As the sparkling diamond glitters with the purest rays when displayed on black velvet, so Calvary and the death of Jesus Christ, God's Son, can never be understood or appreciated except by the background of a poor, sinning, helpless, hopeless, warring, condemned race! One reason that I preach so much on sin is that one who does not acknowledge himself as a sinner never feels the need of a Saviour. The doctrine of sin is the base of all Bible doctrine. Sin is taught in the Bible before redemption, and one who denies the awful prevalence of damning sin, the universality of sin in a depraved, fallen race, will never honor Calvary. Our so-called "Christian Science" friends who say that sin is not a fact, that what men call sin is simply "an error of mortal mind"- naturally they know nothing of the atonement, do not preach a new birth. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 81]
Some men have been getting too good, they think, to need the fountain filled with blood of which our fathers and mothers sang, and in which they trusted, and into which millions of poor sinning souls have plunged, to come out pure and clean, regenerated, headed for Heaven! Many have talked about Jesus as a great teacher, as a martyr, as the Great Example for the race, but there is no regeneration in teachers and martyrs and examples. Men must have a SAVIOUR because man is a hopeless, helpless, incurable sinner. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 81-82]
England and America are not Israel. Neither history nor the Bible can possible connect Anglo-Saxon people with Israelites. And evidence is totally lacking in language, traditions, sabbaths, circumcision and religion. England is not Israel.
Some people believe that Tarshish of the Bible was England. But in that case, the wish is father to the thought without any evidence. Tarshish, except as a name for four different men in the Bible, refers always to "mighty ships fitted for long voyages" (Young's Analytical Concordance). See First Kings 10:22, for instance, where King Solomon's "navy of Tarshish" came once in three years, "bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks." It is manifest that they did not get ivory (elephant tusks) nor apes in England. Patriotic English and Americans speak of "the young lions" as if they described the British dominions and America, but for this, evidence is lacking. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 87]
The day of Christ's glorious reign over the earth cannot come, that Scripture [2 Th. 2:2-9] says, until there is first a falling away and the Man of Sin be revealed (vs. 3). Then verses seven and eight say that there is a Person, evidently the Holy Spirit, who hinders so that the Man of Sin can not be revealed, until that Person be taken out of the way. This refers, no doubt, to the rapture of Christians. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. We will be taken out to meet Christ in the air. In that sense, His headquarters, His temples, will be taken out of this world. Through saved people, who are the light of the world under Christ, and the salt of the earth, the Holy Spirit has held in check the steadily growing wickedness. The Man of Sin cannot be revealed until after the rapture (we use the joyous term "rapture" for that event when Christians, living and dead, will all be changed in a moment, and taken to Heaven with Christ). Of course, the Holy Spirit will still work on earth as He did in Old Testament times, but His work through the present generation of Christians, of course, will be stopped when they are caught away to meet Christ. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 102-103]
Let no one deceive you then - no one knows who is the Antichrist. He has not been revealed. He will not be revealed until after the rapture. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 103]
All this foolish talk about "the mark of the beast" is beside the point. No one can possibly know what the mark is until the beast himself is made known. It will certainly be more than the Italian fasces on the dime, more than the blue eagle. It will certainly not be the observance of Sunday as our Seventh Day Adventist friends claim. The beast himself has not been revealed and there is not a thing in the Bible by which Bible students can identify his mark. - John R. Rice [World-Wide War and the Bible, pg. 103]
The Saviour said in Mark 13: 32, 33:
"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is."
No man knows when Jesus is coming. Jesus Himself, when He was on earth, did not know the time of His second coming. (Doubtless He does now know). The angels in Heaven do not know the time, so let no man pretend to know. We know neither the day, the hour nor the time. Seventh-day Adventists in the day of Miller and Mrs. White, set the time, as many others have done, by making Daniel's seventieth week (Daniel chapter 9) mean 2,520 years. But they missed the time and caused great confusion and reproach on the Bible doctrine of the second coming. Anglo-Israel teachers, and others, have claimed to see in the Great Pyramid in Egypt an inspired revelation of the end of the age. They made an inch mean a year, and set various times for the coming of Christ and the end of this age. But their speculations were in vain, their calculations have failed in the past, and will fail in the future. Jesus Himself plainly warned that no man knows the time of His second coming. Others have taught that the entrance of General Allenby into Jerusalem in 1917 marked the beginning of the generation that would see the Saviour's coming. But all the calculations of men have failed in the past and cannot be relied upon in the future. Nobody knows when the Saviour is coming! - John R. Rice [World-wide War and the Bible, pg. 107]
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