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ALONE
WITH GOD
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Spiritual Answers and Reasons
for Faith |
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A Cloudy
Time
The Protestant age is well represented in Scripture as a
cloudy day. The primitive glory was seen as a morning
without clouds; the papal age, as a long dark night. The
Protestant age is far from the transplendent light and
glory of the apostolic days, and yet it is not so dark as
the time when popery ruled the religious world. The
Protestant age presents a mixture of truth and error, of
light and darkness, of salvation and sin. It is not clear
day, as in the beginning, nor yet dark night, as was the
age before it. Thus saith the prophet: " And it shall
come to pass in that day, that there shall not be light;
and bright ones shall withdraw themselves: but it shall be
one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not
night." Zech. 14: 6, 7, American Standard Version.
The day foreseen in the above
prophecy is the gospel day. First there was to be a clear
morning, a beautiful sunrise. In that time the holy
saints, like stars? shone brilliantly in the midst of this
earth. But it was foreseen that these " bright ones
" would withdraw themselves. The thousands who were
martyred ascended to paradise; others lost the
illumination —holiness— and drifted into apostasy; and
those who remained true retired into a wilderness state of
obscurity while a beast power, under a great apostate
church came visibly upon the field. This was a time of
night. i ' Of this period the prophet said," There
shall not be light." Following this period there was
to be a time when it. was " not day, and not
night." This applies to the Protestant era. Ezekiel
foretold this in the following words: "As a shepherd
seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his
sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and
will deliver them out of all places where they have b been
scattered in the cloudy and dark day." Ezek. 34: 12.
the era of Protestantism is the time during which God's
people have been scattered and this period is termed a
cloudy day a mixture of light and darkness.
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