of a religious day of rest—all contrary both to the Bible and to the basic principle of the American Constitution.
Largely due to the energetic effort of two young men (E. J. Waggoner and A. T. Jones) who by pen and voice appealed for loyalty to the First Amendment, Sen. Blair’s project was defeated—but only for a time. This great nation continued to manifest its lamb-like spirit of civil and religious liberty (which included the principle of no pre-emptive attack in war).
Now the volcano has rumbled, the avalanche has shifted; this power has begun to roar “as a dragon.” Revelation 13 is at last beginning to “roll.” Simple common sense now confirms what God has said all along, “Come out of [Babylon], My people” (Rev. 14:8; 18:1-4).
—Robert J. Wieland
From the “Dial Daily Bread” Archive: March 12, 2003.
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