And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
(Rev 12:6)
…true Christians, avoiding the churches as being now nurseries of impiety, went into deserts and lifted up their hands to God with sighs and tears.”
Where was our religion before the Reformation? We have here the answer. The very question implies what prophecy had declared – its temporary invisibility. It was in the wilderness; hidden, but not lost; cast down, but not destroyed; exhibited amongst the few; known to God, though mostly unknown to men; like the seven thousand whom Elijah knew not of, who had not bowed the knee to Baal: some in secret, insulated from those around, even as in “a barren and dry land where no water is,” pouring forth their fervent prayers, sighing and crying to God; some, fewer still, prepared to act a bolder part, and stand forth as Christ’s confessors and martyrs rather than submitting to false Christendom. The Roman Church and her Ecumenical Daughters maintain their own ubiquity and visibility at all times; consequently, never having experienced this predicted wilderness life, it could not for this very reason be the true Church of Christ. It is the Church of Anti-Christ.
Adapted from E B Elliot’s Horae Apocalyptae
During the coming Mark of the Beast Inquisitions God’s elect will be a church on the move, a church secreted in homes, a church in the wilderness.
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