What God Hath Joined Together. . . .

The three angels’ messages reveal their full meaning when all their aspects are considered together.

When you hear the term, “three angels’ messages,” what thoughts enter your mind?

Possibly you summarize the first message as “the judgment hour” or “the gospel,” the second message as “the fall of Babylon,” and the third, as “the mark of the beast” or “the Sabbath” or “righteousness by faith.” Abbreviating in this way is valuable as a memory device. On second thought, you can probably think of other aspects of the three messages.

What follows in this article is a reflection on how many topics these fundamental messages actually do cover, as I understand them. I also want to wrestle with the terrible verses about God’s wrath.

As we all know, portrayals of the three angels are appearing as never before on Seventh-day Adventist letterheads, buildings, magazines, and lapel buttons. Alan Collins appears to have started the trend with his sculpture on the front wall of the Trans-European Division building in St. Albans, England, which, incidentally, is not far from where I was born. Today there tall shrubs are being trained into the shape of angels in front of the Southeastern California Conference office. Ironically, although we are portraying the three angels more than before, some of us seem to be talking about them less. Older readers will remember when our missionaries carried “the third angel’s message” to distant lands, and when our colporteurs (take a breath) sold “third-angel’s-message-filled literature.”

So what are the three angels’ messages? Here they are (Revelation 14:6-12 RSV), with items I want to emphasize printed bold.

First angel’s message. “Then I saw another angel flying in midheaven, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and tongue and people; and he said with a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water.’”

Second angel’s message. “Another angel, a second, followed, saying, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her impure passion.’”

Third angel’s message. “And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast and its image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also shall drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and he shall be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.’ Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.”

Seventeen Topics. Re-reading the messages reassures us that our brief summaries—“judgment hour,” “gospel,” “fall of Babylon,” and so forth—are quite valid. But see how many different topics are covered:

1. Preaching the eternal gospel.

2. Fulfilling a global commission.

3. Calling people to fear God and give Him glory.

4. Announcing the arrival of judgment hour.

5. Summoning people to worship the true God.

6. Championing the doctrine of creation.

7. Observing the Sabbath.

8. Declaring the fall of Babylon.

9. Warning against beast worship.

10. Warning against the mark of the beast and the image of the beast.

11. Warning about the undiluted wrath of God.

12. Warning about torment in the presence of the Lamb.

13. Challenging people to develop endurance.

14. Identifying the saints.

15. Keeping the commandments.

16. Cherishing the faith of Jesus.

17. Historical sequencing. The three messages follow each other, beginning at the arrival of the judgment hour.

Three messages but seventeen topics, as I have arranged them. You might arrange them differently; but an impressive conviction comes over me as I reread the messages and reflect on the list. It’s counsel that we often hear offered at Christian weddings: “What God hath joined together, let no one put asunder.”

A Broad Message. The three angels’ messages as they occur in the Bible are not only the gospel, or only righteousness by faith, or only a call to keep the Sabbath. Instead, they are all of these things and many others. In the last days, the true church attends appropriately to the entire list. “What God hath joined together, let no one put asunder.”

The true church for today preaches the everlasting gospel, the only true gospel there ever was or ever will be, about redemption through the Seed, salvation through the Lamb and Priest, and eternal joy through the coming King. It is not just any old gospel but is the same “gospel of the kingdom” that Jesus referred to in Matthew 24:14. It is the good news that in providing Pattern, Ransom, Priest, and Rescuer, God has offered us unlimited forgiveness and outright victory in this life and immortality in the next.

If it is not “any old gospel,” neither is it to be preached in “any old manner.” It is to be preached specifically in the setting of the arrival of the final judgment. It is an urgent gospel based on the fulfillment of the 2300 days and the undeniable fact that time is running out and the plagues are about to fall.

Sequential Arrangement. We’ll come back to the plagues in a minute. We note meanwhile, that the sequence of the three angels is apparently significant. In the prophecy, the second angel “followed” the first, and the third “followed” the second. In actual fact, the first angel’s message began to be preached first in Europe, America, and the Middle East, in the 1820s and 1830s. We associate the initial proclamation in America with William Miller and his associates. The Millerites were so diligent in mailing their literature to mission stations around the world that before the great disappointment they believed they had reached every one of them.

One of Miller’s leading associates, Charles Fitch, a beloved Presbyterian minister, began preaching the second angel’s message in the summer of 1843, combining the fall of Babylon (in the second angel) with the call to “come out of her” in Revelation 18:4.

When Captain Joseph Bates learned about the Sabbath and began to keep it, he discovered that the third angel’s message focused on the Sabbath-Sunday question, and so he began to preach the third message in 1845 and 1846.

In God’s providence the sequence in which these three messages were fulfilled mirrored the prophetic sequence under which they “followed” each other in Revelation.

Interconnected Prophecies.
Reference to the arrival of the judgment hour in the first angel’s message, to Babylon in the second, and to the mark and image of the beast in the third all imply intense preaching on Bible prophecy. The commencement of the judgment is dated to 1844 by the 2300-day prophecy, which is explained by the seventy-week prophecy and entails careful preaching on the prophecies of Daniel 2, 7, and 8. Reference to the mark and image of the beast necessitates careful preaching on the leopard-bodied and lamb-horned beasts of Revelation 13, which also involves study of the 1260 days and of the United States in prophecy. Ministers who choose to be true to the three angels’ messages preach and explain these prophecies frequently in their pulpits.

Christ-like Character Development.
The first angel’s message calls us to “fear God,” to “glorify” Him, and to “worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water,” a paraphrase based on the Sabbath commandment. The third angel summons the saints to develop “endurance” in keeping God’s commandments through faith in Jesus.

The first angel’s message, along with the third, which emphasizes the “endurance” of the saints and their faith-filled Christ-centered commandment keeping, implies a great deal about character development.

Seventh-day Adventists who fulfill the three angels’ messages have much to say about the Sabbath and about worship. They show that worship includes singing praise (as in Revelation 4 and 5) but is not merely singing praise, as some Christians seem to say today. Jesus warned, “Not everyone who says [or sings?] to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 7:21). Elder W. W. Prescott spoke for most Seventh-day Adventists a century ago in his gloriously Christ-centered booklet, Christ and the Sabbath (1893) when he observed that “the highest form of worship is in obedience.”

Similarly, Ellen G. White wrote in 1911 that “there is no other way of manifesting reverence so pleasing to Him as by obedience to that which He has spoken” (Counsels to Parents, Teachers, and Students, p. 111 = Review, October 5, 1911).

God’s glory is His character, so we glorify God when the beauty of His character shines in our eyes, hands, and voices. The first angel’s message, along with the third, which emphasizes the “endurance” of the saints and their faith-filled Christ-centered commandment keeping, implies a great deal about character development. Sermons should dwell on God’s mercy but not exclusively so. To measure up to the three angels’ messages, sermons should also stress in a balanced but urgent manner, Christ-centered faith-filled God-empowered self control, discipline, sacrifice, restitution, kindness, and total victorious maturity before our Jesus lays aside His priestly robes. What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.

“The Most Fearful Threatening.”
The three angels’ messages uplift and encourage, but they also contain “the most fearful threatening ever addressed to mortals” (The Great Controversy, p. 449).

John the Beloved, the human author of Revelation, the disciple who sat closest to Jesus at the Last Supper and stood longest beside Him at the cross, was entrusted by God to include in the three angels’ messages a strident warning about the fall of Babylon and another strident warning about the unmixed wrath of God that hangs over the heads of those who choose to worship the beast or its image and to receive the “mark of the beast.” People who have come to think that the third angel’s message is exclusively “justification by faith”* need to reread the message as it appears in the Bible.

Astonishingly, the warning about God’s unmingled wrath is Christ-centered! Those who suffer the indescribable torture that God warns us about here will suffer it, the third angel says, “in the presence of the Lamb.”

Wrestling with how to explain this ominous information involves a discussion longer than space allows here. Don’t we recall that when John (the future writer of Revelation) and his brother James asked Jesus to bring fire down from heaven to burn up some uncooperative Samaritans (Luke 9:54-56), Jesus refused? When reading from Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:16-19), didn’t Jesus close with the words, “the acceptable year of the Lord,” pointedly omitting what Isaiah had said about “the day of vengeance of our God”? In Matthew 18, the chapter on forgiveness, didn’t Jesus reveal how readily God forgives even our 10,000-talent sins when we repent of them?

Yes, praise His name! But then we remember that the God who changes not (see Mal 3:6) did send fire from heaven when Elijah asked Him to. He sent fire twice, burning up two companies of soldiers (see 2 Kings 1:9-12). We remember that when the forgiven 10,000-talent debtor in Matthew 18 went out and tormented a co-worker who owed him a hundred pennies, the employer sentenced the forgiven but unforgiving debtor to prison; indeed, according to the Greek and to the New International Version, the employer sentenced him to prison so he could be tortured. Having finished the story, Jesus made sure we didn’t miss the moral: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matt 18:35).

We remember that in Daniel 7 the investigative judgment is promised for the specific purposes of rewarding the persecuted saints and of committing to flames the beast who has persecuted them (while attempting to change God’s law).

Things begin to come clear. God sent fire from heaven in Elijah’s day in order to protect Elijah from soldiers who were intent on his death. By contrast, the Samaritans whom John and James hoped to incinerate were not endangering anyone. The employer tortured his 10,000-talent servant only when the man became a menace to one of his other employees. The professedly Christian beast is going to be destroyed because he not only thinks to change the law but also “wears out the saints of the Most High” (see Dan 7:25).

The Christians who will receive the seven last plagues will not merely be Sunday keepers; they will be coercive Sunday keepers.

Coercive Sunday Keeping.
Last year I completed a long study paper on the mark of the beast. The topic had been assigned to me by the Daniel and Revelation Committee of the General Conference, and I had agreed to do it very reluctantly. But as I wrote it I realized that the mark of the beast is not merely Sunday keeping but is coercive Sunday keeping practiced by people who have had every chance to know better.

Come to think of it, haven’t we long taught that people will get the mark of the beast only when the final Sunday laws are being agitated? Doesn’t Revelation 13 show that people will get the mark at the time when they erect the image to the beast and pass laws about buying and selling? And, as we just mentioned, wasn’t it the characteristic mark of the little horn in Daniel 7 that it both thought to change the law and also wore out the saints?

The Christians who will receive the seven last plagues will not merely be Sunday keepers; they will be coercive Sunday keepers. They will not receive the mark of the beast until their Sunday keeping is combined with beast-like Sunday legislation, forbidding God’s true servants to buy or sell and vigorously threatening their lives.

Cain sinned when he chose to worship God in his own way rather than in the way God requested. But his sin ripened into a major felony when in spiritual jealousy and rage he killed his brother Abel. It was then that God asked the penetrating question, “Where is your brother?” (a type of the investigative judgment) and put a mark on him.

Punishment That Protects.
God has guaranteed us freedom of choice. He Himself chose to endure the cross rather than to compel our wills. He is displeased even when we compel people against their conscience to observe the genuine Sabbath, “for God will accept only willing service” (see Review, April 15, 1890). He will evidently be very displeased when professed Christians attempt to compel other Christians to keep the spurious Sabbath in the face of clear opportunities to know better and after centuries of experience with religious freedom. God’s fatherly instincts will be roused and He will move to punish the perpetrators of cruelty and to protect their intended victims.

God will send the seven last plagues on Satan’s mean Christians in order to protect His own meek ones. The meek and lowly Jesus, who is both our Lamb and our Lion, is portrayed in the third angel’s message as being in attendance at the punishment in order to reassure us. Christ’s protective participation during the time of trouble was also foreseen in Daniel 12:1, “At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book.”

No doubt very, very few Sunday keepers today have any conscious intention of persecuting Sabbath keepers. But bad choices often lead to worse choices. The three angels’ messages, which encourage people to develop principled, attractive, Christ-like characters, warn us that if we choose not to develop the faith that can render us Christ-like, many of us will inevitably and inescapably be drawn into a vortex of opposition so vicious that while convinced we are obeying God and doing Him a service (see John 16:2), we will one day do murderous things against His true children which we cannot now imagine.

Our Assignment.
Upon the Christ-centered, faith-filled, commandment-keeping saints who worship God and give glory to Him during the judgment period, falls the fearful, unpopular, distasteful responsibility of announcing that every system of worship other than the true one is—as it really is, in very truth—corrupt and fallen, and that every single person who persistently rejects Christ’s appeal to come out of Babylon will escalate downward in sinfulness and at last need to be punished with the undiluted anger of God, the seven last plagues. Even sincere Christians whom Jesus currently refers to as “My people,” will behave like this if they do not choose to “come out” of Babylon (see Rev 18:4).

It is not a pretty assignment, this obligation we have to preach the full message of the three angels. Most preachers, I among them, prefer to emphasize the “gospel” aspects of the messages, aspects for which we are heartily grateful and which mercifully are also true.

Don’t the gospel aspects take on new luster as well as earnestness when preached in the setting of upcoming events?
The gospel aspects? Yes, but don’t they take on new luster as well as earnestness when preached in the setting of upcoming events? What are people to do in order to be protected from the seven last plagues? Believe the gospel and trust in Jesus; believe and trust sincerely enough to come out of Babylon and obey the commandments of God.

The “most fearful threatening” should be viewed as given in mercy.
It is given to prevent people from making the wrong day-by-day decisions that will lead to accepting the mark of the beast, and it is given to encourage the saints by assuring them that God will protect them from persecution, even as He protected Elijah and as He defended the hundred-penny debtor.

Because the Seventh-day Adventist message deals with Babylon and the beast, is it somehow “anti-Catholic”? No! No more than Noah’s message was anti-people when he warned that if the people continued in their sins they would die in the flood. For Noah’s message was about sin and the flood. He said the flood was coming, and the ark was still open. His message was “pro-people,” offering them a chance to be saved, and our message is “pro-Catholic” in the same way.

“What God hath joined together, let no one put asunder.” I believe that God is prepared to grant us grace and wisdom to combine the eternal gospel with His end-time warnings in making effective appeals to sinners; and it seems to me that our most loyal Bible-centered evangelists are repeatedly finding this to be true.

“As the end approaches, the testimonies of God’s servants will become more decided and more powerful, flashing the light of truth upon the systems of error and oppression that have so long held the supremacy. The Lord has sent us messages [including the three angels’ messages] for this time to establish Christianity upon an eternal basis, and all who believe present truth must stand, not in their own wisdom, but in God; and raise up the foundation of many generations [i.e., the Sabbath; see Isaiah 58:12-14]. These will be registered in the books of heaven as repairers of the breach, the restorers of paths to dwell in [Isaiah 58:12]. We are to maintain the truth because it is truth, in the face of the bitterest opposition. God is at work upon human minds; it is not man alone that is working. The great illuminating power is from Christ; the brightness of His example is to be kept before the people in every discourse” (SDA Bible Commentary, 4:1152 [letter 1, 1890]).

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*In 1889 Ellen G. White was asked if the new message on “justification by faith” was the third angel’s message. She replied that justification by faith was “the third angel’s message in verity” (Evangelism, p. 190 = Review, April 1, 1890). Until about 1890, the Bible doctrines that Seventh-day Adventists are supposed to believe and teach were understood to comprise the “faith of Jesus” referred to in the third angel’s message. Because of this, the term “third angel’s message” became shorthand for “the Bible truths SDAs are supposed to believe and teach.” Thus, when published in 1890, the statement that “justification by faith” is “the third angel’s message in verity” was equivalent to, “Yes, justification by faith is indeed a Bible doctrine that Seventh-day Adventists ought to believe and teach.” Ellen White did not mean that justification by faith is all there is to the third angel’s message.