The United States of America is changing fast. Our privacies are being violated daily in the name of the Patriot Act, and soon conservative groups will be targeted not only by the IRS, but by the National Security Agency. The National Defensive authorization Act (NDAA) says that an American citizen can be detained indefinitely if he or she is suspected of being a threat to the country. Imagine the day when God's faithful people, who keep the Commandments of God (Rev. 14:12), being sentenced to imprisonment and even death (see Rev. 13:15) because they will not forsake the Law of God and worship the venerable day of the sun! 

     The last events certainly will be rapid ones. Now is the time for God's faithful ministers to preach a more pointed testimony then that of John the Baptist! "In this fearful time, just before Christ is to come the second time, God's faithful preachers will have to bear a still more pointed testimony than was borne by John the Baptist. A responsible, important work is before them; and those who speak smooth things, God will not acknowledge as His shepherds. A fearful woe is upon them" (1T 321). "With the spirit and power of Elijah he [John] denounced the national corruption, and rebuked the prevailing sins. His words were plain, pointed, and convincing" (DA 104). 

    And what was the prevailing sin that led to the benumbing of the mind and moral corruption of a nation? "As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:37-39).  

     "The same sins that brought judgments upon the world in the days of Noah, exist in our day. Men and women now carry their eating and drinking so far that it ends in gluttony and drunkenness. This prevailing sin, the indulgence of perverted appetite, inflamed the passions of men in the days of Noah, and led to wide-spread corruption. Violence and sin reached to heaven. This moral pollution was finally swept from the earth by means of the flood. The same sins of gluttony and drunkenness benumbed the moral sensibilities of the inhabitants of Sodom, so that crime seemed to be the delight of the men and women of that wicked city. Christ thus warns the world: "Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed" (Luke 17:28-30).