Signs of the Times, Book 1 - Ellen G. White

esist God's warnings and array themselves against his law because their
sinful life cannot harmonize with the pure principles of God's moral
government. They consider it too hard work to reform their lives, therefore
they endeavor to make the law of God meet their low standard of morals. It
was God's purpose in sending Noah to warn the world that the people should
see their sins and awaken to a sense of their crimes and great wickedness and
be alarmed and fear and repent that God might pardon and save them.
As the time of Christ's second appearing draws near, the Lord sends his
servants with a warning message to the world to prepare for that great event.
As the world have been living in transgression of the law of God, in mercy
he sends a message of warning to arouse their attention and hold before them
the law of God as a mirror into which they can look and discover the defects
in their moral character. If they will at once make earnest efforts to remedy
these defects, by repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus
Christ, they will be pardoned through the merits of his blood, for this is the
only hope of the transgressor of the law of God. But as in the days of Noah,
there is with the majority a total disbelief of the testimony God has in mercy
sent to warn the world of her coming destruction.
When Noah proclaimed the solemn message, yet an hundred and twenty
years the judgments of God in a flood of water should destroy the world and
its inhabitants, men would not receive it, so it is at the present time. Those
who warn the transgressors of law to repent and turn to their allegiance for
the Lawgiver is coming to punish the disobedient, will plead and entreat and
warn the majority in vain. Peter describes the attitude of the world in
reference to the last message: "There shall come in the last days scoffers,
walking after their own lusts and saying, Where is the promise of his
coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were
from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of,
that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out
of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being
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