Chapter 13
Here we have a chapter where prophecy is interpreted
by history and the Roman empire is the background for the passage. Rome, while
still a republic, became an empire. The historical Roman empire became the
first client nation to God and the preserver of western European civilisation.
This is going to become a very important principle when we get to chapter
fourteen because in that chapter we are going to see several very valuable
principles. The human race cannot be destroyed by anything that man does or
anything that man constructs. The human race cannot be destroyed by man’s
volition or by any nuclear weapons of any kind. The human race is going to
continue until the end of human history. This means that while man is capable
of destroying himself God intervenes with divine judgment before this happens.
All divine judgment comes from the same source as divine blessing, the justice
of God, and some of the greatest blessings that come to the human race come in
the form of judgment, because certain segments of degeneracy are wiped out and
certain segments of religion are wiped out. The greatest enemy to the
destruction of the human race is not in the field of sophisticated weaponry,
not nuclear weapons, but on the one hand degeneracy and the inevitable result
of self-righteousness in religion on the other. Religion and degeneracy are far
more dangerous than any nuclear weapons or any human power that has ever
existed on the face of the earth. So God blesses us with judgment. He also
blesses us individually with adversity and some of the greatest blessings that
come to us come in time of adversity, not just in time of prosperity.
Prosperity is obvious, adversity is not obvious and yet it should be for the
believer who understands the system and has advanced to gate seven in that
system, the divine dynasphere.
We learn also that many of the things that we are
going to study in this passage about dictatorships and about the use of human
power are prophecies of the future but they are interpreted in terms of history
of the past. Therefore this becomes a very unusual chapter and it leads to
another unusual chapter: how God uses divine judgment in order to, preserve the
human race. The human race has been preserved many times by civilisation from a
Gentile client nation but many more times the human race has been preserved by
divine judgment. Divine judgment is one of the greatest things we have going
for us and that means that adversity for the believer is not designed to
destroy him or to make him distraught in any way but is designed to bless him.
Our blessings come in rather strange packages as far as unbelievers are
concerned or human viewpoint thinking of believers, and therefore you can count
on it that when you are in a time of adversity there is blessing in it for you
just as in a time of prosperity. The source of the blessing is the same — the
doctrine you have accumulated and the ability to recognise and have a personal
sense of destiny, and to utilise the doctrinal rationales in that connection.
Out of the historical Roman empire there emerges an
eschatological empire of the future. We are going to study in chapter thirteen
the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation. We will also study in the last
half of the chapter Israel as it will exist as a nation in the Tribulation, not
as a client nation to God but, first of all, as a source of antagonism and,
secondly, as the objective of the ecumenical world religion system, where they
finally get to Israel with ecumenical religion. It must be kept in mind, then,
that ecumenical religion is Satanic and it is just as dangerous as any other
form of adversity in life. Degeneracy and religion are man’s two greatest
enemies for both are the products of man’s volition, and man uses his own
volition to destroy himself. We would not be here today were it not for the
fact that God has judged the human race periodically. These judgements are the
perpetuation of the human race, not its destruction. They only destroy certain
portions: the religious portion and the degenerate portion.
The revived Roman empire of the Tribulation will not
exist in crystallised form during the Church Age. We see constantly in the news
people advocating and looking toward a united states of western Europe, the
combining of western European powers, and we see, of course, the economical
factors already there, the military factors there in NATO. There are already those
particular areas which foreshadow what will happen in the Tribulation, but this
might be a very temporary thing unless, of course, the Tribulation is going to
occur in this or the next century. We have no way of knowing when the
Tribulation will begin and we cannot say dogmatically that this is a sign of
the times because there are no prophetical signs for the coming of the Tribulation.
No man knows the day or the hour of the Rapture or the resurrection of the
Church. What we see are historical trends but not necessarily indicative of the
fact that the Tribulation is just around the corner. Nevertheless, when the
Tribulation comes certain things will be true. There will be a very strong
state in the middle east called Israel and there will be a revived Roman
empire, a united states of western Europe. The revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation, however, is not going to exist in any crystallised form until
after the Rapture.
This chapter, then, is the prophetical message
regarding the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation and its relationship to
the nation Israel during the time of the eschatology of the devil’s
desperation. In this particular area we have to note certain principles. We
have to note, first of all, that in the first ten verses we will study a
Gentile dictator, the ruler of the revived Roman empire in the last half of the
Tribulation. We will also study a Jewish dictator in verses 11-18. He is the
ruler of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation. Both of these dictators
are found throughout the scripture and therefore they are called many things by
different writers of the scripture.
The general historical situation in the Tribulation:
it is a time of power politics, a time when nations band together with nations,
not in loose treaties as in the past but in strong spheres of influence. The
state of Israel is a hub in the Tribulation from the middle and toward the end,
and this hub is in a very precarious situation. After the first three and a
half years of the Tribulation four great spheres of influence emerge in
history: the king of the north, the kings of the east, the king of the south
[Pan-Arabic bloc], and the western union. The king of the west plays a big part
in our passage. The king of the west is the united states of western Europe
which we call the revived Roman empire.
Rome of the past will be revived but the Romans of
the past will not be the Romans of the revived Roman empire because the Romans
of today are not the Romans of the past. There have been the invasions of many
races and the Romans of today are made of almost every combination of people
imaginable. The peninsula of Italy has housed many nations.
The Jews and the Romans are the major factor in our
passage. The two greatest people of the ancient world were the Romans and the
Jews. They were great for different reasons but there is no group of people in
all of ancient history who are as great as the Jews in certain areas or as
great as the Romans in certain other areas. Therefore it is fascinating to find
them in the future having as great a future in the Tribulation as they had
greatness in the past. It was inevitable that the two peoples whose history
extended over a thousand years should encounter each other at various times in
the course of past history. The Romans and the Jews met at the crucifixion of
our Lord Jesus Christ where the two greatest systems of law in the ancient
world combined to put our Lord on the cross. The Jews were the only client
nation of the Old Testament times and of ancient history, and when the Romans
administered the 5th cycle of discipline to the Jews in AD 70 they became the first
Gentile client nation in history. So the only client nation of ancient history,
the Jews, were followed by the first Gentile client nation, the Romans. At the
same time all the blessings of the ancient world had their source in Israel
just as the blessings of modern history originate from the same source, the
Word of God, for both the Old and the New Testaments were written by Jewish
authors. The only possible exception might be Luke. It is inevitable that these
two greatest peoples of ancient history should meet, then, in the future.
A word about dictators. Dictators are people who
always know what is best for everyone else and they seek to impose that
knowledge on others without their consent. Hence the dictator rejects
self-determination, freedom of choice, as the right of every individual members
of the human race. Dictators reject the laws of divine establishment, they
reject privacy, private ownership of property, and they reject the sacredness
of life, for dictators generally are bad administrators and when they are the
simplest solution to administration is to get rid of the opposition. Dictators
can exist in every area of life. There are social dictators who dominate a
social scene through intrusion into the privacy of others. There are political
dictators, religious dictators, and others for the purpose of superimposing
their ideas regarding what is best for you totally apart from the function of
your own volition or any form of self-consent. Dictators refuse to permit you
to make your own mistakes and in that sense they can be classified as arrogant
crusaders seeking to run your life by their own standards, or lack of them, and
that means that in their philosophy of tyranny dictators only want you to make
their mistakes from their bad decisions. They want to make the decisions for
everyone. Dictators are arrogant and often very self-righteous since the two
characteristics are joined in the unholy matrimony of tyranny. Because
dictators use force and violence to superimpose their will and ideas on the
masses they inevitably reject doctrines and principles of establishment related
to human freedom and self-determination.
Perhaps the greatest danger comes from those who
have great power and use that power to intrude upon the privacy of others. For
example, the news media. They face a great temptation. They have tremendous
power today and when they use their power to intrude upon the privacy of others
then it becomes tyranny. They are no longer dealing with news, with what is
actually going on, but they are actually on crusades and they intrude upon the
privacy of people in order to put them down, to eliminate them as a check on
their crusades.
Dictators can only exist, function, and succeed in
the atmosphere of untruth and the atmosphere where Bible doctrine is rejected
or distorted, in the atmosphere of the cosmic system of Satan, and in the
atmosphere of the historical environment where the cosmic system has major
influence. We see it today in two trends in our own country: the rise of
religion as over against Christianity which is not a religion, and with the
rise of religion the rise of degeneracy. They always rise together. There are
those who react to degeneracy — like homosexuality — and get into
self-righteous religion, and there are those who react against self-righteous
religion and get into something like drug addiction or some hell-raising
activity which is simply a reaction.
A maximum number of people, then, living in the
cosmic system always creates a vacuum historically, and into that vacuum is
drawn some demagogue who has the qualities and the qualifications to become a
dictator or a tyrant. The only defence against this is the pivot of mature
believers. This creates the environment for the dynamic function of human
freedom. The mind must be exploited for truth to make significant decisions for
freedom.
The Gentile dictator of the Tribulation is found in
the first ten verses of our chapter and beginning in verse one we have the
empire of the Gentile dictator. In verses 1-10 we are now studying the Gentile
dictator of the last half of the Tribulation. He actually becomes a dictator in
the first year or two of the Tribulation.
In verse one the first problem we have to face is
the textual problem. “And I stood on the sand of the sea” is not found in the
original text. It is a correction of the missing verse of the previous chapter.
Chapter 12:18 says, “and he [Satan] took his stand on the sand of the sea.” As
in Daniel chapter 7:2,3 the sea represents the nations of the world. The sea
may be calm or it may be stormy, a picture of the interaction of nations in
human history. The calm suggests peace and the storms suggest warfare. The
various functions of the sea portray the various interactions of nations in
history. The currents of the sea are like the political trends in any given
generation.
During the time of the eschatology of the devil’s
desperation Satan takes a stand on the earth because he no longer takes a stand
in heaven. That was the significance of the missing verse that we studied in
chapter 12:18. Satan is confined to the earth during the last half of the
Tribulation. This chapter actually begins, then, with the phrase, “And I saw a
beast rise up out of the sea,” and since that is where the Greek text begins,
that is where we begin, with the revived Roman empire.
We have the sequential use of the conjunction kai, correctly translated “Then.” Next is the aorist
active indicative of the verb o(raw, “Then I saw.” The constative
aorist tense contemplates the apostle John’s vision in its entirety. It takes
the rise of the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation, during the time of the
devil’s desperation, and gathers it up into one entirety. What John sees in
this context parallels what Daniel saw in Daniel chapter seven. The active
voice: the apostle John produces the action of the verb. We saw that Satan took
a stand on the sands of the sea but it was John who saw the vision. The
indicative mood is declarative for the reality of John’s vision as a part of
the eschatology of the devil’s desperation.
The accusative singular direct object from the noun qhrion is used for the first dictator. It certainly is an
apt word, it is “beast” in the sense of a real animal but it is also used for
people of a bestial nature. Here the noun has a human connotation. Confusion is
added to the problem by the fact that the King James version translates two
Greek words the same. The other is zoion which simply means a living
creature. The noun zoion is used for elect angels,
the four angels of Revelation 4:6-9. Qhrion is used, and has been used
in Revelation 11:7, for Abaddon the prince of demons, the murderer of the two
witnesses, Moses and Elijah. Qhrion is also used for those
unbelievers who are completely demonised in the cosmic system. We have two in
this chapter: two dictators. One is the dictator of the revived Roman empire,
the other is the dictator of the state of Israel in the Tribulation. So we
translate it: “Then I saw a beast monster,” the dictator of the revived Roman
empire. The most demonised members of the human race are these two dictators.
This dictator receives his power from Satan under
two principles. Firstly, he is demon-possessed to the maximum in the cosmic
system. In other words, his rise is based upon his advance into evil in the
cosmic system. He is also under demon influence and demon telepathy which is
transference of thought from Satan to this dictator. Secondly, this dictator
uses to the maximum the power of evil. The cosmic system is his contact with
the supernatural power of Satan.
The dictator uses his great power of
evil to gain his rulership, and there is a principle here. The power of evil
can never penetrate a group apart from that group’s consent or apart from that
group’s characteristic of evil. In other words, the power of evil can only
succeed where evil exists. If, instead of the power of evil, there is the power
of doctrine, there is the power of a pivot, there is the power of the Word of
God, then the power of evil simply cannot make any inroads at all.
The power of evil belongs to Satan
but the power of evil is delegated in various components of strength to those
who live in the cosmic system, and Satan uses believers and unbelievers in the
function of the power of evil. The sad thing is that you can’t recognise the
power of evil by the personality because some of the sweetest, most righteous,
moral people that you ever see have received from Satan the power of evil. They
will come in very subtly and malign and gossip and question and produce doubts
and make their infiltration into any organisation of any kind. The power of
evil is designed, one way or another, to distract you from Bible doctrine, from
the daily intake of Bible doctrine, from growing spiritually in grace. The
power of evil is always going to attack, therefore, any area where there is a
possibility of forming a pivot. And it always starts with sweet people
maligning, gossiping, expressing jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness,
implacability. The power of evil always infiltrates through motivational evil,
it never starts out through functional evil. Functional evil always follows
motivational evil.
So we must understand that the two
men that we are studying, the dictator of the revived Roman empire and the
dictator of Israel in the Tribulation, came into power through evil. The power
of evil belongs to Satan and he delegated it to these two people under
conditions that we will note.
This beast monster is said to have an origin: the
preposition e)k plus the ablative of qalassa, “from the source of the sea.” This is the sea of
nations during the Tribulation. The accusative neuter singular present active
participle from a)nabainw means coming up out of the
sea. The present tense of the participle is a retroactive progressive present,
it denotes what has happened in the past. In the beginning of the Tribulation
the united states of western union begins to rise and continues into the
present time, the middle of the Tribulation. The revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation produces the action of the verb and the participle is used as a
relative clause because of the retroactive progressive present. It is going to
be translated by the English perfect, “Then I saw a beast dictator [Satan’s
slave, the Gentile dictator of the revived Roman empire in the last half of the
Tribulation] who had ascended from the sea.” The revived Roman empire of the
first part of the Tribulation comes out of the sea of nations, fighting and
jockeying for power in the Tribulation.
Next we have a present active participle from e)xw. The retroactive progressive
present is known also as the present of duration, what is begun at the
beginning of the Tribulation and is continued into the middle. The active
voice: the dictator of the revived Roman empire produces the action. This is a
circumstantial participle and a circumstantial participle in the Greek is often
translated with a conjunction “and” and a finite verb. So we translate: “and he
had.” Then we have kerata deka, deka for ten plus the accusative
plural direct object from keraj, “ten horns.”
The horn is
a symbol of power in the Word of God and the ten horns are ten nations which
were once part of the old Roman empire. Not only is the horn a symbol of power
and authority but horns represents nations or groups who possess power and
authority by combining. In Daniel 8:20,21 we have a ram with two horns. This is
the Persian empire: one horn for the Medes; one horn for the Persians. In Amos
6:13 arrogant Israel boasts about her conquest of Gentile nations whom they
call horns or powerful nations. In Jeremiah 48:25 the horn of Moab is the power
and sovereignty of Moab as a nation. Moab at its peak. In Daniel 7:7ff ten
horns are the ten nations combined to form the revived Roman empire in the
Tribulation, while the little horn of Daniel 7 is the dictator we are studying
at the present time. So the word “horn” is found quite frequently in
relationship to nations and, in the plural, nations combined together. In Zechariah
1:18-19 we have four horns, four empires who administer the fifth cycle of
discipline to client nation Israel. They are Assyria, Chaldea, the Hellenistic
empire of the Seleucids, and Rome. Therefore it is concluded, of course, that
horns are legitimately used for powerful nations performing certain functions
related to their power.
Translation: “And he [the dictator of the revived
Roman empire] had ten horns.” It would be nothing but speculation to determine
the ten horns or nations which compose that revived Roman empire of the future.
The problem is that we don’t know when the Rapture is going to occur. If the
Rapture were to occur sometime in the near future then we could do a little
speculating but if the Rapture is not going to occur for another thousand years
nations are going to change and the names are going to change. While the sea in
this verse represents the great mass of nations of the Tribulation it can also
refer to a literal sea, the Mediterranean which became a Roman lake after the
third Punic war. So it could be nations bordering on the Mediterranean or
expanded to include other nations as well. If the Rapture should occur sometime
soon nations which were once in the Roman empire sound like this at the
present: Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria, England, Holland,
Belgium, West Germany (not East Germany), Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania,
Bulgaria, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Western Turkey, Syria,
Lebanon. All of those nations are modern nations and all of them were once in
the old Roman empire. Nations definitely not involved: East Germany, Russia,
Iran, the USA,
Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China.
The real key to understanding the horns in verse one
is to go to Daniel chapter seven where we have some expansion. Daniel 7:2,3,
“Daniel said, ‘I was looking in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds
of heaven [the rise and fall of empires under a principle: Jesus Christ
controls history] were stirring up the great sea [four empires were stirring up
peoples and nations of the world]. And four great beasts [empires] were coming
up from the sea [Gentile nations], differing each from the other’.”
Verses 4-6 describe these empires. In verse four we
have the lion, the Chaldean empire, followed by the bear in verse 5 which is
the Persian empire, followed by the leopard in verse 6, the Hellenistic empire
of Alexander the Great which disintegrated into the Hellenistic monarchies
after Alexander’s death.
In verse 7 we pick up the concept. “ ‘After this I
kept looking in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast [the historical
Roman empire, the first Gentile client nation], dreadful and terrifying and
extremely strong; and it had large iron teeth [Rome from BC 146-49, the transitional
period from republic to empire]. It devoured and crushed and trampled down with
its feet the rest [the expansion of the Roman empire]; and it was different
from all the beasts that were before it [it became the first Gentile client
nation to God], and it [the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation. Moving
from Rome of the past to Rome of the future] had ten horns’.”
Rome as a client nation to God started in AD 70 with the fall of Israel.
Long before that the transition had been occurring. What held up Israel as a
client nation during the transitional period was the ministry of the apostles —
Paul, John, Peter, James. Rome as a client nation to God continued until AD 476. From 476 AD and throughout the rest of
the Church Age other Gentile nations function as client nations to God. Gentile
client nations cease to exist at the Rapture because the pivot of mature
believers is removed from planet earth by resurrection — no pivot; no client
nation. All the pivots go up at the Rapture. After the Rapture comes the
Tribulation and the revived Roman empire under the concept of the ten horns of
Revelation 13:1; 17:1-17; Daniel 7:7. These ten horns are taken from the
countries mentioned above.
Verse 8, “ ‘While I was contemplating the horns [the
ten nations combined to form the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation],
behold [in the middle of the Tribulation], another little horn [dictator of the
revived Roman empire], came up from among them, and three of the first horns
were uprooted [in order to establish his dictatorship he had to fight and
defeat three out of the ten nations before the other seven surrendered to his
power] before it; and behold, this horn possessed eyes like the eyes of a man,
and a mouth that spoke arrogantly’.”
In other words, in the middle of the Tribulation, or
just before that time, a dictator [the little horn] emerges and conquers three
of the nations in this confederation. The others surrender to his power. He
then becomes an absolute dictator over this power bloc of the Tribulation. This
fact explains our ten horns in Revelation 12:3; 13:1; 17:3.
Daniel 7:9, “ ‘I continued looking [past the
Tribulation and second advent and Millennium] until thrones were set up [the
nations of the Millennium. The thrones are set up so that believers of the
Church Age who are winners can rule nations in the Millennium], and the Ancient
of Days took his throne [the coronation of Jesus Christ at the second advent];
his clothing was like white snow [the uniform of glory over His resurrection
body], and the hair of his head was like pure wool [the strategic victory of
Christ at the first advent]. His throne was a flame of fire [the baptism of
fire, which means that only believers enter the Millennium, unbelievers are
cast into fire], its wheels [the chariot of fire which we studied in Ezekiel]
were a burning fire [the judgment of the baptism of fire at the second
advent]’.” Verses 10-12 describe details of the second advent judgements.
Verse 14, “ ‘And to him [Jesus Christ] was given
dominion [rulership of the world], glory and sovereignty, that all the peoples,
nations, and languages might serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion
which will not pass away; furthermore, his kingdom is one which will never be
destroyed’.”
Verses 18-26, “ ‘But the saints of the Highest One
[Jewish believers or true Israel] will receive the kingdom [the restoration of
Israel as a client nation to God under the Palestinian covenant] and possess
the kingdom forever.”
‘Then I
desired to know the exact meaning [interpretation] of the fourth beast [the
historical Roman empire], which was different from all of the others, most
terrifying, with its teeth of iron and its claws of bronze, and which devoured,
crushed, and trampled under foot whatever was left, and the meaning of the ten
horns which were on its head, and the other horn [the dictator of the revived
Roman empire] which came up, and before which three of them fell [were
defeated], namely, that little horn which had eyes [genius combined with demonism]
and a mouth that spoke arrogantly [eloquence from the cosmic system], and whose
appearance was more arrogant than his contemporaries’.”
“ ‘I continued looking while the horn was making war
against the saints and winning over them until the Ancient of Days came [second
advent of Christ], and pronounced judgment in favour of the saints of the
Highest One, and the time arrived when the saints took possession of the
kingdom. Therefore he said [interpretation]: ‘The fourth beast will be the
fourth empire [the Roman empire] on the earth, which will be different from all
the others, and it will devour the entire earth and tread it down and crush it.
As for the ten horns [revived Roman empire], out of this kingdom ten kings will
arise [the first half of the Tribulation]; and another [the dictator who takes
over about the middle of the Tribulation] will arise after them, and he will be
different from the previous ones [because he is Satan’s servant, both
demon-possessed and under great demon influence] and he will conquer three
kings. He will speak out against the Most High and will impress the saints of
the Highest One, he will try to change times and laws; and they [believers]
will be delivered from his hands for three and one half years [Jews delivered
from the holocaust]. Then the court will sit [second advent of Christ], and his
dominion [Satan as the ruler of the world] will be taken away, to annihilate
and to destroy to the end [to the end of the Millennium, until he is
released]’.”
We note in
Revelation 13:1, “having seven heads.” The ten horns are the confederation of
nations which form the revived Roman empire in the first half of the
Tribulation. The seven heads are the nations who did not have to be conquered.
Because in this confederation of ten nations we have so many bad decisions from
a position of weakness the vacuum is created. Out of that vacuum came a
dictator. First these nations would not accept this man until he ruthlessly
conquered three of them and the other seven accepted his dictatorship. In that
way he became the dictator of the revived Roman empire and the phraseology
“seven heads” refers simply to those nations which were not conquered but came under
the power of this dictator. The seven heads, then, are the surviving nations in
the revived Roman empire by the middle of the Tribulation. Hence, we have the
first and last status of the revived Roman empire in the Tribulation. In the
first half of the Tribulation a ten-nation confederation; in the last half of
the Tribulation a seven-nation dictatorship.
We have next a phrase which is called the interpretive
use of the conjunction kai. This is the idiomatic use,
the interpretative kai, and should be translated
“this means.” So after the ten horns and seven heads we have kai meaning “this means.” Then we have the
prepositional phrase e)pi plus the genitive of keraj, meaning horns. This means that “on his horns” (we
have the possessive genitive of a)utoj, the intensive pronoun uses
a personal pronoun), the revived Roman empire during the first half of the
Tribulation, “were ten crowns,” deka diadhma [diadhma is the ruler’s crown]. In the first half of
the Tribulation, then, the dictator was part of a political confederation, ten
nations of the revived Roman empire. In the last half of the Tribulation he
rules what is left of it after he conquers it.
The revived Roman empire in the last half of the
Tribulation is then described. We have a connective kai
this time denoting a contrast with the previous phrase, translated “but.” Again
we have the preposition e)pi but this time plus the
accusative of the noun kefalh, “but on his head.” We had
in the previous phrase e)pi plus the genitive,
emphasising contact. This time we have e)pi
plus the accusative, emphasising motion or direction. In the first half of the
Tribulation the dictator has contact but in the last half of the Tribulation
the dictator has motion, he is in control of the revived Roman empire, “but
over his head [the revived Roman empire] the name,” the accusative singular
direct object from o)noma, meaning name, designation
or person. Then the accusative plural in apposition to that: blasfhmia, blasphemy, “but over his head the name blasphemy.”
Blasphemy simply refers to the fact that he is the head of the ecumenical
religion of the Tribulation. He has a religious empire as well as a political
empire. His political empire is mentioned in the “seven heads and on his heads
were ten crowns.” So he controls the entire Roman empire. The ten crowns refer
to the original ten nations.
There are two things that create a vacuum in any
nation at any time. One is stupidity: you stop thinking. When you stop thinking
you create a vacuum for a dictator. That is what happened to Nazi Germany, to
Russia, to China. That explains the rise of communism; it invades where the
vacuum exists. The other part is when you make bad decisions from a position of
weakness. You lost control of your own life and you have no personal sense of
destiny, and your status quo contributes to the national lack of control and
the nation’s failure to have a sense of destiny. One way or another, every
nation after four generations of degeneracy is destroyed.
A vacuum was created in this ten-nation
confederation and out of that vacuum comes a dictator. He conquered three and
ruled seven but the other three are also under his control. That is all this is
saying: “then I saw the beast dictator [Satan’s man] who had ascended from the
sea [because he was in an area where negative volition created a vacuum that
sucked him up], having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten
crowns [on his horns — the revived Roman empire; the ten crowns — the political
empire during the first half of the Tribulation] but over his head [revived
Roman empire during the last half of the Tribulation] the name of blasphemy
[Satan’s last great attack against the human race: ecumenical religion].”
In the last half of the Tribulation the dictator has
absolute control politically, but something is added and something is taken
away from his absolute control. Taken away are the ten crowns of the ten horns,
which means they are no longer independent states in a confederation but a part
of a single empire, the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation. Added to the
seven surviving states is the name “blasphemy,” indicating that this is a
religious as well as a political dictatorship. The worst thing that could
happen is to have both a religious and a political dictatorship. The revived
Roman empire in the last half of the Tribulation is religious and political,
and we will see how this ecumenical religion not only gains control in the
revived Roman empire as a Satanic power but also takes over the state of Israel
where people will say in that day, “It can’t happen, Judaism will resist it.”
But Judaism has no power apart from Bible doctrine. Judaism will have a system
of religion without the doctrine of the Old Testament.
Verse 2, the precedent and power of the empire. This
takes us back to Daniel chapter seven for explanation in verses 3-6. This is
the passage which will explain the system of precedence.
“And four great beasts were coming up from the sea
[of nations], different from one another,” a phrase which means idiomatically
that they follow each other historically, they do not coexist. “The first [the Chaldean
empire] was like a lion [that will explain “lion” in Revelation 13:2] and had
the wings of an eagle [the rapidity with which the Chaldean empire came into
prominence]. I kept looking until the wings were plucked [that is Nebuchadnezzar’s
madness resulting in the palace revolution of Daniel chapter four] and it was
lifted up from the ground [the restoration of Nebuchadnezzar] and made to stand
on two feet like a man [Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion ]; a human mind was also
given to it [eventually he became very brilliant from his learning of
doctrine]. And behold another beast, a second one, resembling a bear [the
Median-Persian empire which lasted two centuries]. He was raised up on one side
[the Persians dominated the Medes], and three ribs were in its mouth between
its teeth [the story of Cyrus the Great: the first rib are the Medes, the
second was Lydia, the third rib was Babylon and the fall of the Chaldean empire
in BC 539]; and
thus they said to it [the bear], ‘Arise, devour much meat!’ ” This is the
expansion of the Persian empire from India on the east to Greece on the west.
These conquests were divine judgements on demonised empires practising
idolatry, Isaiah 41:2-7; 44:28; 45:1-13; 2 Chronicles 36:22-23; Ezra 1. God
used a born-again believer [Cyrus] to exercise judgment. Degeneracy hit in all
of these great nations all at the same time. God used the Persian empire also
to protect and restore Israel to its client nation status.
In Daniel 7:6 we read: “After this I kept looking,
and behold, another one, like a leopard [Alexander the Great and his Macedonian
empire], which had on its sides four wings of a bird [the first wing was the
conquest of Asia Minor, the second was the conquest of the Mediterranean world,
the third was the conquest of Persia’s eastern empire, and the fourth was the
conquest of Parthia]; the beast also had four heads [Seleucus, Ptolemy, Cassander,
Lysimachus, heads of the Hellenistic monarchies], and dominion was given to
it.”
Revelation
13:2 has the same beast analogy. It begins with a connective kai, introducing a result from what precedes. It is
translated “Furthermore.” The aorist active indicative of o(raw follows, “Furthermore I saw.” The aorist tense is a
constative aorist, it contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety, the
parade of empires which sets the precedent. The active voice: John is the human
author and he produces the action of the verb. The indicative mood is declarative
representing the verbal idea from the viewpoint of reality.
Then we have the subject, the nominative singular
from qhrion,
which means the beast monster, and we are looking now at the revived Roman
empire. “Furthermore the beast which I saw,” and then the perfect active
indicative of e)imi, “was,” and with the
comparative particle o(moioj, “was like.”
Next we have the instrumental of association of the
noun pardalij, which means leopard, “was
like a leopard,” The leopard, as we saw in Daniel, is the Macedonian and
Hellenistic empires. This analogy denotes the rapid conquest of the dictator in
forming the revived Roman empire. He had the speed of Alexander. We are talking
about a future ruler of the revived Roman empire in the Tribulation who will
break all records for conquest and he is compared to the rapidity with which
Alexander the Great conquered the world. While it took Alexander twelve years
to form his empire this beast dictator does it in less than a year.
The pro-Jewish analogy of the first half of the
Tribulation is brought up next. We have the adjunctive use of kai, “also.” We have the nominative plural from the
noun pouj and the possessive genitive
a)utoj, “his foot,” “also his foot
was like.” And then we have the descriptive genitive of a)rchoj for the bear. The bear refers to the Persian
empire. And what is the precedent that the Persian empire set? It was
pro-Semitic. Not only did the Persians treat the Jews well but they also
sponsored their return to the land and the restoration of the client nation.
Hence, the analogy of the bear is a reference to the Roman dictator’s
pro-Semitic policy toward Israel in the first half of the Tribulation and after
his sensational conquest at the time of the middle of the Tribulation. It is
only after the abomination of the desolation is put up in Israel that
anti-Semitism rears its ugly head. The revived Roman empire is pro-Semitic in
the first half of the Tribulation, right up until the middle of the
Tribulation, but with the fall of Satan from heaven there is suddenly an
outbreak of anti-Semitism. So we have the bear which is analogous to the
dictator’s pro-Semitic policy in the first half of the Tribulation.
Then we have thirdly, the lion, the anti-Semitic
policy of the last half of the Tribulation. We have the connective conjunction kai, a nominative singular subject stoma and, again, the possessive genitive from a)utoj, “and his mouth.” Then we have an ellipsis which
demands the verb to be, “and his mouth was like the mouth of a lion.” The lion refers
to the Chaldean empire which was anti-Semitic. Therefore it establishes analogy
with the Roman dictator’s policy at the end of the Tribulation. He became
anti-Semitic. Each empire of the past had a characteristic which would be found
in the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation.
Translation: “Furthermore the beast which I saw [the
revived Roman empire of the Tribulation] was like a leopard [the dictator’s
rapid conquests in the first half of the Tribulation is compared to the rapid
conquest of Alexander the Great], also his feet were like the feet of a bear
[the dictator’s pro-Semitic policy in the first half of the Tribulation is
compared to the pro-Semitic policy of Persia], and his mouth was like the mouth
of a lion [the dictator’s anti-Semitic policy in the last half of the
Tribulation].”
Note the reverse order of the animals in Revelation
chapter thirteen. In Daniel chapter seven the lion came first, then the bear,
and then the leopard. The reason for that is quite obvious. In Daniel seven the
lion came first historically, then came the bear, and finally was the leopard.
That is the historical order of Daniel chapter seven, but now when we come to
Revelation chapter thirteen these are reversed because these analogies are
related to the Tribulation, not to past history. The pro-Semitic policy of the
Roman dictator of the Tribulation came first in which he made the treaty. The
period of the bear or the pro-Semitic policy is when the king of the west, the
revived Roman empire, made the treaty with the state of Israel in the
Tribulation. But behind that pro-Semitism was religion. The dictator was the
head of ecumenical religion of the Tribulation and he wanted to bring Israel
into the religion. The greatest persecutors of Israel have always been
religion. (Bible Christianity is not a religion) Ecumenical religion, once the
dictator of the revived Roman empire became its head and accepted the rulership
of ecumenical religion in the world at that time, began persecuting the Jews.
Next we have the connective kai followed by the nominative singular subject drakwn, “dragon.” Satan is the highest of all angelic
creatures and the ruler of all fallen angels, Matthew 8:28; 9:34; 12:26; Luke
11:18,19. Satan or the dragon is the central antagonist of the angelic
conflict; he is the anti-God creature of creatures, Hebrews chapters one and
two. Yet God did more for him than any other creature. So why would Satan be
against God? How could he turn on someone who did so much for him? In one word:
arrogance. Sometimes arrogance is called vanity, sometimes it is called pride,
but arrogance can change people instantly and always for the worst. When the
believer gets involved in the cosmic system he turns on the one who has given
his eternal life and every fantastic, marvellous blessing, and even keeps each
one of us alive.
Satan is a genius, and he is a genius when it comes
to organisation. He has a great system of organisation, Ephesians 6:10. He is
also a criminal, and when you are a good organiser and a criminal it is natural
that you are going to get into trouble. As a criminal he is the original
murderer in history, John 8:44. Satan is the enemy of God, and being the enemy
of God what Satan hates the most is truth, Bible doctrine. He can’t stand Bible
doctrine. Satan is the ruler of this world and is far superior in very way to
the creatures of this world, and yet we have one thing that gives us great
power, the ability to resist, the ability to see through him, the ability to
discern, and the ability to fulfil the plan of God, and that is Bible doctrine.
And so what defeats Satan is not any attractiveness, not any beauty, not any
wisdom or talent that we might have, and above all not any form of
self-righteousness (the quintessence of arrogance), is Bible doctrine resident
in the soul. Naturally, therefore, Satan is the enemy of Bible doctrine,
Matthew 13:9, 39.
Satan is also a great strategist. 2 Corinthians 2:11
“… in order that no advantage be taken of us by Satan for we are not ignorant
of his strategy.” Satan has all of the natural advantages over us but it is one
thing to have natural advantages over someone and something else to take
advantage of someone. The difference is volition. No one can take advantage of
you apart from your own consent, apart from the function of your own volition.
By creation Satan is superior to us in every way but Satan cannot take
advantage of us unless we agree to it from the function of our own volition.
What protects our volition from making those wrong decisions, bad decisions from
a position of weakness, is Bible doctrine. Ignorance is what ruins us as
believers. Arrogance and ignorance are our two greatest enemies.
2 Corinthians 11:3 says, “But I am afraid, lest as
the serpent [Satan] deceived Eve by his craftiness your minds will be led
astray from the simplicity and virtue of devotion to Christ.” There is a
phenomenal gem. The point being: Satan must deceive our minds. And why our
minds? Because the mind is the recipient of Bible doctrine. You are not led
astray in any way except through the mind because that is where your volition
is and the source of all sin, the source of human good, the source of evil.
Devotion to Christ is the system in the divine dynasphere.
2 Corinthians 11:14, “Satan disguises himself as an
angel of light.”
Revelation 13:2, “and the dragon.” Let us see what
Satan is doing here, the aorist active indicative of didomi, he is giving something. Watch out when the devil
gives away something. When Satan starts to give you something it means that you
are now his slave if you accept his gift. So you have to be careful who is
giving you what; “and the dragon gave,” the constative aorist contemplates the
action of the verb in its entirety. The active voice: Satan produced the action
of the verb through the delegation of authority to the Roman dictator. The
indicative mood is declarative for the historical fact that during the
Tribulation Satan gains by giving. That is what people often have in mind when
they give you something. This is why giving in the local church must always be
anonymous. The pastor must not know who is giving what because people often
give to a pastor so that they can tie him up and use him for whatever ends they
may have down the line. So when people give the pastor shouldn’t know anything,
and when people give they should give as unto the Lord.
“and the
dragon gave to him,” the dative singular indirect object from a)utoj. This is the intensive use and it is translated “to
him.” Once the devil starts giving away something you are under his power if
you accept his gifts, and if he gives power then he controls you and the power
you have is his power, you are a puppet on a string.
We have what he gives in the accusative singular
direct object, dunamij. God gives dunamij and Satan gives dunamij. God’s dunamij to the royal family is the
divine dynasphere. Dunamij is where we get dynasphere;
that is the plan of God. But Satan also gives a system of power related to the
cosmic system, “and the dragon gave to him his power.”
Satan, then, as the super creature does possess
great power. For example, Satan can blind the minds of unbelievers when they
are exposed to the gospel, according to 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, but he just can’t
reach in and coerce volition. How he blinds is he starts giving presents. There
is nothing that will blind people more than to receive gifts without
understanding what is behind it — not love, but control. Basically, there are
two reasons why people give: because of love and to control. There are people
who will do a favour to you because they want to control you; other people will
do a favour for you because they love you. When giving is an expression of love
and the favour comes there are no strings. But when giving is going to demand
favour down the line and there are strings it is always to control you. One
nice thing about grace: no strings.
So we have the power of Satan, and the power of
Satan is in giving. He is giving because he has strings. Satan doesn’t do these
things unless God permits it, and there is a reason for it. Satan tried to gain
power over Job and failed, and when Job would not accept his presents then he
became vindictive. If you refuse the gifts of someone who is trying to control
you the next step is vindictiveness. Many a person will turn against you with
vindictiveness simply because you rejected their presents and therefore
wouldn’t come under their control. That is why Satan killed the children of
Job. But the children of Job weren’t much good anyway and God gave Job other
children later on. It was really a case of God permitting it and it turned out
for good because Job rejected Satan’s gifts.
Satan motivated Cain to murder his brother Abel.
First of all Satan had to hook Cain. Satan gave Cain the most beautiful farm in
the world at that time and all of the food grown at Cain’s farm was
magnificent. In fact, it was so good that Cain was arrogant about it and when
it was time to bring a gift to God, instead of bringing the lamb and the
shedding of blood which represented the cross he brought all this beautiful fruit
and vegetables. And who has been giving him all this great success in farming?
Satan. So Cain brings all this produce that Satan has given him and says, “Look
God, here’s my gift”. God rejected it. So then Satan motivated Cain to murder,
John 8:44; 1 John 3:12.
Satan is often the executor of believers who are
sentenced to the sin unto death. That is vindictiveness. Cf. 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Timothy 1:19,20.
Satan’s power is obviously then related to use and
function of violence. But it doesn’t start there. Satan hooks people by giving
them something. A gift from Satan is the beginning of trouble. So the first
object here is that the dragon gave to the dictator his power.
Then he gave a second thing, “and his throne.” The
dragon is the ruler of this world. So we have a second accusative, qronoj. He gave him not only power
but a title to go with his power. This dictator is Satan’s servant. This
dictator gave his soul to the devil. In return for his total dedication to the
devil the dictator of the little horn of Daniel chapter seven receives great
power and great authority. It is one thing to have power, it is something else
to have great authority to go with it. The extent of his authority: he had the
political rulership of the revived Roman empire; he was the religious leader of
Satan’s ecumenical religion of the Tribulation.
Translation of verse two: “Furthermore the beast
which I saw [the dictator of the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation] was
like a leopard [the dictator’s rapid conquest in the first half of the
Tribulation], also his feet were like the feet of a bear [the dictator’s
pro-Semitic policy in the first half of the Tribulation], and his mouth was
like the mouth of a lion [the dictator’s reversal to anti-Semitism policy in
the last half of the Tribulation]: and the dragon [Satan, the ruler of this
world] gave him to him [the dictator of the revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation] his power, and his throne, and great authority [political
authority as the ruler of the revived Roman empire and religious authority as
the ruler of ecumenical religion].”
We are going to study two dictators in chapter
thirteen but we need to spend a little time first on a principle or two by way
of introduction.
First of all we are going to note in this chapter
two kinds of dictators. One is a Jew and one in a Gentile; one is a Roman and
one is a Jew. It is interesting that we should have in the Tribulation of the
future a Jew and a Roman as the two great dictators of the Tribulation. The two
greatest people of the ancient world were the Jews and the Romans. It was
inevitable that the two people whose history extended over a thousand years in
the ancient world, and whose history is almost longer than any people of any
time, should encounter each other in the course of human history. The Romans
and the Jews met at probably the most dramatic point, the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ. They represented the two greatest systems of law in the ancient
world and, as far as the Jews are concerned, the greatest system of law in all
of human history. And it is interesting that these two fantastic systems of law
were used to put our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. It wasn’t just the Jews,
it was both Jewish and Roman law. So Jews and Romans met at the cross.
The Jews were the only client nation of the Old
Testament times in ancient history and when the Romans finally administered the
fifth cycle of discipline in AD 70 they became the first Gentile client nation in history. While all
the streams of ancient history flow into the lake called SPQR [The Senate and the People
of Rome] all the streams of modern history flow out of the lake called SPQR. At the same time all
blessings of the ancient world had their source in Israel. Just as history
flows into and out of the Roman empire all the blessings of the ancient world
flow in and out of Israel. It is inevitable that the two greatest peoples then
should meet in ancient history, for one of them has all the trends of history,
one of them has all the blessings of history. And just as they have met in the
past to form some of the most dramatic pages of history so they will meet in
the future to form the great drama of the last half of the Tribulation.
The history of the Tribulation prophesied in chapter
thirteen finds Rome and Israel meeting again during one of the most dramatic
moments in all of history. They meet in the form of their two dictators: the
dictator of the revived Roman empire and the dictator of Israel in the
Tribulation.
Dictators
1. Dictators are people who always know what is best
for everyone else and seek to impose that knowledge, however limited, on others
without their consent. The difference between a legitimate ruler and a dictator
is the one word “consent”. People who are legitimate rulers rule by the consent
of the people; illegitimate rulers or dictators rule without consent.
2. Hence the dictator rejects freedom of choice and
the principle of self-determination as the right of every individual member of
a society. In effect, a dictator rejects freedom and he assumes the right to
live everyone else’s life for them.
3. Dictators can exist in every category of life. We
are going to study the eschatological aspect but there are dictators in social
life who superimpose their will on the social circle. There are, of course the
political dictatorships. We are filled with them in our time in history; they
have existed in the past. There are economic dictatorships and religious
dictatorships. Some of the latter are great dictatorships such as in the
Reformation — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin.
It is one thing for people to present to you their
ideas, which is legitimate, but to demand, even with the use of force, that you
follow their ideas is something else. The only legitimate dictatorship is
parents over children.
4. Dictators refuse to permit you to make your own
mistakes. In that sense they are arrogant crusaders seeking to run your life by
their standards or lack of standards. This means that in their philosophy of
tyranny dictators only want you to make their mistakes from their bad
decisions.
5. Therefore dictators are inevitably arrogant,
self-righteous. Even the most evil of men, due to their arrogance, have
self-righteousness.
6. Because dictators inevitably have to use force
and violence to superimpose their will and ideas on the masses they inevitably
reject doctrines and principles of establishment related to human freedom and
self-determination.
7. Dictators insist on having their own way because
their arrogance assumes that their way is infinitely superior. For this reason
dictators assume both perfection and infallibility either in themselves or the
system that created them.
8. Consequently, dictators can only exist, function
and succeed in the atmosphere of the cosmic system of Satan. That means the
historical environment where the cosmic system has major impact.
9. In other words, a maximum number of people living
in the cosmic system create a vacuum for the rise of a dictatorship, while only
the pivot of mature believers creates the environment for the dynamic function
of human freedom. Human freedom isn’t always dynamic but when it is it is
because of a pivot of mature believers. Freedom, like any other system, can be
abused.
The greatest protection against any system of
aggrandisement is the mind, the right lobe of the soul. The right lobe of the
soul must be exploited by truth to make significant decisions for freedom. All
freedom comes from truth: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.” Sometimes significant decisions are fighting for freedom; sometimes
significant decisions are defining freedom in terms of truth, category #1,
doctrine: laws of divine establishment.
A second point of introduction
Revelation thirteen is a chapter where prophecy is
interpreted by history. For example, Rome or SPQR while still a republic became an empire. To
understand Rome you must understand the roots of Rome, and while Rome in its
infancy was often a kingdom it crystallised into a republic, and while it was a
republic it became an empire. Nationally Rome was a republic and, as a matter
of fact, up until the last couple of hundred years of Roman history it
continued to be a republic nationally because of the senate. It was only when
the senate was packed out and became a useless tool that we have dictatorship
in the Roman empire. The fact that there were rulers calling themselves Caesar
does not mean that they were a dictatorship, as long as you have the senate you
still have the republic. But that is nationally. The great problem in the last
200 years of Rome as a republic was the struggle between the fact they could
handle Rome because they had been learning how to do it for 500 years of their
history. They had seven hundred years as a republic, they had to learn how to
handle a republic. They had accepted their system and had learned how to handle
their problems by setting up systems to do it. The senate was the basis for the
republic, but while they could administer their own nation, as a republic they
could not administer an empire. The Romans never learned how to do it as a
republic and that is why they became an empire. In other words, they either had
to give up everything outside of Rome and the small area of Italy that they
controlled as their nation or accept the empire and come up with something new,
and the only Roman who was flexible enough to think in terms of good
administration outside the country and citizenship for people outside the
country was Julius Caesar. He was the first man who really could think clearly
and therefore it was Julius Caesar who was the end of the republic and the
beginning of the Roman empire.
So in this chapter we have prophecy interpreted by
history. It is not an accident that we have a revived Roman empire in the
Tribulation. Rome, while still a republic, became an empire. They did not go
from a dictatorship to an empire, they became an empire while they were still
functioning as a republic.
The historical Roman empire became the first Gentile
client nation to God. Not only was it a client nation to God and the preserver
of civilisation but it became the preserver of western European civilisation as
we know it today. Furthermore, Rome did two things as an empire. It established
a system for missionary activity all over the world. It also evangelised for civilisation.
When various other peoples were conquered by the Romans they wanted to be
Roman, they admired Roman civilisation and therefore they would start to ape
the manners of the Romans. In effect this was tantamount to the Romans
evangelising for civilisation. The barbarians who conquered Rome were
civilised. The only ones who were not were the Mongolian types who were
barbaric and resisted all forms of civilisation. So the historical Roman empire
became the first Gentile client nation because in the ancient world there was
more freedom in the Roman empire by the time of the Antonine Caesars than in
any other nation in the history of the ancient world. People had more freedom,
more self-determination, more laws of divine establishment by which self
determination was possible.
Out of the historical Roman empire emerges an
eschatology, the eschatological empire of the future. What Rome represented in
the ancient world a future empire will represent in the Tribulation. Hence, the
revived Roman empire of the Tribulation. It will not exist in crystallised form
during the Church Age though the seeds are planted through any historical trend
to form a united states of western Europe, or better yet, a united states of
western Europe, middle east and North Africa. For we think of the Roman empire
as western Europe but the Roman empire extended across North Africa and the
middle east, and what we now call Turkey. Iran was not ever in the Roman
empire, neither were Saudi Arabia nor Russia. The revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation will therefore not exist in crystallised form until the Rapture
occurs.
With this in mind we can look at another concept of
introduction. Chapter 13 is divided into two parts. In the first ten verses we
study the Gentile dictator, the dictator of the revived Roman empire. In verses
11-18 we study the Jewish dictator, the dictator of Israel in the Tribulation.
These two dictators need to be identified outside of chapter thirteen as well
as explained inside of the chapter.
The Gentile dictator of the
revived Roman empire has nine different identifications (aliases) in the
scripture:
1. He is the feet of the image in Daniel 2:31-35.
2. He is the little horn of Daniel 7:8,9, 19-26. 3.
He is the prince that shall come in Daniel 9:26,27.
4. Ezekiel calls him the prince of Tyrus in 28:1-10 (Tyrus
is Latin for Tyre).
5. From the standpoint of his statue Daniel calls
him the abomination of desolation, as does Matthew — Daniel 11:31; 12:11;
Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:14.
6. He is called the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians
2:3-10.
7. He is also the Antichrist. The preposition “anti”
has two meanings: against and instead of. So both of these dictators are anti-Christ.
This one is anti-Christ [against Christ] and as such he is mentioned in 1 John
2:18, and will be studied in Revelation 13:6.
8. He is the scarlet-coloured beast on whom the
great prostitute rides in Revelation 17:3, 8-13.
9. He is the beast out of the sea in Revelation
13:1-10.
At some point in these ten verses most of those
passages just mentioned will be brought in, either by way of amplification or
to give us additional information about this dictator.
The Biblical identification
of the Jewish dictator. Five aliases are found in the Word
1. Dan the serpent (an interpretative alias), Genesis
49:16-18.
2. The king who shall do according to his own will,
Daniel 11:36-40.
3. He is the Antichrist in the connotation of the
preposition anti [instead of]. He passes himself off as Christ. He comes
instead of Christ, hence he is the false Messiah of Matthew 24:23,24;
Revelation 13:11, 13,14.
4. He is also the false prophet of Revelation 16:13;
19:20; 20:10.
5. The beats out of the earth [land, of Israel],
Revelation 13:11-18.
By way of summary of the two dictators called the
first and the second beast
1. The first beast is a Gentile; the second beast is
a Jew.
2. The first beast is a political dictator of the
revived Roman empire in the Tribulation; the second beast is a political
dictator of Israel in the Tribulation.
3. The first beast is a religious leader of
ecumenical religion in the Tribulation; the second beast is the leader of
Judaism in the Tribulation.
4. Each beast is an antichrist. The first beast is anti-Christ
in the sense of against our Lord; the second beast is anti-Christ in the sense
of “instead of” — the false Messiah.
5. The first beast is totally demonised in the
cosmic system; the second beats is also eventually totally demonised in the
cosmic system.
6. The capital of the first beast will be Rome; the
capital of the second beast will be Jerusalem.
The general historical situation in the Tribulation
The state of Israel is surrounded by four great
spheres of influence in the time of the devil’s desperation. There is the king
of the north, comparable today to the Russian communist bloc. We do not know
when the Rapture is going to occur and so these are all based upon what we have
now. They are comparable. The kings of the east or the kings of the sunrising
would be comparable today to the Chinese bloc. In world war two that would have
been comparable to the Japanese empire, and if the Rapture doesn’t take place
for a thousand years, or even 200 years, it will be some other empire that will
be in the east. The king of the south would be the pan-Arabic bloc. The king of
the west is the revived Roman empire. So Israel is surrounded, as it were, by
four great spheres of influence. In making comparisons it is not implied that
these four power spheres of the 20th century are the prophetic fulfilment, but
they are simply contemporary approximations. However, for us to have a frame of
reference these comparisons with contemporary history are offered and will be
developed in great detail in Revelation chapter sixteen.
In verse 3
the revived Roman empire in the Tribulation is presented. The revived Roman
empire must be distinguished from other great empires during the Tribulation in
that it is a civilised empire. The point is that civilised people are just as
evil as barbarians. Civilised people have old sin natures; civilised people can
be just as cruel as barbaric people can be cruel. There is no distinction
between them because the only restraint and the only production of virtue comes
through the truth of the Word of God. The first category of truth, the laws of
divine establishment, are for unbelievers as well as believers so that
unbelievers at least can be virtuous in this life. But the second two
categories belong to the believer only: category #2, the gospel of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and category #3, Bible doctrine for the believer.
Verse 3 starts with the death of the old Roman
empire in the first half of the verse. “I saw” in the King James version is not
found in the original manuscript. It actually begins with the conjunction kai which is a sequential conjunction and is translated
“Then.” Then the accusative singular numeral e(ij,
“one,” followed by the verb o(raw. Actually it isn’t found
here but since it was the last verb it is used here. “Then I saw one.” Since
“one” is in the accusative it must be the object of a verb, so this is why it
is inserted, it is not actually found in the original. We can translate it, if
we want, simply, “Then one of his heads.” We have the prepositional phrase e)k plus the ablative of kefalh, plus the possessive genitive
of a)utoj.
This is the beginning of an explanation. “One of his
heads” is the historical Roman empire in the time that John wrote the book of
Revelation. We are going to see the future Roman empire in the Tribulation in
terms of the past. Revelation 17:10 says, “And there are seven kings: five are
fallen [five had fallen in John’s time], one is [the sixth king was the Roman
empire at the time of the apostle John], the other has not yet come [the
revived Roman empire of the Tribulation].” The five that are fallen refer to
the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Chaldea, Persia, the Hellenistic empire of
Alexander the Great. So this subject will occur again: the fact that there was
an old Roman empire, and it must be distinguished from the future empire of the
Tribulation.
The Roman empire became the historical centre of
gravity, the first Gentile client nation to God. It is the central lake into
which all the streams of ancient history flowed, and from which all the rivers
of modern history flow out. Rome began as a village of rude shepherds and Rome
went on to become a great empire, but it took a little time: namely, seven
hundred years. First there were shepherds on the banks of the Tiber. Then the
history of the growth from a village to a city state, and from a city state to
a nation, a united Italy, and then the growth of that united Italy into a world
empire. When Rome began as a republic and officially became an empire after the
death of Julius Caesar it didn’t change Rome. Egypt, Assyria, Chaldea and
Persia could not make such a transition from republic to empire, or from empire
to republic. In other words, from one form of government to another form of
government. Rome demonstrated a remarkable flexibility, it not only survived
going from a republic to a dictatorship but it became stronger and greater in
making the transition. A continuity, of course, is important for stability and
Rome was the only great empire in the ancient world that completely changed its
governments, going from antithetical forms — republic to dictatorship — and doing
so without any destruction and, in fact, with improvement. Continuity was
necessary for stability and the first client nation to God had to be stable.
There is the necessity of stability for the formation of a pivot.
The transition, then, from the republic SPQR to the empire SPQR did not change the
underlying ability of Rome nor its stability which first became the Gentile
client nation to God, but never as a republic. It was Rome’s stability in
making the transition from republic to dictatorship that was so useable by God,
not its form of government. Form of government is not the issue. Any form of
government can provide freedom. With some forms of government it is more
difficult because dictators gain and hold their power usually by some form of
violence, something that becomes an enemy of freedom; but this was not true in
the Roman empire. The Roman empire and the man who would rule it had nothing to
do with the greatness or the freedom or the rights of self-determination
throughout the empire. Actually, Rome never became civilised as a republic.
They had great law but the Romans in their republic were very cruel people,
they were a barbaric people, they were shepherds. As they gained power, and
their lust for power and their lust for plunder became greater and greater
their cruelty extended with it. But once the Romans became an empire and once
they had a dictatorship form of government they were actually civilised as over
against being barbarians in the republic.
Manifest destiny is a great issue at this time. The
history of the Roman republic is one of tragedy of establishment stability
alternating with socialism and civil war, but none of these things actually
could provide the background that was necessary for the first Gentile client
nation. So manifest destiny brought out the genius of Rome whole socialism and
the demands of the masses brought out the weakness of the Roman republic. When
the masses dominated the republic it became a democracy and therefore became
extremely unstable. The result was 200 years, not four years, of terrible civil
wars. But when the genius of Roman rule and legal procedure dominated the
republic, then they would have a little breathing space. And it was the empire,
not the republic, which became the great client nation to God.
It is interesting that most modern historians will
try to glorify the republic and try to find in the republic all the greatness
of Rome. But the republic brought out all the worst in Rome: its cruelty, its
inability to administer an empire, its terrible attitude toward people and
toward life in general, plus the destruction of freedom through socialism,
through feeding the masses, feeding and entertaining of those out of work. In
fact they encouraged people to be out of work so that the Roman land owners
could buy up more and more farms and become even greater.
In Luke 21:20,24 we have a key passage in
relationship to Rome: “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies [these
were the three legions of Rome surrounding the walls of Jerusalem in AD 70], then know [this was
addressed to believers living in the Roman empire] that her desolation [of
Israel] is at hand [the fifth cycle of discipline, the destruction of Israel as
a client nation to God].
“They will fall by the edge of the sword, and will
be led into slavery into all nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot
by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” That happened in
AD 70 and that
will be the story of Israel until the second advent of Christ. Never again will
there be a Jewish client nation to God until the end of the Tribulation, the
second advent of Christ. There will be Jewish nations; there have been Jewish
nations since the fall of Israel in 70 AD; there is a Jewish nation now, but that Jewish
nation can never be a client nation to God. The Jews with all their genius will
always be controlled and dependant on Gentile nations. This is the times of the
Gentiles and in the times of the Gentiles only Gentile nations can function as
a client nation to God. Israel depends today on the kindness of strangers in
order to be the greatest military power in the middle east. There is no such
thing as a great Arab military power. The Arabs are just not military minded
and they cannot cut it.
The history of the Roman republic is generally
divided into three parts. The first part is the internal conflict between the
Patricians and the Plebeians eventuating in uniting the people. That started in
510 BC and went
to 367 BC. Rome
had a history of almost 300 years before this but it was a history of kings and
peoples. Secondly, the republic had an expansion of the united Rome, first over
Italy from 367 BC
to 266 BC and
then over the Mediterranean from 264-146 BC. Then we have that terrible period of civil war,
the internal struggle which comes with prosperity — 146-49 BC. In 49 BC Gaius Julius Caesar had
absolute power, and from then until his death five years later in 44 he was the
great genius which guaranteed the perpetuation of the Roman republic as an
empire. His famous five years are the greatest five years of any genius in the
ancient world in turning things around. It can only be compared to what
Napoleon did to Europe between 1795 and 1815, and it took Napoleon 20 years.
The republic in Rome had little to do by precept or example with modern life,
whereas imperial Rome is the explanation of modern history. Because of the
corruption of the masses some form of monarchy was inevitable. Monarchy was the
only system which could unite the power of the senate at home with the administrative
function of the councils in the provinces, and the corruption of Roman
citizens, the invasion of barbarians, made monarchy inevitable. The secret to
the survival of Rome was better government in the provinces, not at home. And
while dictators took over at home the fantastic government in the provinces set
up by Julius Caesar guaranteed that Rome would not only be perpetuated from 44 BC at his death but would be
perpetuated all the way to 476, and no matter what problems came their way.
Caesar saw the necessity for one-man rule, but only
under laws that guaranteed the freedom and self-determination of citizens.
Hence Caesar became the champion first of the city mob, then of the many
nationalities outside the Roman empire. Caesar was an aristocrat and, in
effect, he betrayed his own class. He accomplished politically what
Christianity would accomplish spiritually in the Roman empire. Caesar would
make Roman citizens out of millions of people in the Roman empire while
Christianity would convert those millions to establish the first Gentile client
nation to God. Both the mob of Rome and the senate became a clique which would
have destroyed Rome but Caesar and his genius became the champion of wide
nationalities and he fulfilled the political principle of “whosoever.” Caesar,
in effect, destroyed the power of both the Roman senate and the Roman mobs and
he replaced them with a system of government which blessed and stabilised not
only Rome and Italy but the entire empire. While the malt of the old Roman republic
was still surrounding some, most of the old forms of the republic did continue.
The senate continued to deliberate, councils and praetors were elected as
before in the republic, Caesar drew most of the important powers into his own
hands. Being a Patrician Caesar could not hold the office of tribune which
belonged to the Plebes, so he devised a new tribune power which was granted to
him for life. He was also censor for life, he was the head of the state
religion, and he was called Pontifix Maximus. This, of course, becomes an
illustration of the dictator of the revived Roman empire: head of ecumenical
religion and ruler of the empire in the Tribulation. From this he became
dictator for life with the title of Imperator for himself and for his
descendants.
At this point Caesar’s power resulted from the union
of tribune power in the city of Rome with pro-consular power over the
provinces. Caesar had been a proconsul and understood the problems at both
ends. The genius of Caesar extended from the battlefield to the codification of
all Roman law, the creation of a great public library. Eighty-thousand landless
citizens of Rome were given lands beyond the sea, thus cutting down the welfare
roles from 320,000 when Caesar took power to 150,000. And until Caesar the
chief duty of the Roman government had been the distribution of food and
entertainment to the masses. Caesar reduced the taxes, he made them very fair.
He changed the system of ruling the provinces into one of the greatest
administrative concepts of ancient history. Instead of plundering the provinces
it became rulership of the provinces.
Caesar was also a military genius but he was a great
statesman. He was a lawgiver, he was a jurist, he was an orator, a poet, an
historian, a grammarian, a mathematician, and architect. The murder of Caesar
removed the greatest genius of ancient history but not the system that he had
created. After a brief period of anarchy Caesar’s work was completed by lesser
men. The work of Caesar prepared the way for the dispensation of the Church and
the rise of Gentile client nations which would characterised the Church Age.
Even though he was an unbeliever his contribution was phenomenal.
“Then I saw one of the heads.” This was the Roman
empire at the time of the apostle John. The heirs of Julius Caesar are known as
the Julio-Claudian Caesars or dictators. They include Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, Nero. Some of them were good and some were not, but whether they were
good or bad the system carried them. The system carried the evils of Nero and Caligula
just as much as the system carried the good ones like Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius.
The apostle Paul was the greatest genius of the
Roman empire. Thanks to the policy of Caesar Paul was a Roman citizen as well
as a Jew by race, but regardless of his race he was the greatest Roman of them
all. Thanks to the policy of Caesar, Paul being a Roman citizen was able to do
even greater things for the Roman empire, the communication of Bible doctrine.
Paul died just before Nero. In fact, Nero died in AD 68 three months after Paul
as a penalty for condemning Paul to death. Both men died just two years before
Israel was removed as a client nation to God. Paul anticipated it; Nero was the
one who started moving troops toward the middle east and it was Nero who sent
the first Roman legions to attack Palestine and Jerusalem. It was also Nero who
put to death the apostle Paul for which God put him to death.
As a result of the fifth cycle of discipline
administered by the Romans in AD 70 the times of the Gentiles began. The times of
the Gentiles is defined as the period of history when only Gentile nations can
function as client nations to God. It began in AD 70 with the fall of Jerusalem and it goes
actually to the Rapture of the Church. There will be no client nations to God
in the Tribulation. Once the pivot is removed the we go into a different type
of history altogether, no client nations in the time of the Tribulation. It
runs, therefore, coterminously with the Church Age after AD 70 but requires a pivot of
believers for its modus operandi. There will never again be a Jewish client
nation to God until the second advent.
With the death of Paul and Nero the Flavian Caesars
came to power, first Vespatian in AD 70 and then his son Titus from 79-81, and then his
evil son Domitian from 81-96. It was Domitian who put the apostle John on the
Island of Patmos, and once he died then a new era would begin, the great client
nation era of Rome. While the ministry of the apostle Paul gave Christianity a
vigorous start in the Church Age it was the ministry of the apostle John which
resulted in the great period of prosperity, the greatest period of prosperity
that perhaps the world has ever known. The year was 96 AD, one of the most important
in history. It is important, first of all, because of the completion of the
canon of scripture. It is important because of the death of Domitian and the
beginning of the Antonine Caesars. It is important for the momentum of the
pivot of mature believers which demonstrates the power of Bible doctrine in a
very uncertain time of history.
The Antonine Caesars began in AD 96. The first one was a
Spaniard named Nirva, an older man about to die. He lived for two years and
during that time he released John from his prison on the Isle of Patmos. He did
nothing to discourage. In fact, during the two years of his reign Christianity
began to expand. Then came Trajan from 98-117 AD, then Hadrian from 117-138, then Antoninus Pius
from 138-161, then finally, Marcus Aurelius from 161-180 from when his evil son
Commodus followed from 180-182. From 96-182 not one of these rulers was a
born-again believer but each one of them followed the system of Caesar and it
was the system that made it possible for people to accept or reject Jesus
Christ as saviour. It was a period of great evangelism, a period of great
missionary activity inside the Roman empire. Very shortly that missionary
activity would go outside the Roman empire and to all the world.
War is one of the constants of history and it has
not diminished with civilisation or democracy. As a matter of fact in the last
3,421 years of recorded history only 268 years have been without war. Out of
those 268 years approximately, 100 hundred of these belonged to the period of
the Antonine Caesars. Never before in history has so large a part of the world
known such an unbroken time of rest and peace, prosperity and freedom from
warfare. Thanks to a large pivot of believers there was economic prosperity and
the growth of cities. Rome had a population of over 2-million, Alexandria and Antioch
half a million. Corinth, Carthage, Ephesus, Lyons had 250,000 each. The
prosperity existed in spite of socialism where the government still supported
the unemployed at home. The only prosperity which can coexist with socialism is
derived when you have a large pivot of mature believers in a given area.
During the period of the Antonine Caesars
communication and travel were the greatest in the ancient world. The roads were
safe, piracy was wiped out, the ports were crowded with shipping. Trade
flourished as it did not flourish again until after 1492, the time of Columbus.
Traffic flowed continually along three main arteries of commerce between Europe
and Asia: north by the Black Sea, then by caravan which followed the present
Russian trans-Caspian railroad; south by the Suez and the Red Sea to India, and
then overland to China; caravans crossing Arabia was the third area. Travel was
safe from frontier to frontier so that going from, say, the Thames all the way
to the Euphrates was not only safe but was much more comfortable than it would
ever be until railroads in the 19th century. People travelled for business and
pleasure as never before. The significance of this greatest period of travel
also had other concepts which come out later in the Reformation and
Renaissance. Obviously safe travel meant the spread of Christianity. But
growing socialism could be seen in the Egyptian grain tax of 144,000,000
bushels each year which were transported to Rome to feed the masses.
Military conquests of Rome were made during the time
of the republic whereas the empire was chiefly in a defensive posture. Their
wars were not for conquest but defence. There were several exceptions. The
walls of Rome were no longer on the Tiber but on the Danube, the Rhine, on the
Euphrates, Hadrian’s wall between England and Scotland. The greatest
universities in the world were established at that time in Rome, Alexandria,
Athens. Below the universities the Roman empire set up grammar schools which
corresponded to our high schools. They did everything to help people to read
and write, which also helps in evangelism. The government supported teachers
and professors, they were exempted from taxation. The Roman government honoured
them in many ways and the result was not only the greatest literacy but
education as the means of providing a frame of reference for two languages,
Latin, the official language of the empire, and Koine Greek which became the
official language east of the Adriatic.
As is always the case with a client nation to God
great contrasts inevitably exist. The orgies of the aristocrats, the debauchery
of the middle class, the evil of the mobs and rabble coarse and vicious in
their violence is contrasted with the fantastic rise of Bible doctrine, the
tremendous momentum, the pivot growing and growing and reaching out to people
of every class of society. Divorce and slavery threw a shadow across the Roman
empire while the evils of the circus increased. And yet, thanks to Bible doctrine
and its influence through the pivot of many mature believers there was a strain
of virtue, as illustrated by the thoughtful courtesy and sensitive honour of Pliny
or the integrity of Marcus Aurelius who wrote on his wife’s tomb: “Only once
did she cause me sorrow and that was by her death”. During the peak of the Antonine
Caesars Bible doctrine resulted in the improving the position of the woman. The
woman had her greatest freedom and opportunity not in the twentieth century but
in the time of the Antonine Caesars. They had equal position before the law
which was a tremendous breakthrough in the ancient world. She also became the
companion to her husband rather than the slave of the family which was the
woman’s role in the republic.
Beginning with the emperors from 193 there was a
gradual decline in the Roman empire interspersed with revivals such as occurred
in the time of Constantine from 312-337, and the peaceful infusion of
barbarians which resulted in their conversion and opened the door for the next
client nation to God which would be the kingdom of the Franks.
All of this is the Roman empire which is mentioned
by, “Then I saw one of his heads.” That is the Roman empire at the time of
John. But we are going to see that this Roman empire is going to die, it is
going to go out as a client nation to God. Our next phrase which is coming up
begins with a comparative particle o(j which suggests the manner
in which something precedes, so it is translated here “as if.” With it we have
the perfect passive participle of the verb sfazw,
the Koine Greek word for the Classical Greek word sfattw.
It mean to be wounded, “as if it had been wounded.” This is where we have the
beginning of a bleeding nation, the old Roman empire. The perfect tense
recognises a completed action with existing results. This is a dramatic perfect
representing the existing state of the historical Roman empire.
John was actually writing about the future. The day
in which he lived was about to introduce the golden age of the Antonine Caesars
but there would come a time later on in the empire, about 410 AD, when things would not be so
good. So we have a passive voice with the participle: the historical Roman
empire receives the action of the verb when it starts bleeding to death. All
great nations, all empires, go down through a process; they do not suddenly
collapse. They bleed to death slowly and always it is because of the volition
of the individuals in that nation or empire. The passive voice refers to the
day in 410 when Rome was captured by Alaric and who practically destroyed it
exactly 800 years after it had been captured by the Gauls. The bleeding starts
in 410 and it will end up in 476 AD. This is the last days of the Roman empire, the
period which sfazw covers.
In 476 Odovacar the German dethroned Romulus Augustus
the Little and the history of Rome came to an end with a ruler who was named
after the founder of the city [Romulus] and the founder of the empire [Augustus].
The participle is a conditional participle: “as if it had been wounded.” The
verb sfattw in the Attic Greek is used
for a ritual slaying. The Koine equivalent, sfazw,
means to slaughter, to kill, to murder in regard to men, to sacrifice in
relationship to animals. But in relationship to a nation it refers to bleeding
to death. No nation is ever destroyed by an outside power, it is always
destroyed internally, and we have the beginning of the internal bleeding of SPQR as an empire.
Next we have a prepositional phrase and we have a
lot of history between the participle and the prepositional phrase: e)ij plus the accusative of qanatoj, “to the point of death.” In other words, the bleeding started in 410
and the death occurred in 476 AD. “Then I saw one of his heads [the Roman empire at
the time of writing] as if it had been wounded to the point of death.”
We actually have to go back to the year 376 to see
how the bleeding started. Prior to 376 many tribes had been admitted into the
boundaries of the Roman empire. Many barbarians had come into the empire. Some
of them had been converted to Christianity but all of them had been converted
to Roman civilisation. They were proud to be Roman citizens and did everything
possible in order to do so. This was an attitude that existed over a number of
centuries, for when the apostle Paul was being judged in the middle east his
judge was a very prominent Roman centurion, and one of the things that shocked
him was the fact that here was Paul who was born a citizen of the Roman empire,
whereas the centurion had to spend a great deal of time and hard work and money
in order to gain that citizenship. That was the attitude. The objective was
always to become civilised and it was considered to be a privilege to be a
Roman citizen, and eventually the barbarians were better citizens of Rome than
the original Romans themselves.
In 376 the Visigoths, i.e. the west Goths, appeared
on the Danube frontier. They were fleeing from the terrible Huns who were the
Asiatic Tartars, Mongolians. Valens, the emperor of the eastern empire in Constantinople,
gave them permission to cross the border and to settle in his area, but they
were told that they would have to give up their arms and Roman agents would
supply them with food. The Roman agents pocketed the money and supplied either
inferior food or no food at all. This made the Goths angry. They were happy to
come into the protection of the Roman empire and they did give up their arms.
Once they were on their reservation south of the Danube Roman agents embezzled
the imperial funds and the food did not arrive, while at the same time the Visigoths
bribed these same agents to let them keep their arms. As a result the Goths
marched on Constantinople and at the famous battle of Adrianople in 378 Valens
was defeated and slain. He simply picked the wrong people to administer the
problem.
The new emperor was Theodosius the Great and he
pacified the Goths by giving them land in the Danubian provinces. But in 395 Theodosius
died and the Goths revolted under their young chief, Alaric. Alaric decided to
take the Goths and start moving. He first went to Greece and he conquered it.
He was prevented from moving into Italy by a very famous German who was now a
Roman citizen. His name was Stilicho the Vandal, one of the most brilliant
generals of his day. He commanded the Roman armies and was able to stop Alaric.
But there was an emperor at the time by the name of Honorius and he was very
weak, very petty, and very arrogant. He became very jealous of Stilicho and
therefore one day he decided to get rid of him. But first, Stilicho not only
stopped the Goths but he stopped an army of 200,000 wild Germans who didn’t
even have a tribal name. They were under a leader called Radagaisus. They had
invaded Italy and were besieging Florence when he came back from the defeating
the Goths and he stopped them. He didn’t even know at the time when he saved
Florence and drove out these wild Germans that already the conspiracy for his
death was at hand. So Honorius, in his jealousy and suspicion, had Stilicho the
Vandal assassinated. He came back to report to the emperor in Rome that he had
saved the country and was stabbed to death. When Alaric heard it he turned
around and went back and with no Stilicho to stop him Alaric invaded Italy with
the Visigoths. The emperor Honorius hid himself while Alaric marched in and
took Rome. For five days the city was sacked and after it was over there wasn’t
much left. This was the beginning of the end of the old Roman empire. So
between the participle and the prepositional phrase — “wounded as unto death,”
we have a nation bleeding to death.
The Visigoths, under their king Alaric, decided to
take all of their plunder and go to Africa by way of Sicily, but he died on his
way. He was succeeded by his brother Adolf who married the sister of the
emperor Honorius who was still hiding. He then went over to Spain which was
held by the Vandals and conquered it. There he set up a famous Gothic kingdom.
Many of the Spaniards of today are Germanic, descended from the Goths. The
Gothic kingdom lasted for three hundred years until it was finally overrun by
Islam, but until that time a very stable government existed when the rest of
the world was going mad. Meanwhile two other German tribes, the Bergundians and
the Franks broke into the continental empire, while the Angles, the Saxons, and
the Jutes, entered England in 408 when the Roman legions were withdrawing.
Other races began to break through the barriers of the empire who were not even
Germans. So great was the Hun invasion that Rome had to assemble an army of Visigoths,
Franks and Bergundians. There were no Romans left to fight, they were too
decadent. They faced the famous Hun leader who came in at this time called Attila
and the two armies met in 451. It was called the battle of the nations. Aetus,
the Roman commander, was German. He had spent his youth among the Huns and he
knew how to fight Attila. He was successful in that great battle. While Attila
was defeated he began to move east but decided to move south toward Rome. In
the meantime the army of Aetus was on the other side of him. He retreated
toward Rome.
At this time a lot of myths were established. Pope
Leo I went to Attila’s camp and persuaded him to move on. That was the great
story but there is no truth in it at all. The empire was bleeding to death and
Leo didn’t have any influence on Attila at all. The real true story is that Attila
was now approximately eighty years old and he found a beautiful young girl who
was about his 55th wife, and on the night of the honeymoon, as it proceeded, he
died of a heart attack.
The perfect passive participle of sfazw indicates that Rome began to bleed internally
around 410 but did not terminate until 476. It took 66 years for the empire to
die. It generally takes about two generations once the bleeding becomes
serious.
Now Aetus who had saved the Roman empire from Attila
was assassinated by the Roman emperor Valentinian III who was now on the throne
in Rome. Valentinian was just a petty, jealous, arrogant, decadent Roman person
and he in turn was murdered by a senator named Maximus whose wife he had raped.
Valentinian said: “I am the emperor. All women must worship me, send your wife
in here.” When Maximus got back in town and found out about it he just went and
killed the emperor. Maximus then seized the throne and compelled Eudocia, the
widow of Valentinian, to become his Queen. Eudocia got her revenge by hiring
one of the German generals just back from the war to come and rescue her. The
Vandals then came in and captured Rome and killed Maximus. After the Vandal
raid they took all of the great wealth that was accumulated but not moved by
the Goths and they decided to take it back to their headquarters in North
Africa. On the way over a fleet of some seventy ships got caught in a
Mediterranean storm and the wealth of the ancient world is somewhere at the
bottom of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Hippo in Carthage.
After the Vandal raid the power of Italy fell to
another German general who had just come back with his divisions, Count Ricimer.
Then another German general came back after him and said no, I am the ruler, so
he killed Ricimer and put his son, Romulus Augustus the Little on the throne.
However, he was murdered by Odovacar and Romulus Augustus the Little, who was
just a little boy, was pensioned off by Odovacar. Odovacar then came to power
and decided that he would rule them but that he would not be emperor, there
would be no more emperors. On the day that Romulus Augustus the Little was
pensioned off that was officially the end of the empire. No one ever again took
the title of emperor though Odovacar tried to reconcile his Roman and German
subjects and build up a new nation.
Meanwhile the death of Attila had liberated the Ostragoths
or the east Goths who now invaded the empire. They had a genius king by the
name of Theodoric who defeated Odovacar and established a Gothic kingdom in
Italy. So there was a Gothic kingdom in Spain, a Gothic kingdom in Italy, the
Goths who were originally German barbarians became much more civilised than the
Romans and without their degeneracy. They were non-degenerate and therefore for
awhile there was a very pleasant place to live in Italy and in Spain and even
in southern France. Theodoric the Goth caused everyone to live in harmony and
eventually the Visigoths moved out of Italy and the Lombards moved in and the
darkness began to cover that land which had once been the home of the greatest
empire of all time probably, even to this day. From 476 onward in history there
was no longer a Roman empire. The Teutonic peoples of western Europe began to
struggle and this culminated in the rise of the Frankish empire for which
France is named. The Franks were German, not French. The Frankish empire
included what is now Germany and France and it reached its peak under Charlemagne
who became the ruler of the next Gentile client nation to God.
Other dates of interest deal with the roots of SPQR but not the official end of
the empire: the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, the fall of Constantinople to
the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and finally, Napoleon after the famous Battle of Austerlitze
caused Francis II
who was the emperor of Austria to declare the holy Roman empire officially
dead, though it never was holy, it never was Roman, and it really never was an
empire.
We are going to make a distinction between the
historical Roman empire of the past and the prophetical Roman empire of the
future in the Tribulation. We will give the historical Roman empire a beginning
date of BC 31
with the reign of Augustus and terminating in 476 AD with the dethronement of Romulus
Augustus the Little. That we will call the historical Roman empire for from
where we stand it is past history. At the time that John wrote its greatest
glories were ahead. Then we note the prophetical Roman empire which begins with
the Tribulation, the rise of the Roman dictator of Revelation 13:1-10, and
terminating with his judgment at the second advent — Revelation 19:20. We have
seen both from Daniel and from Revelation how the Roman empire started and how
it fell, and then how we have the rise of the prophetical empire, the one in
the future.
We notice next in Revelation 13:3 the connective
conjunction kai emphasising a noteworthy
fact and translated “nevertheless.” “Then I saw one of his heads as it had been
wounded to the point of death, nevertheless.” Then we have the statement of the
fall of the historical Roman empire: “nevertheless,” and then we have a
nominative singular subject from plhgh, meaning a blow, a blow
which causes death. With it we have a descriptive genitive from qanatoj, meaning death, and then the inevitable possessive
genitive of a)utoj, “his” or “its” death. We
will translate it, “nevertheless his mortal wound,” even though it means
literally, “his death stroke.” It is simply an idiom meaning “his mortal
wound,” that is, the destruction of the historical Roman empire in 476.
Then we have the aorist passive indicative of the
verb qerapeuw which means to heal.
“Nevertheless his mortal wound [his death stroke in 476] was healed.” That is
the revived Roman empire in the Tribulation. 476 is when he died; 410 is when
the internal bleeding began. By 476 the Roman empire was destroyed and the Teutonic
struggle for western Europe began. All of this is in the Church Age. There have
been attempts to revive the Roman concept. Mussolini tried it in our century.
Even Napoleon tried it in his day and he named his son by the Austrian princes
the King of Rome. But there is no Roman empire and we move on to today and the
resurrection or the Rapture could occur today, tomorrow, or a thousand years
from now. No man knows the day or the hour when the Rapture is going to occur,
but when it does there will be no longer any client nations to God. We have one
of the great disaster periods of history, Daniel’s seventieth week, which we
call the Tribulation. The resurrection of the Church means the end of client
nations to God but not the end of nations or spheres of influence or power
blocs. One of the great power blocs at the start, the ten-nation confederation,
eventuating in the middle of the Tribulation in being a seven-nation
confederation ruled by the dictator, is the prophetic Roman empire. It will be
very much like the old Roman empire with three ingredients: a system of
government ruled by a dictator; a system of ecumenical religion; there will be
believers in that empire in the future. And so we have the healing. The healing
takes place in the Tribulation, it is the revival of the old Roman empire.
The constative aorist tense contemplates the action
of the verb in its entirety: the revival of the prophetic Roman empire in the
Tribulation. The passive voice: the prophetic Roman empire receives the action
of the verb. The indicative mood is declarative for the future reality of the
revival of SPQR
in the Tribulation, “nevertheless his mortal wound [the destruction of the
Roman empire in 476] was healed.” This is the revival of the prophetic Roman
empire.
There is a more expanded concept found in Daniel
9:24-27. Remember the principle that comes out of this: All nations destroy
themselves by the volition of the people in that nation.
Verse 24, reference to the restoration of Israel as
it relates to this Roman empire. “Four hundred and ninety years have been
decreed for your people [Israel].” Israel has in history two separate periods
of four hundred and ninety years and in between we have the seventy years of
the Babylonian captivity because the Jews in the first 490 years of their
history as a land refused to observe their Sabbatical years, so God gave them
their Sabbatical years all at one time, 70 of them in slavery. After the
termination of the 5th cycle of discipline in BC 516 and the completion of the walls of
Jerusalem in 445 the Jews have 490 more years. The Bible must be interpreted in
the time in which it was written, hence these are 490 lunar years, not calendar
years as we know them today. A lunar year has 360 days. 516 BC is the year that the temple
was completed under the ministry of Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest and
under the prophetic ministry of Haggai and Zechariah.
“and your holy city [Jerusalem],” a reference to BC 445 when Nehemiah returned
to rebuild the walls. 586 BC was when the 5th cycle of discipline was administered by Nebuchadnezzar
and the Chaldeans. Fifty years later in BC 536 we have the remnant returning to build the
temple. In 516 the temple was completed. In 458 Ezra returned because they
still didn’t understand that you have to have doctrine to go with it, and he
taught Bible doctrine. In 445 Nehemiah returned to rebuild the walls because
Jerusalem needed protection. In 445 when the walls were rebuilt is the time
when the clock starts for the second 490 years.
Seventy years of captivity ended in 516 but that did
not begin their time factor because first of all they had to have doctrine and
they had to have a military establishment before they could be a nation again —
the two necessary ingredients for the establishment of a nation, and you must
have both of them. Under the ministry of Zechariah, Haggai, Ezra, Nehemiah,
they finally got into gear and once the walls were completed and Nehemiah had
organised their military system then time began again. But that second 490
years stopped at the cross and fifty days later the Church Age, the
dispensation of the royal family of God, began with our Lord’s resurrection,
ascension and session. But the Age of Israel stopped at 483 years and those
last 7 years will be picked up in the Tribulation after the Church is removed.
God never mixes Israel and the Church. Israel can come into the Church by
personal faith in Jesus Christ.
Verse 24 continues with six items which will be
accomplished by God at the end of the second 490 years. The last seven years of
the Jewish Age is terminated with the second advent of Christ. The first 490
years was terminated with the fall of Jerusalem and the administration of the
fifth cycle of discipline; the last 490 terminates with the second advent of
Christ, and when He returns He is going to do six things:
a. He is going to finish the transgression, the
second advent termination of the fifth cycle of discipline of client nation
Israel. He will finish their punishment.
b. He will make an end to sin — the baptism of fire
which eliminates Jewish unbelievers of the Tribulation from participating in
the blessings of the Millennium.
c. He will make a propitiatory covering over
iniquity — the regathering of believing Jews at the second advent to become the
client nation to God in the Millennium. This is taught in Isaiah 5:26,30;
10:19-23; 11:11-16; 14:1-3; Joel 2:15ff; Zechariah 10:6-12. This regathering
terminates the fifth cycle of discipline for Israel.
d. To bring in everlasting righteousness — the
resurrection of the Old Testament believers and the Tribulational martyrs at
the second advent.
e. To seal up the vision and the prophecy — this is
when we have the fulfilment of the unconditional covenants to Israel.
f. To anoint the holy of holies — the dedication of
the Millennial temple. The modus operandi of the Millennial temple is described
in Ezekiel chapters 40-48. All six of these items are fulfilled at the second
advent of Christ and are a part of our Lord’s tactical victory.
The question arises: How does this passage relate to
what we are studying in Revelation 13:3? This is found in verses 25 and 26.
Daniel 9:25, the chronology between the
administrations of the fifth cycle of discipline. This is the prophecy of the
period between BC
445 and AD 30.
In 536 BC Cyrus the Great decreed the
return of the remnant to rebuild the temple — Ezra chapter one. In BC 516 the temple is completed.
In 458 BC the
decree of Artaxerxes caused the return of Ezra and the great doctrinal revival
recorded in Ezra chapter seven. In BC 445 the decree of Artaxerxes caused the return of
the military genius Nehemiah to build the walls, Nehemiah 2:1-3, and in 445 the
time clock again begins. Israel is now once again a client nation to God.
“Then you must know and understand,” first of all you have to know the
doctrine and then you have to apply it. This is addressed primarily to Jews who
had to understand the eschatology and make application of it, “that from the
issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince
[the first advent of Jesus Christ] there will be seven plus sixty-two weeks
[483 lunar years, not calendar years],” there is an interval, the Church Age,
between the 69th and the 70th week. That brings us to 30 AD, the crucifixion of our
Lord.
Continuing in verse 25, “it [Jerusalem] will be
built again, with streets [literal streets but referring to commerce, social
life, spiritual life, normal business activity] and moat [the military
establishment], even in times of distress,” in times of distress people still
went to Bible class. There was business as usual.
The first increment of 49 years takes us to BC 396, just four years after
the completion of the Old Testament canon. Therefore the first 49 years are
separated from the others because in that period of time the canon of scripture
was completed and circulated. Malachi was completed around 400 BC.
The two great events at the end of the 483 years are
given in verse 26, “Then after the sixty-two weeks,” i.e.. the 49 years and
then we have 434 years after that, and that brings us down again to our AD 30, “the Messiah will be
cut off and have no one,” the idiom means, but not for Himself. He is to be
judged on the cross but not for Himself. This is a reference to the saving work
of Christ on the cross, “and the people,” the Romans of the historical Roman
empire who will destroy Jerusalem in AD 70 and administer the 5th cycle of discipline, “of
the prince who is to come,” they are the people of the prince who is to come,
and that is what we have been studying, the dictator of the revived Roman
empire of the Tribulation. Now, “the People” is the subject and the verb is
“will destroy the city.” The Roman people will destroy the city, Jerusalem, in AD 70, “and the sanctuary [the
temple]. And its end [end of client nation Israel in AD 70] will come with a flood;
furthermore to the end [of the Jewish Age, the end of the 490 years] wars and desolations
are decreed.”
In AD 30 our Lord was crucified; the Church Age, the
dispensation of the royal family, began. During the period of forty years from AD 30 to AD 70 the Jews were to have
their last warning, which they ignored. One of the warnings was the gift of
tongues. Israel was a client nation to God during the first forty years of the
Church Age and their job was to communicate doctrine to the Gentiles. Their
warning [Isaiah 28] was that Gentiles would communicate the gospel to the Jews
in foreign languages, and the Jews would be evangelised by the gift of tongues
which is getting the gospel in a foreign language. From AD 70 to the Rapture of the
Church is the period of Gentile client nations to God. There are no client
nations in the period we are studying, the Tribulation, the pivot has been
removed. With the removal of the pivot and no client nation status all military
organisations get out of line. There is no more honour in the military later on
in Israel and we start having wars and desolations which will terminate with
the Armageddon campaign. The “wars and desolations” of Daniel 9:26 have no more
meaning for one simple reason: no client nation to defend, no pivot to defend,
until we get down to a principle: Satan at the end of the Tribulation seeks to
destroy all Israel and there will arise another Nehemiah, another David,
another Joshua, another great general, and that general will be a believer who
will get together a military organisation which will be fighting against
hopeless odds but will be delivered at the second advent.
Verse
27, “And he” [ the dictator of the revived Roman empire] will make a covenant
[or treaty] with the many [a technical word used for Israel in the Tribulation]
for one week.” This explains the dictator in the first half of the Tribulation
being pro-Semitic. In the middle of the Tribulation he becomes anti-Semitic,
“but in the middle of the week [of the Tribulation] he will put a stop to the
sacrifice and the food offering,” he has allowed Israel to continue the
practice of Judaism as a part of the treaty, “and under the aegis of the
abomination [ecumenical religion of the Roman dictator] there comes one who
causes desolation [the Roman dictator] until the end [of the Tribulation], then
what is decreed shall be poured out on this desolator,” Revelation 19:20.
In the last part of Revelation 13:4 we see the
admiration of the masses for the revived Roman empire of the future in the
Tribulation. We have the connective conjunction kai,
“and,” the nominative feminine singular adjective o(loj, which means here “entire,”
and with it the nominative feminine singular subject gh, “the entire earth [world].” Then we have the verb,
the aorist passive indicative of qaumazw, which means to be amazed,
astonished, to be in total admiration. The culminative aorist tense views the
astonishment, the admiration, in its entirety but it regards it from the
viewpoint of existing results, the spread of ecumenical religion. The dictator
is the religious leader of a world movement (ecumenical religion) in the
Tribulation. The passive voice: the entire world receives the action of the
verb, minus those who have some doctrine and discernment, and this is our first
point: in the Tribulation, as even now, only those who have a maximum amount of
doctrine have the ability to discern both the trends of history and to avoid
being carried away by super amazement or total admiration. The indicative mood
is declarative for the reality of the total admiration of the masses, the
people of the world, for ecumenical religion.
Next we have an improper preposition, o)pisw plus the genitive of qhrion,
the prepositional phrase is an idiom which means following — “and the entire
world was amazed and followed the beast.” It means to follow the beast dictator
in their admiration. The entire world was impressed, amazed. This is the second
principle: People are impressed by power. The beast dictator of the revived
Roman empire certainly impresses the masses. The greatest power in the world is
Bible doctrine but these people have rejected Bible doctrine. What impresses
them? Political power, but the power that impresses the masses will be
destroyed at the second advent of Christ. This means that people should be
impressed with truth rather than power. There is more power in doctrine than in
all of the political power of the world. However negative volition is impressed
with various categories of power rather than Bible doctrine because with Bible
doctrine you have to think, you have to apply it in your own life, whereas with
political power someone else thinks for you. These people are impressed by this
beast dictator because he is a religious leader and a political leader; he
thinks for them in the religious area, he thinks for them in the political
area. When people are impressed with the truth they follow the Lord through His
system and Bible doctrine, but when people are impressed by power they follow
some arrogant dictator like the beast dictator of the prophetic and revived
Roman empire.
Verse 4, the worship of power in the Tribulation. We
have a connective conjunction kai, translated “Furthermore,”
followed by the aorist active indicative of proskunew which means to worship. Here we have people worshipping a creature.
The first creature they worship is Satan himself who is called the dragon, then
they worship the power and the person to whom he gives that power. So they
worship an invisible creature to them but they are aware of him and they know
him through their residence in the cosmic system.
The principle that we are going to see that is so
important is that they worship power in human beings. The problem is that is a
misdirection of worship for the true basis for worship must be truth, Bible
doctrine. When you worship power instead of truth then you are in trouble.
“Furthermore they worshipped,” the constative aorist
tense contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety. The active voice:
the masses of people throughout the world who admire the dictator of the
revived Roman empire produce the action of the verb, and they do this through
ecumenical religion in the last half of the Tribulation. For ecumenical
religion gives them the opportunity of, first of all, expressing their worship
toward a person they can see, a human being who is the dictator of the revived
Roman empire; and the one who gave him power who is a creature they cannot see,
Satan as the ruler of this world. First of all they see the power, they learn
something about the power, they learn the religious system, and they direct
their worship toward the visible and then toward the invisible. That is a sign
that they do not have virtue, impersonal love toward all mankind and personal
love for God. Why? Because with their very own volition they have rejected
truth and have gone positive toward power. Positive volition toward truth is
Christianity; negative volition toward truth is religion. Remember that
Christianity is not a religion. The indicative mood is declarative for the
reality of Satan’s ecumenical religion in the Tribulation.
With this we have the dative singular indirect
object from the noun drakwn, transliterated “dragon.”
This refers to Satan as the ruler of the world, so in effect this is devil or
demon worship which becomes an integral part of ecumenical religion in the last
half of the Tribulation, during the time of the eschatology of the devil’s
desperation. That is the greatest period of religious activity in all of
history. We have seen it as the greatest period of evangelism in history but
simultaneously there is the great counterattack, the great evangelism on the
part of Satan.
Now religion and Christianity are not the same.
Religion has been invented by Satan to counterfeit the plan of God and to
fulfil Satan’s objective to be like the Most High God, one of the five
objectives he stated in Isaiah in the prehistoric angelic conflict. In
Christianity man seeks and finds God through personal faith in Jesus Christ
which is, of course, tantamount to God seeking man. In other words, in
Christianity God seeks man through Christ; in religion man seeks to gain the
approbation of God through his own works. Religion emphasises the evil genius,
then, of Satan; Christianity represents the perfect integrity and grace of God.
Since religion is the counterfeit of Christianity
the Bible mentions at least nine of these counterfeits which are used to
deceive.
1. Satan has
a counterfeit gospel, some system of works, 2 Corinthians 4:3,4.
2. Satan has
counterfeit ministers, 2 Corinthians 11:13-15.
3. Satan has
a counterfeit doctrine, 2 Timothy 4:1.
4. Satan has
a counterfeit communion table, 2 Corinthians 10:19-21.
5. Satan has
a counterfeit righteousness, motivated by arrogance — Matthew 19:16-28.
6. Satan has a counterfeit spirituality, the
legalism mentioned in Galatians 3:2,3.
7. Satan has
a counterfeit modus vivendi, Matthew 23:13-26.
8. Satan has
a counterfeit power, 2 Thessalonians 2:8-10.
9. Religion
has a counterfeit god, 2 Thessalonians 2:3,4.
Ecumenical religion in the Tribulation must have,
therefore, its own false teaching. Therefore we note some of the
characteristics of these false teachers or false prophets who will exist in a
very real way in the future, just as they do today and just as they have in the
past.
First of all, false teachers practice hypocrisy from
the base of arrogance, gate 1, cosmic 1. They use often a phoney facade of
piety, whatever it takes to impress you. If you are impressed by piety they are
pious, if you are impressed by zeal they are zealous, if you are impressed by
inflexibility they are dogmatic and inflexible with you, though they do not
agree. So false teachers practice hypocrisy using a phoney facade — Matthew
7:15; Romans 16:18.
Secondly, false teachers function under human public
relations modus operandi. They use the legalism of some form or sometimes the
phallic cult, but they use some system to court their victim. They do not
evangelise in reality, they court, they give you attention. They do not give
you truth, they do not give you doctrine and let the chips fall where they may,
they find out what you want to hear and they let you hear it. Legalism is used
as a system of courting in Galatians 4:17,18; 2 Timothy 3:5-7.
There are always some people who are really
impressed with self-sacrifice, and when you take self-sacrifice to the ultimate
this really impresses people. Therefore you find in the 2 Timothy passage, for
example, “forbidding to marry”. They are going into the ultimate of asceticism.
Asceticism impresses people, and Satan uses asceticism in order to gain
converts just as often as he uses the phallic cult.
Thirdly, false teachers appeal to human arrogance
and pride by giving you personal attention. People need truth, not personal
attention, but religion reverses it and says people want attention, we will
give it to them. People need truth, not a friendly organisation. Churches where
truth is taught are not designed to be lonely hearts clubs, though you will
find some of the greatest friendships in the church where truth is taught for
the greatest foundation for rapport among believers is the mutual acceptance of
Bible doctrine.
Fourthly, false teachers promote idolatry as the
devil’s communion table.
Fifthly, false teachers are the promoters of
arrogant self-righteousness and all forms of legalism, 1 Timothy 1:6,7.
Finally, false teachers not only exist in every
generation of the Church Age but they intensify their efforts during the
Tribulation.
One of Satan’s major objectives is to siphon off
worship from God and direct it toward himself, and all religions do this one
way or another. Furthermore idolatry in religion becomes the worship of the
invisible creatures, the demons themselves, 1 Corinthians 10:20.
The powerful dictator
One of the greatest traps in the world is public
opinion. Public opinion is, of course, one of those vacillating things
oscillating between approbation and disapprobation, and when people become
involved in the cosmic system they become extremely sensitive to what other
people think of them. In personal love that is a normal thing but when one
wants the approbation of the general public he is trapped. No one was ever more
trapped than the man who will live in the future, the dictator we are studying.
More than anyone else he is going to lust for the approbation of the public.
One of the easiest ways to do this is probably to gain power.
There are many businesses that depend upon public
opinion and there are many normal functions in economic life and social life
where public opinion and the approbation of the public is a desirable factor.
But when you desire it personally and associate it with your own glory then you
are really trapped. As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you will never be
trapped in the sense of the dictator we are studying because his lust for power
and his desire for maximum approbation from the public is going to cause him to
end up in the lake of fire. This is impossible for the believer but what is
very possible when one is involved in cosmic one is the fact that misery is
self-induced if we are interested in gaining the approbation of the crowd. Obviously, again, there are certain kinds of businesses and certain
kinds of function in life where crowd approbation is involved, but when you
want it for yourself and when you associate it with your own personal happiness
you can count on it that you will never be happy.
If we were to interview our dictator right now,
although prophetically he is not on the scene as yet, we could ask him how it
feels to be the most powerful man in the history of the world. This man we are
studying reaches the very peak of success in every possible field. He is the
epitome of greatness politically in his day, a future day in the Tribulation.
He will be great from the standpoint of religion and will be the religious
leader of the world. He will receive greater religious approbation than any
other human being in all of history. He will also have phenomenal success as a
military man, so in at least three professions, and perhaps more, he will reach
the peak among his contemporaries in the Tribulational period. He will also
have power, influence and approbation that far exceeds anything we know at the
present time.
So great and so powerful is this man that he is
studied from at least three different viewpoints in the scripture. He is seen
as a great military leader in Daniel; he is seen as a great political leader in
our passage; he is seen as a person who more than anyone else in history
learned the secret of surrendering himself to Satan and gaining more power from
Satan than anyone ever had in the past. He has the power to work miracles or to
delve into extra natural phenomena and impress people with it — not the ability
to impress people by the genius of his own mentality or personality but by the
use of extra natural power. We see the same thing in religious realms in cults
today where people are impressed with so-called divine healers, or those
involved in the tongues movement, or those who appear to have some supernatural
experience and to demonstrate some supernatural power. It has been a way of
life in other parts of the world such as India and Africa.
2 Thessalonians 2:1, “Moreover, brethren [royal
family of God], with reference to the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ [the
Rapture of the Church], and our gathering together to him.”
Every now and then we have an appeal made in the
scripture on the basis of the application of our eternal future, the
resurrection. There is a time coming when all of us will have a permanent body
that will serve us magnificently throughout all eternity. Every now and then it
is a good idea to take a look ahead and see what is coming up for all of us. We
will never spend one second in the lake of fire and there is, therefore, this
marvellous future prospect. There is a legitimate anticipation which is a part
of happiness. Happiness doesn’t mean that you have to be thoroughly satisfied
with your circumstances at the moment. They may be very adverse and therefore
you can anticipate better circumstances and better times ahead. That is what is
means when it says, “we urge you”. Now we have you in a happy frame of mind,
says Paul, and the reason he wants the Thessalonians to be in a happy frame if
mind is because the Thessalonians have been suckers for human approbation. They
have become involved in cosmic one and they have this lust that they associate
with happiness.
Verse 2, “that you be not easily shaken in mind,”
the mind should be strong because of doctrine; it should be strong because of
the plan of God rationale, “nor disturbed, neither by a personality.” One thing
that often bothers people and causes them to be unhappy all the time is
personalities in their vicinity. How are you going to keep from being shaken by
personalities? By having doctrine in your soul, “nor by an evil policy,” that
could be an evil policy in business, or a policy of any category in life,
“neither by a false doctrine,” false doctrine, of course, always shakes the
mind, “nor by a bad motive,” it is easy to read other people’s motives and
therefore to become disturbed, “nor through a forged epistle,” the Thessalonians
had received a forged epistle. It did not come from Paul. There was a nearby
cult which had sent this out as an epistle from Paul, “as from us, alleging
that the day of the Lord had come.” In other words, there were some people who
said the day of the Lord had already come. Hard times had come and when things
get bad people say, “We are in the Tribulation.” There was a Tribulationist
cult and they said they were living in the Tribulation and that the Rapture
would not come until the end of the Tribulation, or the middle of the
Tribulation. Paul is going to refute this by bringing in our subject: the
dictator of the revived Roman empire.
Verse 3, “Do not let anyone deceive you in any way,
since the day of the Lord [the Tribulation and second advent] cannot come
unless the departure [Rapture of the Church, the resurrection of all royal
family] has come first, and [after that Rapture] the man who is lawless
[antiestablishment], the one doomed to destruction, shall be revealed.”
It is interesting that Paul would say at the end of
verse three that the most powerful man in all of history as a political
dictator, as a religious leader, as a military genius, and as a miracle-maker,
would be doomed to destruction; but before he is he has to be revealed.
Verse 4, the description of the dictator: “who opposes [the Lord Jesus Christ. He is anti-Christ]
and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he
is installed in the temple of God [the Jewish temple of the Tribulation],
proclaiming himself to be God.”
Verse 5, “Do you not remember when I was still face
to face with you [Paul taught the Thessalonians face to face and then moved
on], I constantly taught you these things?” Paul constantly taught the Thessalonian
believers eschatology. He repeated again and again.
Verse 6, “And so you know the one [the Holy Spirit]
who restrains [Paul taught them the system, gate one: the filling of the Holy
Spirit, etc.] … ”
It is God the Holy Spirit who acts as a restrainer
on total disaster in history. And how does God the Holy Spirit perform this? He
does it by those in the system, the divine dynasphere. Every decision you make
within the system: to recover the system through rebound, to live at gate two
through the function of the faith-rest drill, to have basic virtue, humility, teachability,
to learn daily Bible doctrine, advancing to maturity at gate eight and,
therefore, being recruited for the pivot for God the Holy Spirit works through
the pivot. There is a restraint on degeneracy, a restraint on evil, but the
restraint comes through the formation of the pivot.
“ … so that he [the dictator of the revived Roman
empire] may be revealed [in his own dispensation].”
This dictator would probably have come before. Other
dictators have made deals with Satan before. There are ways in which people can
make a deal with Satan and other people have done it but they have never
succeeded as this man succeeds. The reason is because even though it may be
very small the very existence of the pivot in this world guarantees a certain
restraint upon degeneracy and barbarity in history. It doesn’t mean that
certain areas will not be degenerate and barbarous but it does mean that there
is not the unrestrained evil that will exist in the Tribulation. The reason is
that in every generation there are always just a few who advance to maturity, a
few who grow in grace and reach gate eight. Those few act as the restrainer.
God the Holy Spirit works through them.
Verse 7, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already
operational,” right now we have the mystery of lawlessness. There are people
right now in this world who have made a deal with Satan and in whatever area
they have chosen they are Satan’s own hand-picked shock troops. They are
periodically demon-possessed but, more than that, periodically they are
Satan-possessed. There are people right now who have the same power that this
future dictator will have but the existence of the pivot acts as a restrainer.
Your existence as a mature believer acts as a restrainer in history. There may
not be many believers who have reached gate eight in our generation but the
ones who have act as a restrainer. Lawlessness is already here but it is in its
mystery form, it has not been revealed in its form and cannot be so revealed
until the Tribulation, “only he who now restrains [God the Holy Spirit] will
continue that ministry through the system until he is taken out of the way.”
When the Rapture of the Church occurs the system
goes with it, and gate one as the power system goes with it, and we return to
the Old Testament form of the ministry of God the Holy Spirit which is quite
different from that today. The Church Age is the only dispensation in which God
the Holy Spirit indwells every believer and you can be filled with the Spirit.
That never existed before and it will never exist in the Tribulation.
Verse 8, At that time [the Tribulation] the lawless
one [the Roman dictator] shall be revealed,” he will go farther with Satan’s
power than any human being in history because there is no pivot of mature
believers, “whom the Lord shall destroy with the breath of his mouth,” when he
is destroyed he is destroyed by, as it were, the least power of God which is
greater than any power of a creature. God’s power is infinitely greater than
any power that any creature has or any power that any creature possess and
delegates or bestows on another, “in fact he shall neutralise him by the very
appearance of his coming [the second advent];
Verse 9, “whose presence [the dictator] in history
shall be according to the modus operandi of Satan [Satan gives him his power],
with all power,” Satan has never been able to delegate such great power and
have it turn out successfully for him. That is because of the pivot. The very
moment the Rapture takes place there are no believers left on the earth, and
with no believers you have no pivot. That means unrestrained evil for the first
time in history and that is when this man who made a deal with Satan is brought
by Satan to the forefront. He becomes the great dictator “and by means of
miracles.” Why miracles? Because when it comes to seeing a miracle that is
where you get the masses and approbation from the crowd. That is exactly what
this man did. While he has all of these great abilities in all of these realms
it is the miracle that does it; “even wonder of miracles of the lie,” Satan has
miracle ability and he gives this power to this one man.
Verse 10, “and by means of all deception of unrighteousness
to those who are being led astray,” if you are negative toward the truth you
are a sucker for a miracle. If you reject Bible doctrine then you are open for
a life of unhappiness self-made, “deprived, destroyed, because they do not
receive the love of the truth,” there is the issue: Bible doctrine. If you
reject the truth you are never going to have happiness in life, “in order that
they might be delivered,” they have rejected truth by which they might be
delivered from this delusion.
Verse 11, “And so for this reason God sends them the
modus operandi of delusion and error, a deluding influence, so that they
believe the lie [the miracle],
Verse 12 — “in order that they all might be
condemned because they do not believe the doctrine, because they have taken
pleasure in unrighteousness.” What kind of unrighteousness? The lie.
Verse 13, “But we are always obligated to give
thanks to God concerning you,” there is a pivot of mature believers in Thessalonica,
royal family, “having been loved by the Lord, because God has elected you
[royal family] from eternity past to salvation by means of sanctification from
the Spirit [the system] and by means of belief in doctrine.”
This gives us a little profile of the person we are
studying and we are ready for Revelation 13:4 again. “Furthermore they
worshipped the dragon [Satan] because he gave absolute power [and authority] to
the beast [the dictator of the revived Roman empire].”
Why did they worship the beast? O(ti, the word “because,” “he [Satan] gave,” aorist
active indicative of didomi.
Satan can only give power to someone who has gone through a complete system of
discipleship to him, someone who has achieved more in the cosmic system than
anyone before him, a totally evil human being. That is exactly what we have,
“because he [Satan] gave.” The constative aorist tense contemplates the action
of the verb in its entirety. The dictator of the revived Roman empire, this
genius, receives something from Satan. At a time when there is not restraint he
receives the power to perform these miracles.
The dictator of the revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation receives two things and they are all gathered into one, the
accusative singular direct object from ecousia, which means both power and authority, but here it combines them,
“because he gave absolute power to the beast.” The active voice: Satan produces
the action of the verb in giving authority and power to this dictator. The
indicative mood is declarative for the future reality of this beast dictator
receiving authority and great power from Satan. Then we have the dative
singular indirect object from qhrion, the beast [dictator].
Note that the beast dictator of the revived Roman
empire of the Tribulation is a political ruler over the prophetic Roman empire
and he is a religious leader over ecumenical religion in the Tribulation.
Behind all religion Satan lurks as the source of religion and the object of
worship in religion. Furthermore religion produces every category of violence
in warfare.
There is nothing worse than any member of the human
race being worshipped by other members of the human race. It means two things:
firstly, those who do the worshipping are arrogant and have no capacity for
life or love or happiness or blessing; secondly, the one who receives this
abnormal adulation is also very arrogant and has no capacity for life, for
love, for happiness or blessing. But more than the fact that a group of people
worship some man is the fact that it has an adverse effect historically and it
is always the development of a hurricane, a great tragedy, a great disaster in
history. As we study the great dictator of the revived Roman empire in the
Tribulation we note the great unhappiness of this man, the terrible end of this
man. We have seen that he was a genius in four different fields and more than
any person who ever lives Satan could use this man. He sold out to Satan at a
time when there was no restraint on the activity of Satan’s man. He became
Satan’s man in the Tribulation when all restraint had been removed and he
became the leader of ecumenical religion.
Once you get into religion it is inevitable that you
are going to get into the worship of some human being. No human being is worthy
of worship. Respect, love, appreciation, friendship, but not worship. So we
have the adjunctive use of the conjunction kai,
“also,” followed by the aorist active indicative of the verb proskunew, “also they worshipped.” The aorist tense is a constative
aorist, it contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety, it actually
suggests there is a pattern: people who worship a person do so from the arrogance
of their souls. They find that they cannot compete with the power of the
dictator so they succumb to it emotionally and they worship the dictator as a
part of the modus operandi of ecumenical religion. The word we are using for
worship here is the word for the worship of God, which is legitimate and normal
for those who have Bible doctrine, but this does not mean that we should
worship man. Idolatry was the means worshipping Satan in the past, and still
is. Satan, like God, is invisible. Satan is a creature; God is the creator.
Once a person gets into Satan worship there are no
restraints inside that person’s own soul. They become very emotional and they
think the most important thing in life is to be happy, to have a good time.
This is anything but innocent when they get into such things as the phallic
cult. That is exactly what happens in this case and it is all linked up to
religion which makes it legitimate. It makes it a part of worship and sooner or
later, once idolatry and Satan worship begins in any form, it is inevitable
that people look for a person of power to worship — a phenomenon that occurs in
the Tribulation. It is a phenomenon that brings great disaster to people —
crime, for example.
This ecumenical religious system will spawn the
greatest violence of all time in the history of the world. This dictator is
called “the beast” because he is under the control of the ruler of this world,
Satan, and has absolutely no restraint of any kind because of compassion. In
the Tribulation there is no normal compassion in life, people do not feel sorry
for people unless they are believers with Bible doctrine. There is no client
nation in the Tribulation, there is a very small pivot because it is constantly
being martyred by the beast dictator. Therefore restraints that we have today
will not exist and that means an outbreak of violence such as the world has
never seen. The only protection comes from this beast dictator. People respect
his power, get under his organisation, have an ID card, so that they are in
some measure at least for part of the Tribulation protected from this
violence.
This aorist tense suggests a process whereby Satan
finally gets a religion that sets aside every standard of category #1 truth,
the laws of divine establishment. Violence is the order of the day and there is
no compassion, and there is no kindness to strangers. The aorist tense also
explains the idol or the statue of the dictator, called the abomination of
desolation. The active voice: those involved in the ecumenical religion of the
Tribulation will engage in idolatry of worshipping the statue of this dictator.
This dictator can only be in one place in one time so people worship a statue
of him. So we combine worshipping man with worshipping fallen angels all in one
category of religion. The indicative mood is declarative for the historical
reality of this situation. The dative singular indirect object of qhrion follows, and again we have the word “beast”
referring to a human being — “they also worshipped the beast dictator.”
Principle: This is a trend which has existed to a
limited extent since the beginning of human history, and what it really amounts
to is not so much man worshipping man as man worshipping power and the person
who has that power. It is tantamount to a worship of power and worship of power
always goes with arrogance. Those who worship power will never appreciate
freedom. Their whole life is characterised by false motivation. They are
ambitious for more power, they want to succeed in some field, they want approbation.
Once a person begins to worship power they desire approbation: the two go
together.
The rationale of ecumenical religion is given very
briefly in one phrase. We have the present active participle of legw. Legw means to speak but legw
also means to reveal logoj. Logoj means thought and so they
are speaking their thoughts. This could even be translated “to think,” “and
they thought.” They are now expressing thought. This is a present active
participle. The circumstantial participle is translated by the finite verb and
preceded by the conjunction “and.” This is a legitimate into-English
translation of the circumstantial participle. The futuristic present tense
denotes an event which has not yet occurred but is regarded as so certain that
in thought it is contemplated as already occurring. This is something that will
be thought in the future. The active voice: the religious disciples of Satan’s
ecumenical religious system produce this action.
Then we have the interrogative pronoun tij which introduces the first of several admiring
questions, “who.” The ellipsis demands the verb to be. When people are thinking
they do not necessarily think in full and complete sentences, so we have “who
is,” and then the comparative adverb o(moioj. They are making
comparisons, and this is important because truth comes in absolute form. Truth
is not relative. The application of truth is only relative because we apply
doctrine to different situations. The different situations are relative but the
truth is absolute. Here we note immediately, by o(moioj, “Who is like,” that this is a relative thing, this is a matter of
comparison, “who can compare with.” They said, “who is like,” and as soon as
they put the word “like” in they are showing that they cannot think in terms of
absolutes. If all a person can do is think in terms of relative concepts they
have no happiness, no truth, no stability, no life, no capacity for anything. A
soul must have absolute norms and standards from absolute truth to have
capacity for love, life, and happiness.
“And they said, Who is like,” and then the dative of
comparison, qhrion, “who is like the beast?”
This is the expression of their thinking while they are worshipping. People are
impressed with power and people who are impressed with power will never be
impressed with freedom and will never have capacity for happiness or life. And
when power becomes religion then you are dealing with evil. When power becomes
religion also there are multitudes of converts and Satan’s whole system of
false doctrine is always in terms of relatives. He gains his converts through
miracles and people who are impressed with miracles are always a sucker for
this system. So it boils down to this: when people do not have truth or
doctrine they are impressed with the wrong thing.
Then it goes on to ask a second question. The
connective kai tells us that this is the
second one. We have the interrogative pronoun tij
again, “and who.” This shows what they are worshipping, “who is able,” the
present active indicative of dunamai. Their whole life is
saying, “Who is able?” In other words, who at this moment can do the most for
us?
Now what are they worshipping? The negative volition
population are obviously kow-towing to someone. The question comes up and it is
completed in the aorist active infinitive of verb polemew which means to make war, to fight. So we translate it: “Who is able to
fight against him?” And “against him” is meta
plus the genitive of the intensive pronoun a)utoj.
There is a declaration of power. The dramatic aorist of polemew is for a state which has just been realised. It is
an idiom which is used as a device for emphasis. The active voice describes the
subject as producing the action of the verb or representing the state expressed
in the verbal idea, and we have a conceived result in this second question.
“Who is able to fight against him?” These two questions may be the liturgy for
the ecumenical religion which is nothing more than a demon cult.
“They worshipped the dragon because he gave absolute
power to the beast dictator: they also worshipped the dictator, and they
thought, Who is like the beast? who is able to fight against him.”
There is, of course, in this type of liturgy a fear.
Religion inspires fear; doctrine inspires honour, integrity, virtue, good
motivation, a sense of destiny, control of one’s life and thousands of
decisions made from a position of strength. Remember, the great temptation that
Satan offered Christ, the kingdoms of this world in Matthew 4:8,9 — “The devil
took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of this
world, and their glory [glamour]; and he said to him, ‘All these things will I
give to you, if you will fall down and worship me’.”
Satan has always had this power. He has only offered
this much power, all the kingdoms of the world, twice. He offered it to Christ
when He was on earth and he will offer it in the future to this great dictator.
What our Lord rejected this dictator of the revived Roman empire will accept,
and through the medium of the beast dictator Satan becomes the object of
worship in ecumenical religion of the Tribulation. This dictator is Satan’s
puppet to simulate the devil’s arrogance, worship and admiration from the
masses.
The passage we are studying forms a kind of
composite of all of the dictators of all time. We have seen in this great
dictator of the future, the dictator of the revived Roman empire, all of those
characteristics which are related to his total dedication to Satan, Satan’s
system, and everything that he expected to get from it. As we go along we see
the various functions of power which come from his dictatorship, his religious
power, for example; he is the ruler of ecumenical religion in the Tribulation.
One of the things that has limited the power of some of the great dictators in
our own day has been their antagonism toward religion as we know it. Hitler,
for example, even though he was demon-possessed, was very anti-religious. The
same thing could be said for Joe Stalin and all of the rulers in the Russian
communist empire. One of the many self-limiting systems of power with many of
these dictators is the fact that they have not explored the possibility of
controlling people through religion, for religion is designed to do exactly
that. Dictators generally, in our day at least, emphasise the political power
and as a result they often lose opportunities for greater enslavement and
control of people. We have, for example, Mussolini and his whole concept was to
revive the glories of Rome. In so doing he inspired the Italian people to
things that ordinarily they would not have accomplished. He did. of course,
clean up Italy in a most remarkable way but his problem was that he used
culture as the system for gaining power. He was out of his league when he
hooked up with Adolf Hitler because Hitler knew how to control Mussolini
through political power and the use of the military. As a result Mussolini lost
out as a dictator.
There never has been in history and there never will
be anyone comparable to the dictator we are studying because he combines
everything. Some dictators use the economic approach, some the cultural
approach, some the military approach, some the political approach and some the
religious approach. But like most people in the day in which we live when
people have a tendency to major in some specific area, or to emphasise only one
aspect of a situation and become an expert in a limited field, these dictators
all miss something. The other factor is, as we noted in 2 Thessalonians chapter
two, these dictators are all under some restraint. In the Church Age we have a
pivot. It may be small, it may be large, but whether it is small or large it
does act as something of a restrainer. The pivot will be removed, of course, at
the Rapture of the Church so that all restraint is removed.
But the biggest problem with dictators throughout
history is that they have a tendency to see only one side of a situation in the
acquiring of power. All of the leaders in Islam, for example, emphasise
religion almost to the exclusion of everything else. It is very difficult, and
this is true of people in general, to see all sides of a situation or to
develop a balanced concept of a situation. Many of the dictators and people who
have the tyrant power and absolute rulership are often quite on the stupid side
and there is some system that is carrying them or they have majored in one area
and know it well. We are looking in our passage at the total dictator. There
have been men who have had dictatorial powers in the past who were men of
genius and the men of genius are the ones who come the closest to really
understanding all aspect of what it is to be a dictator. For example, Frederick
the Great of Prussia probably more than anyone else was a man of great genius,
but he also had the composite concept. A dictatorship is not necessarily a bad
thing provided it is related to virtue, honour and integrity; but when it is
related to the cosmic system then it becomes a great power for evil. Only
humility uses power and authority properly.
In verse 5 we note the arrogance and the power of
the dictator of the revived Roman empire in the Tribulation. We have a new type
of power coming up. We have seen his political power, we have seen his
religious power, we have seen his power to grab the masses through miracles.
Now we are going to see another aspect of his power in this passage and we are
also going to see his failure to use his authority properly because of
arrogance. Satan is the greatest genius creature that ever lived and yet with
all of his genius he was never able to use authority properly. Arrogance
destroys the proper use of authority.
We have the connective kai
emphasising a fact as surprising and unexpected, translated here “Furthermore.”
Next we have the aorist passive indicative of the verb didomi, which means to give or to delegate. The constative
aorist tense contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety, hence a fact
or action extended over the last half of the Tribulation, the time of the
devil’s desperation. The passive voice: the Roman dictator of the prophetical
Roman empire receives the action of the verb. This is a declarative indicative
representing the verbal action from the viewpoint of eschatological reality.
With this is a dative singular indirect object from the intensive pronoun, used
as a personal pronoun, a)utoj, “to him.” Satan gives to
the dictator this great power. This man has power in all of these areas and
they are all brought together under something that is absolutely necessary in
order to gain and control and keep all of this power together, and this is the
ability to communicate. Some people are always promoted beyond their ability to
handle the power because their capacity for power is limited by their ability
to communicate. One of the most important things in the world are not the
communications systems that we have established in this age of scientific
miracles but the ability of the human being to communicate. We are talking now
about the basis of life itself, the ability to communicate. The individual, if
he is going to utilise power properly, must have the ability to communicate and
to be understood. And that means that first of all he must have the ability to
think. One’s communication can never exceed one’s thinking for communication
expresses your thoughts through your mouth. You can take all kinds of courses
in public speaking but you will never advance in most of the areas of life
unless you have the ability to communicate lucidly what you think.
Communication is used for many things. Our dictator
whom we are studying uses communication to sell himself. That is his job: to
make himself appealing to the maximum number of people with different views of
life.
We have then accusative singular direct object from
the noun stoma, “mouth.” People have been
great in many fields of public life simply because they had great speaking
ability and were able to form thoughts and were able to communicate those
thoughts. This man would never have been a success if he had not learned to communicate
his ideas. His ideas were evil but, after all, he is dealing with the devil,
the origin of evil. Apparently he did not have the ability to communicate at
first but the devil gave him this ability because he is representing Satan
himself — “Furthermore there was given to him [the dictator of the revived
Roman empire] a mouth,” eloquence. He is said in the present active participle
of lalew to communicate, he is
speaking. Unfortunately, what follows indicates that he was on the evil side of
the fence. The pictorial present tense depicts a future event in the process of
occurrence. The active voice: the dictator who has greater power for evil than
any human being almost who has ever lived produces the action of the verb. The
participle is circumstantial.
With it we have the accusative direct object made up
of several words. The first is an adjective used as a noun, megaj, meaning arrogant words
here. Arrogant words express an arrogant mind. We are talking about evil and
systems of evil, and when these are presented then you have the whole story.
Arrogant words are not necessarily bragging about yourself; arrogant words are
the statements of principles that are false. And why are they arrogant words?
Because this man speaks what is false. He gives false principles but he gives
them eloquently and persuasively. They sound good because he is such a great
speaker.
Then we have another word. Evil comes in many forms
and blasphemy is always any statement made about God. We have the conjunction kai and the accusative plural direct object from blasqemia, “and blasphemies,” speaking against God. Megaj refers to speaking that which is wrong, giving that
which is false about human life; blasfemia is giving that which is
false about God. Anyone who is going to be a dictator has to sell himself to a
maximum number of people. He has to have the ability to speak and to express
thoughts and to communicate evil in a persuasive way. That is what we have at
this point: the dictator speaking in the power and the arrogance of the cosmic
system with its demon influence and demon possession offers the world a
man-made Millennium if the world will simply turn to Satan. But neither the
genius of Satan nor the combined efforts of man can duplicate the perfect
environment of the coming Millennial reign of Christ.
It is fascinating that if any man can stand up and
offer perfect environment people will vote for him. It is an offer that the
ruler of this world can fulfil on a limited basis and so people always buy it,
but when the Word of God and its magnificent eschatology says that in the
future there will be one thousand years of perfect environment born again
theologians in many denominations reject it. People who have the ability to
understand it reject it.
So here is an arrogant eloquence, a dynamic person,
communicating the doctrines of Satan as per 1 Timothy 4:1, “But that same
[Holy] Spirit explicitly communicates [reports] that in letter periods of time
[the time between the first and the second advents] some [believers] will
become apostate [depart from the doctrine], paying attention to deceitful
spirits and concentrating on doctrine from demons,” doctrines of demons will be
communicated in the Tribulation through such demon-possessed and
demon-influenced personalities as the dictator of the revived Roman empire and
the dictator of Israel.
The general summary of this dictator’s message is
found in Daniel 7:25 — “And he will speak false doctrine against the Most High
God and he will oppress the saints of the Highest One [believers in the
Tribulation]; furthermore, he will try to change the times and the law; and
they [believers] will be under his power for three and a half years [the time
of the eschatology of the devil’s desperation].”
The modus operandi of this dictator is patterned
after the various gates of the cosmic system. His converts will live and
degenerate in the cosmic system.
We now note the power of the
dictator in the second half of verse 5. We start out with a connective
conjunction kai, meaning “and,” followed by
the aorist passive indicative of the verb didomi
which means to give or bestow, sometimes it even means to delegate, “and there
was given.” The aorist tense is a constative aorist, it contemplates the action
of the verb in its entirety. It takes the last half of the Tribulation and
gathers it up into a single whole. The passive voice: the dictator of the
revived Roman empire of the Tribulation receives the action of the verb from the
power of Satan as the ruler of this world. The indicative mood is declarative
for a future reality of the authority of the Roman dictator.
Next we have e)cousia again, the accusative singular direct object. It means really in this
passage absolute power. With this we have the aorist active infinitive of poiew which means here to function. He was given power or
authority to function. The culminative aorist tense views the function of this
dictator in its entirety but regards it from the viewpoint of existing results,
the evangelism for Satan which occurs in the last half of the Tribulation. With
this we have an active voice in which the dictator produces the action and the
infinitive is intended result, the fulfilment of a deliberate objective,
therefore the blending of purpose and result, “and there was given to him
authority to function,” and then the time is given as forty-two months, the
last three and a half years of the Tribulation.
At this point there is a fantastic principle hidden
away in this phrase. This man is a genius and he surrenders himself in such a
way to Satan as to have the greatest power of anyone of any dictatorship that
ever existed. He combines military genius, political genius, and with this in a
most unusual way a religious genius, and in these three categories he manages
to accumulate fantastic power, not only over the ten-nation confederation of
the revived Roman empire but at the same time a great portion of the population
of the earth, through ecumenical religion. The reason for this is given in the
fourth part of his profile which has to do with his ability to perform miracles.
As we have seen miracles appeal to emotion and a large portion of the world at
any time in history is always very emotional, and therefore very up or very
down because instead of being rational, instead of looking at history from the
viewpoint of Bible doctrine people look at it from the standpoint of emotion.
People respond to their circumstances. Whether they are local circumstances or
whether it is world history they respond emotionally unless they have doctrine
to do otherwise. This man’s genius gives him the power to rule, the power to
control, but that doesn’t make him popular. What makes him popular is the
emotional approach, and we have his power to perform miracles. We have also
noted a fifth category and that is the power of communication, eloquence in
public speaking which is a part of his public image.
But with all of this power, with all of this
ability, with all of this talent, like so many people before him there is
always an absolute truth that captures him. That absolute truth comes in
relative increments; that absolute truth is time. Time limitation is the sixth
and final part of the profile of this great dictator. There is a time
limitation on human power. Human power is terminated by that absolute doctrine
called death, and all of the great dictators with all of their ability, with
the tremendous use or abuse of their power, have finally been overtaken by
time. There is a time limitation on any form of human power or human success or
human greatness. The time limitation on human power can be one of two things:
death or some form of divine judgment apart from death. This dictator, like all
of the great dictators of the past, is going to lose out because of time. That
is mentioned at the end of the verse. And so that last phrase, “to function for
forty-two months” refers to the time limit.
Translation of verse 5 — “Furthermore there was
given to him [the Gentile dictator of the revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation] a mouth [eloquence] speaking arrogant doctrines and blasphemies;
also there was given to him authority to function forty-two months [the last
three and a half years of the Tribulation].”
Principle:
Those who reject or divorce themselves from truth seek arrogance. They may
speak arrogance with power, they may speak arrogance from degeneracy, but the
content of their speech is inevitably arrogance. Arrogance, of course, is
motivating evil as well as functional evil. Life in the cosmic system is always
divorced from the truth. That is why we are constantly warned as believers to
rebound, to name our sins, to function under the privacy of our priesthood, to
recover the divine system and to function in the divine dynasphere.
Without truth there is not a way to have a
relationship with God. Truth must be a part of our thinking. It is truth by
which we are saved, it is truth by which we must live, it is Bible doctrine
which we must use to make daily application to life. Truth is the greatest
antidote to the Satanic system, to his genius for lies and, as far as evil is
concerned, to avoid it. Without truth we have no place to go, no understanding
of the present, no hope for the future and no way to profit from the past. In
other words, without truth [Bible doctrine] we are nothing. Only truth in three
categories can make life meaningful and wonderful and give us the capacity for
happiness.
That brings us now to verses 6-8 where we see the
policy of this dictator. We begin by noting the anti-Christ policy in verse 6.
This dictator is now seen as the Antichrist.
We begin as usual with the connective conjunction kai, followed by the aorist active indicative of a)noigw which means to open, “And he opened.” With it is
the accusative singular direct object of stoma,
“And he opened his mouth.” We have just seen under the fifth part of his
profile that he has tremendous public speaking ability. Now he is going to use
it. The aorist tense is a constative aorist, it contemplates the action of the
verb in its entirety, the hundreds of speeches that this man made in a short
time by which he was able to superimpose his thinking, his policy, his
politics, his religion, his blasphemous concepts on the people of the world. He
will have a world-wide public speaking ministry. The active voice: the dictator
of the revived Roman empire produces the action of the verb. The indicative
mood is declarative representing the verbal idea from the viewpoint of reality.
The purpose of it all is given in a prepositional
phrase: e)ij plus the noun blasfemia. Blasphemies has a very definite connotation. Blasfemia means first of all to malign your neighbour, to run
down someone you can’t stand. It means that you are arrogant: the subject is
always arrogant, always vain, and he functions at gate one of cosmic one. That
means he has arrogance or jealously. People run down other people, they malign
and judge, because they are jealous, because they are not getting enough
attention, not being recognised often enough. They are hypersensitive, they are
bitter because of some frustration, they have not received the perpetuation of
attention and love that they think they deserve. They are vindictive or
implacable or full of self-pity. Whatever the reason may be blasfemia means to malign the object of antagonism. When one
is preoccupied with himself, living of course inside of cosmic one, and does
not receive the attention he thinks he deserves, the alternative is very
simple: malign, judge, run down, seek revenge, destroy the object of hatred in
any possible way.
Sometimes it is directed toward a group of
individuals, the “I’ll show you” attitude, and one’s life becomes motivated
just to prove to that group how stupid they were not to accept you and give you
proper recognition and honour. It also is used against anything where people
disagree. It can be used against a political party. So blasphemy has to do
first with maligning people or groups of people or organisations that involve
people or places where you have been rejected.
Our passage goes on to show us that in this case we
are not talking about public speaking about people, we are talking about public
speaking to meld people into an attitude against God. We have the preposition pros plus the accusative of qeoj, “against God.” This is why one of his titles is
Antichrist, because the word “anti” means against. It also means “instead of”
but he is obviously against our Lord Jesus Christ, and so he opposes our Lord
and used his great eloquence to speak against our Lord. It means “against” as a
title for the Roman dictator in 1 John 2:18 and in our passage, Revelation
13:6. It means instead of or in place of for the Jewish dictator whom we will
study next. He comes in place of Messiah in Matthew 23:23,24 and in Revelation
13:11,13,14. Through the Roman dictator Satan attacks the essence of God and
the essence of God rationale.
This man is a military genius and we have already
seen in our dispensation that a client nation to God cannot exist without a
pivot. There must be a pivot of mature believers. The larger the pivot the
greater the prosperity of the nation. There must also be one other factor and
that is the military establishment. This man is not only a military genius but
he is out to conquer the world. He is limited in his time and will not quite
succeed. In conquering the world, how do you destroy opposition? Not
necessarily by using his military genius but by using his religious genius. The
greatest world peace movement of all time will come from his anti-God speeches.
He is not only anti-God but he will use religion to conquer great portions of
the world. He will talk about disarming, nuclear freezes, about all of the
things that communist propaganda has thrown successfully into the western world
and shaped the thinking of so many people — people who are not communist but
just stupid. We are going to have a situation where there will be anti-God
blasphemies being spoken, a religious system to actually bring in great world
peace, the announcement that Satan will bring in the Millennium before the
second advent can occur. This is why the period is called the time of the
devil’s desperation. He has only three and a half years to try to put into
operation control and conquest of the world. The blasphemies therefore will
include every doctrine related to the future of Israel including the regathering
of Israel at the second advent, the fulfilment of their unconditional
covenants. The ecumenical religion therefore sponsored by the Roman dictator
will also be used in the modus operandi of blasphemy for religion is the
devil’s ace trump in any generation of history. Actually, there are three targets
in this great public speaking attack, one of the greatest propaganda attacks of
all time.
We have noted that in this verse the dictator opened
his mouth in blasphemies against God. Now we have the three targets for his
blasphemy. The first is the person of God. We have seen that blasphemy refers
to slandering of individuals and that it is motivated by arrogance. Now we have
the verb, the aorist active infinitive of blasfemew, and it first of all means to slander, and when it is directed toward
people that is the way it should be translated rather than to transliterate it.
The transliteration really deals with God. “And he opened his mouth in
blasphemies against God, to blaspheme his person,” the accusative singular
direct object of the word o)noma means person as well as
name. The culminative aorist tense views slander in its entirety but regards it
from the viewpoint of existing results. The existing results are obvious from
the relationship between the constative and the culminative aorist. The dictator
has great public speaking ability. He is a great communicator and his eloquence
results in the invigoration of the people of the day to hate. He is on a hate
God program. His eloquence results in the invigoration of an ecumenical
religious system in the last half of the Tribulation and the whole objective of
this religion is to hate God and hate those people who have any relationship
with God. The religion is anti-essence of God, anti-Trinitarian, and anti-Christ.
The active voice: the dictator of the revived Roman empire produces the action
of the verb. This is an infinitive of intended result. The result indicates the
fulfilment of a deliberate objective and therefore the blending of purpose and
result. By slandering the person of God each member of the Trinity is attacked
in relationship to their respective areas of faithfulness to mankind. God the
Father is the author of the divine plan. He is under attack. God the Son is the
executor of the divine plan, emphasising salvation through faith in Christ. He
is under attack. God the Holy Spirit is the revealer of the divine plan. He is
under attack. The attack upon Christ, in effect, is an attack upon all three
members of the Trinity.
Secondly, there is an attack against the tabernacle
of God. We find the connective kai followed by the accusative
singular direct object of the noun skhnh, and it means “tabernacle.”
With this is the possessive genitive of a)utoj,
“and his tabernacle.” This is actually the tabernacle of the testimony, the
tabernacle of Exodus 27:21; 29:4; Numbers 1:1, which had to be perfectly
constructed to scale in heaven as a heavenly memorial to the person and the
work of Christ during the first advent. So when it says, “and his tabernacle,”
we are talking about a tabernacle in heaven that follows the exact scale of the
tabernacle of Israel. The tabernacle of Israel was designed to teach
eschatology to them for the coming of Christ was future to the people of Israel
at the time of the tabernacle. In order for people to understand Christology in
their day there was constructed to scale this tabernacle. Every part of the
tabernacle became the doctrine of Christology and the doctrine of soteriology.
This tabernacle is now moved to heaven and in heaven there is a tabernacle
which is constructed to the same scale with the same connotation, the only
difference being that now that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Now that the
first advent has occurred and we have the strategic victory of our Lord in the
angelic conflict the tabernacle in heaven does exactly the same thing as the
communion table on earth. The tabernacle in heaven is a memorial to the
strategic victory of Christ on the cross.
Salvation by grace through faith in Christ is
slandered in every generation but Satan makes a concerted effort to destroy
this truth in the last half of the Tribulation, and this is the second category
of attack, the tabernacle of God. It must be remembered that the tabernacle and
its furniture was actually used by the Levitical priests to teach every aspect
of the person and the work of Christ and the tabernacle is very meaningful
therefore in Jewish evangelism of the Tribulation. Therefore it was maligned by
Satan. Thirdly, the sons of Israel are under attack. The Jew is a walking
testimony to the faithfulness of God. Whether he is a believer or an unbeliever
is not the issue. The fact that the Jew lives on planet earth during the rest
of history, all the way through the Tribulation, indicates the faithfulness of
God.
Next in the text we have a pun, the articular
present active participle of the verb skhnow. Skhnh and skhnow form the paronomasia: one
is the noun, the other is the verb. The verb means to live in a tent, “and
those who tabernacle.” To illustrate the paronomasia: “And he opened his mouth
in blasphemies against God, to blaspheme His person, and His tabernacle, and
those who tabernacle in heaven”. The last phrase is the preposition e)n plus the locative of o)uranoj.
It always bothers Satan when he is kicked out of
heaven that heaven is filled with Jews who are saved. There are Gentiles too
but here, of course, it is talking especially about the Jewish believer. The
definite article is used as a personal pronoun and a relative pronoun. The
present tense is a perfective present tense, it refers to what has come to be
in the past, Jewish believers going to heaven after physical death, and it is
emphasised as a present reality to Satan. During the last half of the
Tribulation we have the eschatology of the devil’s desperation when he is
confined to the earth. He cannot go to heaven any more and heaven is filled
with those people he despises and has sought to destroy in every generation.
There was never a generation of human history in which Satan has not tried to
destroy all Jews on the face of the earth. So obviously Satan does not laugh at
this paronomasia. What really bothers him are all of these Jews he has tried to
destroy and the fact that many of them, because they have personally believed
in Christ and have responded to the message of the tabernacle, are now in
heaven.
Translation: “And he opened his mouth in blasphemies
against God, to slander his person, and his tabernacle [the memorial in heaven
to the person and the work of Christ], and those [Jewish believers] who
tabernacle in heaven.”
In the first advent of Christ, Christ tabernacled on
earth: John 1:14, “The Word [the living Word] became flesh [hypostatic union,
the first advent where Satan was strategically defeated] and tabernacled [skhnow] among us.” He didn’t dwell among us. To
dwell would mean to stay down here permanently. He only came for a short time
to totally defeat Satan and provide for each one of us eternal salvation, and
so the word “tabernacle.” He just came for a bivouac, to pitch a tent. He is
the tent, the tabernacle, “and we beheld his glory, glory as of the
uniquely-born one [virgin birth] from the source of the Father, full of grace
and full of doctrine.”
Because our Lord tabernacled on earth, says John, a
lot of members of the human race are going to tabernacle in heaven. Because
Christ tabernacled on earth you as a believer will tabernacle in heaven
forever. Tabernacling in heaven means residence in the interim body, and what
is so wonderful about this and what really angers Satan is that even the worst
Christian loser that ever lived will reside in heaven and be very happy as he
awaits the resurrection and the resurrection body, while at the same time Satan
is confined to the earth and can no longer go to heaven.
We have noted that Satan gave the dictator of the
revived Roman empire the greatest power the world has ever known, but no matter
how much power he was given he is no stringer than time, and time runs out and
the power is gone. Sic transit gloria munde:
“the glory of the world passes away.”
What is it that Satan can’t stand more than anything
else. He knows his time is short, and that bothers him. Satan, as one of the
greatest creatures of all time, cannot stand to be laughed at and this
paronomasia is really laughing at Satan. All people who are arrogant take themselves
seriously, so seriously that they can never stand to be laughed at. This is
exactly what John 1:14 and Revelation 13:6 does: we have Satan laughed at. The
death of a believer has great dignity, great blessing, great power, and Satan
has never been able to cancel it, even though he has the power of death, as we
are told by the Word, and often is permitted to take believers out of the world
in a painful way as discipline. Once the believer dies Satan has lost control
of that believer now matter how great a loser, no matter how long he lived in
the cosmic system. Satan with all of his power and all of his ability has lost
control.
Verse 7, the dictator has a domestic policy. Why?
Because all violence, all degeneracy, all disorganised evil is eliminated by
even the worst dictators. Why do these people always eliminate these things?
Because since Satan has been the ruler of this world since the fall of man he
has tried to produce the Millennium. it isn’t that Satan doesn’t want to
produce good, but it is impossible. He doesn’t have the power or the ability
because of arrogance, because of innate evil, cosmic one: his prehistoric
attitude and policy by which he swept one third of the angelic hosts into his
system. Satan wants to produce good and when Satan uses dictators like Hitler
and Stalin one of the things they do is try to eliminate private violence. They
go for organised evil. Remember that organised evil always tries to produce
good and actually uses a facade of pseudo good: “Look what we are doing for
you.” Therefore it tries to become a substitute for regeneration and by
becoming a substitute for regeneration it inevitably produces, among other
things, religion. But it also produces a domestic policy, and what is the one
thing that challenges this facade: the dictator with the facade of good
produced under the principle of organised evil? He knocks out the crime, the
criminal, you no longer find petty crime on the streets or private or public
violence. All violence is now in the hands of the government.
But there is always a challenge to this because the
man who does this, the dictator, always takes away freedom. And who is it that
stands up for freedom? The born-again believer who knows Bible doctrine (not
the born-again believer in the cosmic system). The born again believer with
doctrine in his soul becomes the enemy, so we have the persecution of the
believer. Why does the dictator persecute the believer? Not because he wants to
persecute the believer, the dictator wants to avoid that as much as possible,
but because the believer with doctrine is the great challenge to his system of
organised evil.
In verse 7 we notice the dictator’s policy of
persecution in the first part of the verse and then his tremendous power in the
last. We begin with the connective conjunction kai
which now advances the argument, and is translated “Furthermore.” The aorist
passive indicative of the verb didomi follows and it means to
give, “Furthermore there was delegated,” “to him,” the dative singular direct
object from a)utoj, the intensive pronoun used
as a personal pronoun and referring to the dictator of the revived Roman
empire. So this is Satan giving something else to his dictator, his man. The aorist
tense is a constative aorist, it contemplates the action of the verb in its
entirety, hence a fact or action extended over the last half of the
Tribulation, the time of the devil’s desperation. The passive voice: the
dictator receives the action of the verb; he receives power. The indicative
mood is declarative representing the verbal action from the viewpoint of
reality, reminding us once again that while there are many forms of evil power
and many forms of illegitimate power on this earth, because Satan is the ruler
of this world and Satan uses people, there is one person that Satan can never
touch — the believer with doctrine resident in his soul. The power of doctrine
is greater than any human power of any kind on this earth, religious or
political, or any power that represents evil.
“Furthermore it was given to him,” and, of course,
what is given to him is power, “to make war against the saints.” “To make” is
the aorist active infinitive of the verb poiew.
The aorist tense is a culminative aorist, it views the persecution of believers
in its entirety but regards it from the viewpoint of existing results, namely
the testing of Tribulational believers with great historical disaster.
Strangely enough, Satan’s man takes over government
after government. Government is designed by God to be a power for good, Romans
13, but government is only a power for good when category one truth, the laws
of divine establishment, are found in its constitution and carried out properly
by those in a position of leadership. Government has the responsibility of
providing a military establishment to defend the freedom of people. A military
establishment would be, of course, a system of law courts and a police system
protecting from crime within and the military establishment to protect from the
criminals without, i.e. the nations who would attack. The rest is all pivot.
But when you have a nation with no pivot, which is all too often in history,
and you have no law courts to define freedom and protect the rights of
individuals then inevitably you will have crime — private violence, public violence,
and from those two, degeneracy. It is degeneracy that is used by the dictator.
Germany was in a state of degeneracy when Adolf Hitler came to power; communist
Russia was in a state of degeneracy when Lenin came to power. This is always
the way.
Two things can happen when a nation is in a state of
degeneracy: God can destroy it or He can give it a living discipline rather
than a dying discipline. The fifth cycle of discipline would be the dying
discipline; the dictatorship would be the living discipline — the strong man
comes to the front: things are so bad we must have a strong man to solve
everything and along comes the dictator.
The dictator of the revived Roman empire has only
one thing to stamp out: the truth. Evil in an organised form cannot exist with
truth. Truth and degeneracy can coexist. It coexisted in Sodom. Degeneracy is
disorganised evil but organised evil, dictatorship, must stamp out the truth.
This has been a procedure followed in communist China, in communist Russia, in
Cuba, and wherever the communists have gone this has been the procedure. So
that when the strong man comes he always makes war against those who have the
truth, and therefore the accusative singular direct object of poiew, polemoj, which can be used for warfare or for battle.
We translate it, “to make war,” and then we have the preposition meta plus the genitive plural from a(gioj. A(gioj means to be set apart. What
sets apart certain people? Their knowledge of doctrine; doctrine resident in
the soul. These are the people that organised evil must destroy. Organised evil
gets rid of crime, of degeneracy, but with it they always take away freedom.
In cosmic one self-righteous arrogance is morality,
very strict morality, a morality that any unbeliever can follow. But when you
have morality in the cosmic system — arrogance can produce great morality —
there is one thing missing: the virtue of the Christian way of life. Morality
minus virtue is self-righteous arrogance and a part of evil. There is nothing
wrong with being moral but morality doesn’t have any power. Morality is for
believers and unbelievers to live side by side and respect the rights and the
privacy and the freedom of each other, but there is no power in strict
morality. The Christian way of life is not a system of morality, it is a divine
system of virtue. Virtue is far greater than morality. This dictator rises to
power by using morality: “I’m going to stop all the crime.” Hitler stopped all
the crime too, the Government was committing all the crime. That is organised
evil.
We have a connective kai
which tells us that this power means to overcome, physically here. This power
meant that many believers with doctrine were tortured and killed. Power was
given to take their life but even though the dictator had the power to torture
and kill he did not have the power to cause them to renounce Christianity and
become a part of the system. Doctrine in the soul is far more powerful than the
greatest evil in the world. Even though this power was given, God permitted
this, the aorist active infinitive of nikaw,
to overcome, to conquer. The constative aorist is for a fact or action
extending over that period of time known as the eschatology of the devil’s
desperation, the last half of the Tribulation. The active voice: the dictator
of the revived Roman empire had this power. He didn’t use his system of
government, he didn’t use his political system in order to wipe out the saints,
he used ecumenical religion. Religion always produces zealots. Religion appeals
to arrogance and religious people in their arrogance are zealous to kill
believers with truth. That is the system the dictator uses to overcome them, to
get rid of them, to conquer them; but they do not renounce the truth. This
emphasises the evil nature and the great evil of religion. Remember that true
Christianity is not a religion but a relationship with God through faith in our
Lord Jesus Christ. Religion as a principle represents the evil genius of Satan.
Basically religion was originated by Satan to counterfeit the plan of God and
to draw worship to himself and away from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Verse 7, “Furthermore power was given to him [the
dictator of the revived Roman empire] to make war against the saints, and to
overcome them.” Nikaw is the verb to “overcome,”
the aorist active infinitive here.
We have noticed in this principle that there are two
kinds of evil: organised evil and disorganised evil. Disorganised evil is
called basically degeneracy, and there is always coexistence between degeneracy
and believers advancing to maturity, believers with a high spiritual content to
their lives. So in disorganised evil degeneracy and spiritual advance coexist,
even though they are antithetical. The principle is that it is very difficult
for truth to continue, for doctrine to be taught, and for believers to grow
when there is organised evil. Disorganised evil and doctrinal believers
coexist. Here we have a statement, then. To overcome has to do with the fact
that disorganised evil no longer exists in the revived Roman empire. They were
conquered, “to make war against the saints and to conquer them.” The aorist
tense, again, is a constative aorist for a fact or action extended over that
period of time known as the devil’s desperation, the last half of the
Tribulation. The dictator produces the action of the verb through ecumenical
religion which is one of the great systems of organised evil. This emphasises
that organised evil has a great system for persecuting the truth.
The ecumenical religion of the revived Roman empire
is spread through false teachers. Satan doesn’t like to use unbelievers as
false teachers because there is no rapport between the unbeliever and the
believer. As a result the more unbelievers that are pulled into the cosmic
system and get into this concept of morality without virtue, this function in
the cosmic system, this zeal without knowledge — the implacability and
inflexibility concept — the more they become eloquent evangelists for the
Satanic system. So to be successful any Satanic evangelist must practice
hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is the natural result of being moral without
virtue: arrogant self-righteousness plus crusader arrogance.
One of the other factors that is inevitable: in
order to cover up your own inconsistencies you must develop a pleasing public
relations personality. There is nothing wrong with a pleasing personality. In
fact the genuine pleasing personality is the flexible personality, where you
hear something that is false and you don’t challenge everything that is not
true but you are tolerant and you listen and you relax. You wait until the Lord
gives you some wisdom or the right opportunity and therefore you are not a
zealot.
The Tribulational martyrs simply have to take a
stand for the truth. In fact they are forced to the place where they must
publicly renounce Christ, or they must state that they refuse to do so and that
is when they are martyred. But we are talking about the believers now who
become the evangelists for Satan. They must have either a good public relations
personality or a flirtatious personality to court others for religion. Religion
courts; Christianity evangelises. In representing Satan they appeal to the
arrogance of others and they always approach with the idea that you must
improve your life. Religion always talks about improving one’s life and
performing good works, and working one’s way into a relationship with God.
Generally the converts of evangelists for the cosmic system become arrogant
like himself.
The infinitive is the infinitive of intended result
when the result fulfils the deliberate objective of getting Tribulational
saints involved in the cosmic system. This is accomplished through ecumenical
religion. The objective is often fulfilled in the relationship to believers by
some form of inculcation of arrogance, one of the twelve gates. With this we
have the accusative plural direct object from a)utoj,
an intensive pronoun used as the personal pronoun.
We have two antithetical categories of believers who
were conquered in this war against the saints. When the saints are being
conquered they are being conquered in two ways. There are two kinds of
believers here: the believers who are negative toward doctrine and the
believers who are positive toward doctrine. Category #1, believers who were
negative toward doctrine were punished by God through this dictator and his
system of organised evil for their cosmic involvement. They will die the sin
unto death in the last half of the Tribulation. But then we have the believers
who were positive toward doctrine, and they glorify God by remaining faithful
to the Word. Their life was not as important as doctrine. For these believers
their life was Bible doctrine and they demonstrated the fact that Bible
doctrine resident in the soul is much more powerful than the greatest power of
the greatest dictator in history, the dictator we are studying. There is a far
greater power in your soul as a believer when you have doctrine than any human
system of power that has ever existed.
A specific area has to be involved in organised evil
so in the remaining part of verse seven we have the evil dynamics of ecumenical
religion in the Tribulation. The connective conjunction kai, translated here “and,” is followed by the subject
in the nominative singular. The subject is the noun e)cousia, meaning power or authority,
“and authority.” Then we have the aorist passive indicative of didomi which means to give or to delegate, “was
delegated.” The constative aorist contemplates the action of the verb in its
entirety. The passive voice: the power or the authority receives the action of
the verb: it is delegated. The indicative mood is declarative representing the
verbal action from the viewpoint of prophetical or eschatological reality. We
have a dative singular indirect object of a)utoj,
“to him,” the dictator of the revived Roman empire. Translation: “and authority
was given to him.”
Next we have the preposition e)pi plus the accusative, where it is translated “over,”
“authority was given over.” And then we have the adjective paj, and paj is going to cover four
different categories, “over every,” and then there are four categories. Each of
the four categories is a noun in the accusative singular. The first is fulh and it is correctly translated “tribe” and it is a
reference to Jews, both in Israel and throughout the world. That is the first
category. The second one is the accusative singular from the noun laoj which means “people.” The third is the accusative
singular from the noun glossa, and it means “languages,”
but it is mistranslated throughout the New Testament “tongues.” It is in the
singular and with paj it comprehends all
languages. Finally we have the accusative singular from the noun e)qnoj, used here for nations. Now we have a corrected
translation of the entire verse but we note the last half of it: “to make war
against the saints, to conquer them: and authority was given to him [the Roman
dictator] over every tribe [the Jews], and people [citizens of the revived
Roman empire], and languages [foreigners living outside the revived Roman
empire], and nations [Gentile nations in contrast to the Jewish nation].”
Note the four categories over which ecumenical
religion has power and authority because it penetrates into areas where it has
no legitimate authority. It penetrates into nations where it has no legitimate
authority under the principle of separation of religion and state. It
penetrates into areas of a foreign language where it has no authority because
it does not think in the same language. It penetrates into areas of citizens of
the revived Roman empire and destroys their freedom of choice. It also
penetrates into the Jewish area and therefore runs across the boundaries of the
cultural background of the Jews as well as their concept in religion.
The leader of ecumenical religion who is the
dictator of the revived Roman empire is politically only a dictator of a great
empire but religiously, as a religious leader, he has influence way beyond the
boundaries of his great empire. And the principle is always the same: religion
extends its evil influence where political power cannot penetrate. Hence,
through political and religious power the revived Roman empire of the
Tribulation accomplishes what the historical Roman empire and the holy Roman
empire were never able to accomplish: to actually conquer the world through
religion.
While the Roman dictator has universal control of
people of the world through ecumenical religion it does not bring world peace
which has always been one of the front motives of ecumenical religion. In fact
religion cannot bring peace to the world; religion is the source of many wars.
As a matter of fact religion is going to be the source of war in the last half
of the Tribulation. Historically, prophetically and biblically religion starts
wars. Only the pivot of mature believers and only orthodox Christianity can
provide any interlude of peace, as illustrated by the Antonine Caesars from
96-192 AD.
Verse 8, the dictator’s foreign policy. His alliance
with Israel is that part of the foreign policy that God the Holy Spirit sees
fit to advise us.
The ecumenical religion of the Tribulation is
mentioned first. We have the emphatic use of the conjunction kai, translated “in fact,” and the nominative plural of
paj, the adjective used as a
substantive, “all.” It refers to Jews living in Palestine during the
Tribulation, to the nation Israel in existence in the Tribulation. With this we
have the articular present active participle from the verb katoikew which means to dwell or to live. The definite
article is a nominative plural used as a relative pronoun. Its antecedent is a
nominative plural o(I, “who.” Then we have the
customary present tense denoting what habitually occurs among Jews who live in
Israel during the last half of the Tribulation, the time of the eschatology of
the devil’s desperation. The active voice: Jews living in Israel during the
last half of the Tribulation are going to produce the action of the verb. The
participle is circumstantial and we have a prepositional phrase to amplify the
participle: the preposition e)pi plus the genitive of the
noun gh, “in fact all who live in
the land.” Then we have the main verb, the future active indicative of the verb
proskunew which means to worship,
“will worship.” These are unbelieving Jews. The believing Jews in the middle of
the Tribulation all flee. They leave the land. Then there is evangelism in the
last half of the Tribulation, so “all” does not include those Jews who are
evangelised in the last half of the Tribulation.
The accusative singular direct object of a)utoj is translated “him,” and it refers to the dictator
of the revived Roman empire as the ruler of ecumenical religion. The worship
part is ecumenical religion. And notice that one of the categories of the
previous verse has been taken. The category was fulh,
“tribes,” Israel. Outside of the revived Roman empire of the Tribulation is
Israel and all of a sudden Jews in Israel are worshipping the dictator. They
are in Jerusalem; he is in Rome. This is ecumenical religion. He has no
political influence at this point, that will come as a result of religion. It
is religion which penetrates the strong culture of the Jews. No matter how
strong the culture may be, no matter how strong the Jews may feel, if they
reject the truth and they reject the One who is the truth, Jesus Christ, their
Messiah, their culture is not strong enough, their truth in category #1 is not
strong enough, and religion will penetrate this most powerful of all cultures
and will convert the Jews and bring them into line politically in every
possible way. As the converts grow in Palestine, in the land of Israel, they
put political pressure on their dictator who is then forced to make a deal.
The future tense of proskunew is a gnomic future, it is for a statement of fact or performance which
may be rightfully expected to occur when the Roman dictator is able to start
converting through ecumenical religion Jews in the land of Israel. The active
voice: unbelieving Jews in Israel will produce the action of the verb, they
will be converted by their rejection of the gospel. This creates the vacuum,
and into that vacuum goes the false teaching of ecumenical religion. The
indicative mood is declarative for the eschatology of the situation. We have
eschatological reality of a treaty between the revived Roman empire with its
ecumenical religious system, and the Jews with Judaism minus doctrine. This
becomes a great issue for whenever anyone, no matter how strong a people may
be, rejects the truth the vacuum is opened and through that vacuum goes into
the soul these concepts. These false concepts are accepted, they get into the
cosmic system, and once these Jews are in the cosmic system they put the
pressure on their own dictator and he, therefore, is forced to make a treaty.
And, by the way, it is a minority that does the job.
And that is the way it is in history. Majorities
never influence history, it is the minorities that are organised, minorities
with a system, minorities with motivation. And minorities often take away from
the majority freedoms they enjoy simply because they have a strong system. It
is that old principle: “the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease,”
and you can amplify that right into the principle of historical trends.
The entire world will not worship the beast since there
are two areas developing and will develop by the middle of the Tribulation.
There is first of all the king of the north. There are also the kings of the
east, the king of the south, the Arabs stay with Islam. These three blocs are
the only places where there is no penetration of ecumenical religion. The
religion of Islam rejects the ecumenical religion of the revived Roman empire.
The oriental system will consolidate under whatever there may be at that time
to reject it, and the northern country is isolated. But the revived Roman
empire will penetrate everywhere else, including the western hemisphere.
Minorities run the world, and when a nation is
prosperous it is because a minority of born-again believers in a national
entity have advanced from gate four to gate eight. The majority is never right
and the majority never has any influence in history. The majority is just a
great big slob mob waiting to be influenced by an organised minority. No
majority in history has ever had any influence. The impact of history is always
with the organised minority. And, as a matter of fact, the principle is true
even where there is good instead of evil, for it is a small pivot of mature
believers who provide the prosperity for all when we have it. It was also a
pivot of believers, a small percentage of the population in the Roman empire
that were the basis for the most fantastic prosperity the world has ever known
during the time of the Antonine Caesars. It is always the minority that is
organised and has a system that has the influence.
It was no problem for the unbelieving Jews in Israel
to hook up with the revived Roman empire. The treaty is described in Matthew
24:15 and Daniel 11:44 briefly. But brevity does not keep us from understanding
in detail exactly what happened.
Principles
1. There is no real power in public opinion. Public
opinion caters to the viewpoint of the majority and majorities have no power or
control in history. It is always the minority which controls or influences
history. Sometimes it is a good minority, like a pivot of mature believers in a
client nation to God. Frequently, however, it is a minority for evil which
controls the historical trend. Organised minorities produce dictators. Public
opinion reacts to these minorities but public opinion has no organisation and
no power. What is public opinion? Public opinion is today’s news, and tomorrow
it is gone. Public opinion can bully the weak but public opinion has no power.
Public opinion can flatter the successful but, again, it has absolutely no
power. Public opinion only has clout with arrogant and stupid people, but it
has no power even as stupid people have no power. Stupid people are lemmings,
pawns in the game. The only way that you and I keep from being pawns in the
game is by maximum perception of Bible doctrine. Public opinion is all too
often only a system of self-righteousness, arrogance and mass hysteria which
assumes that their condemnation has power or influence in history. It has none.
People often operate on the false premise that public opinion has influence
over evil, while in reality evil cares nothing for public opinion.
2. We have noted that in the first half of the
Tribulation this dictator was pro-Semitic. It suited him to be pro-Semitic. We
have also noted that organised evil, whenever organised evil meets a goat, a
sacrifice, something to advance its own power, it always picks something and
becomes anti-something. This explains why we begin to see a very strong
minority in our day who are involved in anti-Semitism. It is one of the signs
that out of degeneracy organised minorities are beginning to function. We might
ask how this man, the dictator of the revived Roman empire, could be
pro-Semitic for three and a half years and then turn around and become
anti-Semitic. He is organised evil, he is working for Satan his master, it is
no problem at all for organised evil to reverse its policy, e.g. the attitude
of the Chinese communists when they took over in China and used Christians in
coming to power but once they were in they said, “Out.” Power grab is the name
of the game.
Verse 8, “In fact all [Jewish unbelievers in the
last half of the Tribulation] who live in the land shall worship him.”
These are unbelievers who are religious. Religion is
always on the side of organised evil. In the treaty between Israel and the
dictator of the revived Roman empire Israel needs help. She is caught between
four great power blocs. Israel has an affinity for organised evil because they
have already been contacted by its religion. So there is going to be a great
treaty between Israel in the Tribulation and the revived Roman empire, and part
of that treaty is the fact that all of Israel must accept systematic evil in
its most powerful form: religion. In the temple in Jerusalem an actual statue
of the dictator of the revived Roman empire will be put up and worshipped.
Israel faces a problem. The Jews are always going to
have problems as a nation. Israel right now is debating whether they are going
to have to make a deal with Russia or China. They always have to make a deal
with someone because they are surrounded by Arabs — envious people. After the
Rapture in the middle of the Tribulation they will be debating that same issue
again, and in the Tribulation there will be a power that does not presently
exist as such: the revived Roman empire, a united states of western Europe. In
the future the dictator of Israel will turn to the dictator of the revived
Roman empire and make a deal. He has to make a deal to survive. That is the
problem that Israel has today; that is the problem that Israel is going to have
in the Tribulation.
Principle: Weak or weakened people can only survive
by compromise. That is true of individuals and it is true of nations.
Israel is a strong nation but they are in a weak
position. They are going to be in that position in the middle of the
Tribulation. They will select the revived Roman empire, and in making a deal
with the revived Roman empire ecumenical religion becomes a part of it. They
have to accept the religion of the revived Roman empire and are compelled to
put an image up in the Jewish temple, the abomination of desolation. They will
“worship him,” the dictator of the revived Roman empire, that is the point of
the treaty: the revived Roman empire agrees to protect Israel in return for
certain economic considerations and religion.
Next we have a very strange Greek development in
this verse. We have, for example, o(u ou. O(u is a relative pronoun and it is in the genitive
singular from the relative pronoun o(j. It is a descriptive
genitive singular whose antecedent is the genitive paj.
“Whose name” is what comes up next because we have o(u ou gegraptai to o)noma, so we go from o(u over to o)noma. O)noma means person, name, and sometimes it means
personality. So we will start this phrase, “by whose name.” It is necessary to
have something to show in the English what the idiom is going to be, so we will
translate it, “this means, of course, everyone whose name.” The “everyone”
comes from paj, “in fact all.” Then we
have the phrase, “has not been written in the book of life.” This “whose name
has not been written in the book of life” becomes a qualifying factor to show
that there are those who will not compromise in Israel in those days because
they are believers, and why they will not compromise, and how far flexibility
can take you, flexibility can never take you to the compromise of doctrine. You
must be flexible when you are in a position of weakness but your flexibility
must never include the compromise of the Word of God.
The word o)noma means “name,” and while the
King James version translates it “names” (plural) it is name in the singular in
the Greek, indicating that salvation is a private matter between an individual
and God. Privacy, wherever you find it, is a very important thing. Privacy
means freedom. Disorganised evil certainly believes in privacy, it wants
privacy to go out and raise hell! Organised evil says you can’t have your
privacy, it wants you on a computer, it wants to know all of your business.
When you are on a computer and you have a social security number you have lost
part of your freedom. And why are those social security lists so important? Why
is it important to get your name on a computer? So that organised evil can
control you when a dictator comes. That is organised evil, the kind of problem
we have in the last half of the Tribulation. Privacy is so important to
freedom.
Degeneracy likes privacy too. The only thing is that
when degeneracy is crime then the criminals have no right to privacy and the
criminal’s privacy is surrendered because he is committing crime. He must be
apprehended and properly punished and removed from a free society. He has no
rights of a free society. In a general state of degeneracy only the criminals
must be eliminated but that does not hinder the freedom of degenerates who are
not criminals and it doesn’t hinder the freedom of believers and law-abiding
citizens of all kinds. So privacy becomes a major issue and organised evil
wipes out privacy.
“Everyone whose name has not been written.” There is
a book where you do want your name written. Then the verb itself should be
noted, it is the perfect passive participle of grafw
which means to write, “which has not been written.” The perfect tense is a
perfect of existing state, i.e. an intensive perfect where the action of
negative volition toward the gospel means that you are not in the book of life.
Everyone has two chances to have eternal salvation and get their name recorded
in the book of life. The first chance is at God-consciousness, the next is at
gospel hearing. The perfect tense is an emphatic method in the Greek of
presenting a fact or condition. It is a strong way of saying that a thing is.
All believers have their names in the book of life. The passive voice: the Jews
of the last half of the Tribulation who reject Christ as saviour receive the
action of the verb. This is a circumstantial participle.
What is this book of life? We have the preposition e)n plus the locative of biblion plus the descriptive genitive singular of zwh,
“the book of life,” “everyone whose name has not been written in the book of
life.” The book of life is a registry of everyone who believes in the Lord
Jesus Christ during phase two of their lifetime on earth. That is the way the
book of life will appear in heaven: it will have the names of everyone who has
personally believed in the Lord Jesus Christ; it will not have the names of
unbelievers as a registry book in heaven. When people are born into this world
apparently their names are in the book of life but when they reject Christ as
saviour their names are blotted out of the book of life. So, first of all, the
book of life is a roster of all born-again believers. It is so described in Philippians
4:3; Revelation 3:5; 13:8; 17:8; 20:12,15; 21:7.
By imputation of human life at birth all members of
the human race have the same chance and are put in that book. That imputation
is made by God. Life is imputed after birth and the very fact that God imputes
life to the soul means that that person is in the book of life. Their name is
not blotted out of the book of life until they depart from this earth without
accepting Christ as saviour. As long as they live on this earth they have a
chance to be saved but when they die, if they have not believed in Christ then
their name is blotted out of the book of life and they are in another book, the
book of works. The book of works is used as the indictment to send people to
the lake of fire forever and ever.
We are dealing with unbelievers, those who are not
registered in the book of life. In this context we are talking specifically
about Jewish unbelievers living in the state of Israel in the last half of the
Tribulation. The owner of the book of life is mentioned next. He is mentioned
in the phrase tou a)rniou, referring to the Lamb. This
is the possessive genitive of the noun a)rnoion and it means actually “belonging to the Lamb,” “the book of life
belonging to the Lamb.” The Lamb emphasises the saving work of Christ on the
cross; it relates the animal sacrifices, the Levitical sacrifices, with their
actual fulfilment when our Lord was on the cross between heaven and earth and
being judged for our sins.
Next we have the articular perfect passive
participle from an Attic verb sfattw, which is sfazw in the Koine Greek. The translation is “belonging
to the Lamb who has been slain.” The definite article is used as a relative
pronoun referring to Christ as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. The dramatic perfect tense of sfazw presents a completed action
with emphasis on existing results from that completed action. The Lamb was
slain so that we can have eternal life. The passive voice: Christ receives the
action of the verb on the cross. The participle is circumstantial.
Then we have a prepositional phrase, a)po plus the locative singular from the noun katabolh, “from the foundation.” With this we have the
descriptive genitive of kosmoj, referring here to the
world system, Satan’s world system, “of the world.” The Lamb didn’t have to
become slain until Satan became the ruler of the world, so we don’t have the
usual word. In talking about the planet we have the word gh, but we are talking about the world system came
into existence after man sinned, after man lost the rulership of the world. The
plan of God for our salvation was designed in eternity past before the
foundation of the world but it became necessary to put it into operation when
man sinned. The work of Christ was entered into the computer of divine decrees
billions of years ago. The omniscience of God the Father entered the work of
Christ into the computer and, of course, we know the printout, our so great
salvation. Remember that salvation came before sin in the plan of God.
Translation of verse 8 — “In fact all Jewish
unbelievers of the last half of the Tribulation who live in the land [the
nation Israel in the last half of the Tribulation] will worship him [the
dictator of the revived Roman empire, the religious leader of ecumenical
religion in the Tribulation]; this means, of course, everyone whose name has
not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb who has been slain
from the foundation of the world.”
The King James translation of verse 9 is: “If any
man has an ear, let him hear.” What is left out is important. We have had this
phrase seven times before in chapters two and three but on those occasions
there was added the phrase, “what the Spirit saith to the churches.” That was
the Church Age where we studied the historical trends of the Church Age, the
only dispensation in which there is no prophetical historical trend. All trends
are historical in the Church Age but once the Church is removed, the
resurrection or the Rapture of the Church, the completion of the royal family
of God, then we go into the Tribulation and historical trends are based entirely
on prophecy. In Revelation chapters two and three we read, “what the Spirit saith
to the Churches.” The Church is gone in the Tribulation.
The first word in verse 9 is the conditional
particle e)i, it introduces the protasis
of a first class condition. That means an assumption or supposition from the
viewpoint of reality. The reality in this case is assumed to be true. If this
had been in a second class condition then the assumption would be that some
people do not have ears and therefore can’t hear. If it had been a third class
condition then you could choose as to whether you have ears or not. If it had
been a fourth class condition it would express a wish that you had said
something you shouldn’t and you wish that people didn’t have ears. “If” means
“If and it is true,” it is an assumption of truth.
Next we have the nominative singular of the
indefinite pronoun tij. An indefinite pronoun
takes people in general and takes a chunk out and says that this category is
different from the rest. This is a category of people and they are
distinguished from other people by such and such and so and so. The Greeks had
a word for it, tij. So the indefinite pronoun
represents a category and in this case it represents believers in the last half
of the Tribulation. That is the time of the devil’s desperation, the last three
and a half years before the second advent. And he says, “If anyone,” and
“anyone,” being the indefinite pronoun tij, indicates that out of all
the people alive on the earth there is a special category, those who have
believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and they are in view here.
Next we have the verb, the present active indicative
of e)xw, “if anyone has.” The
static present represents a circumstance which is assumed as perpetually
existing, people have ears. The point is: everyone has an ear. Everyone,
therefore, has the ability to understand, to comprehend, to learn. When it
says, “If anyone has an ear,” it means a lot more than just having ears, it
means having the ability to learn. There is no excuse for any member of the
human race not understanding what is going on historically. The problem is that
just because we have the apparatus for learning doesn’t mean that we are going
to learn. Volition is the problem. Some people are unteachable, they don’t want
to learn. Having ears means having the potential to learn and one of the worst
things that can happen to anyone in life is to not be curious about anything.
“If anyone has an ear.” The active voice: believers
in the Tribulation produce the action in this case. The indicative mood is
declarative for the reality of the assumed premise.
With it we have the accusative singular direct
object from the noun ouj, the word for ear. As an
organ of hearing the ear represents the principle of perception and, of course,
inasmuch as no one earns or deserves the right to have an ear the ear
represents non-meritorious perspicacity. Much of the learning at the time of
writing of the book of Revelation depended upon hearing and concentrating on
what was being taught. Therefore the possession of ears is analogous to the
function of GAP,
the perception of Bible doctrine through a grace system. Part of logistical
grace is the divine provision for the believer to learn doctrine. The assumption,
then, of the protasis is that any believer in the last half of the Tribulation
has received as a part of logistical grace the opportunity to learn doctrine by
which he can make right decisions from a position of strength in time of
historical disaster. Furthermore he can maintain control of his life and he can
have a personal sense of destiny by which he advances to maturity and glorifies
the Lord Jesus Christ in whatever is left of his life in time. None of this is
possible apart from the consistent and intensified perception of Bible
doctrine.
Principle:
Momentum meets the exigencies of life. A learner will be a doer, a
learner will be a person making right decisions and right orientation to life.
Something that should be emphasised in our study of
historical trends is the fact that historical crisis and historical disaster
always provides an opportunity for people who would otherwise never be known in
history. They rise to the front. Any believer in the last half of the
Tribulation who after salvation has made right decisions on a daily basis are
going to be the men of the hour. Right decisions from a position of strength
prepares one for historical disaster. Our right decisions have to do with
momentum in the system. Our relationship to Bible doctrine in the system, Gate
four, determines our relationship to the Lord because the one thing that the
Lord uses in promotion is virtue.
All virtue begins at gate four: enforced and genuine
humility. Humility is always directed toward authority. It is the basis of all
virtue. Humility is never directed toward freedom. Virtues do not begin with
freedom, freedom is merely the environment for expressing them. Humility is
always directed toward authority: authority that is unfair, unjust, or
authority that is fair and just; antithetical systems of authority but
authority nevertheless. Some of the greatest testings in life come from the
fact that people cannot handle authority, and if you can’t handle authority you
can’t handle freedom because whether we use freedom properly or not is
determined by our attitude toward authority. Authority isn’t always fair and
many of the authority tests come from authority that isn’t fair. We cannot
learn unless we have a respect for authority and understand authority as a principle,
not as a person or persons with whom we have contact, and often unfavourable
contact. Authority is not a person. People often hate police officers. That is
because they have rejected authority and therefore they have no virtue. The
police officer represents authority and therefore they hate the police officer.
When a nation is overtaken by a crisis or historical disaster, if that nation
is generally anti-authority the nation is destroyed. If that nation is
pro-authority they are pulled together and they survive.
It is true of us as individuals. We are greater for
recognition of authority than we are for using freedom. The utilisation of
freedom in itself is nothing, it is the basis by which we approach that freedom
that is important. You cannot learn Bible doctrine unless you have an ear. The
ear is the perceptive system, but it is more than that. The ear indicates that
there must first of all be a recognition of authority, the most basic virtue in
life.
Remember: momentum meets the exigencies of life.
Loss of momentum from doctrinal perception means failure in historical
disaster. The believers who are losers in the last half of the Tribulation are
going to be overwhelmed by their circumstances. They do not have confidence in
God because the only believers who have confidence in God are those who are
consistent in the perception of doctrine. Consistency is the important factor.
We note next the aorist active imperative of the
verb a)kouw which means to hear, and it
is used for perception of doctrine, daily perception of doctrine. It means
perception under normal times, perception under difficult times preparing for
historical disaster. “If any man has an ear, let him hear.” Why? Because your
daily perception of doctrine is your biggest asset because it produces
motivational virtue. Motivational virtue is confidence in God. For example, if
you are getting a raw deal from a boss, or if someone maltreats you, someone is
unfair and unjust; if you have confidence in God, so what! If your confidence
is in God from your daily perception of doctrine and you are getting a raw deal
you have to go back to a basic principle in your life: God has a plan for your
life, there are no accidents in the Christian life, and if you have confidence
in God there is no such thing as unfairness because God isn’t unfair and He
uses the unfairness of man to promote His people. Right decisions from a
position of strength in our daily normal lives is the only preparation for the
crisis and you don’t get that way by an occasional visit to church or an
occasional flicking of the button of a tape recorder.
The constative aorist tense is for a fact or action
extended over a period of time, the last half of the Tribulation. It takes
positive volition toward doctrine and gathers it up into a single whole. It
takes every day under all circumstances no matter what is happening to prepare
for the crisis.
The third person suffix of the verb refers to the
believer living in the time of the eschatology of the devil’s desperation, the
last half of the Tribulation. It applies to believers of all dispensations,
that is why it is in the Bible. By interpretation this is eschatology; by
application it belongs to you and to me today. The imperative mood expresses
and appeal to the volition of the believer living in the last half of the
Tribulation but it is there for our study as an appeal to us. This is an
imperative of command, it is a divine mandate to the believer that living in
time every moment is a challenge. Life is a challenge, the ups and downs of
life are a challenge.
The omission of the phrase found in chapters two and
three, “what the Spirit saith to the churches”, is another confirmation of that
eschatological doctrine that the church does not go through the Tribulation but
is resurrected prior to Daniel’s seventieth week. God never confuses or mixes
His plan, He always keeps Israel and the Church separate. God’s plan for the
royal family or Church Age believers always includes born-again Jews but God’s
plan for Israel does not include born-again Gentiles.
So once the royal family is completed and
resurrected under the title of the Rapture of the Church “let him hear” is the
mandate. Such a mandate we have in the Church Age for without Bible doctrine we
are never going to make it and without Bible doctrine we cannot approach
historical disaster with a personal sense of destiny.
Verse 10 in the King James version doesn’t even
sound as though it belongs here. It is confusing and is not what the Greek
says. In verse 9 we saw the mandate: gate four, keep on doctrine, every day,
momentum, momentum, momentum. Make good decisions from a position of strength,
have control of your life, and as a result have personal sense of destiny. Now
what happens if you fail to do this? This is the story we have in this passage.
First of all we have the loss of a personal sense of destiny through the
function of violence, violence in the sense of evil.
We begin with the conditional particle e)I, “If” (and this is introducing a first class
condition), an assumption or a premise from the viewpoint of reality. With this
we have the nominative singular subject from the indefinite pronoun tij (without an accent. With an accent on it it means
who, what, or why) which defines a specific category. The category is
terrorists, war lords, criminals, mercenaries and gangsters. All of those in
the last half of the Tribulation who throw off the harness of establishment and
civilisation and practice violence apart from the authority of establishment
are included. The authority of establishment includes the police officer and
the soldier representing his country in combat but it does not include the
mercenary who fights for profit and plunder. Tij
represents the category: those who resort to unlawful use of violence become
the victims of violence.
Violence never solves problems. Instead it results
in loss of control of one’s life plus a loss of a personal sense of destiny.
Mercenaries use violence not as a representative of their own nation but for
profit or plunder, for the sheer love of killing. Hence, this is not dealing
with the military service for one’s country or the function of the police
officer in line of duty, it is dealing with lawless people who use violence for
pleasure, for profit, for plunder. The use of the word “pleasure” here speaks
of that form of arrogance which derives pleasure from the use of violence to
bully, to intimidate, to control others apart from establishment authority.
Next we have the preposition e)ij plus the accusative of the noun a)ixmalosia which means captivity, “into captivity.” The
absence of a verb here means that this is an obvious ellipsis and the question
arises: what verb denotes the true meaning of the passage. Suggested
translation: “If anyone leads others into captivity.” That seems to be the best
verb to use for this particular ellipsis. Ellipsis always demands the insertion
of a verb to complete the idea. The unlawful use of violence deprives of
freedom, privacy and property, three things to which you have a God-given
right.
The next phrase starts out with the preposition e)ij plus the accusative singular of a)ichmalosia, the same thing again. It includes any form of
violence, criminal action, which enslaves, imprisons, destroys the freedom, the
property, the life of others. This can be construed as enslavement, false
imprisonment, being held as hostages by terrorist groups. It can include
religious or political groups who seize for the exploitation of their political
or religious activities, whatever their objective happens to be. It also is to
seize for the exploitation in the field of prostitution. This is the first
conditional clause that observes the use of violence to deprive people of their
freedom, their property and their life. The people who do this always have a
purpose. They do this to advance themselves but they have made bad decisions
from a position of weakness, they have lost control of their own lives, they
have no personal sense of destiny, no confidence in God, no courage toward man
and circumstances.
The second conditional clause: we have e)i again, and while the first conditional clause
deprives others of freedom and property the second conditional clause uses
violence to deprive people of their lives. Note the word “deprive” in contrast
to the word “defend” in this passage. We do have the right to defend our
freedom, our property and our lives. The principle: violence deprives, freedom
defends. This is why we have both law enforcement and the military
establishment to defend our freedom from both domestic and foreign violence. So
we have the conditional particle e)i introducing a protasis of a
first class condition, an assumption or premise from the viewpoint of reality,
if and it is true.
Next we have the nominative singular of tij again, the indefinite pronoun which represents a
category, the same category: criminals, gangsters, mercenaries, terrorists, and
paramilitary groups, religious and political. These are the ones who throw off
the harness of establishment and establishment authority and wallow in the
cosmic system where they use violence to deprive others of freedoms, rights,
property, lives. Again we translate it, “if anyone”. Beyond this the Greek text
must be used to correct the translation of the King James version.
Next we have the prepositional phrase e)n plus the instrumental from the noun maxaira. The maxaira is the famous Roman short
sword. We translate: “with the sword,” “if anyone with the sword.” Next is the
future active indicative of the verb a)pokteinw which means to kill, “if
anyone shall kill with the sword.” The predictive future tense anticipates what
is expected to occur in the last half of the Tribulation: violence and more
violence. The active voice: criminals, gangsters, terrorists, etc. produce the
action of the verb in the last half of the Tribulation. The indicative mood is
used for the reality of the assumption or premise of the first class condition,
hence declarative for the reality of future violence in the last half of the
Tribulation. This is not the use of weapons legitimately.
Then we have the impersonal verb of compulsion or
unavoidable fate, dei,
and it is translated “must.” Next comes the accusative singular of general
reference from the intensive pronoun a)utoj, translated “he,” “he
must,” followed by the aorist passive infinitive of a)pokteinw, “he must be killed.” The constative aorist tense contemplates the
action of the verb in its entirety. The passive voice: the subject receives the
action of the verb under the principle of living by violence resulting in dying
by violence. The infinitive is the infinitive of result. In other words, those
who function under the principle of unlawful terror are going to be killed by
unlawful terror. Next comes the preposition e)n
plus the instrumental singular of maxaira again, meaning “by the
sword,” “must be killed by the sword.”
The divine
policy regarding the use of unlawful violence goes all the way back to Genesis
9:5,6, “Most emphatically I will require your lifeblood; I will require an
accounting from every animal [who murders] and every man [who murders], from
the hand of every man his brother I will demand the life of man.”
That is capital punishment going through judicial
procedure, not through a mob taking the law into its own hands.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood will be
shed,” that is the judicial modus operandi resulting in the establishment of
guilt and the administration of capital punishment. When there is no capital
punishment crime is motivated to continue using violence. The only way to stop
criminals is to put their own lives on the line.
Matthew 26:52, Peter has just done the dumb thing,
he has tried to stop our Lord from going to the cross and dying for our sins.
The Lord has explained it all to him but he never caught on. He is going to
defend the Lord. When the temple guard came out to take our Lord in then garden
out came the sword. He is brave and stupid. He cut of an ear, using violence to
solve a problem, but what he was really doing was slowing down the plan.
“Then Jesus
said to him [Peter], Return your sword to its scabbard; for all who draw the
sword [the unlawful use of violence, crime],” Peter is not a soldier, he is not
in law enforcement, and he is not defending his personal property, “will die by
the sword,” either capital punishment from a system of justice or the
inevitable result of God’s law: those who live by violence will inevitably die
by violence. Romans 13:3,4 adds to this. Exodus 21:12 adds — “He who strikes a
man so that he dies shall definitely be put to death.” Numbers 35:30 — “If
anyone murders a person, the murderer shall be put to death on the evidence of
witnesses (plural), however no person shall be put to death on the evidence of
one person.” The court of final appeal is found in Romans 12:19 — “Never take
your own revenge, instead give place to punishment from the justice of God, for
it stands written, ‘Punishment belongs to me, I will repay, says the Lord.’
That, of course, is to cool us down when we get hot-headed.
The last phrase of verse 10 becomes extremely
important to us because this is the only way we are ever going to put it
together. It should be translated, “In these circumstances” or “under these
circumstances.” It is the adverb of place, w(de,
and it is an adverb used as an idiom. It means “under these circumstances.”
Under the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. Next we have the
verb, the present active indicative of e)imi,
the verb to be, “in these circumstances a personal sense of destiny is,”
present linear aktionsart, is and always will be. What is a personal sense of
destiny in the time of the devil’s desperation, the last half of the
Tribulation? What is a personal sense of destiny in the time that we are facing
in the near future, historical disaster? In these circumstances a personal sense
of destiny is. And then we have the
predicate nominative u(pomonh. The personal sense of
destiny, the active voice of e)imi, produces the action of the
verb. The indicative mood is a declarative for the reality of a fact: in the
most adverse circumstances of life, in the worst circumstances of life, whether
it is a personal disaster, a national disaster, a global disaster, you can have
a personal sense of destiny, you can have confidence in God, you can have
courage toward man and circumstances. You don’t have to fall apart, become
emotional, become irrational, or have a nervous breakdown. You can face up, and
that is what we have in the last part of this verse. What is u(pomonh? It means endurance, fortitude, steadfastness,
perseverance. This is a technical reference to the function of the three stages
of the faith-rest drill.
Then we have the connective conjunction kai and the predicate nominative from the noun pistij. Ordinarily pistij means faith. Actually it has three meanings. In the
active sense means trust, confidence, faith. In the attributive sense it means
that which causes faith or trust — faithfulness or reliability. In the passive
sense it means what is believed, hence it means doctrine, the body of faith.
Number three is the one that is used here. The possessive genitive of a(gioj follows, “the doctrine of [belonging to] the saints
[believers].”
“under these circumstances, a personal sense of
destiny, is [the function of the faith-rest drill] the steadfastness, the
constant courage, and the doctrine belonging to the saints.”
There is your personal sense of destiny: the
doctrine you have learned. The only way to approach the coming disaster is to
take in doctrine consistently every day. That is the only answer; that is the
only hope.
Translation: “If anyone [those who use unlawful
violence] leads others into captivity he will go into captivity: if anyone
[those who use unlawful violence] shall kill with the sword he must be killed
with the sword. In these circumstances a personal sense of destiny is the
fortitude, the steadfastness, and the doctrine belonging to the saints.”
We are now about to study a Jewish dictator who is
contemporary with the dictator of the revived Roman empire. The Jewish dictator
is not a military genius but he is, however, a political genius and a religious
leader passing himself off as Messiah. Like the first dictator we have studied
there is a time limitation on this man’s power, the last three and a half years
of the Tribulation.
We begin verse 11 with the conjunction kai in the Greek. Here it is the sequential use of the
conjunction and is correctly translated “then” instead of “and.” With this we
have the aorist active indicative of the verb o(raw
which means to see, “Then I saw.” And with this we have the accusative neuter
singular direct object from several words, first of all the adjective a)lloj, meaning another of the same kind of dictator. He
is not different from the first. There are some minor differences: the first
dictator we studied, the dictator of the revived Roman empire is a Gentile;
this dictator is a Jew. Outside of that he has the same profile that we have
noted in the first dictator. The noun is the same that describes this dictator
as the last one, qhrion, which means beast
dictator, someone who has no true morality, no honour, no integrity, no sense
of responsibility, no virtue, functioning as a dictator.
The verb o(raw in the constative aorist
represents an additional vision. The active voice: it is the apostle John who
produces the action of the verb. “Then I saw another beast dictator.” This is
Satan’s slave, the Jewish dictator of the nation Israel in the last half of the
Tribulation, the time of the devil’s desperation.
Next we have a present active participle from the
verb a)nabainw which means to come up, to
rise to power actually, “Then I saw another beats dictator who rises to power.”
The pictorial present tense brings into focus a picture of the events in the
process of occurrence. This is an eschatological passage but it is used in the
grammatical sense of the pictorial present. The active voice: the Jewish
dictator of the last half of the Tribulation produces the action. The
participle is circumstantial.
We have with this a prepositional phrase which is
mistranslated, e)k plus the ablative of source
from the noun gh, “out
from the land,” the land of Israel. This Jewish dictator in the last half of
the Tribulation reaches the peak of his power during the eschatology of the
devil’s desperation. His modus operandi is recorded in greater detail in Daniel
11:36-39.
“Then the king [the Jewish dictator] will do
according to his own will [this is an absolute dictatorship], and he will both
exalt and glorify himself above every god [this is the character of the
dictator as the false prophet Revelation 16:13; 19:20], furthermore he will
speak blasphemous things against the God of gods [Jesus Christ as the God of
Israel]; consequently he will be successful until the Tribulation has been
completed, for what has been decreed [in eternity past] will be accomplished
[in time].
“Furthermore he will not understand the God of his
fathers [he will not understand the Lord Jesus Christ], nor does he have any
desire for women, nor does he recognise any god [he is an atheist]; for he will
glorify himself above all.
“Nevertheless he will give honour [a treaty
recognition] to the god of fortified cities [the dictator of the revived Roman
empire] …
“Furthermore he will construct a system of defensive
fortification with the help of this foreign god [the dictator of the revived
Roman empire]; to those who acknowledge him [the worship of the Jewish dictator
as Messiah] he will enrich them with great wealth, and he will cause them to
rule over the many [the Jews], and he will distribute the land for a profit
[price].”
The Messiah when He comes is going to distribute the
land according to tribes. The false Messiah distributes the land according to
price — whoever pays him the most.
In Revelation 13:11 he is called “another beast
dictator.” “Then I saw another beast dictator who rises to power from the land
[Israel].” The first thing we notice about this man is not his military genius
but the fact that he, too, is a religious genius. Remember that religion is the
devil’s ace trump and that religion is the source of all evil. Religion is one
of the ways in which Satan rules and administers the rulership of his world. So
we have again the connective conjunction kai,
translated “and,” plus the perfect active indicative of the verb e)xw, “and he had.”
Then we have the accusative plural direct object
from the noun keraj with the adjective numeral duw, “two horns.” Then the accusative neuter plural from
o(moioj sets up a comparison,
“like,” plus the dative of person or thing, a)rnion, “like the Lamb,” a)rnion referring to our Lord Jesus
Christ. In Revelation 5:6 we noted that Jesus as the Messiah is the Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world, and He is said to have seven horns. We
noted there that the Lamb was the Lord Jesus Christ controlling history. The
lamb with two horns is a dictator controlling a very simple empire in the
Tribulation. Since the horn symbolises human power and authority the two horns
of the lamb represent the civil and the religious power of this Jewish
dictator. He is the lamb with two horns. He is said to rise to power from the
lamb, “and he had to horns like a lamb.” In Revelation 5:6 in contrast Jesus
Christ, the true Messiah is said to have been killed as a sacrifice and He is
now said to be standing in the middle of the throne with the four angelic
heralds, and in the middle of the angelic staff He had seven horns. These seven
horns include, first of all Jesus Christ controlling history. He controlled
history in seven ways: the age of positive volition in the garden of Eden; the
age of negative volition, from the fall of man to the fall of Babylon, the
first United Nations; the dispensation of nationalism, the period of Gentile
nations; the dispensation of Israel; the Church Age; the Tribulation; the
Millennium. That adds up to His seven horns; Jesus Christ controls history.
The two horns of the Jewish dictator, again,
represent his function as false Messiah over Judaism and as dictator over
Israel. Translation: “Then I saw another beast dictator who rises to power from
the land; and he had two horns like a lamb.” In passing himself off as Messiah
to Israel this dictator is able to explain to us several passage of scripture.
Genesis 49:16, Why doesn’t Dan have representation
among Jewish evangelists in the Tribulation? “Dan shall rule his people,” the
dictator of Israel in the Tribulation is from the tribe of Dan. Dan is very
apostate during this period, “as one of the tribes of Israel,” this explains
why Dan is omitted from the list of Revelation chapter seven. Dan is also
omitted from the genealogy of 1 Chronicles chapters 2-10. Dan was the first
tribe to become involved in idolatry — Judges 18:30, and the last tribe to
recover their inheritance in Joshua 19:47-49. So Dan is famous for apostasy and
out of the tribe of Dan comes the dictator we are studying.
Verse 17, “Dan shall be a serpent on the road, a
viper along the path, that strikes the horse’s heels,” the horse is Israel in
the Tribulation, “so that the rider tumbles backwards,” the rider is Jewish
believers living in Israel during the last half of the Tribulation.
Verse 18 is the cry of Jewish believers living in
Israel during the last half of the Tribulation, “O Lord, I wait for your
deliverance.” That will be their constant prayer.
The Jewish dictator, then, comes from the tribe of
Dan which is famous for its apostasy in the past and infamous for its apostasy
in the Tribulation. Religion is always the worst persecutor of true believers.
Satan, the author of religion, uses this instrument in the hands of this
dictator to neutralise and destroy Jewish believers in the Tribulation.
Matthew 24:21, one horn is the political power of
Dan as we have noted in Genesis, the other horn of the dictator is here in
verses 21-27.
“For at that time [the last half of the Tribulation]
there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning
of human history [the kosmoj], nor ever will occur. And
unless those days [the time of the devil’s desperation] had been cut short, no
human life would have been delivered; but for the sake of the elect to
privilege [Jews who are believers and alive at the second advent] those days shall
be cut short. At that time [after the born-again Jews have reached the high
desert country in the middle of the Tribulation] if anyone says to you [during
the last half of the Tribulation], ‘Behold, here is the Messiah,’ [believers
have to come to the point in time of disaster where they can distinguish
between what is true and what is false] or ‘There is the Messiah’, do not
believe that person.”
In other words, people who teach what is false must
not be believed. How can you tell the difference? Maximum perception of Bible
doctrine gives the ability to distinguish the true from the false. Those who
fail to learn doctrine will be deceived. How can these people tell that Messiah
has not come? They know all of the signs of the second advent, including the
fact that the entire earth will be covered with a great light, “Behold, every
eye shall see Him.” That is one of seven biblical concepts by which they can
tell. Failure to understand that particular point of eschatology means that
they will be martyred for their stupidity.
“For many false Christs and also false prophets will
appear and will show great miracles and extra-natural phenomena.” If there is
anything that impresses the believer who is negative toward doctrine it is a
miracle. It is something he can’t explain and he is always impressed by
something he can’t explain instead of being impressed by what is easy to
understand in Bible doctrine. So there will be very emotional people and they
will be impressed by the miracles, “to deceive, even the elected to privilege
[Jewish believers living in that place of refuge in the mountains of Edom, Moab,
and Ammon], if that were possible,” third class condition: whether it is
possible or not depends entirely on whether the believers have enough doctrine
or not.
“Behold, I have told you in advance.” In other
words, they are to understand the eschatology because eschatology prepares for
future events.
“Consequently, if they shall say to you, ‘Behold,
there he is out in the desert,’ do not go [do not leave your place of refuge],
or ‘Behold, here he is in one of the inner rooms,’ do not believe that
propaganda.” Why? You will know when Christ returns.
“For just as lightning comes from the east, and
flashes to the west, so the coming of the Son of Man will be.”
Just as
lightning can be seen by all, so also everyone will see the second advent —
Revelation 1:7. Furthermore, the second advent, like lightning, will occur
quickly, according to Revelation 22:7, 12. In other words, there is no excuse
for believers who are saved in the first part of the Tribulation and who have
used the faith-rest drill to be lured out by propaganda. This dictator has two
horns. One horn is his great civil ability, his other horn is his great
religious leadership. In historical crisis God has always provided a way of
escape. In the first half of the Tribulation believers have escaped to Edom, Moab,
and Ammon; they are up there in the high ground and they are there because they
have utilised the three stages of the faith-rest drill. In the third stage they
have made the proper conclusion. But being there for another three and a half
years people have a tendency to become bored once they have succeeded in the
crisis, and they fail to realise that you must keep going with doctrine and
that you are going to be tested. So these people become a little lazy about
doctrine, a little indifferent, and they get bored. Along comes someone who
says that Christ has returned, and that they should come down. If they come
down they will be captured and martyred, and so in order to avoid that they are
warned: ‘Learn to distinguish what is true [Bible doctrine] from what is
false.’ And you can’t do it unless you are prepared by day-by-day-by-day
perception of Bible doctrine. You never know what portion of the Word of God is
going to be important to you. One slip into the cosmic system and believers
will succumb to the propaganda of the Jewish dictator, and these are the ones who
are martyred in the last half of the Tribulation.
The principle that must be emphasised: No believer
can think or discern beyond the inventory of his ideas. Therefore the daily
perception of doctrine will provide for us the necessary inventory of ideas so
that we can be winners both in personal and in historical disaster. We are
limited in the application of doctrine: we cannot apply what we do not know.
People think in terms of their inventory of ideas, therefore the importance of
Bible doctrine resident in the soul to provide the right inventory and to fill
up all of those shelves with application for every situation and circumstance
in life, whether prosperity or disaster.
At the end of verse 11 we have Satan getting into
the picture because this servant of the devil, this dictator, has the rhetoric
of Satan. We have the conjunction kai which has an adversative
connotation here. Therefore we translate it “but” instead of the usual “and.”
With this we have the imperfect active indicative of the verb lalew. It means to speak in a flowing manner and is used
here for the connotation of eloquence. Ordinarily the imperfect tense denotes
linear aktionsart in past time. The imperfect differs from the aorist in
representing a process rather than a simple event. The imperfect differs also
from the perfect tense in that it represents a process but has no connotation
of the completion of that process. The imperfect fails to imply the attainment
of the end to which the progress is made. This is therefore called an inceptive
imperfect, denoting the beginning of the process or, as in the case of
eschatology, an action on the point of occurring. The active voice: the
dictator of the Jewish nation is another one of those great public speakers of
the Tribulation. Along with the first dictator he has tremendous skill in the
field of communication of ideas. The indicative mood is declarative for the
reality of the dictator’s Satanic rhetoric in the future.
With this we have the comparative particle o(j, translated “like,” and with it the appositional
nominative from drakwn, “dragon,” and dragon
refers to Satan. Translation: “but he kept speaking like the dragon.” Total
cosmic involvement gave this Jewish dictator the genius of Satan in
communicating his ideas. His ideas are false, he is locked into the cosmic
system. As an unbeliever this Jewish dictator is the recipient of both demon
influence and demon possession in the cosmic system, therefore he is a
brilliant salesman of the Satanic plan.
Again, the principle that we want to remember is
that no one can think beyond the inventory of his ideas. Only the daily
perception of doctrine will provide the necessary inventory of ideas to cope
with both personal and historical disaster. Therefore the importance of Bible
doctrine to provide that inventory so that we can be winners in time of
historical disaster.
Principle: no believer can think beyond the
inventory of his ideas
This is true of people in general. When people are
working in a certain kind of business, in a certain kind of profession, in any
kind of an organisation, no one has the capacity to think beyond the inventory
of his ideas. If the idea isn’t there, the thought is not there; if the thought
is not there, the ability is not there. This is why we see people get promoted
beyond their capacity. But we want to apply the principle specifically to the
believer.
1. When the believer is faced with personal or
historical disaster he must be able to cope with the problem or problems from
his own personal inventory. No believer should be dependant on others when it
comes to personal or historical disaster. This does not mean he will not
receive encouragement from others but the point is that in disaster you
yourself as an individual are isolated. When the believer has faithfully taken
in doctrine and added to his inventory and passed all of his tests he has a
full inventory when he moves into disaster; and there is nothing that he cannot
handle, he is totally and completely spiritually self-sustaining. He has
prepared himself by good decisions from a position of strength.
2. No one solves his problems by relying on the
inventory of someone else’s ideas. You may take some good advice and have an
immediate solution because you took that advice, but it was someone else’s
advice, it was not your application of doctrine. Therefore you did not gain any
strength from it, only the person who gave you good advice. Of course, if the
person gives you bad advice then they are in trouble with you.
3. Therefore the necessity for maintaining a large
personal inventory of doctrinal principles, categories and rationales for every
situation in life — including happiness.
4. Only the daily perception of doctrine will
accumulate the necessary inventory of ideas by which we can cope with personal
and historical disaster.
5. The winner in disaster can make the right
application of doctrine to his circumstances. That is because in time of
prosperity he has been consistent in the accumulation of a large inventory of
Bible doctrine. Therefore he makes right decisions from a position of strength,
he maintains control of his own life in disaster, and even in the worst of
historical disasters he has a personal sense of destiny.
Verse 12, the forum and religious policies of this
Jewish dictator. We have the emphatic use of the conjunction kai translated “In fact.” With this we have the present
active indicative of the verb poiew, which
we will translate here “exercises.” The reason for that translation is the
accusative singular direct object of e)cousia, he “exercises authority.”
The present tense is a perfective present, it denotes a continuation of
existing results from the treaty between the revived Roman empire and the state
of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation. Here it denotes a fact which has
come to be in the past but is emphasised as a present reality. The active
voice: the dictator of Israel in the Tribulation produces the action. The
indicative mood is declarative for the future eschatological reality of the
exercise of great power on the part of the Jewish dictator as the result of his
treaty with the revived Roman empire.
The dictator now feels strong. Before he was very
weak because he realised the four spheres of influence were about to destroy
him, he couldn’t hold out against them. But as soon as he has a treaty he feels
strong, he has depended upon the help of a foreign power.
Next we have a possessive genitive from three Greek
words: the definite article tou, followed by prwtoj, followed by qhrion,
“the first beast dictator,” the Gentile dictator of the revived Roman empire.
one adjective comes next in the Greek that modifies e)cousia, and that is paj, “all.”
“in fact he
[the Jewish dictator] exercises all the authority of the first beast dictator,”
which means that in the last half of the Tribulation there is a definite treaty
between the state of Israel and the revived Roman empire.
Then there is another phrase, an improper
preposition, e)nwpion plus the intensive pronoun a)utoj, “in place of him” or “on
his behalf.” This indicates an alliance between the Gentile dictator of the
revived Roman empire and the Jewish dictator of the state of Israel during the
time of the devil’s desperation.
In his foreign policy, then, the Jewish dictator
makes an alliance with this prophetical Roman empire and he exercise all of the
authority [religious] of the Roman dictator in the function of that large and
great ecumenical religious system. The basis of the treaty, then, between this
revived Roman empire and the state of Israel is religion, the ecumenical
religious system, and under the provision of the treaty the state of Israel
adopts ecumenical religion as its system. That means that traditional Judaism
in Jerusalem has to be set aside and there in the temple in Jerusalem the great
statue of the dictator is set up that is called the abomination of desolation —
the signal for believers of the first half of the Tribulation to get out and
into the mountains of Edom, Moab and Ammon where they will be safe unless they
listen to some of the propaganda. The Jews who have a good inventory of
doctrinal concepts obey the command. There will also be some emotional
believers who will decide to stay and fight. All Jewish believers who disobey
this command will be killed. Again you see the principle: you must have a good
inventory of ideas; you must have doctrine and you must be able to rightly
divide the Word of truth. That stability, therefore, becomes one of the great
characteristics of the believer who has a maximum inventory of ideas through
the daily intake of doctrine.
The cosmic system is also designed to make the
believer fanatical. This is one of the greatest problems with believers, they
become totally and completely fanatical and in this way they ape every
characteristic of dictatorship that we are studying. The fanatical believer is
only different from the evil dictator in degree, otherwise there is no
difference between a fanatical arrogant believer and any dictator that has ever
lived. Fanaticism is defined as zeal without knowledge, no inventory of ideas.
The believer cannot think, again, beyond his inventory. Fanaticism by-passes or
ignores the principle of virtue-first. The fanatic has no virtue, only
arrogance. Hence, fanaticism is irresponsible arrogance without even the
motivational virtue of gate 5 or the functional virtue of gate 6 in the divine
system. Fanaticism is arrogant obsession with self minus doctrinal inculcation,
so that cosmic fanaticism and total obsession of self seems to characterise not
only the two dictators we are studying in this chapter but also believers
living in cosmic one.
We have noted the profile of the beast dictator. The
first beast dictator and the second beast dictator have a similar profile with
several exceptions. The first beast dictator, the dictator of the revived Roman
empire, is a military genius and he gains control of the revived Roman empire
in the last half of the Tribulation. He is also a political genius and a
religious genius. He also has the ability to appeal to the stupid. The stupid
are always impressed by miracles. The lower your inventory of truth the more
you are impressed by Satanic miracles and, of course, Satan is in the miracle
business. He communicates this function to his servants, special servants who
are in the public eye. Of course this is the appeal to emotionalism in the
masses.
We have noted that the majority of people never
control anything; we have noted that public opinion is almost totally
meaningless and can only bully the weak. But this also means that public
opinion is always impressed by what they cannot understand since they have no
inventory of truth. Miracles were performed in the Old Testament in times of
apostasy, like the apostate generation of the Exodus. Miracles were performed
by our Lord in a time of apostasy, the apostasy of Israel during the first
advent of Christ. Miracles are not a sign of power except in the function of
our Lord’s fourteen miracles which were given as a sign of His Messiahship.
People are always impressed by miracles because they are stupid, because they
are emotional, and therefore they have no inventory of Bible doctrine. Today
there is no gift of miracles, and yet we find many people in our generation
alleging to have the power of miracles. These people are making an allegation
which is not true and they are being used by Satan in the cosmic system. They
do perform acts of Satanic function and they are all designed with one thing in
mind: to keep you as a believer from having an inventory of Bible doctrine in
your soul. Those who worship power and idolise evil will never appreciate
freedom or have any capacity for happiness, and this not only includes the
dictators who rule countries today but it includes the dictator in the pew, the
arrogant born-again believer living in the cosmic system. When people do not
have truth or doctrine they are always impressed with the wrong things and they
always distort the truth.
We noted that the dictator of the revived Roman
empire had a dynamic in the field of verbal communication. So does our second
dictator. The ability to communicate, of course, is one of the most important
functions in life and the ability to communicate may mean the ability to
communicate truth or what is false — to be persuasive in either case. As far as
these dictators are concerned they communicate what is false to further
eliminate any inventory of Bible doctrine in the soul. Of course, one nice
thing about all human power is that it has a time limitation.
We have noted in the past that there is no power in
public opinion. Public opinion caters to the viewpoint of the majority and the
majority have no power or control in history. A careful study of history
indicates that it is always a well-organised minority that controls.
Illustration: The French revolution; the communist minority in the Russian
revolution; the Nazis were a minority in Germany. Public opinion always reacts
to these minorities but public opinion has no organisation, no power; public
opinion is news today and gone tomorrow. Public opinion has no power against
organised minorities and their depredation. Public opinion, therefore, can only
bully the weak and flatter the successful; it has no power with the communists,
for example, who ignore it.
One thing we have not brought together in the
profile of the dictators we are studying is the fact that the power of the
dictator prevents him from thinking beyond the inventory of his own ideas. The
corrupting influence of power not only erases the norms of divine establishment
and supersedes the standards of category #1 truth, the laws of divine
establishment, with some terrible use of power but it hinders the cosmic
dictator actually utilising any previous inventory of honourable principles
that he may have possessed in his lifetime. This is explains the conflict
between organised evil as represented in the dictatorship and disorganised evil
of free enterprise represented by crime, homosexuality and crusader arrogance.
While disorganised evil and degeneracy coexist together with Christianity
organised evil cannot tolerate Christianity even as organised evil does not
tolerate degeneracy. A careful study of history will see that this is often the
case. Remember also that morality can be just as much a part of degeneracy as
immorality. The key to degeneracy is the study of arrogance we have made, the
twelve gates of cosmic one.
We note in verse 12 that “he [the Jewish dictator
exercises all the authority [temporal and religious in Israel] of the first
beast dictator on his behalf, and he forces the land ...” He is going to force
upon them a new religious system. The basis for the treaty between the revived
Roman empire and the state of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation is
really ecumenical religion, and under the provision of the treaty the state of
Israel adopts this ecumenical system of the revived Roman empire.
At this time we must turn to Daniel chapter 12 to
see something of the repercussions of accepting this ecumenical religion.
Daniel 12:11, “And from the time [the middle of the
Tribulation] that the regular sacrifice is abolished.” One of the first things
that the dictator must do is to order the abolishing of the sacrifices where
the five categories of Levitical sacrifices are offered, speaking of the
doctrines of propitiation, unlimited atonement, the various categories of soteriology
and the basis for the rebound technique. Those sacrifices are offered in the
Tribulation once the temple is reconstructed. Then the dictator suddenly
decides that no longer will animal sacrifices be offered. Animal sacrifices. of
course, were merely a way of teaching the doctrines of Christology and soteriology
before the completion of the canon of scripture, “and the abomination of
desolation [a statue of the dictator of the revived Roman empire] is set up,
there will be then 1,290 days [the last three and a half years of the
Tribulation, the same as the 42 months of Revelation 13:5].”
The first 45 days of the Millennium are now brought
into focus in Daniel 12:12 — “How blessed [happy] is he [the Jewish believer in
the last half of the Tribulation who keeps waiting, the dynamic function of the
three stages of the faith-rest drill] and therefore attains [still lives]
during the 1,335 days!” The difference between the 1,335 days and the 1,290
days of the last half of the Tribulation is 45 days, so these are the 45 days
into the Millennium. At that time the Jewish believers will observe the first
feast of the Tabernacles which portrays the Millennium.
This celebration is actually described in Zechariah
14:16 — “Then it will come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations
that went up against Jerusalem [certain armies that attacked Jerusalem in the
Armageddon campaign] will go from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of
the armies, and to celebrate the feast of the Tabernacles.” (The feast of the
Tabernacles is described in Leviticus 23:33-43) While this verse emphasises
Gentile believers who survive the Tribulation and the baptism of fire of
Matthew 25 there are also Jewish believers who survive and they are mentioned
in Ezekiel 20:34-38. They are the ones who enjoy those extra 45 days which were
mentioned in Daniel 12:12.
Returning to Revelation 13:12 we note the religious
policy of the dictator of the revived Roman empire. So far in our passage: “In
fact he [the Jewish dictator] exercises all the authority [both temporal and
religious in Israel] of the first dictator on his behalf ...”
We resume with a connective conjunction kai, translated “and” or “then.” Next is the present
active indicative of the verb poiew. Generally poiew means to do, to make, to manufacture. Here it means
to force. The present tense is a perfective present, it denotes the
continuation of existing results. It denotes the abuse of this power. Dictators
generally are non-enlightened, they abuse their power. Very few men in history
have had that much power without abusing it. The active voice is a causative
active voice and that it where we get the translation “he forces.” The
indicative mood is potential indicating a status or condition.
Next we have the accusative singular direct object
from the noun gh, referring here to the land
of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation, “and he forces the land.” This
is part of the double accusative direct object of personal and impersonal
object. Next is an articular present active participle from the verb katoikew which means to reside or to be a citizen, referring
to the citizens of the land, “then he forces the land and those who reside in
it.” The definite article in the accusative plural is used as a direct object
and as a demonstrative pronoun. It refers to the citizens living in the future
in the state of Israel. The descriptive present tense is for the citizenship
now performing an action, they are being acted upon by the abuse of power. The
active voice: the Jews living in Israel are going to be the subject of the
action. They produce the action of being citizens in a dictatorship and
citizens in a dictatorship have restricted freedom or no freedom, depending
upon their compliance to the policies of the dictator. In other words, the
dictator is using and abusing his power with regard to the citizens of the
state of Israel in the future. The participle is circumstantial. With this we
have a prepositional phrase, en plus
the locative of a)utoj, “in it,” “and those who
reside in it [the state of Israel].”
Next we have the purpose clause. We have the
conjunction i(na to introduce a semi-final
purpose clause. A semi-final purpose clause denotes the direction of the action
in the main verb to a given result which is sought for or anticipated. It is
sought for in this case. The dictator is trying to use his power to force
people to worship in the ecumenical religious system of the revived Roman
empire.
There is a principle here: No one can force you to
worship apart from your own free will. The key to worship is volition, free
will. You have the right to accept or reject what is taught, you have the right
to worship or not to worship, you have the right to choose to serve under the
Lord’s divine system [the divine dynasphere] or not. You must have, of course,
privacy for all of this. The major principle is your personal freedom. If you
are ever going to be spiritually self-sustaining you must make your own
decisions from a position of strength. You must have a personal control of your
life and a personal sense of destiny, and you cannot do that unless you have
your privacy.
This beast dictator comes along and he says that all
religions in the state of Israel are wiped out. That would include the cultural
religion which is Judaism. Today Judaism is a cultural religion. Why? Because
they have ritual without reality. There will also be certain Jews who have
personally accepted Christ as saviour, they are evangelised as we have seen in
Revelation chapter seven and we will get additional information in chapter
fourteen. And then there are a certain number of other religions. There is a
religious tolerance until this treaty with the dictator of the revived Roman
empire when everyone must then conform to the ecumenical religious system of
the dictator. Everyone will come in and bow down in the temple to what the
Bible calls “the abomination of desolation.”
And so the subject then, “and that they should
worship”, the future active indicative of the verb proskunew. Notice that worship follows force. Any time that any church, any
group, any organisation, demands that you must believe this or else is out of
line. The truth must be communicated but you have the option of accepting or
rejecting that truth. No one has the right to force you and when people are
forced to accept the truth then you have organised evil, you no longer have the
function of freedom. The whole purpose of Christianity is to foster freedom and
Christianity actually says a person can accept or reject Christ and that it is
a person’s personal business. If a person accepts Christ he must always keep
his doctrine straight and never confuse Christianity with the state. The state
must always be separate from Christianity. Therefore Christians have no right
to enter into civil disobedience, “Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” It must be recognised that
everyone has a right to be wrong and everyone has a right to be right; everyone
has a right to choose for themselves, in fact they must choose for themselves.
We are studying dictatorship in terms that say no, you cannot. Occasionally,
there are enlightened dictators who are different, like Frederick the Great who
even set up an officer’s code for the army which demanded that cognisance be
given to the claims of Christ on the life and that all virtue in the military
must be directly related to the principles of Bible doctrine in the scriptures.
He didn’t demand that his officers accept Christ as saviour but this was the standard.
He also despised socialism in any form. Frederick the Great understood freedom
and said it was the motivation for everything in life.
Now we have anti-freedom with these two dictators in
this purpose clause, “In fact he [the Jewish dictator] exercises all the
authority of the first dictator on his behalf, then he forces the land [Israel]
and those who reside in it to worship the first beast dictator.” This is the
accusative singular direct object of the adjective prwtoj
and the noun qhrion.
Then we have Israel becoming a centre of ecumenical
religion. We have a descriptive genitive singular from two words: the relative
pronoun o(j and a)utoj, “who of him,” but translated correctly into
English by combining these words to read “whose.” Then we have the nominative
singular subject plhgh, which is not a wound as
such although it can be translated “a mortal wound”; it means a death stroke, a
fatal wound. The stroke of death, qanatoj, is a part of the noun and
the word formation and it is literally the stroke of death but it means the
fatal wound. It is an idiom and is a reference to the historical destruction of
the old Roman empire in 476 AD, the administration of the fifth cycle of discipline to Rome as the
first Gentile nation to God. And then we have the aorist passive indicative of
the noun qerapeuw which means to heal, “the
fatal wound was healed.” The constative aorist tense views the revival of the
Roman empire in the Tribulation in its entirety. The passive voice: the
historical Roman empire of the past receives the action of the verb as a
prophetic empire in the future. The indicative mood is declarative for the
historical trend of the Tribulation presented in the form of eschatological
doctrine.
Translation of verse 12 — “In fact he [the dictator
of the Jewish state in the Tribulation] exercises all of the authority of the
first dictator [the Gentile dictator of the revived Roman empire] on his
behalf, then he [the Jewish dictator] forces the land [Israel] and those who
reside in it to worship the first beast dictator whose fatal wound [fall of the
historical Roman empire] was healed [the revival of the Roman empire in the
Tribulation].”
Once you begin to learn Bible doctrine you begin to
develop an inventory of ideas, and the sooner you do the sooner you will mature
and have the ability to discern, to be spiritually self-sustaining. When the
average person sees a miracle or what appears to be a miracle he immediately is
terribly impressed and immediately assumes some great ability to the one who performs
it, and he even adheres to and believes anything that the one who performs the
miracle has to say. This has been the system for religion throughout the
centuries. The reason that people are impressed by the superficial, the stupid,
and the idiotic is because they have no inventory of ideas and cannot think in
terms of principle. No inventory means that you are going to be very emotional,
very stupid, very unhappy, and you will never be able to understand what is
going on and will be a loser all of your life. That is exactly what is going to
happen to a lot of believers and unbelievers in the Tribulation.
In verse 13 we have the amplification of the
religious modus operandi of the Jewish dictator and the function of miracles is
the title of the verse. In the King James version is says, “And he doeth great
wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight
of men.”
This evil man, this dictator, this representative of
Satan, is performing extra-natural phenomena, miracles, and a lot of people are
impressed. With unbelievers you would expect it; with believers you wonder why.
Just because someone performs a miracle it doesn’t mean that it has anything to
do with the truth. The sooner you are able to think in terms of truth, the
sooner you have an inventory of ideas related to truth, i.e. doctrine, the
sooner you will be spiritually self-sustaining, discerning, and have the
ability to see that a miracle in itself is utterly and totally meaningless. It
is an amazing fact that while the Jews have always been smart and some of the
greatest geniuses of all time, yet “the Jews seek a sign [miracle], the Greeks
seek wisdom.” Here are the smartest people in the world and they are always
looking for a miracle. They are seeking miracles; they are impressed with
miracles. If there is anything that neutralises inherent smartness and high IQ it is to look for miracles
rather than explanations related to truth and to Bible doctrine. In every age
of human history there are always a large number of suckers, idiots, imbeciles,
stupid people, born with high IQs but are taken in by miracles. A miracle means
nothing unless it is related to the truth. Our Lord performed miracles for one
reason: to demonstrate His Messiahship. It was a demonstration of who and what
He was and the purpose of our Lord’s miracles was to gain a hearing for His
message so that people would hear the truth. It is an amazing thing that every
nitwit in the world who comes up with a miracle always gets a gathering. The
first principle we note in verse 13 is that people are more impressed by what
they see than by what they think.
We start with the adjunctive use of the conjunction kai, translated “Furthermore.” Then the present active
indicative of poiew which means here to
perform, “Furthermore he [the Jewish dictator] performs.” With this we have the
accusative neuter plural direct object from two words: an adjective megaj and with that, shmeion, “great miracles.” These miracles are performed through the power and
the manipulation of Satan as the ruler of this world so that the masses of
people living in Israel and Jews throughout the world will actually believe
that this is the Messiah. To make a false Messiah appear like a real Messiah
requires miracles to deceive the people. People are always deceived by
miracles, even someone who promises them miracles — like politicians. Satan
produces the miracles to palm off the false prophet, the dictator of Israel, as
the false Messiah.
Then we have an illustration of his miracles. We start
with the conjunction i(na, generally used for a
purpose clause, but this is a most unusual use of a conjunction. It is used
here as a substitute for the explanatory infinitive. The infinitive cannot be
used without a demonstrative, therefore i(na
is substituted and it should be translated, “for example he even.”
Now we have our present active subjunctive in poiew meaning to cause, “he even causes.” The tendencial
present tense is used for an action which is purposed or attempted though it is
not actually taking place at the moment. It is eschatological, in other words.
We have the causative active voice for an action through an intermediary means.
Satan is the source; the dictator of Israel as the false Messiah is the means.
The subjunctive mood is potential implying a future reference, therefore we are
looking at an eschatological picture. Then we have the accusative singular
direct object from the noun pur, the word for fire, “for
example he may even cause [it doesn’t say that he will] fire.”
Here is where why we have i(na with the exegetical infinitive, the present active
infinitive of katabainw, “to come down.” This is a
pictorial present. The active voice: the dictator, passing himself of as the
Messiah, in other words deceiving people, produces the action of the verb. He
does it in the last half of the Tribulation when dupes are needed and being
enlisted by Satan. The infinitive is the infinitive of intended result, it
blends a purpose and a result, and since the result fulfils a deliberate
objective to deceive the people into thinking that the dictator is the Messiah
it means it is accomplished, there is one born every minute. Then the fire is
said to come down from heaven, from the sky, e)k
plus the ablative of o)uranoj.
This is one time it doesn’t mean heaven, it just means from the direction of
the sky. Then there is one more preposition, e)ij
plus the accusative of gh, “to the land” or “to the
earth.”
One other thing is necessary to complete the concept
of the miracle. We have three prepositional phrases in a row: the improper
preposition [an improper preposition is really an adverb used as a preposition]
e)nwpion plus a)nqrwpoj. A.T. Robertson, a famous Greek exegete in his day,
said that Elijah had called down fire from heaven, James and John had once even
urged Jesus to do this miracle in Luke 9, the idea being that this is an
imitation of that concept. This was obviously an attempt to use a little
one-upmanship against the two witnesses, Moses and Elijah. We studied this in
Revelation 11:5 where it says that fire shoots out of their mouth and it
destroys their enemies. Obviously, here, there is no attempt to portray the
truth, only to put down the truth. When the truth is being portrayed it is a
legitimate function and the whole objective is not to perform the miracle but
to get a hearing for the truth. Here it simply to destroy any hearing of the
truth.
The corrected translation: “Furthermore, he [the
Jewish dictator] performs great miracles, for example he may even cause fire to
come down from heaven to the earth in the presence of the people.”
Miracles minus doctrine are meaningless. Even worse,
they are deceptive. Miracles often manifest divine power but very infrequently
in the time in which we live. All too often they manifest the power of Satan
working through people involved in the cosmic system. And the principle that
must always be remembered: God never performs miracles to relieve suffering or
pain, otherwise God would provide miracles in every case of suffering or pain
and there would be no suffering or pain. Any miracle from God usually
alleviates suffering, but that isn’t its purpose. Jesus didn’t come to the
earth to alleviate suffering otherwise all the time He was on the earth no one
would have had any pain or suffering. Yet people came to Him suffering and in
pain. So it is obvious that our Lord did not perform miracles to alleviate
suffering, He performed miracles to call attention to His person and His
message. So God performed miracles in the past to give accreditation and hearing
to both the Old Testament prophets, the heralds of the first advent, our Lord
Jesus Christ, the apostles and prophets prior to the completion of the canon of
scripture. We do not live in the age of miracles. People looking for miracles
do not understand truth. Often they are merely emotional about their own
problems but not rational. Miracles today are being used by Satan himself.
Miracles
1. Miracles without truth are meaningless. They are
deceptive.
2. Miracles often manifest divine power. They were
so used in the past to accredit Moses as God’s messenger. (Satan was in the
court that day too, and he performed miracles through the Egyptian priests)
3. God never performs miracles to relieve suffering
or pain. His miracles do alleviate suffering but if He does it for you, why not
for thousands of others.
4. God performed miracles in the past for one
reason: accreditation. He performed miracles so that people would recognise
“this prophet is from God”. Elijah performed seven miracles; Elisha performed
fourteen because he asked for a double portion. Why did God permit Elijah to
perform miracles? So that people would listen to his message. It isn’t the
miracle, it is the message. Miracles do not form an inventory of ideas in your
soul. It is doctrine, it is the message that performs the inventory of ideas.
Our Lord, on one occasion, even delegated the seventy disciples, gave them the
power of miracles and said to them that if the people would not hear their message
(they will see the miracle) that they were to pick up their sandal, fill it
full of dust, shake it out and leave town. Why? Because they wouldn’t hear the
message. They would sit around all day and see the miracles. It is the message
that is important.
5. The purpose of these miracles in the past and
miracles in the Tribulation was so that a message could be given, to give Bible
doctrine a hearing, and to keep believers functioning in the plan of God. God
assumes that once you have it in writing, the Word of God, you are ready for
the fact that instead of miracles God intends for you to use your volition
today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day, because the whole purpose of life
and the secret to life is what you have in your soul: truth. We start out minus
truth in the frontal lobes of the soul and the purpose it to get that truth.
6. Satan performs miracles to distract people; our
Lord performed miracles to attract people to the doctrine. Satan performs
miracles to distract people from doctrine and to hinder the believer from
executing the plan of God. In other words, Satan performs miracles to
evangelise for the cosmic system. He doesn’t perform them directly, he performs
them through cosmic evangelists, believers and unbelievers in the cosmic
system.
7. Hence, it is not the miracle performed but the
content of the message that accompanies the miracle. If the message is Bible
doctrine the miracle is genuine but if the message promotes false doctrine or evangelisation
for the cosmic system the miracle is a distraction from Satan.
This leads us to the overall conclusion regarding
verse 13: People are more impressed by what they see than by what they know.
In verse 14 we have the resultant function of the
deception. We have the connective conjunction kai
again, “and.” With that we have i(na again plus the subjunctive,
the present active subjunctive of planaw, the key to miracles, the
purpose of miracles as far as Satan is concerned. It means to deceive. That is
the purpose for miracles. And who would be deceived by miracles? Someone who
had a very low inventory of ideas, someone who had no inventory of doctrine, no
inventory of truth. The customary present tense denotes what habitually occurs
when Satan begins to perform miracles through some human being. The active
voice: the human being in this case is the dictator of Israel in the last half
of the Tribulation; he produces the action; he produces the miracle. The
subjunctive mood is potential implying again an eschatological reference. The articular
present active participle of katoikew follows and it means those
who reside in the land. Here is a perfect case of where the participle is used
as a noun rather than as a verb. We translate it: “and so that he [the Jewish
dictator] might deceive the residence of the land. We have the preposition e)pi plus gh again and it refers to the
land of Israel. The residence of the land would be Jews living in the land of
Israel in the last half of the Tribulation.
Then we have another prepositional phrase, dia plus the accusative of shmeion which means miracles or signs, “because of the miracles,” and then the
accusative neuter plural from the relative pronoun o(j,
“which.” Another verb follows, the aorist passive indicative of didomi which means to give or to delegate, “which were
given.” The constative aorist tense contemplates the action of the verb in its
entirety. The passive voice: the dictator of the state of Israel receives the
action of the verb, the power to perform miracles. The indicative mood is
declarative, a statement of the origin or source of the miracles as the sign.
Then we have the dative singular indirect object from a)utoj, used as a personal pronoun, “to him.” In other
words, he was given this power to perform these miracles. Then, again, the aorist
active infinitive of poiew, meaning to perform. And.
again, the improper prepositional phrase e)nwpion plus qhrion, “in the presence of the
beast dictator.” In other words, the beast dictator of Israel performs these
miracles in the presence of the dictator of the revived Roman empire, which means
that sometime in the last half of the Tribulation after the signing of the
treaty the dictator of the revived Roman empire will travel to Jerusalem for
the opening of the new religion, the ecumenical system. When he does the
dictator of Israel will perform these miracles in his presence. Apparently
there will be opening ceremonies for suckers!
Translation: “And that he [the Jewish dictator]
might deceive the residence of the land [the purpose of miracles] because of
these miracles which were given to him in the presence of the beast dictator
[of the revived Roman empire].”
So in order to destroy Israel in the last half of
the Tribulation the Jews must be deceived by the two dictators: the dictator of
Israel through the performance of miracles is able to deceive many Jews as the
false prophet and the false Messiah; the dictator of the revived Roman empire
deceives the Jews through bringing ecumenical religion to the land. The
principle is: A deceived people are a fallen people; a deceived people are a degenerate
people. Remember that degeneracy has two categories — a moral degeneracy and an
immoral degeneracy — but whatever the category of degeneracy may be a deceived
nation is a fallen nation, a deceived nation is a degenerate nation. Only truth
or Bible doctrine can protect people as individuals or nations from nations
from self-destructive deception. Please notice that the deception is really
self-destructive. They stand there and watch the miracles; they go to see the
miracles; they are positive toward the miracles.
The greatest system of deception, therefore, is
religion: religion of cosmic two and the arrogance of cosmic one. When people
reject the truth or Bible doctrine they are vulnerable to deception. First they
get into cosmic one where they are preoccupied.
Problem: How are you going to get the Jews to
abandon their traditional Judaism? These are unbelieving Jews who are in ritual
without reality, and by the thousands in the middle east at that time their
traditional religion is Judaism, except for those who have personally accepted
Christ as saviour. The answer to that is found in 1 Corinthians where it says
that the Jews seek a miracle, the Greeks seek wisdom. It would take a miracle
in order to actually get them to abandon their traditional religious attitude
of Judaism, and that is exactly what happens. Satan empowers the dictator in
Jerusalem to start performing miracles and they are done in the name of this
dictator and in this way the Jews amalgamate their traditional Judaism with
ecumenical religion. Remember that the dictator in the revived Roman empire is
the head of ecumenical religion, so in order to destroy Israel in the last half
of the Tribulation the Jews must be deceived by both the Jewish and the Gentile
dictators. The dictator of Israel through the performance of these miracles is
able to deceive the Jews and cause them to abandon their traditional Judaism.
The mandate
of deception is given in the last part of verse 14, starting with the word
“saying,” the present active participle of the verb legw.
However, it is not going to be translated as in the King James version,
“saying,” because the circumstantial participle is best rendered into the
English by the conjunction “and” plus the finite verb, and we are going to
translate it, “and he kept saying.” The progressive present tense signifies
action in the state of persistence, present linear aktionsart. The active
voice: the dictator of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation passing
himself off as the Messiah, known also as the false prophet or Antichrist,
produces the action of the verb.
Next we have an articular present active participle
from the verb katoikew. This is a participle used
as a noun or a substantive, and it is a participle in the dative plural,
therefore the indirect object, “and he kept saying to the residents.” And then
we have e)pi plus gh, “upon the land” literally, but we translate it in
better English, “of the land [Israel].” We have next an aorist active
infinitive from the verb poiew which means here to manufacture,
“he kept urging the residents of the land to manufacture.” The aorist
infinitive denotes that which is eventual or particular in contrast to the
present infinitive, so it gathers into one entirety the many speeches that the
dictator made. This dictator is very successful because he can communicate.
Then we have the accusative plural direct object from e)ikon, referring to an idol. Then the dative of reference
from qhrion, “to manufacture an idol to
the beast dictator.”
“and he [the beast dictator] kept urging [mandating]
the residents of the land to manufacture an idol to the beast dictator.”
The mandate to Israel from the beast dictator who is
both the false prophet and the false Messiah is therefore related to idolatry
which is constantly prohibited by the Word of God. The mandate related to this
idolatry exposes the Jewish dictator not as the true Messiah but as a false
Messiah. This brings us, then, to the concept of idolatry in the future even as
we have noted it in the past.
Throughout the history of Israel as a client nation
to God they were constantly warned against idolatry. Idolatry is always related
to religion and idolatrous religion is always related to demon possession of
the unbeliever and demon influence of the believer. As stated in the next
verse, verse 15, idolatry is contact with demons, demon worship, and therefore
it is Satan worship. Idolatry is the subject of the first two commandments in
the decalogue. The first commandment prohibited mental idolatry, as illustrated
in Deuteronomy 5:6-7; the second commandment prohibited overt idolatry as per Deuteronomy
5:8-10. Because idolatry involves life in the cosmic system, reversionism, scar
tissue of the soul, all of the evils of the phallic cult, and it is often
called spiritual adultery. The analogy to idolatry and spiritual adultery is
found in Jeremiah 3:8-10; Ezekiel 16:23-43; 23:24-30; Revelation 17:1-5.
Idolatry, then, is the basis for becoming involved with demons. For the
unbeliever it is demon possession and demon influence; for the believer it is
demon influence only. This is why idolatry is called the devil’s communion
table in 1 Corinthians 10:19-21. Furthermore, idolatry is related to the
phallic cult in Ezekiel 22:3-18; 23:37-39.
The greatest motivation to evil in all of history is
religion. Religion motivates evil. Remember that Christianity is not a
religion. Religion also results, therefore, in great functional evil. We have
studied before the phallic cult and noted that the phallic cult produces both
idolatry and from that idolatry immorality. Immorality destroys freedom.
The ten commandments are not dealing with sin as
such, they are dealing with the principle of freedom. For example, the phallic
cult produced great immorality in Leviticus 18:3-25. Immorality is an attack
upon freedom, an attack upon the privacy of property, the rights of
individuals, the sacredness of human life. Immorality attacks every aspect of
freedom. Freedom and immorality simply cannot coexist. Furthermore, as we have
studied both organised and disorganised evil, when you have freedom you have
disorganised evil in two categories: immoral degeneracy and moral degeneracy.
Moral degeneracy is perhaps the most subtle of the two, it is self-righteous
arrogance, but both categories are involved in degeneracy. Degeneracy as a
system of evil always coexists with Christianity and whereas there may be
attacks on Christianity from time to time they are limited, it is not an
overall system of persecution. Christianity goes over into degeneracy and evangelises;
degeneracy under the cosmic system goes over to Christianity and does some
evangelising and born-again believers become involved in some form of moral or
immoral degeneracy. But all that is because of the existence of freedom.
Now, degeneracy and evil does something else.
Degeneracy finally becomes overpowering if you have too small a pivot in any
given generation when the pivot shrinks, and the expansion of degeneracy with
the immoral phase destroys freedom. The moral phase attacks freedom too. Self-righteous
people say you have to do it their way and they persecute you if you do not.
But eventually it knocks out freedom and inevitably on this structure of
degeneracy, both moral and immoral, comes the real enemy of Christianity:
organised evil. As long as you have disorganised evil you are free to say, I
accept it” or “I reject it.” Disorganised evil is something in which you do not
have to get involved, you still have the right to say yes or no. But once you
have organised evil all of that changes, you have no option. They are gone.
Degeneracy in the form of disorganised evil
eventually opens the door for the rise of a dictatorship, but in the meantime
as long as you have status quo of a client nation Christianity and disorganised
evil coexist and continue to coexist under the principle of freedom. It is
organised evil that will not tolerate either Christianity or degeneracy in
either of its forms. Organised evil always has its own facade of
self-righteousness and that facade will not tolerate the truth, in our case
Christianity; in the future, born-again believers, and it will not tolerate
degeneracy. One form of degeneracy is crime, and organised evil wipes out
crime, but it has its own crime. It doesn’t like competition. The Government
murders people as in Russia and in China, and other places; the Government
commits all the crime. That is organised evil and organised evil systematically
destroys anything that has a system of toleration related to it.
The phallic cult always includes immorality. It
includes demonism, Leviticus 20:6; it includes human sacrifice, Leviticus
20:1-5; it rejects establishment authority, Leviticus 20:9; it produces
degeneracy, Leviticus 20-10-23; it is related to idolatry and demonism and the
phallic cult, of course, promotes homosexuality, bestiality, incest, Deuteronomy
12:9-31. So there is a tremendous breakdown. In other words, when the Jews came
into the land for the first time and took over the land, the greatest warning
was against idolatry. Why idolatry? Because idolatry is a system that
amalgamates moral degeneracy with immoral degeneracy and once it amalgamates
the two then it establishes a dictatorship called organised evil. It takes over
disorganised evil and converts it to organised evil and at the same time maintains
a close contact with demonism. This is what destroyed the Canaanites. The land
of Canaan was once a great nation but it had been destroyed and the final
punishment of Canaan was the fact that the Jews came in and took over the land.
There were several exceptions. For example, the Philistines who were Greeks
came into that particular area and were left there as a test, as were the
Phoenicians. The Jews had a generation that failed the test and they took over
the same customs as the Canaanites, as the Phoenicians, as the Philistines, and
the result, of course, was devastating to them. Idolatry and the phallic cult
helped, then, to destroy Israel as a client nation to God and resulted in the
fifth cycle of discipline. This is the subject of many passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah
and Ezekiel.
This is what we have, then, so far in our passage:
“and that he [the Jewish dictator] might deceive the residents of the land [the
state of Israel in the last half of the Tribulation] because of the miracles,”
the Jews with all of their natural brilliance are impressed by miracles, “which
were given to him [Satan gives the power of miracles to this dictator] in the
presence of the beast dictator.” In other words, Satan honours the Gentile
dictator of the revived Roman empire as the leader of ecumenical religion, “and
he [the Jewish dictator] kept urging the residents of the land to manufacture
and idol to that beast dictator.”
That brings us now to our relative clause which
presents the historical and prophetic Roman empire. Once again we see the
historical Roman empire which is introduced by the nominative singular of the
relative pronoun o)j, and it will be translated
“who.” This introduces the historical Roman empire.
With this relative pronoun we have the present
active indicative of the verb e)xw. It is the historical
present, it views the past event with the vividness of a present occurrence.
The active voice: the historical Roman empire, the first Gentile client nation,
produces the action of the verb. This is a declarative indicative for the fall
of the historical Roman empire in AD 476. The accusative singular direct object of plhgh gives us the word that is going to be used to
indicate the fall of the Roman empire, and that is the death stroke or the
mortal wound, and then the descriptive genitive of the noun maxaira, “of the sword.” This is the Roman sword. The
Romans destroyed themselves. If the Barbarians had destroyed them then God the
Holy Spirit would not have permitted this vocabulary, maxaira. Instead we would have had r(omfaia, the Barbarian sword. The Romans destroyed
themselves, and it brings up the principle again: No nation is ever destroyed
by an outside nation, they merely come in and finish the job. A nation always
destroys itself by its own bad decisions.
While many tribes and Barbarians had been admitted
into the Roman empire as allies and had proved faithful defenders of the
frontiers it was the Visigoths who really started the ball rolling. By this
time the Romans had departed from category #1 truth, the laws of divine
establishment, and there was not a very large pivot of mature believers. And so
the Visigoths appeared on the Danube. When a client nation breaks up the
repercussions are terrible throughout the world and in the case of the Roman
empire there were terrible repercussions from the break-up of the client nation
to God. Masses of non-Germanic Barbarians began to invade the empire, some of
the wildest people in the world — the Slavs, the Huns, the Tartars, and others.
So this is the death stroke of the sword, “who had
the stroke of the sword.” This dictator is said to be related to the historical
Roman empire, “and has revived,” the aorist active indicative of the verb zaw, which means to live, and “has come to life” would
be a good translation. The culminative aorist tense views the revival of the
Roman empire in the Tribulation in its entirety but regards it from the
viewpoint of existing results, namely the basis for Satan’s decisions of
desperation in the last half of the Tribulation. The active voice: the revived
Roman empire of the Tribulation produces the action. The indicative mood is
declarative for the reality of this eschatological event in the Tribulation.
The revived Roman empire in the Tribulation will be composed of ten nations which
were formerly a part of the historical Roman empire. We will not be here to see
it because the Church will be removed by the Rapture. The Roman dictator
conquers three of the ten nations before the remaining seven surrender to his
power. The Roman dictator is also the religious leader of ecumenical religion
in the Tribulation and therefore the aorist active indicative refers to the
revived Roman empire.
Corrected translation of verses 13,14:
Verse 13, “Furthermore he [the Jewish dictator of
the state of Israel] performs great miracles. For example, he may even cause
fire to come down from heaven to the earth in the presence of the people [the
Jewish people in the state of Israel].
Verse 14, “And so that he [the Jewish dictator]
might deceive the residents of the land [the Jews living in Israel in the
Tribulation] because of the miracles which were given to him in the presence of
the beast dictator [the dictator of the revived Roman empire]: and the [the
Jewish dictator] keeps urging the residents of the land to manufacture an idol
[the abomination of desolation] to the beast dictator, who [the historical
Roman empire] had the stroke of death [the fall of the historical Roman
empire], and has revived [come to life, the revival of the Roman empire in the
Tribulation].”
In verse 15 we note first of all that the image is
related to demons and therefore a sign of demon power. We begin with the
sequential use of the conjunction kai, translated “Then,”
followed by the aorist passive indicative of the verb didomi, which means to give, to
bestow, or to delegate. The constative aorist tense contemplates the action of
the verb in its entirety. The passive voice: the Jewish dictator of the state
of Israel receives the action of the verb, the ability to perform a trick with
the statue known as the abomination of desolation, the statue of the dictator
of the revived Roman empire. The dative singular indirect object of a)utoj follows, an intensive pronoun used as a personal
pronoun, third person, because the personal pronoun from the Attic Greek was
not brought over. It is translated “to him,” referring to the Jewish dictator
of Israel. The ellipsis demands some word like e)cousia or dunamij, some word for power or
authority, “Then it was given to him [the Jewish dictator] the power.”
Next we have an aorist active infinitive of didomi again, same word repeated. It means here to
provide. The culminative aorist tense contemplates the action of the verb in
its entirety but regards it from the viewpoint of existing results: the
deception of the people. People who are negative to truth are easily deceived.
The active voice: the dictator of Israel during the Tribulation produces the
action of the verb. To sustain his false claim to Messiahship and to provide
worship for the Roman dictator he must, of course perform something that will
deceive the people. The infinitive of actual result is here and with this we
have the accusative singular direct object from pneuma,
meaning a spirit, not the Holy Spirit. Pneuma
has a number of interesting meanings. It originally meant “breath,” then it
came to mean “spirit.” Sometimes it is used for the Holy Spirit; sometime it is
used for life, since life and breathing are generally related in some way. Also
it is used here for a certain type of demon: it means an evil spirit, a demon. It also refers to a ventriloquist type demon
who controls the vocal cords of unbelievers when they are demon possessed and
this is the type we have in this passage.
This ventriloquist demon is first found in the Old
Testament under the Hebrew noun Ov
(long “O”). The ventriloquist demon could work in two ways, according to the
Old Testament scriptures. The voice could be thrown from out of the ground as
though the dead were speaking from their burial place, or the voice could be
thrown from the mouth of some individual who was demon-possessed. The Greeks
had a word for it and this same demon is called e)ggastrimuqoj, pronounced engasthrimuthos. So the ventriloquist demon is designated pneuma or spirit. The noun pneuma
does not always refer to demons but it does in Matthew 8:16; Mark 1:27; 6:7;
3:11; 5:13; Acts 5:16; 8:7; 1 Timothy 4:1.
The
ventriloquist demon is also associated with the gift of tongues. There is a
legitimate speaking in tongues on the part of unbelievers who are
demon-possessed by the e)ggastrimuqoj demon. When born-again
believers are speaking in tongues allegedly, they are faking it all the way.
When unbelievers are speaking in tongues there is no fakery there at all, the
demon is actually there and using the vocal cords of the unbeliever he
possesses. But whether it is a believer or unbeliever speaking in tongues it
all adds up to the same thing: no one has legitimately used the gift since
August of AD
70.
In Revelation 16:13, 14 we read, “And I saw from the
mouth of the dragon [Satan during the time of his desperation] and from the
mouth of the beast dictator [from his eloquent speech], and from the mouth
[eloquent speech} of the false prophet [the Jewish dictator], three unclean
spirits [ventriloquists, or e)ggastrimuqoj demons who control human
vocal cords] like frogs. For they [the demons] are the spirits of demons
performing miracles, who go out [as Satan’s ambassadors] to the kings of the
entire world [earth], to assemble them for that final war of the great day of God
the Almighty one.”
The Koine Greek however merely refers to the demon
as pneuma. “And it was given to him
[the Jewish dictator] the power to provide a spirit [ventriloquist demon]”. In
this case the spirit or demon is given to the idol known as the abomination of
desolation and mentioned in Daniel 11:31; 12:11; Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:15. The
idol is the image of the dictator of the revived Roman empire in the
Tribulation. The original and historical idol known as the abomination was the
statue of Antiochus Epiphanes put up in the temple in the time of the famous Maccabaean
war in BC 167
on the 25th of December. Up to that time 25 December did not have too much
significance.
With this we have the dative of reference of the
noun e)ikon, used for an idol or an
image (the abomination of desolation) and then a descriptive genitive from qhrion, the beast dictator. So we have the beginning of a
translation: “Then it was given to him [the Jewish dictator of the state of
Israel] the power to provide a demon spirit [ventriloquist demon] for the idol
of the beast dictator ...”
Mark 13:1, “And as he [our Lord Jesus Christ] was
leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Teacher, what massive
stones and what wonderful buildings!’ ”
Verse 2, “Then Jesus replied to him, ‘Do you see all
of these great buildings? Not one stone shall be left on top of another which
will not be torn down’.” The doctrine He has taught inside of that building is
permanent but the building itself is not. They were emphasising that which is
not going to last. This was fulfilled in August of AD 70.
Verse 3, “Later as he was sitting on the Mount of
Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew questioned him
privately,
Verse 4, “Tell us, when will these things happen
[the question is actually answered in Luke 21:20-24], and what will be the sign
when all of these things are going to be fulfilled?” The sign will be the
destruction of the temple, just as in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple, the sign
of the fifth cycle of discipline. The disciples are still interested in signs,
not in doctrine. All of that will change, however.
Verse 5, “The Jesus began to teach them [He warns
them first], ‘Beware that no one misleads you’.”
Verse 6, “ ‘Many will come in my name, alleging, “I
am he [Messiah]!” and will deceive many more’.” In other words, there is a
sucker born every minute and people who reject truth are always deceived. In
the Tribulation they will be deceived because there will be a statue in the
temple which will start talking. The nitwits will believe it.
Verse 7, “ ‘And when you hear of wars and rumours of
wars, do not be frightened; for these things [historical trends] must occur;
but that is not the end [“end” is a technical word for the Tribulation]’.”
Verse 8, begins the historical trends of the Church
Age: “ ‘For nation will rise up against
nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various
places; also famines. These things are the beginning of birth pangs [the
holocaust pregnancy, historical disaster]’.”
Verse 9,
the Tribulation begins: “ ‘But you must be on your guard [when the Tribulation
begins]; for they will deliver you over to the Sanhedrin [the Jewish courts of
the Tribulation], and you [Jewish believers] will be flogged in the synagogues,
and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, as a testimony to
them’.”
Verse 10, “ ‘And the gospel must first be preached
to all nations [grace before judgment, the evangelism of the Tribulation]’.”
Verse 11, “ ‘And when they arrest you and bring you
to trial, do not worry ahead of time about what you will say, but communicate
whatever is given to you in that hour; for it is not what you say but the Holy
Spirit [who teaches what you say extemporaneously]’.”
Verse 12, “ ‘And brother betray brother to death,
and a father his child; and children will rebel against their parents and cause
them to be executed’.”
Verse 13, “ ‘And because of me you will be hated,
but he who stands fast to the end [of the Tribulation] will be delivered [by
the second advent]’.”
Verse 14,
the middle of the Tribulation: “ ‘And when you see the abomination of
desolation standing where it should not be [in the holy of holies of the temple
in Jerusalem] (let the student understand)’.” Being a student is more than
learning, being a student demands application of what you learn, “ ‘then let
those who are in Judea [the first segment of believers saved in the first three
and a half years of the Tribulation] flee to the mountains [Edom, Moab and Ammon]’.”
Verse 15, “ ‘Furthermore let him who is on the roof
of his house not go down, or enter in [to his house], to get anything out of
it;”
Verse 16, “and let him who is in the field not turn
back to get his coat.”
Verse 17, “But woe to those who are pregnant and
those who are nursing babies in those days!”
Verse 18, “But pray that it will not occur in the
winter,” extreme weather.
Verse 19, “For those days [the last half of the
Tribulation] will be tribulation [historical disaster and holocaust] such as
has not occurred since the beginning of creation which God created, until now,
and never shall be.”
Verse 20, “And unless the Lord [Jesus Christ who
controls history] had shortened those days [the last half of the Tribulation]
no person would have been delivered; but for the sake of the elected to
privilege whom he has chosen, he shortened those days [so that believers will
be alive at the second advent].”
Next: Warning to the Jewish believers of the first
half of the Tribulation who have fled to the high desert country is now
apropos. So beginning in verse 21, what about those who fled?
Verse 21, “And at that time [the last half of the
Tribulation] if anyone says to you, ‘Behold, here is the Messiah’; or ‘Behold,
he there’; do not believe him;
Verse 22, “for false Christs and false prophets will
appear on the scene, and will perform signs and miracles, to deceive the elect,
if that were possible” — third class condition meaning some will be deceived.
That means that once they hit the high desert country they cannot neglect their
doctrine. It must be kept current for application.
Verse 23, “But be alert; behold, I have told you
everything in advance,” no excuse.
Verse 24, “But in those days, after that
tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,
Verse 25, “and the stars will be falling from
heaven, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken.”
Verse 26, “And then they shall see the Son of Man
coming in clouds with great power and glory.”
Verse 27, the regathering of Israel: “And then he
will send forth the angels, and will gather together his elect to privilege
[born-again Jews] from the four winds of heaven [the four weather areas], from
the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven,” the farthest end
of the earth: living Jews will be regathered; the farthest end of heaven: the
resurrection of Old Testament Jews who have believed in Christ.
That brings us now to the demon function of the
image in Revelation 13:15. It begins with the conjunction i(na introducing a final purpose clause which expresses
a distinct objective or purpose conceived of as the aim or action indicated in
the main verb. The objective is stated in two verbs, speaking and manipulating
through an apparent miracle to gain control of human volition — tantamount, of
course, to Satan worship through ecumenical religion. We translate it “so
that”.
Next comes the conjunction kai, translated “even,” “so that even.” Then the
subject in the nominative case, e)ikon, “the image,” followed by
the possessive genitive of the beast dictator and the aorist active subjunctive
of lalew, another communication verb
which means here to speak, “so that the image might even speak.” The constative
verb contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety, the function of the
ventriloquist demon in making the image appear to speak. The active voice: the
ventriloquist demon produces the action. The subjunctive mood is the potential
subjunctive for a final clause with a future reference.
Then we have a connective conjunction kai, “and,” followed by the aorist active subjunctive
of poiew translated here “cause.”
The culminative aorist views the apparent miracle in its entirety but regards
it from the viewpoint of existing results, the assassination or execution of
those who refuse to worship the idol. And, again, i(na
plus the subjunctive is for the final clause.
The second use of i(na
introduces a sub-final clause which denotes the direction of the action which
is sought or anticipated, translated “that.” What is sought or anticipated is
the death of those who will get into the ecumenical religious system. They are
described by the nominative plural of the correlative relative pronoun o(soj, “as many as.” And then the conjunction e)an plus the negative mh,
meaning “if not,” “and cause that as many as do not,” this is an idiom. Then we
have the aorist active subjunctive of proskunew, meaning to worship, “as many as do not worship.” The ingressive aorist
tense contemplates the action of the verb in its beginning. In other words, do
not get down and worship. The active voice: believers who are positive toward
doctrine in the land of Israel in the Tribulation will refuse to worship the
image in the temple. The subjunctive mood is potential, having the element of
contingency.
With this is the dative singular indirect object of e)ikon, the “image,” and then what happens to them: the aorist
passive subjunctive of a)pokteinw, and it means “should be
put to death.” The constative aorist means that they will be executed
instantly. The passive voice: those who refuse to worship the image receive the
action of the verb, martyrdom. And, again, i(na
plus the subjunctive expresses a semi-final clause. The principle: Frustrated
religion always resorts to violence to get its way. The use of violence to
coerce volition reveals the Satanic nature of volition both now and in that
future day.
Translation: “Then it was given to him [the Jewish
dictator of the state of Israel] to provide a demon spirit [ventriloquist
demon] for the idol of the beast dictator, so that the image of the beast
dictator might even speak, and cause that as many as do not worship the image
of the beast dictator would be put to death [executed].”
In verses 16 and 17 we see the economic policy of
the Jewish dictator. The first thing we notice is the computerised system of
persecution which begins the doctrine of computerised tyranny. What we have
here is the principle that “high-tech” has got an evil application, like most
20th century developments. It really isn’t the scientific development, it is
the people who use it and apply it and, of course, we have an evil application
of high technology in the last half of the Tribulation.
Verse 16, We notice the adjunctive use of the
conjunction kai which is translated,
“Furthermore,” followed by the present active indicative of poiew. Poiew
is a very common verb and generally it is translated “to do, to make, to
manufacture.” It actually has another meaning, “he causes.” The present tense
is a pictorial present, it presents to the mind a picture of events in the
process of occurrence. Here we have eschatological events. The active voice is
the causative active voice in which the subject is related to the action of the
verb through an intermediary means. The indicative mood is declarative for the
reality of a future policy, not too different from policies of the past. With
this we have the accusative plural from the adjective paj, translated “all.”
Then we have some appositional accusatives, and with
them we have to translate it, “Furthermore he causes everyone.” And then we
have five appositional accusatives, each one is in the plural. The first one is
the adjective mikrw, a word used of persons to
indicate stature, or age, but not here. It is used here in the connotation of
influence or power and it means the least, those who really do not have any
power at all. Too many people without power always want power whether they are
qualified or not. Generally their very desire and lust for power means their
disqualification.
With this we have another adjective megaj which is translated “great” and means those who
have some power or influence. Megaj is also an interesting
adjective because it is one of the few that always has the accent on the first
syllable. So we have the small and the great, referring to those who have power
and influence and those who do not. Often those who have the power and the
influence are under a greater power, the concept of dictatorship.
The third and fourth categories take into contrast:
first of all we have the accusative plural plousioj, “rich.” No matter how bad the times someone always uses bad times to
their own advantage. There are those who become rich in bad times because they
either have courage or ability to utilise bad times to their own advantage. But
the next one is typical and one that should be called to the attention of all
countries that practice socialism: ptoxoj, “the poor.” Jesus said:
“The poor you have with always.” Poverty will never be eradicated. You can
alleviate suffering through some form of charity but there will always be poor
people just as there will always be rich people, illustrating the principle
that there is no such thing as equality in the human race. There is ability
used; ability not used. There is lack of ability, lack of courage, lack of
aggressiveness, many explanations for the contrast, but inevitably there will
always be the rich and there will always be the poor. There will always be the
free and there will always be the slave. The word e)leuqeroj presents us with the free. It does not mean freedom in the sense we
understand it but having made good decisions, having the ability for more
decisions. Good decisions produce more and more options for great decisions.
The principle is that a consistent life of good decisions will open up options
for greater decisions. The accusative plural of douloj
which is translated “slave” means people who by bad decisions limit their
decisions, loss of freedom because their options were not opened. So we have
six appositional accusatives, they are divided into three couplets and
therefore we have three categories. The first category would be the achievement
category. It means the successful and the unsuccessful. The second category is
economic: the rich and the poor. The third category is social: the free and the
slave.
So the word “all” is described in terms of these appositional
accusatives. “Furthermore he forces everyone, the small and the great, both the
rich and the poor, the slave and the free.” Of course, this is dictatorship.
Dictatorship superimposes power and authority over everyone, usually
erroneously but not always. The result is that we have an achievement category
where even the achievers have lost their influence, the successful have lost
their influence, and social success is also included here.
Note that in the greatest period of historical
disaster in all of human history, the time of the devil’s desperation, the last
half of the Tribulation, that Jews living in the middle east both fail and
succeed. The real surprise is that during historical disaster people
distinguish themselves from their peers in three categories. Category #1,
achievement in many areas of professional and government function; category #2,
economic success. There will be a certain type of entrepreneur who will take
risks in adverse times and become very wealthy; category #3 is social
achievement or success which also occurs in times of historical disaster. In
past history nearly every great royal family became prominent in a time of historical
disaster when the crisis ability paid off in the rise to social prominence. All
past greatness usually comes from this system. Note also that in time of
historical disaster there are always those who are going to be losers and those
who fail. Hence the obvious existence of the small who have failed in disaster,
the poor who have failed economically, the slave whose survival in historical
disaster depends on the charity and the ability of someone else. Historical
disaster, then, is designed to bring to the top those who have some form of
ability, some form of courage, some very strong drive in the field of strength
in time of adversity. Historical disaster therefore is a producer of
opportunity and greatness, it does not mean bad times for those who have a good
mental attitude, who have made good decisions from a position of strength, have
control of their lives and a personal sense of destiny. The principle then is
that historical disaster is an opportunity for greatness. Latent ability goes
unnoticed in times of historical prosperity but historical disaster provides
the opportunity for greatness, the achievement on the part of those who would
lack opportunity in normal times.
Historical disaster is necessary for the survival of
a nation and is just as important to the strength of a nation as times of
prosperity. Historical disaster is not only necessary for the survival of a
nation but at the same time it reveals latent ability and provides future
leadership and greatness through the promotion of the crisis personality.
Prolonged and extensive prosperity in a nation guarantees the ascendancy of
mediocrity and if the nation is to continue there must be historical disaster
so that the mediocrity is eliminated. In time of extensive historical
prosperity the opportunity for those who have real potential in greatness is
not there. So disaster is a good thing for a nation. Periodic disaster is a
healthy thing for a nation to provide opportunity for those who have the
ability and it washes out the mediocrity which has destroyed the nation. The
ascendancy of mediocrity denies opportunity to those who have real potential of
greatness. The historical disaster must provide opportunity for talent and
potential greatness to express itself if the nation is to survive. Therefore we
should look upon historical disaster as believers with three applications: a.
Historical disaster indicates the fact that the pivot of mature believers has
shrunk and that you and I as believers have failed in our responsibility to
God; b. All things work together for good; c. Divine discipline is needed to
perpetuate the human race. All three of those applications are positive
applications. Disaster renews the nation.
The categories here give us one more principle:
National disaster also emphasises the true doctrine of man’s inequality. God
has provided and given us life not because we are equal but because we have
equal opportunity. The only thing that all people have in common where equality
exists is that part of the soul called volition. You are free to choose to make
a good decision or a bad decision. Salvation is a decision. When Christ died on
the cross He died for all. He was judged for the sins of the entire human race
and therefore whosoever believes in Him has everlasting life. It doesn’t matter
whether a person is rich or poor, an achiever or a failure, a winner or a
loser. Christ was judged for everyone on the cross. But notice that the
decision of salvation is “whosoever believeth,” and that is a positive
decision. Furthermore, it is a non-meritorious decision as many other decisions
in life happen to be. But you make one decision and you have eternal life.
Volition is the only equality in the human race.
Once you start using your volition there is
inequality. Some people use their volition and make constant good decisions to
become winners in life. Others use their volition in a negative way and they
become losers in life. Therefore you have great inequality, and the greater the
freedom the greater the inequality that exists. Freedom guarantees inequality
in life so national disaster always emphasises the true doctrine of man’s
inequality.
All of mankind are the products of their own
decisions. Man apart from God and Bible doctrine uses prosperity to attempt the
impossible — the equality of man. Man in his arrogance, in his crusader
arrogance, in his self-righteous arrogance, influenced by Satan himself — that
is Satan’s favourite line: all men are equal. No they are not. The only
equality that God has provided is to give everyone the same start in life, you
have volition. Man is not born equal and does not live in a state of equality
with others. Equality is a myth, the deception of Satan as the chief evangelist
for the cosmic system. Equality is also the greatest form of human hypocrisy.
The fact that man has free will and self-determination guarantees the fact that
equality will never exist in the human race. And many races talk about being
downtrodden, but there are always people in that race who use their volition to
rise to the top. It is true in every race. There is no such thing as a deprived
race, that is only the crying of the losers in that group. Always you are going
to find people saying that but race is not an issue. It is a false issue.
Neither is economic status an issue. The fact that man has free will is the
issue.
All forms of socialism are the expressions of
arrogance, the opportunity for the demagogues to seize power by false promises.
Man cannot make man equal with other men. What is impossible for man is only
possible with God, and God has done it for us. And where did he do it for us?
At the point of salvation every believer receives 36 things. Every believer has
tremendous opportunities. Every believer enters into union with Christ. “In
Christ” is a great phrase. It doesn’t make any difference what your race is,
what your economic status is, whether you are rich or poor, whatever your
status may be all believers are entered into union with Christ. So all
believers with their volition and the wonderful system that God has provided
with its eight gates gives you the opportunity. In that system God will take
you to the top and you will be a winner, but if you make a decision to get into
the cosmic system you are going to be a loser all of the way. The very
existence of the divine dynasphere versus the cosmic system tells us that there
is no such thing as equality. The believer in the divine dynasphere is
infinitely superior to the believer in the cosmic system.
Volition is the divider of people. Inequality is
based on the function of freedom and using one’s volition to make either good
or bad decisions, for man is the product of his own decisions. Prosperity
provides limited opportunity for success and gives rise to the dominance of
mediocrity, but historical disaster and crisis provides the opportunity for
greatness.
That brings us now to the system of computerised
tyranny. It should be noted that high technology is no better than the people
that use it. Evil people using high technology come up with evil applications.
High technology in the Tribulation is going to be the master system of
enslaving most of the world. Most of the world are going t be slaves because
they are under computerised tyranny. The system which will be described in the
next two verses is tantamount to computer control of the people of the world.
Hence, we are about to study the principle of computer tyranny or the
destruction of human privacy and the enslavement of the world in the
Tribulation. Remember that freedom cannot exist without privacy. Privacy and
freedom must coexist and every attack on privacy is an attack on human freedom.
The computer and high technology have many wonderful applications but in this
passage we are going to study computer tyranny, the answer to evil
bureaucracy’s dreams. The potential dangers of high technology have nothing to
do with advance in science but they have everything to do with the application.
To have a computer record of criminals is a good thing for law enforcement but
to have a computer record of law-abiding citizens eventuates in control of
those law-abiding citizens, hence it destroys their freedom. The criminal, of
course, has no right to his freedom but the law-abiding citizen has every right
to freedom and privacy. Computer technology used to control people and privacy
destroyed is what we will have in the Tribulation.
That brings us now to the conjunction i(na and the study of computerised tyranny, the
eschatological aspects of high technology, computer control of people
throughout the world and the principle of the destruction of human privacy
through high technology. Remember that freedom cannot exist without privacy,
the two must coexist. I(na is a conjunction
introducing a final purpose clause which expresses the purpose of the main
objective of the action of the main verb. With this we have the aorist active
indicative of didomi, “that they should give.”
The culminative aorist tense views the event in its entirety but regards it
from the viewpoint of existing results: control of the people of the world
through ecumenical religion. Ecumenical religion, however, works through a
system of giant computers throughout the world, but especially there is one in
Israel to control the people there. The active voice: the subject in the active
voice produces the action of the verb and since the subject is taken from the
third person plural suffix of the verb the question arises: who is the subject?
And a plural subject indicates a system of bureaucracy based on high
technology. So we have a plural subject because we are dealing with bureaucrats
of the future, a computer system that has programmed away the privacy of the
citizen in the hands of bureaucrats. This system is not only used in Israel, it
is used throughout the entire revived Roman empire and most parts of the world
in the last half of the Tribulation; every place where the state has accepted
the ecumenical religious system of the beast dictator of the revived Roman
empire. Those who adhere to the ecumenical religion are going to receive a card
or its equivalent, an ID card. This permits them to buy and sell. In other
words, to live and function in the economy of the world-wide religious system.
Without this card or its equivalent, a computer mark on the hand or on the
forehead, the people who reject the religion of Satan will be ostracised from
society, persecuted and martyred. Hence, the subject is the tremendous number
of bureaucrats in every country during the last half of the Tribulation who
administer the system of computerised tyranny. The subjunctive mood goes with i(na to form a purpose clause. With this we have the
dative plural indirect object from a)utoj, the intensive pronoun used
as a personal pronoun, third person. It is translated “to them,” “that they
should give to them.” This is used as the personal pronoun to identify the
worshippers of the beast dictator of the revived Roman empire. Hence, the ID
card or its equivalent, the mark of the beast, is necessary for survival. “That
they should provide them” is the way we translate didomi.
Next we have the accusative singular direct object
from the noun xaragma, “mark.” It means something
engraved, something etched, something imprinted. The Bible must be interpreted
in the time in which it was written and in the Attic or Classical Greek xaragma was used for the strike of a snake, it was used to
mean an inscription, and for the branding of camels or slaves to denote
ownership. It was used for a soldier in the Roman army when he enlisted: his
serial number was branded on his hand. In effect then, this ID card of the
ecumenical religious system of the revived Roman empire is some kind of a
technical brand to relate to the key of the computer system. This mark or
identification card is necessary for social activity, business activity,
religious activity, and even survival at that time. And since the ID card is so
important to avoid loss or counterfeit the card is printed or engraved or
somehow marked on the body of the individual. Furthermore it is marked where it
can be easily observed: on the right hand or on the forehead. Those who are
great, rich and free will probably have the privilege of the ID card on the
right hand; those who we noticed previously as small, poor or slaves will have
the ID mark on the forehead — verse 16:
“Furthermore he causes [or forces] everyone, the
small and the great, both the rich and the poor, both the slave and the free,
that they [the bureaucracy of ecumenical religion] should provide them [those
who come into the religious system] and ID card [a mark, a code, a number, a
brand] on their right hand or on their forehead.”
This, then, is the system of computerised tyranny.
666 can be in the future a code number, an ID card, imprinted on the right hand
or the forehead and related to the code system in the computer which has the
names of all of those who are members of this ecumenical system of the future.
This code number could be tied into the computer’s memory system which has a
detailed information about each convert in the cosmic system. The fact that the
ID card is not carried on one’s person in some plastic form indicates the
advance in technology at that time. Apparently it may not even be visible
except under a certain light. A plastic card, of course, can be lost or
counterfeited but the code number 666 indelibly marked on the right hand or the
forehead cannot be lost.
Verse 17, the policy of economic tyranny related to
it. This time we combine the two words that we have started with in our Greek
for the last several verses. We have the connective conjunction kai and with it the conjunction i(na plus the negative mh
to introduce a negative purpose clause.
Next comes
the subject, the nominative singular subject of the indefinite pronoun tij. The most fascinating thing about the indefinite
pronoun is that it is definite. It is used to represent a definite category.
With the negative mh it is translated “no one,”
“And that no one.” Then we have the present middle subjunctive of the verb dunamai which means to be able, “And that no one should be
able.” The customary present tense denotes what habitually occurs under
computerised tyranny of the ecumenical religious system of the future. The
middle voice: this is a deponent verb, middle in form, active in meaning. The
subjunctive mood is used with i(na to form a final purpose
clause.
Then the aorist active indicative gives us the
tyranny, a)gorazw which means to buy. The aorist
tense is an ingressive aorist contemplating the action at the beginning. The
active voice: people within the range of the power of ecumenical religion
produce the action, the infinitive of actual result. This is followed by an aorist
active infinitive of polew which means to sell. In
other words, we are talking about business activity, “And that no one should be
able to buy or to sell.”
Principle: We should remember that religion
[Christianity is not a religion] is always cruel, it is always vindictive
toward those who reject it. Ecumenical religion of the Tribulation is no
exception, it carries the same inherent evil and cruelty found in world religions
today, like Islam or Hinduism.
The World Council of Churches plus the National
Council of Churches is a good illustration of the cruelty of religion. The
National Council of Churches purports to be tolerant of everyone and take in
everyone with different views, and they are always out in some form of social
action. But the vindictiveness is seen in the fact that today the World Council
of Churches and the National Council of Churches are supporting terrorism. In
the case of ecumenical religion in the Tribulation the same trend is seen. It
persecutes the nonconformist by starving him out. There is also, of course
later on, martyrdom, persecution, torture, murder, but here we simply have the
economic isolation of the nonconformist. There is no honour code in ecumenical
religion, no virtue, no grace, no system of impersonal love toward all. Instead
there is demonism, terrorism, persecution and economic ostracism. In short,
everything which characterises religion, the use of force, violence, and the
hypocrisy of human love on the other hand, produce arrogant self-righteousness
as well as ascetic self-determinism. Next we have the threefold description of
this ID card. It begins with an idiom, e)i mh, in the next phrase, literally it is “if not,” but
it is an idiom meaning “except.” And with this we have the articular present
active participle of the verb e)xw, “except he who has.” The
present tense is a perfective present, it refers to a fact which has come to be
in the past but is emphasised as a present reality. The active voice: the
adherents and converts of ecumenical religion in the Tribulation produce the
action. The participle is circumstantial.
Now we have the three ways in which the ID card is
set up. First there is a general ID card in the accusative singular direct
object of xaragma, translated “mark” and it a
reference to the ID card for members of the religious system. Secondly, there
is an ID card for the clergy in ecumenical religion. This is brought out with
two words, the accusative singular direct object from o)noma which means sometimes “name,” sometimes “person,”
sometimes “identities,” sometimes even “personalities.” Here it means “name.”
With it is the descriptive genitive of the noun qhrion
used for the beast dictator, the dictator of the revived Roman empire, “the
name of the beast dictator.” This is a second ID card and this is a special
card for leaders and clergymen in the ecumenical religious system of the
Tribulation. So we have first of all the ID card called “the mark,” “except the
one who has the mark [or brand], or the name of the beast dictator [a special
leadership card with the name of the religious leader of ecumenical religion],
or the number of his name.”
We have third identification: the code number. First
there is disjunctive particle h, “or”, and then the
accusative singular from the direct object of a)riqmoj, and with it a descriptive genitive of o)noma,
the possessive genitive of a)utoj, “for the number of his
name.”
Translation: “And that no one should be able to buy
or sell, except the one who has the mark [the ID card], or the name of the
beast dictator [special leadership card for religious leaders], or the number
of his name [the code number related to the computer system].”
Principle:
Religion destroys the privacy of the individual. In that way, again, we
see a contrast between religion and Christianity. Christianity recognises the
privacy of the royal priesthood; religion is anti-privacy. To the extent that
churches stick their nose into your business, to that extent they are religious
instead of Christian. Religion is self-righteous and, of course,
self-righteousness comes from arrogance. Self-righteous people always invade
the privacy of others.
Verse 18, we start out with the adverb o(de. It is correctly translated “Here.” With it we have
the present active indicative of e)imi, “Here is,” plus sofia, the predicate nominative singular translated
“wisdom.” Here it means wisdom in the technical sense of application of Bible
doctrine. Wisdom is the application of Bible doctrine, but you have to know
Bible doctrine before you can apply it. Doctrinal application in this context
refers to the interpretation of the historical trends from the eschatological
revelation of this passage.
There are two ways of determining historical trends.
The first is prophecy, which is pertinent in every dispensation except the
Church Age. The second is the application of doctrine which is pertinent in
every dispensation of human history but the only system for determining
historical trends in the Church Age. The historical trend in view in this
passage is computerised tyranny, the control of the economy through a
programming system in high technology. It distinguishes between those who
adhere to the ecumenical religious system and those who reject it. It is all on
the computer. This verse gives the Tribulational believer the opportunity of
making his decision before the pressure and before the persecution exists. This
passage will be studied very carefully once the Tribulation begins and every
believer throughout the world where ecumenical religion goes will definitely
have to know about this and prepare his decision. It gives the opportunity to
think about it before it happens. That is what wisdom is: the opportunity to
have the information before the decision is made. This is a general principle
as far as the Word of God is concerned: don’t go to press without the facts,
always research the situation. Gather all the information before you make
decision. God recognises this principle and gives a future generation of
believers the opportunity of researching it, of knowing what is going to happen
so when it happens they will have their answer, they will be able to say, “I
refuse to become a part of this system.”
Next we have the articular present active participle
of e)xw, “he who has,” and then we
have the accusative singular direct object from nouj,
which generally means the mind but it also means the faculty for thinking, and
we are going to translate it, “he who has the ability to think.” The ability to
think here is an idiom meaning “get the facts before you make your decision, do
not go off half-cocked.”
Then we have the aorist active imperative of yhfizw which really means “let him compute.” “He who has
the ability to think, let him compute.” In other words, it is a mechanical
high-tech system, a computer system 666 versus your brain. Your brain is a
computer, or should be. If you fill it up with doctrine it will compute. So you
have human computer versus mechanical computer. The culminative aorist tense
contemplates the action of the verb in its entirety but regards it from the
viewpoint of existing results, the ability to know the facts first and make a
decision on the basis of truth, Bible doctrine. The active voice: the believer
who understands the pertinent eschatology produces the action of the verb. He
has a human computer, a brain, that can outthink the mechanical system. This is
the imperative of permission which recognises the fact that you may or you may
not believe and you may not know and you may not obey. Then we have the
accusative singular direct object from a)riqmoj again, “let him compute the number of qerion,
the beast dictator.”
“Here is wisdom [the application of pertinent
doctrine to the historical trend]. He who has the ability to think [the
believer functioning under the first two stages of GAP, reception and retention]
let him compute [the function of the third stage of GAP, recall and the application
of pertinent doctrine to the historical trend at that time] the code number of
the beast dictator.”
Principle: The believer must be cognisant of
doctrine and inculcated with it through the function of Gap in order to use his
spiritual computer against the mechanical computer.
The ability to think comes through perception of
Bible doctrine, perception of the truth, while the application of that doctrine
forms the historical trend in the mind. In other words, understanding
historical trends through the application of doctrine facilitates dealing with
those trends. You anticipate the trend, you make your decision, and once you
are under pressure you stand by your decision. The believer continues to have
confidence in God, in God’s plan through the adverse or prosperous
circumstances of history. As a matter of fact historical adversity does not
affect the plan of God for the believer, nor does it hinder divine blessing in
time of great historical disaster.
The explanation: We begin with the explanatory use
of the post positive conjunctive particle gar,
“for.” We are going to get an explanation. Then the present active indicative
of e)imi, “for it is.” The static
present tense represents a condition taken for granted as a fact. There is a
computerised system in the future, there is a code number for this particular
subject to draw out the memory of the computer with regard to who adheres to
the ecumenical religious system. The active voice: the number 6 produces the
action of the verb, since 6 is the number of man in the Bible. However, the
code number is 6 tripled, hence the deifying of man through the cosmic system.
Six tripled is simply the deifying of man. There are three members of the
Godhead: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; each one has
identical essence. Six represents man; 666 = man deified. It isn’t six hundred
and sixty-six, it is simply 6 tripled.
Then we have the predicate nominative of a)riqmoj again plus the possessive genitive of a)nqrwpoj, “for it is the number of man.” The Bible explains
what the number is before the number is given.
Satan’s approach to mankind in the garden of Eden
was the appeal to the arrogance or deification of man. The ultimate in man’s
arrogance is his own deification. Genesis 3:5 explains this phrase, “you will
be like God,” the deification of man, 666, “knowing good and evil.” The
tripling of the number of man is 666, hence the deification of man in Satan’s
cosmic system. The deification of mankind is the function of the cosmic system
of Satan.
It must be remembered that 666 is the code number in
the computer and it designates all the members of the ecumenical religious
system. The code number leads to a memory bank where all adherents to
ecumenical religion are recorded plus all information concerning their personal
life. The memory bank in the computer destroys both the privacy and the freedom
of those who fall into this ecumenical system. Those people who are not in this
memory bank of the computer are believers whose perception of doctrine has
caused them to make a decision, and they reject this apostasy. Such believers
will not have the ID card, 666. They will be persecuted, excommunicated from
society, some will starve to death, others will be tortured. Many are going to
survive and be preserved for the Millennial reign of Christ. This is a part,
then, of historical disaster in the time of the devil’s desperation.
Nevertheless, in the worst of all historical disasters in history God will
preserve many thousands of born-again believers right under the nose of the
dictator, in all of the danger spots, and they will be preserved until the
second advent to form the cadre for the population explosion of the Millennium.
If there is any significance in the number 666, apart from computerised
tyranny, it is the deification of man inside the cosmic system.