The context is the third demon's message:

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good.... And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education--in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs. They will become the new class. Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible. It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration.-- Chris Hedges, American Fascists, pp. 146-147.

The false prophet power has an undisputed control in the world. We are continually being propagandized and systematically urged by him to accept the third demon's message, and at the very least to become passive, apathetic and obedient. To willingly accommodate great evil and adapt to it like the Master Assimilating Chameleon has done is to imitate the character of the beast.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Flattery is praise and praise is worship. Either by deception or by coercion, the two main strengths of the false prophet power, we are being urged to accommodate incredible evil.

To accommodate evil without the slightest resistance, whimpering, or protest is equivalent to receiving the character of the Master Assimilating Chameleon and the symbolic meaning of the number 666.

Seventh-day Adventists are always asking for Spirit of prophecy support for any seemingly new theological insight so I present to you now the larger context in EGW's conceptualization of the third angel's message:

It is God's design to manifest through His people the principles of His kingdom. That in life and character they may reveal these principles, He desires to separate them from the customs, habits, and practices of the world. He seeks to bring them near to Himself, that He may make known to them His will.... MM 187.4.

A great work is to be accomplished in setting before men the saving truths of the gospel. This is the means ordained by God to stem the tide of moral corruption. This is His means of restoring His moral image in man. It is His remedy for universal disorganization. It is the power that draws men together in unity. MM 187.5.

To present these truths is the work of the third angel's message. The Lord designs that the presentation of this message shall be the highest, greatest work carried on in our world at this time.--MS. 166, 1899. MM 188.1.

So why is the Seventh-day Adventist church so slavishly conformist to the propaganda of the false prophet power?

"The third angel's message will not be comprehended, the light which will lighten the earth with its glory will be called a false light, by those who refuse to walk in its advancing glory." RH, May 27, 1890.

It's important to see that the hierarchy will be afraid of the power which lightens the earth with the glory of God, i.e., the third angel's message. But they're certainly not afraid of the feeble version of the third angel's message that the SDA church has now.

“There is to be in the churches a wonderful manifestation of the power of God, but it will not move upon those who have not humbled themselves before the Lord, and opened the door of their heart by confession and repentance. In the manifestation of that power which lightens the earth with the glory of God, they will see only something which in their blindness they think dangerous, something which will arouse their fears, and they will brace themselves to resist it. Because the Lord does not work according to their expectations and ideal, they will oppose the work.‘Why,’ they say,‘should we not know the Spirit of God, when we have been in the work so many years?’— Because they did not respond to the warnings, the entreaties, of the messages of God, but persistently said,‘I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.’” 1888, p. 765.

Eugene

You've said much but with little explanation of what it is you're trying to say. Please clearly explain your views in regard to the threads title. Just what is it that is out of context in regard to the 3rd Angels Message? It would seem that all religions/peoples are currently being warned. Yet your focus is on the SDA. What exactly is your issue with this religious body as it pertains to the 3 Angels Message of the Holy Writ?

Thank you
Bree

Bree wrote:Eugene

You've said much but with little explanation of what it is you're trying to say. Please clearly explain your views in regard to the threads title.

Hi Bree,

I thought that my first sentence explained the thread's title: "The context is the third demon's message:"

Note the colon (:) at the end of that sentence. "The sign (:) is used to mark a major division in a sentence, to indicate that what follows is an elaboration, summation, implication, etc." Then a very alarming paragraph by the American journalist, Chris Hedges, followed. To understand the larger context of it and its exact relationship to the third angel's message, if you are interested, I recommend the very detailed thesis at http://everythingimportant.org.

This thread is just a brief summary.

What should Seventh-day Adventists do in the worst emergency imaginable?

Unquestionably, the worst religious crisis imaginable is the arrival of the three demon messengers (Revelation 16:13-14) to seduce the last generation of mankind while all the watchmen of the Seventh-day Adventist church are fast asleep.

In this context, do Seventh-day Adventists really believe that God will excuse their party attitude, their petty and even evil pursuits and their cowardly spirit of do-nothingness?

"What astonishing deception and fearful blindness had, like a dark cloud, covered Israel! This blindness and apostasy had not closed about them suddenly; it had come upon them gradually as they had not heeded the word of reproof and warning which the Lord had sent to them because of their pride and their sins. And now, in this fearful crisis, in the presence of the idolatrous priests and the apostate king, they remained neutral. If God abhors one sin above another, of which His people are guilty, it is doing nothing in case of an emergency. Indifference and neutrality in a religious crisis is regarded of God as a grievous crime and equal to the very worst type of hostility against God." —Testimonies for the Church, Vol 3, pp. 280-281.

The meaning of this Christmas video is the absurd way it illustrates the unparalleled lust that many Christians have to be on the side of prosperity and power while easily dismissing the suffering and death of Jesus Christ as no big deal:

Menorah lights are shining
So brightly everywhere
And the big box office
Makes Jews millionaires
They may have killed our savior
That's not the best behavior
That's ok he rose again three days later
and now I'm an active J-dater

Here's another song about compromise in the third demon's message, which illustrates the comedy of selling out:

The beast with lamb-like horns speaks with the voice of a dragon, and "exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him." The spirit of persecution manifested by paganism and the papacy is again to be revealed. Prophecy declares that this power will say "to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast." [Revelation 13:14.] The image is made to the first or leopard-like beast, which is the one brought to view in the third angel's message. By this first beast is represented the Roman Church, an ecclesiastical body clothed with civil power, having authority to punish all dissenters. The image to the beast represents another religious body clothed with similar power.



The formation of this image is the work of that beast whose peaceful rise and mild professions render it so striking a symbol of the United States. Here is to be found an image of the papacy. When the churches of our land, uniting upon such points of faith as are held by them in common, shall influence the State to enforce their decrees and sustain their institutions, then will Protestant America have formed an image of the Roman hierarchy. Then the true church will be assailed by persecution, as were God's ancient people. Almost every century furnishes examples of what bigotry and malice can do under a plea of serving God by protecting the rights of Church and State. Protestant churches that have followed in the steps of Rome by forming alliance with worldly powers have manifested a similar desire to restrict liberty of conscience. In the seventeenth century thousands of non-conformist ministers suffered under the rule of the Church of England. Persecution always follows religious favoritism on the part of secular governments. {4SP 277.2}

Jews hail new papal saints who revolutionized ties with Catholics

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By Philip Pullella
April 24, 2014
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(Pope John Paul II, standing in front of a group of Italian rabbis, waves farewell April 13, 1986, to members of Rome’s Jewish community in the Rome Synagogue. REUTERS/Luciano Mellace)

The late Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, who will be made saints on Sunday, did so much to end two millennia of Catholic anti-Semitism that a Jewish human rights group calls them “heroes to the Jewish people”.

Both pontiffs marked the world’s largest church in such varied ways that most Roman Catholics would probably list their pioneering respect for Jews, whom John Paul called “our beloved elder brothers” in faith, behind their other achievements.

But for a minority faith that suffered centuries of persecution, life in the ghettos and then the horrors of the Holocaust, the turnaround they achieved in Catholic-Jewish relations could rank as another miracle to their credit.

John is especially remembered for calling the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), whose landmark document “Nostra Aetate” (In Our Times) repudiated the 2,000-year-old concept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus.

“Nostra Aetate ushered in amazing changes in Catholic-Jewish relations around the world, even if the degree to which it was internalized depended on whether Catholics and Jews lived side by side,” said Rabbi David Rosen, International Director of Inter-religious Affairs of American Jewish Committee.

During his long reign from 1978 to 2005, John Paul became the first pope since ancient times to visit a synagogue. On a visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, he left a note saying he was “deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer.”

“It was a gesture that will never be forgotten,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the group that hailed the two new saints as heroes.

Read the full story here.

It's obvious that the beast looks favorably at his own image. http://everythingimportant.org/

Shimei wrote:Three Tests of Authentic Christianity
In the first epistle of John, the apostle gives a definition of authentic Christianity and an authentic Christian.

In 1 John 5:1 we read, "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God." One who is born of God has a new mind and will make the correct, orthodox confession that Jesus is the Christ.

In 1 John 2:29 we read, "If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him." This means the person who obeys God and does righteousness has been born of God.

Not only does a regenerate person have a new intellect and new will, but he also has new affections, new emotions. In 1 John 4:7 we read, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God."

It is interesting that John has three sets of three tests on true Christianity. One set consists of the three tests highlighted by Shimei above. Another set of three is 1 John 2:16: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” NASB.

This is just a restatement of the first set in the negative.

The self-serving lust of the flesh is in perfect contrast to the heightened awareness of a new mind that is imbued with an authentic Christian faith in Christ’s sacrifice for others (Philippians 2:5-11). The boastful pride of life is the very common belief that we can sin with impunity, which was cogently negated by the call to obedience in 1 John 2:29. And the reference to the lust of the eyes clearly echoes back to the vision of “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” in the third temptation of Matthew 4:1-11. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (1 John 2:15). And all this parallels the three angels’ messages in Revelation 14:6-12. See The Three Angels' Messages Versus The Three Demons' Messages.