Reprove, Rebuke, Exhort

“REPROVE, REBUKE, EXHORT, with all longsuffering and DOCTRINE.”
See 2 Tim. 4:1-4.

The honest and earnest saints who will follow this “charge,” will soon find themselves as well as their names out of Babylon, cast out as evil. But by that time the increase of grace, knowledge and love which shall come as a result of faithfulness, will lead them to rejoice and be exceeding glad, to rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Christ, for his doctrines.

The result will ultimately be: Moralists will be called Christians; they will be too wise and scientific to use the Bible as their text-book. Every one will be called a Christian who abstains from a flagrant violation of the laws of civilization. Then the saints will again be called “fools,” and the Bible will be termed “a relic of barbarism,” “a bundle of old wives’ fables,” “a fetich.” Is it not becoming so even now?

It is too late to reform the sects, the vast majority is against you. The only thing to do now is what God commands, “Come out of her, my people; that ye partake not of her sins and receive not of her plagues.” She might have been healed once, (Jer. 8:18-22,) but now, like her prototype Israel, she is given up, left desolate.

The ax is now at work at the very root of the tree and its complete fall is at hand. It is not now a pruning but a destroying process as with the first house of Israel when it was rejected, only it stumbled to rise again, while Babylon’s destruction is to be complete and forever. (Matt. 3:7-10, and Rev. 18:21.)

From Zion’s Watch Tower, March 1885.