When you saw the picture that we showed you last week, and thought of the beautiful New Earth which God will make, where there will be no “sickness nor sorrow nor crying,” where all will be love and peace, and you will be able to play with the lions and leopards and wolves and serpents, without any fear or danger,—did you not long for that happy time to come? But that is what this earth would have been now and always if it had not been for sin.

We have found how in the beginning everything that God made obeyed His Word. The flowers and trees obeyed His Word, and grew just where and how He wanted them to,—they grew in His way. The sun, moon, and stars obeyed His Word, and His hand guided them in His own way through the heavens. The animals and birds and fishes obeyed His Word, and each one lived and worked in just the way that He wanted it to.

But God’s most noble and beautiful work, those whom He had made in His own image to rule over all the rest of His creation, disobeyed His Word, and chose to go in their own way instead of in His way. This brought sad disorder and trouble into God’s beautiful world; for death came upon the plants and the animals and everything in the earth through man’s sin.

And as they watched the fading flowers and falling leaves, as they saw the animals grow wild and fierce and fight and kill each other, as they wept over their dead, and felt their own strength going from them, they knew indeed that “there is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” [Prov. 16:25; James 1:15]

God’s loving heart grieved over the sorrows of His children, over the pain that His creatures were suffering; for not one sparrow falls to the ground without His notice, and He even numbers the hairs of our heads, and sees every tear that we shed. But He cannot save us from the bitter fruits of choosing our own way, unless we are willing to give up our own way, and take God’s way instead.

So that every one may know how good and pleasant and beautiful His way is, He came Himself into the world to live out that way right in our midst. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” [John 14:6] Man’s way is sin and death. God’s way is truth and life. So God cannot give us life, eternal life, in His new earth where everything will be just in His way, unless we will give up our own way of sin, and take His way of truth. We must have Jesus, who is God’s Way, to live in us, so that we shall always choose to do just what God would have us.

He showed to us just what God is, and what we all may be if we will but let God have His own way in us just as He did. Then if you will choose God’s way all the time, instead of your way, and ask Jesus to live that way in you, you will find that His way is life, for He says, “He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” [1 John 2:17]

And though you may have to sleep in the grave for a little while before He comes, His Word which brought the plants, the animals, and man from the ground in the beginning, will call you again from the dust of the earth, and will make “all things new,” as they were in the beginning.

“Come, Lord, and wipe away
The curse, the sin, the stain,
And make this blighted world of ours
Thine own lair world again.”

The Present Truth – November 10, 1898
E. J. Waggoner

Story in pdf  God’s Way