God's Medical Missionaries Heal Body and Soul
Christ was bound up in all branches of the work. He did not make any division. He did not feel that he was infringing on physicians when He healed the sick. He proclaimed the truth, and when the sick came to Him for healing, He asked them if they believed that He could make them whole. He was just as ready to lay His hands in healing on the sick and afflicted as He was to preach the gospel. He was just as much at home in this work as in proclaiming the truth; for healing the sick is a part of the gospel.
To take people right where they are, whatever their position, whatever their condition, and help them in every way possible—this is gospel ministry. It may be necessary for ministers to go into the homes of the sick and say, “I am ready to help you, and I will do the best I can. I am not a physician, but I am a minister, and I like to minister to the sick and afflicted.” Those who are sick in body are nearly always sick in soul, and when the soul is sick, the body is made sick.—Manuscript 62, 1900.
Probation Closes on God's Professed People
God has not revealed to us the time when this message will close or when probation will have an end. Those things that are revealed we shall accept for ourselves and for our children, but let us not seek to know that which has been kept secret in the councils of the Almighty.... —Selected Messages 1:191 (1894).
...the image of the beast will be formed before probation closes, for it is to be the great test for the people of God...—Selected Messages 2:81 (1890).
The image is made by the two-horned beast, and is an image to the beast. It is also called an image of the beast. [The two-horned beast of Revelation 13:11-17 makes an image to the beast portrayed in Revelation 13:1-10.] Then to learn what the image is like and how it is to be formed, we must study the characteristics of the beast itself—the papacy.
The “image to the beast” represents that form of apostate Protestantism which will be developed when the Protestant churches shall seek the aid of the civil power for the enforcement of their dogmas.—The Great Controversy, 443, 445 (1911).
