by Master Elijah Muhammad

       The Bible teaches you that the devil will have power to rule over the people until God
comes and destroy them. This is true. God prepared hell for him in the day that he was
made. Think over that. Before the man was ever made, hell was prepared for him. If the
Bible teaches you that, Christian believers, why do you want to go along with him, since his
destination is hell. You say, “I don’t know when that will be, neither do you.” No one is given
that hour but God Himself and then He passes it over to that angel that you read of in the
Revelation that places one foot on water and one on land.

         The preachers use to use their imagination in that. Of course, they didn’t’ get too far
from the truth. They use to say that the angel would ask God, “How loud was the sound?”
He’d make it a little imaginary. I use to hear my father preach it and he’d put his imagination
to it, because he didn’t know. Today all imagination is removed and the light of truth must
shine so clear that you cannot claim that there was a cloud between you and it. I am the
little boy that’s talking to you now. There is no body coming behind me, but God. I’d better
tell you that.

        I’m like it’s written in the Bible; wherein, it says that, “Before that great and dreadful
day, I will send you Elijah and… he shall prepare the way.” He must have enough converts
to lay claim to the devils world, because God would have some people in it. We can’t execute
judgment on the enemy until we separate them. We must separate the enemy from the
righteous. The first thing He did is call all us righteous. How did He do that? You follow
Satan and all that you do of evil, you’ve gotten it from Satan. Now, Satan is to be destroyed
and God has come to take that which is not Satan’s and give him his own. How are we going
to escape? It’s plain and easy to separate you by what you do if you are following after the
devil.

      God comes and declares that you are not one of the devils and that you are now the
righteous. You say, “I haven’t been righteous.” No you haven’t. That which you were,
unrighteous, it was not your character, that was the devil’s. You had no teacher to argue
with the devil and his teaching, which caused us to act contrary to our nature. We are not
devils by nature. We had been deceived by the devil and didn’t know who he was. We didn’t
have any teacher of our own to tell us to, “come back, don’t follow that man.” He kept our
foreign visitors away from us. When they came in the country, he kept them among himself
and we never saw any of them or knew they were here. We didn’t know ourselves.

       We use to wonder, “Why do these Black African’s come here and he shows more respect
to them than he do to us. We all look alike?” He was trying to keep your black brother from
Africa from mixing with you, to teach you some truth of that about which the white man had
lied. You are learning it today, because as it is written in the vision of the dream of Jacob,
that he saw a ladder reaching from Heaven to the Earth, and angels ascending and
descending. Well, you never understood what that was, because he had put your mind so far
into spooky things. The devil made you think it was something that is not a person, and that

it is something like air out there or the form is out there of air in air. You just didn’t
understand it. If he saw a ladder reaching from Earth to Heaven and angels ascending and
descending, these were people and the connecting through language. This is what prophets
teach of God that will be done. The people in the devil’s civilization will come out and go up
to Allah, up the ladder of time and teaching. Jacob seeing this ladder means the connection
of you and I with the God of righteous people who are called angels. It is true that he was
looking at the end of his time; therein, the people he had deceived would one day be
connecting with the people of righteous and they would be going from heaven and from the
earth, where they lived.

[Excerpt from Theology of Time lecture series]