Eyes on Jesus
Why is oppression and persecution part of life on earth?
“The war in heaven was against God’s law. Satan was determined to bring God to his ideas, his way, to force Him to change the law of His government. Satan worked upon the sympathies of the angels by his deception, but was expelled from heaven, and now is determined to carry out on this earth the plans he started in heaven.
If he can persuade angels to be disloyal to God, he could also do with men. He strives to instill into the minds of people on this earth his masterly deceptions, thus perverting judgment and justice, trampling down the law of God. This work—the conflict between truth and error—lies at the foundation of the trials and tribulations that the children of God will experience.
As long as God’s church is in existence, there will be trials and tribulations.
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.