120 The Revelation of Jesus Christ "Well, don't you know me?" I looked at him a few mo ments, and then I said: "You are Mr.-" "Yes," he answered, "but I am a different man. You go out to my home now and talk to my wife about me, and she will tell you that I have not been drunk in five years. I have not tasted liquor for all that time. I never fight with my wife. My home is a regular heaven now." "My dear brother," I ·said, "you must have come in contact with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God!" At my words, a sneer came over his face. "Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Jesus Christ, nothing! I do not believe in that stuff about the blood of Jesus. The thing that has made me a different man is not what you preach. It is because I have taken up Christian Science that I am a different man." Poor deluded man! Stumbling along in the darkness of a false doctrine, rejecting the fight of God, he thought he was a different man. In one sense he was perhaps; but he was like the man who swept his house clean, and then allowed to enter seven other spirits more wicked than himself. And of that man the Lord said, "The last state . .. is worse than the first."
THE FIFTH TRUMPET-THE FIRST WoE 9:1-12
The closing words of chapter eight are significant: "Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!" No doubt you have taken note of the fact, as we have progressed in our study, that the scenes which the Holy Spirit permitted the Apostle John to behold grew darker and darker. When "the things which shall be hereafter" actually come to pass, the great tribulation comes upon the earth, then the hearts of men will fail them for fear. Spiritual dark ness such as the world has never seen will prevail. And so ter rible will the judgments be, as the seventieth week of Daniel draws to a close, that the last three trumpet judgments are called the three "woes."
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