We finished our last look at Revelation seventeen by focusing on verse eight and this peculiar riddle. “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and go to destruction.” The NLT translation reads like this.
“The beast you saw was once alive but isn’t now. And yet he will soon come up out of the bottomless pit and go to eternal destruction.”
In the last post, I mentioned two controversial things.
First, I told you that the fourth beast is the same beast we are either on the edge of dealing with or tormented by for some time now. And, it is that portion of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue that encompasses everything from the waist down. If you focus on the materials involved, we are talking about bronze, iron, and some clay integrated into the feet.
Secondly, although this beast initiates with the Grecian empire, it is no longer Grecian when it hits the iron portions. From this point on, the beast takes on the characteristics of the Assyrian empires. So a dead portion could be seen as the Grecian Empire and the death of Alexander; however, under a diminished power, the Grecian empire continues until something dramatic changes it to be entirely Assyrian. So I can’t take my assertion back to Alexander.
If I wanted to get technical, there is NO change once we reach the iron, except for the clay integrated into the feet. Since the feet promote balance, it is easy to say that the entirety of the statue is unstable.
“And the people who belong to this world, whose names were not written in the Book of Life before the world was made, will be amazed at the reappearance of this beast who had died.” (NLT)
Are we talking about Alexander the great reappearing?
I don’t think so because he is still dead. The thing that caught the global eye so many years ago was the Islamic empire under the heading of the Ottoman empire. The History channel opened the conversation by immediately referring to them as a Super Power.
“At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman army entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and was defeated in October 1918.
Following the Armistice of Mudros, most Ottoman territories were divided between Britain, France, Greece, and Russia.
The
Ottoman Empire officially ended in 1922 when the title of Ottoman
Sultan was eliminated. Turkey
was declared a republic on October 29, 1923, when Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938),
an army officer, founded the independent Republic of Turkey.”
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-east/ottoman-empire#section_10
The undoing of the Ottoman Empire was the finest example of a beast being killed. But did it go away completely?
“It began its rebirth only five years later with the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in March 1928, the group spread to other Muslim countries but has its largest, or one of its largest, organizations in Egypt, despite a succession of government crackdowns in 1948, 1954, 1965, and 2013 after plots, or alleged plots, of assassination and overthrow were uncovered.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt
As I, humorously, mentioned to a friend, the downfall of the Ottoman empire allowed us to make movies like Casa Blanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, where Algeria, Morocco, and Libya were considered relatively peaceful, beautiful places to visit after the war. He laughed, but all those places were tourist locations until the late seventies. That friend had recently taken a vacation in Algeria and said it was intimidating for foreigners.
So, the Islamic empire remained effectively dead until 1979.
Were there people following after Islam?
Certainly, but they were a non-issue. If you can find pictures of Iran or Afghanistan, you will find them looking like democratically run nations. In effect, they had relative freedoms, but that all changed with the Islamic revolution.
How did this affect America?
The majority of Americans were completely at a loss when our American Embassy in Iran was taken, hostage. We were told that this was an Iranian revolution, when in fact it was an Islamic revolution. So, in 1979 the Islamic caliphate, began, once again, to raise its ugly head. To this very day, America regards all negative conversations about Islam as hate speech and uses businesses like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to prevent people from pointing out the truth and talking about what we know because we still have a constitution and freedom of speech. You see, businesses used to have signs on the door that said, no shoes, no shirt, no service. Now they kick you out if you express an opinion.
Let me ask you this, do you see any other organization or country having as great an effect, or doing as much damage to the global community as Islam?
The answer is a definitive NO. But let's not take my word for it, what does scripture say.
Revelation 17:8 NLT The beast you saw was once alive but isn’t now. And yet he will soon come up out of the bottomless pit and go to eternal destruction. And the people who belong to this world, whose names were not written in the Book of Life before the world was made, will be amazed at the reappearance of this beast who had died.
Lacking “Christians,” the whole world of people whose names are NOT written in the Book of Life will stand in awe of this entity we are calling a woman, just as the Apostle John did. In Revelation 17:7, we are told that John stood in “wonder.” The Greek for that word is awe. He was standing in awe of the woman dressed in scarlet and adorned with gold and who was drunk with the blood of the saints - a word directed expressly toward the tribulation believers who are killed for their witness.
A rather long introduction, so let's move on. Even John is taken back by what he sees and so the explanations continue.
I am curious, do you think John grasped what was being said?
I am quite sure he saw these things as a tremendous horror that was going to come upon the earth – this being said about a man whom they had already attempted to boil in oil.
Revelation 17:9 NLT “This calls for a mind with understanding: The seven heads of the beast represent the seven hills where the woman rules. They also represent seven kings.
The word translated here as understanding was only translated as wisdom in the King James version. That does not make the KJV more correct as both words apply. However, to say someone has wisdom spreads a broad blanket over them and we tend to give them more respect. Understanding can have a more narrow application.
My friend’s dad was a great salesman and an excellent golfer, but he could not put a battery in a car. He did not have the understanding, or what some would call common sense, to do that. I know this about him from experience.
I am struck by the Greek word that John used here, sophia. In the book, The Shack, the Holy Spirit is portrayed as an intangible entity, much like the Holy Spirit, characterized as wind. It was only when Sam, the main character, requested did Sarayu slow down long enough to be seen, sort of. In an article by Dr. Paul Coulter, entitled, Exploring the Shack, he refers to an interview of William Paul Young in which this explanation of Sarayu was given.
“Young explains in his interview with Kim Gravel that this name, which is a Hindi word for a refreshing wind, was suggested to him by an Indian friend. He had been looking for a word that carried a sense of the Spirit as a wind, which is a biblical image of the Spirit’s activity (John 3:8; Acts 2:2). In fact, the Greek word for spirit, pneuma, also means wind. The derivation of the name and the ethereal nature of Sarayu make this depiction of the Spirit relatively easy to accept, especially since most Christians are unlikely to conceive of the Spirit as either male or female. In fact, the clear depiction of the Spirit as a person is probably a healthy redress to the tendency some believers have to think of Him as merely an impersonal force to be referred to as “it.” https://www.bethinking.org/culture/exploring-the-shack
Since we are focusing on the word understanding at the moment, it seems that our learning should be, focused, at times, on specifics and at other times generally.
Wisdom/understanding has a multitude of synonyms – alternate words. A shortlist might look like this.
Perception
Apprehension
Discernment
Agreement
Inclination
Reason
Intellect
You can apply varying terms to an issue to better comprehend what is being said at any given time. In other words, you are learning and gaining wisdom that can then be applied to various things. Discernment is that aspect of our lives that often keeps us safe, while agreement aligns you with an assertion from someone else, even if it’s not true.
Before I dig this hole much deeper, let me say that a word such as wisdom may seem like a simple assertion. But you may have just finished watching every Harry Potter movie and reasoned that wisdom primarily applies to the casting of spells; therefore, in your perception, you have no reason to pursue the alternate meanings behind that word. Unfortunately, this kind of inclination can cause you to lose out on an opportunity to improve your understanding.
The explanations continue.
Revelation 17:9-10 NASB (9) "Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, (10) and they are seven kings; five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while.
The seven heads are:
“seven mountains on which the woman sits,”
The traditional interpretation says this is Rome and the Catholic church. While I would agree that the pope has gone fully apostate, that is for the moment irrelevant. With that said, I turn to the Old Testament, where I find an interesting statement in Jeremiah. Here Babylon is called a destroying mountain.
Jeremiah 51:24-25 MKJV And I will give to Babylon, and to all the people of Chaldea, all their evil that they have done in Zion in your sight, says Jehovah. (25) Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain, says Jehovah, who destroys all the earth. And I will stretch out My hand on you and roll you down from the rocks and will make you a burned mountain.
If I were to take this literally, then I would be considering volcanoes of some height. The problem with that is that volcanoes are localized events and do not destroy all the earth. The obvious assumption is that this is NOT a physical location but a spiritual consideration.
The word destroying is the Hebrew word mashchı̂yth and also means ruin, destruction, destructive, literally a snare, and figuratively corruption.
In a previous post, I talked about what Babylon could possibly mean since to this day it is a wasteland. One of the things I discussed was how Nimrod had built Babel, the beginnings of Babylon, and how all those related to Babylon were violent, destructive people. Israel went into captivity for seventy years at the hands of Babylon, and the story of Esther had an association with the murderous people of that region.
No one can sit in seven places at once, unless they are a CEO leading offices scattered over these locations. It is difficult, at best, to get the church to see Babylon as a corporation.
“and they are seven kings;”
seven kings - Albert Barnes says, “Literally, as denoting a king, or one who exercises royal authority; denoting one of distinguished honor. In a still larger sense, as denoting a dynasty, a form of government, a mode of administration, as what, in fact, “rules.””
This last one fits this global attempt at a government, which I feel is already upon us. And, as though you got whipped cream on your hot chocolate, Charles, the Prince of Wales, is a part of this governing body, whether we like it or not.
Kings is the Greek word basileus and comes through the notion of a foundation of power.
“five have fallen,”
Consider that this message is meant to be understood. So, for John, there may actually be an understanding of who these leaders would have been. For example Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Darius, Alexander, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. There is the possibility of Roman rule in this mix, but I don't know that for sure. This information would have been passed along orally.
“one is, the other has not yet come;.”
Again, John may have been aware of who this was. But you need to keep something in mind, what we think we perceive as a singularity, came out of those who make up the fourth and final beast – out of which we find Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. As I have said, there is no gap as we await the coming Roman empire, because there is nothing in scripture that tells us that we are waiting for the Roman Empire.
The one piece of evidence used to uphold this argument for the Romans, comes from Daniel where it speaks of, the people of the prince that is to come.
Daniel 9:26 NASB "Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.
To follow this line of reasoning you have to ignore the recorded historical accounts of both Josephus and Tacitus. Josephus tells us that the Roman General Titus attempted to order the fires to be quenched and the ravaging of the temple to cease. But Josephus's account also spells out how the Assyrian conscript troops, so hating the Jews, refused to obey the orders of Titus. Joel Richardson, in his book, “The Islamic Antichrist,” details how Rome did more to rebuild than to destroy.
So, if it is the Assyrians that are destroying the temple, then the prince (doesn't this play into these seven who exercise royal authority.) is in all likelihood an Assyrian.
“ and when he comes, he must remain a little while.”
Revelation 12:12 NASB Gives us a peculiar insight.
"For this reason, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time."
It is difficult to perceive a man fulfilling the role of the devil. Perhaps a better way to understand this is to see Satan in possession of the man.
If Satan gives someone ALL his power, how does he do that?
We typically see this as a voluntary possession.
The idea that he only remains a little while seems puzzling unless you apply the pretext of scripture.
"For this reason, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time." (Revelation 12:12 NASB)
How much time does he have?
We act like he will have a cataclysmic impact on the earth for seven years. We do that because he initiates a seven-year peace treaty, which he breaks after 1,240 days. This break causes much grief, on both sides of this war. If you remove the idea of a one-world religion out of the mix, what's left will be the fight to grab Israel's oil. On that note, you can see why many will be angry with a decision, that brings about the destruction of the infrastructure of Israel.
With this person playing the beast role, as the antichrist, and he steps out of the way at 1,240 days, who is left to play the bad guy?
Many will look at me sideways because they still think that the global, new world order, will still be calling the shots. Hardly, because at this point the false prophet, who has converted over to Islam, will become the shot caller for Islam.
This is the event which was Jesus was pointing to when He said, the tribulation will become so great (and deadly,) that NO ONE will survive unless the Father cuts time short.
All this applies to the idea of what Revelation 17:10 is saying that he must remain a little while.
I have to cut this off here as Revelation 17 carries on with more and slightly repetitive explanations.
We are here to learn and understand. I have had enough teaching that was so intricate that no one understood it, nor am I interested in candy fluff which does not teach me anything.
Know this.
We the church will be taken out of here, and soon. Those who are left, the tares who thought they were followers of Jesus Christ, when they were nothing more than seat warmers, will go through an eye opening and deadly experience. Two, the pressure that is coming on the world will be deadly and you will feel like you are drowning. Three, all this death and destruction will be happening during the time when God is pouring out His wrath upon the nations and Israel. Everyone left on earth will fall under one of those two categories.
Now, while you still may have time
Admit that you are a sinner. This boils down to the realization that you are broken, we all are, and that you cannot fix this on your own.
Believe in Jesus Christ. There is NO other answer. Oh sure, if you are stupid, even during the time of wrath, you will find that there is NO other way to the Father. Heaven, peace, and life in the heavenly kingdom, only happen because you give your life to Jesus.
And Confess – Jesus, I have come to realize that there is no hope without you. And you already paid, with your life, so that I could have this life and peace with the Father. I accept and receive your life in me.
