Part 8 (Last Day Events)
In the logic of this theory there was one more step to be taken. To see how logically it came about, let us glance at the steps taken from the first one to this point: First, the church had all work on Sunday forbidden, in order that the people might attend to things divine; work was forbidden, that the people might worship. But the people would not worship; they went to the circuses and to the theaters instead of to church. Then the church had laws enacted closing the circuses and the theaters, in order that the people might attend church. But even then the people would not be devoted, nor attend church, for they had no real religion. The next step to be taken therefore, in the logic of the situation was to compel them to be devoted, to compel them to attend to things divine. This was the next step logically to be taken, and it was taken. The theocratical bishops were equal to the occasion. They exactly met the demands of the case; and one of the grandest of the Catholic Fathers and Catholic saints was the father of this Catholic saintly theory. He wrote:
"It is indeed better that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be rejected.... Many must be often brought back to their Lord, like wicked servants, by the rod of temporal sufferings, before they attain the highest grade of religious development." Augustine, A.T.Jones, Great Empires, p.491.
And in this fashion and along this course of development, which step by step was the only possible outcome in the nature of the situation as it stood, came the development of the beast in the early days of the Christian dispensation. Of course the majority of people who before did not have enough religion to take them to church now went, for they did not have enough religion in them either to discern the nature of this force to offer any resistance to it.
But now the true people of God began to find themselves in difficulty. They could obey a civil law that forbade work on the first day of the week, and the law that forbade them from going to the circuses and the theaters did not touch them either, but when a law came into being that demanded that they worship on the false sabbath, then they found that they had to disobey that law.
So they found themselves suffering the civil penalties of breaking a law that the church had caused the State to enact in the selfish interests of a church which, having lost the power of God, had no right to even exist as a church. And when the church found that such punishments as were inflicted did not cause the true ones to waver and to obey, then, in the ultimate, they brought in the death decree and as history attests, they slew with savage and heartless cruelty the thousands who would not yield but would obey God rather than man no matter what the price might be.
Such was the history of the setting up of the beast. "It was apostasy that led the early church to seek the aid of the civil government and this prepared the way for the development of the papacy." The Great Controversy, p.443.
Thus it was with the setting up of the beast and so will it be in the setting up of the image to the beast. The one is a matter of the past, but the other is yet in the future and terrible will be the repetition of this thing.
In the historical word we have the story of the rise of the beast. In the Prophetic word we have the story of the rise of the image. It is time to spend a little time and space on the story of the rise of the image. This will be the subject of the next posts in this series.