“My mind is deeply exercised in regard to our condition as a people. We ought to be far in advance of any other people on the earth because we have greater light and greater knowledge of the truth, which lays us under increased accountability to advance that light and not only profess to believe the truth but to practice it. When we do practice the truth we are then following Jesus, who is the Light of the world; and if we as a people are not constantly elevating, becoming more and more spiritually minded, we are becoming like the Pharisees—self-righteous—while we do not the will of God.” Manuscript Releases, vol. 12, 318. [Emphasis added.]
Ellen White is talking about all who profess the Adventist faith, but she is concerned that we not only “profess to believe the truth” but “practice it.”
“When Jerusalem was divorced from God it was because of her sins.…The depth of our ruin is measured by the exalted light to which God has raised us in His great goodness and unspeakable mercy. Oh, what privileges are granted to us as a people! And if God spared not His people that He loved, because they refused to walk in the light, how can He spare the people whom He has blessed with the light of heaven in having opened to them the most exalted truth ever entrusted to mortal man to give to the world?” Ibid., 319.
When and how was Jerusalem divorced from God? Because of her sins. What sins? “By shedding Jesus’ blood the Jewish people were about to divorce themselves from heaven. Christ knew that some of those now apparently so sympathetic would soon close against themselves the door of hope and the gates of the city of God. A scene was about to take place, in His humiliation and crucifixion, that would result in the destruction of Jerusalem.” Youth’s Instructor, April 27, 1899.
“In the Jewish nation we behold a chosen nation divorced from God because of unbelief. Jesus, the lover of humanity, was called upon to pronounce sentence against the people for whom He had lived and labored, but from whom He had borne insult, mockery, and rejection.…The salvation of the Jews would have been the joy of Christ, the rejoicing of the angels, but they would not. No man will be saved against his will.” Review and Herald, April 18, 1893. [Emphasis added.]
“When the Saviour saw, in the Jewish people, a nation divorced from God, He saw also a professed Christian Church united to the world and the papacy. As He stood upon Olivet, weeping over Jerusalem till the sun sank behind the western hills, so He is weeping over and pleading with sinners in these last moments of time. Soon He will say to the angels who are holding the four winds, “‘Let the plagues loose; let darkness, destruction, and death come upon the transgressors of My law.’” Will He be obliged to say to those who have had great light and knowledge, as He said to the Jews, ‘If thou hadst known, even thou at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes’?” Ibid., October 8, 1901.
The above quotations show clearly that the Jews divorced themselves from God by their unbelief, and the final development in this divorce was the crucifixion of Christ, which made the destruction of the unbelieving in Jerusalem inevitable.
But these quotations also show that the same end result that came to the Jews, by crucifying Christ, will happen to a professed Christian church at the end of time, and the divorce will be the result of being
- united to the world and
- being united to the papacy.