CHAPTER
11
FALL
OF SATAN
"I do not
know with what weapons WW3 will be fought, but WW4 will be fought with
sticks and stones" -Albert Einstein
The
fall of Satan’s last days empire will be a three-step process. The first element
of the antichrist’s demise will involve the Church rallying together
in the endtime revival when God pours out His Spirit on all mankind,
saving countless millions of souls, as it says in Joel 2,28-32,
And
afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and
daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men
will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour
out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on
the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned
to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and
dreadful day of the LORD. And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD
will be saved. NIV
Once God raises up His Church in front of
pure evil, the
second element of Satan's demise will be martyrdom of the saints. This will precipitate God’s
judgment upon mankind in the Trumpets and the Bowls.
Then the third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of waters; and they became blood.
And I heard the angel of the waters saying, "Righteous are You, who are and who were, O Holy One, because You judged these things;
for they poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and You have given them blood to drink. They deserve it."
And I heard the altar saying, "Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, true and righteous are Your
judgments" (Rev 16,4-7).
The
third component of the antichrist’s demise will stem from the fact
that he and the false prophet will have conflicting interests that cause
internal power struggles between them. Their lack of character will be their downfall. Character is the one thing God has
stressed in Himself and in His followers throughout the Scriptures as
our most valuable attribute. Conversely, Satan has proven the value
of God’s character by demonstrating the destructive power of its
absence, and with that God will use Satan to teach His creation the
lesson that good triumphs over evil. Case in point, the false
prophet is motivated by wealth and greed, yet his greatest failing is pride (self-worship). Satan is utterly dysfunctional and self-deprecating; he has
no inner qualities, and is incapable of cooperating with anyone or
deferring reward, like an undisciplined child. Consequently, he will
betray the false prophet, equivalent to self betrayal, causing the false
prophet to attack the city of Satan (Rome) as a type of
self-destruction. He will literally destroy his kingdom with his own
hands.
The
beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the
prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will
eat her flesh and burn her with fire. For God has put it into their
hearts to accomplish his purpose by agreeing to give the beast their
power to rule, until God's words are fulfilled (Rev 17-16,17 NIV).
Just
as Satan is amassing the world’s wealth, a tremendous Christian
revival will suddenly erupt in Jerusalem and very quickly race around
the globe. Satan will take measures to stop it by raising up the pope.
The Beast will fulfill his purpose in glorifying the antichrist
by convincing the world that the pope is Jesus Christ in the flesh,
Israel’s messiah, and rally the whole world around his
global religion with the hidden agenda of structuring his one-world
government and economy around him. The antichrist will then
stage his own assassination and then purport to rise from the dead,
making himself appear that he is indeed the savior of the world,
counterfeiting (mocking) Christ’s resurrection. This will cause the
whole world to follow after the antichrist, and he will use his
celebrity status to betray the Beast who helped him rise to
power, spending all his fortunes on himself. This phony resurrection should not
have fooled anyone, since the Bible clearly states that this would
happen and that Jesus has already died
once for all (Heb 7-27; Heb 9,12-28; Heb 10,1-10). They will be fooled
by it, though, because Catholics have been desecrating the blood of
Christ for centuries, thinking they are partaking of His actual flesh
and blood every time they take communion. It is only fitting that Satan
should pull this trick against an ignorant and unbelieving world, except
that the Great Endtime Revival continues to grow unimpeded by the wiles
of the antichrist, so the Beast grows impatient of the antichrist
spending his fortunes on himself, while letting this revival grow like
wildfire and takes matters into his own hands, destroying the Vatican
and setting his city on fire, and them migrating to Jerusalem where he
poses as Israel's Messiah.
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The
Beast will defuse hostilities between Israel and their neighboring
countries, forming a covenant with them whereby the orthodox Jews may
rebuild their old covenant temple of worship. The Beast will
then enter the Jewish
temple without permission from the Jewish priests, and the orthodox Jews
will kick him out of their temple, and at that point the man of sin will
go into a rage and order the whole world to organize a system of
rounding up Christians for extermination, starting in Jerusalem. Had the
Beast exited
the temple in favor with all the people, his deception
would have succeeded, but this single act by the Jewish priests,
rejecting the antichrist as their messiah, put a serious wrench in
Satan’s plan to deceive the world into believing that he is their
Messiah. In
the days of Christ the Jewish high priest played a key role in having
Jesus crucified, but the high priest will this time be a key figure in
foiling Satan’s deception.
The
false prophet will accommodate the antichrist by instituting the mark of
the beast, requiring the whole world to worship him by receiving his
mark or be killed, under the agreement that once the mark solidifies his
one-world religion, and once their global economy is up and running and begins funneling trillions of dollars into pure evil, the antichrist
should have held up his end of the trust
by directed the wealth back to the Beast, but the antichrist
will betray his counterpart by receiving the glory and wealth to
himself. That is, the fact that the antichrist broke trust with the
Beast specifies their downfall. Trust is an impossible attribute of Satan, who is utterly
devoid of character. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are dedicated to each other in perfect unity, where faith
and trust are intrinsic within their relationship and the glue that
binds them together is the Holy Spirit.
God promises to judge His people before He
judges the world, as stated in the following two passages:
For it
is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it
begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey
the gospel of God? And, if it is with difficulty that the righteous is
saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner? Therefore,
let those also who suffer according to the will of God entrust their
souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right. 1 Peter 4,17-19
NASB.
See to
it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when
they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we
turn away from him who warns us from heaven? At that time his voice
shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake
not only the earth but also the heavens." The words "once
more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken-that is, created
things-so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are
receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so
worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a
consuming fire." Heb
12,25-29 NIV
The
above passage in Hebrews indicates that the basis of God’s judgment is earthquakes.
He promised to shake everything that is shakable, and whatever remains
belongs to Him. He will judge His people first, not initially by an
earthquake, but by the object of absolute evil, the enemy of all
righteousness and truth, which will shake the Church to its foundations.
God intends to judge the Church during the seals, which is the period of
Satan’s wrath, so that during the trumpets the Church will be prepared
to enter the wilderness, which will be a 3½ year period scheduled as
the most spiritual time in the Church's history, which itself is a
preparing process to receive the kingdom promised to the fathers
thousands of years ago, which was Israel's great hope since the writing
of the prophet Isaiah and the minor prophets of the Old Testament.
According
to the book of Revelation, Satan’s wrath, outlined in the seals, is
the first of three judgments from God; the other two are the trumpets
and the bowls. God intends to judge His people in two
ways: by pruning his church of all unwanted branches that produce no
fruit, and by increasing the fruit production of those branches that
remain. The pruning process will entail the false brethren walking away
from the Church on their own volition, according to the parable of the
Ten Virgins. They will leave in fear of persecution and in fear of
God’s presence, who will be strong among His people in those days. The
false brethren have been a drag on the Church until now, using up
precious resources, while spiritually contributing nothing, so God will
pressure them to make a commitment to a sincere faith or else leave.
Once pruned, His second wave of judgment on the Church will be to
maximize His people’s fruit production during the trumpets, since the
fruit of the Spirit is also the fruit of heaven. This will keep the
Church spiritually healthy, and will witness to those around them who
are being saved, while testifying against those who reject Christ’s
salvation offer, who prefer to follow a madman.
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List
The
nature of Satan as an entity has no legitimate substance, since
he is technically not a part of God’s creation. Although God created
Lucifer, he did not create Satan, rather Satan created himself through
sin (hence the mystery of lawlessness). He and his fallen angels are the
only thing in God's creation that God did not create. He does not have a God-given right to exist, yet he does
exist, and because of man's rebellion he will
become more substantive in the last days than the world itself. God originally gave the
heavens and the earth to Lucifer, who was supposed to be God’s steward
over His creation, but as we know he fell into transgression, so God
cursed Lucifer along with his inheritance, the universe. Much
later Adam came along, and God gave him the earth (which Lucifer still
thinks is his) with the commandment to tend the garden, to expand its
borders until Eden filled the earth, but he too fell into transgression. The eternal lesson God wants to teach His creation is that anyone
who would receive so much power and authority is destined to abuse it.
Only God is humble enough to manage His own creation.
Satan
never acknowledged Adam’s status as inheritor of the earth, since he
enticed Adam to enter his own curse, reducing man to something lower
even than himself, if that were possible, but God has restored man,
because each of us were born in sin through no fault of our own, whereas
Satan sinned in the very presence of God. For this reason God gave man Lucifer's inheritance, plus God's throne, the very thing that
Lucifer sought and gambled everything to attain and lost. Through faith
in Jesus' blood sacrifice God has given the entire universe
to man, not this one, but the one to come. That is, Christians will
forever enjoy Lucifer’s inheritance that he lost through his
own pride and rebellion. It is no wonder he is immeasurably jealous of
Christians, wanting nothing more than to destroy the Church, but once the
Rapture occurs and all God's people are escorted to heaven, the earth and its
inhabitance are destined to crash and burn in the absence of goodness,
righteousness and truth. The
two witnesses are first fruits of the 144,000 Jewish witnesses, according to Rev 14,1-5,
Then I
looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and
with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father's name written on their
foreheads… They follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were purchased
from among men and offered as first fruits to God and the Lamb. No lie
was found in their mouths; they are blameless [NIV].
After the Jewish
priests physically extricate the man of lawlessness from Jerusalem’s
temple, and after the Beast orchestrates a system of mass genocide
against the saints, God will transform the ministry of the Two
Witnesses from gentle shepherds of the Jewish Church to dynamic
adjudicators of God's judgment, aimed at the foundation of Satan’s
empire, but their
timing will appear as though late, allowing the antichrist to rack up a
high score of martyrs before God begins to act, revealing yet another
divine lesson about God. The fact that the Two Witnesses react after
many Christians have been martyred demonstrates God’s perspective on
death, that it is insignificant. In light of eternity and based on what Jesus said in Lk
21,16-19, He will allow some of His people to be killed, “You will be
betrayed even by parents, brothers, relatives and friends, and they will
put some of you to death. All men will hate you because of me. But not a
hair of your head will perish. By standing firm you will gain life” [NIV]. Jesus warned that some of us will die as martyrs, yet not a hair of
our heads would perish, meaning that our enemies have no power over us.
They can even kill us and still we come back to life in the resurrection
of the righteous as martyrs for Christ, obtaining a better resurrection
because of it (Heb 11-35).
God
views seventy years as less than a drop of time in the proverbial bucket
of eternity, and wants us to think in these same terms. He wants to
reward us for letting Him use our suffering to condemn the wicked for
all eternity to a stricter judgment, just as He hardened pharaoh’s
heart so He could judge Him with a stricter judgment. God will forever drive
home the lesson to the rest of His creation that good
triumphs over evil, because He has no plans on repeating this lesson
after He creates the new heavens and new earth at the end of time.
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In
a million, billion years from now He doesn’t want His creation to start
raising a lot of questions about sin and free will, and having to
explain that His people are not robots. They do have a
choice to serve Him, but choosing not to serve Him is the very
definition of evil, since it inherently involves self-elevation, which
knows no bounds. He would rather prove to us now that serving Him is
the only right thing to do, which does not promote a monster. God
does not need to be worshipped; we are the ones who need to worship Him,
because if we don’t we will invariably worship ourselves, which always
turns us into monsters. He would rather answer all our questions on an
experiential basis now, so we may know firsthand the innate malevolence
of God’s absence, and never seek it again. The mystery of lawlessness is not
understood in Satan being the essence of evil; nor is evil in the
creation (Rom 14-14). Rather, evil is defined simply as the
absence of God. This voids the yin-yang philosophy that requires evil to
exist in order to understand what is good. On the contrary, we either have the presence of God, or
we have the absence of God. One is
the essence of purity, righteousness and truth, and the other is the
essence of evil. The reason this must be true is that God is everywhere,
and to seek his absence is impossible to achieve, unless God allows it,
and the only place He allows His absence is in hell, which is where all
evil will one day be throne.
This
moment has been coming ever since Adam fell into transgression; the war
of Armageddon is the literal manifestation of Adam’s choice that he
made in the Garden of Eden. It is the final and ultimate war against God, thus exposing the
fallen
nature of man.
To consider such a futile act of naked aggression against His person is
ridiculous, yet they will attempt to overthrow Him, just as Lucifer once
tried eons ago, and is now using the human race to make one more
hopeless attempt to destroy God. If He failed to kill Jesus while
clothed in the frailty of human flesh, instead unleashed on himself
the law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ
that took away the keys of death and hell and set everyone free from the
penalty of death who believe in Jesus for eternal life, then what chance
does Satan have of winning the war of Armageddon? Why does he even
bother? His greed, his poverty and rage have turned him into a mad dog. When
the Egyptians followed Moses through the Red Sea, it too was an act of
naked aggression, not so much against the Israelites, but against God
Himself, knowing that it was He who was rolling back the sea to provide
a way of escape for the children of Abraham. To follow them into the Red
Sea with the intent of slaying the Israelites between two great
walls of water held apart by the very God they were
trying to destroy, proved that their hatred turned them
completely insane.
These
endtime events will unfold according the sequence outlined below:
1. Great
persecution of both Jews and Christians will happen as a result of a
worldwide economic collapse, followed by the establishment of a New World
Order.
2. God will raise up His
Two Witness, who will start a Jewish
revival by prophesying to the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37,4-14), establishing the 144,000 Jews, who will attain the ministry of
directing the Church of the gentiles into a global revival.
3.
In response to this revival, the Beast will raise up his
antichrist (the Pope), claiming to be Jesus Christ return in the flesh.
4.
The Pope will amass many followers but will fail to derail the Christian
revival and will receive the Beast's glory to himself.
5.
The beast will kill the antichrist, burn his city (the Vatican), migrate
to Jerusalem and pose as Israel's Messiah
6.
His attempts to derail this revival will fail too, and when he exits the
Jewish temple, he will command the arrest and extermination of all Jews
and Christians on a global scale.
7.
God will interrupt the mayhem with a colossal earthquake that
will rock the planet with the sixth seal (Rev 6,12-17), marking the
formal beginning of God’s judgment (seals one through five pertain to
Satan’s wrath, which God claims as part of His judgment).
8.
The first of God’s trumpets will sound, awaking the Ten Virgins
9.
The five foolish virgins will walk away from God, supposedly in
pursuit of more oil
10. God will transform the ministry of the
Two Witnesses from
benevolent shepherds of God’s Church to dynamic adjudicators of his
judgment. God will call them to protect
the saints and judge the world for their unbelief. Their ministry will
last 3½ years. The Trumpet judgments will be orchestrated by the Two
Witnesses.
11. During
the 3 ½-year
period of the Trumpets the Church will flee into the wilderness.
12. After the sixth trumpet, when the ministry of the
Two Witnesses
is complete, they will be killed and will come back to life and
be raptured to heaven as the first fruits of the First Resurrection.
13.
The seventh trumpet will sound, and the dead in Christ will be
raised imperishable. Shortly afterward, the Church will be raptured,
and the bowls of God’s judgment will proceed.
Chapter
List
1
The 5,1-3 says, “Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need
to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will
come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "Peace and
safety," destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on
a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” NIV. A scale of increasing
judgments from God will overwhelm the world as the Seals transition to
the Trumpets, ending with the Bowls in escalating judgments. Mark 13-8
says, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the
beginning of birth pains” NIV. Jesus is saying that we can use natural
and manmade disasters as a kind of clock to determine where we are
within the sequence of endtime events, becoming more frequent and
severe the closer we get to the end. The purpose of the Seals is to
discipline the Church for her disobedience throughout the age of grace; the purpose of the
Trumpets is to discipline the world for martyring the saints, and the
Bowls of God's wrath are so severe that He cannot allow the Church
remain on earth to witness them in the
flesh. Consequently, God will rapture His people before the bowls, for
there will be no place on earth for them to hide.
The
seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple
came a loud voice from the throne, saying, "It is done!" Then
there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a
severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has
been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. The great city split into
three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered
Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury
of his wrath. Every island fled away and the mountains could not be
found. From the sky huge hailstones of about a hundred pounds each fell
upon men. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because
the plague was so terrible. Rev
16,17-21 NIV
Listen
to the words of John the Baptist, a man that Jesus personally commended
as one of the greatest prophets of all time (Mat 11-11), “The voice of
one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of the Lord, make His
paths straight. Every ravine shall be filled up, and every mountain and
hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall become straight (Luke
3,4-6 NIV). The ministry of John the Baptist was to prepare Israel to
receive their Messiah, who ushered in
a man who shook the nation of Israel so violently that such a people are
still trembling from His visitation two thousand years later. The
earthquake of the seventh Bowl is the greatest
earthquake that man would ever experience, articulating the analogy between
this judgment and
the glory that God has prepared for the Church by shaking ungodliness
from His saints.
See to
it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when
they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we
turn away from him who warns us from heaven? At that time his voice
shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake
not only the earth but also the heavens."
The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can
be shaken-that is, created things-so that what cannot be shaken may
remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be
shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence
and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire." Heb 12,25-29 NIV
Satan is about to lose his grip on the world after losing his
place above the world as prince of the
power of the air in Eph 2-1,2. During the
times of great shaking, descriptive of the last days from earthquakes so
severe it makes the stars appear to fall from the sky to God shaking His
people, Satan will
feel these powers too when the heavens are shaken by
forces he hasn’t felt in a long time. Jesus said in Luke
10-18,19, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given
you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the
power of the enemy; nothing will harm you” NIV. God will shake
complacency from the Church in the last days and awaken His people from
their millennial slumber and call them to shake the devil from his lofty
position through the word of God and prayer.
And
there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the
dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong
enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled
down-that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the
whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: "Now have come the
salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of
his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our
God day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood
of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their
lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the
devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows
that his time is short." When the dragon saw that he had been
hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the
male child. The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that
she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert [wilderness],
where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out
of the serpent's reach. Rev
12,7-14 NIV
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List
This
is a battle of the saints in
prayer giving power to the angelic host of heaven, who are fighting for the
Church's sake (Dan 10,12-14). This is the only instance in Scripture that
mentions Lucifer’s heavenly eviction that occurred eons ago and will
occur again in the last days much the same way. It is ironic that it is
mentioned in context with endtime prophecy, seeming to indicate that
this transition from Lucifer to Satan is analogous to a
future angelic battle that will soon occur as a near
identical war that will further lower Satan's status, who was once
inheritor of the entire creation, then lowered to prince of fallen angels
controlling all of mankind on a single planet, to now borrowing the body of
one man to become the antichrist.
The
antichrist will come unglued in the public eye at his failure to stop
God’s revival from expanding and taking over the world, which is
growing faster and gaining more momentum than his own kingdom. Satan will
realize he is over his head when he fails to convince the world he is
the great and power messiah, after angelic majesties and
powers of the heavens have shaken him from his spiritual domain and
blown away his smokescreen of deception,
and pulled away the curtain to reveal a simple demon-wizard at the
controls. Just as Toto pulled away the screen to reveal
a little old man torquing on a lot of levers that cast an
untrue image of himself on the opposite wall to bluff Dorothy and her
friends to fear him, so the Church through the power of God will expose
the antichrist and his lying deceptions, who indoctrinated the world
that believing in Jesus is the source of all the ills of society and
that His disciples need to
be expunged.
Satan
does not want to rule the world through the antichrist because of the
many limitations of sinful flesh. He would rather rule the world as the prince of power
of the air (Eph 2,1-3), but the church has taken his place after the wings of the
great eagle were plucked off the serpent and given to her, so
that she might fly to her place in the wilderness (Rev 12-14). When it
says he fell to the earth, it means he fell from the sky, suggesting
that he was barred from this spiritual vantage point, and was forced to
take on human flesh by possessing the man of lawlessness. God, who is
infinitely more resourceful and intelligent than the devil is working
against him to remove all his options and proving the weakness of the god
they worshipped, compared to our God. It
shouldn’t surprise anyone that Satan’s ways of arrogance and tyranny
are inferior to God’s ways of humility and service.
Satan and his loyal subjects will be overwhelmed by the spiritual power
of God’s Church, which will become a real threat to his world
empire. As the Church continues growing spiritually and numerically, it will overwhelm
the lies and deceptions of the antichrist, exposing Satan, his kingdom,
his motives and purpose for building a one-world religion and government
to enslave the people.
God
will give the world the gift of repentance by contrasting the message of
the New World Order with the message of the Two Witnesses, who will
prophesy for three and a half years that the madman they are following
is Satan in human flesh, backing up their message with signs,
wonders and miracles.
Nevertheless, the majority of humanity will not repent of their worship
of demons (Rev 9-20,21). For this reason God will judge the world for
its unbelief and for blaspheming the Holy Spirit in full knowledge of
the truth, preferring the murderous spirit of Satan and the lust of
their own flesh over the love of the truth. Those who want to kill the
saints will perform their deeds in the very presence of God, in that a
spirit of unbelief will have blinded their minds from acknowledging the
ramifications of their own actions. 2 The 2,9-12 says, “Even him,
whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and
lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them
that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they
might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion,
that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who
believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” KJV.
Chapter
List
In
chapter four, "Rise of the Antichrist", the discussion mostly revolved
around Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue. Its four metals (gold,
silver, bronze and iron)
represented world empires of the Old Testament age that dovetailed with
Daniel’s dream of four beasts, representing world empires of the New
Testament age, but we came short of commenting about the rock that was
hewn from a mountain side, and hurled at the base of the statue,
completely destroying it. Lets first refresh our memory of
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream:
You
looked, O king, and there before you stood a large statue-an enormous,
dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. The head of the statue was made
of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of
bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked
clay. While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human
hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed
them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were
broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing
floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace.
But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled
the whole earth. In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set
up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to
another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an
end, but it will itself endure forever. This is the meaning of the
vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands-a rock
that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to
pieces. Dan 2,31-35,44-45 NIV
The
most interesting feature of this statue is the legs, feet and toes that
were partly made of iron and partly made of clay. The clay had the
effect of weakening the iron, representing two things:
the weakening of the human gene pool (Daniel 2-43), and the weakening of the last day’s global economic system, depicted by the ten toes. The
fact that God hewed the rock from a mountainside without human agency
refers to the Great Endtime Revival and indicates that it is in fact an act of God. The rock represents
both the Lord Jesus Christ and His church. Just as God offered His Son to the world as
a sacrifice for sin, so God will offer His church to the world in the
last days, and they will butcher His saints as they did His Son, so God
will judge them for martyring His people, and for rejecting their
message of eternal life that He spoke through them. For this He will
turn the world upside down and empty the contents into hell.
This
rock, formed without human agency is composed of many little stones,
suggesting that unity of the Church is a divine attribute of God, hewn from a mountainside without human agency,
suggesting that unity is both holy to the Lord, and beyond human grasp
without divine intervention from God. Unity will prove to be God’s
tool of choice to destroy Satan’s kingdom. Satan will consider unity
of the Church to be a threat to his kingdom and attack it, and God will
subsequently judge him for martyring the saints. The purpose of the
Church in the last days, will be to offer Jesus’ gospel of eternal
life to the world once more by requiring everyone to make a conscious
decision to either follow Christ or to follow the antichrist, equating
their decision to side with the devil as the full
expression of contempt for the gospel.
Man
has tried (or perhaps he hasn’t tried) to promote unity for thousands
of years, and has utterly failed. So, when unity finally forms in the
Church, people will know that God is working
among His people. Since unity is impossible with God, it will act as the
greatest sign of Jesus’ imminent return, as Rev 12-1 says, “A
great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the
moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” NASB.
Not even the antichrist is a greater sign of the endtimes compared to unity of the
Church. The world has seen many tyrants throughout the
ages, but how many times have we seen the Church obeying the Holy
Spirit? That is more rare and precious than gold!
The
brilliance of God’s Church that the world hasn’t seen for thousands
of years will light up the sky, blinding Satan’s already blinded eyes,
casting him to the earth with confusion and chaos with the
elementary principles of his own nature affixing to his flesh, tempting
him to destroy
his own kingdom. Remember what Jesus said in Mat 12-25,26, “Every
kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or
household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out
Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?”
NIV. It turns out that Jesus was in fact prophesying of Satan’s
downfall. He will destroy himself, simply by the fact that he is the son
of destruction and is incapable of turning off the spigot of his own
jealousy, which is capable of eating
through anything that tries to contain it, including himself.
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God
will use His church to destroy the kingdom of antichrist in three
stages. (1) The Two Witnesses will physically tear down Satan’s empire,
in that many Christians will be
martyred, precipitating the judgment of God. (2) the 144,000 Jews will preach the
gospel, exposing him so that he cannot accomplish the things he wants to
do, and (3) there will be internal power struggles between the
antichrist and the False Prophet, and they will destroy their own
kingdom. Martyrdom will have
a tremendous impact on people, who will condemn what the Beast is doing, compelling
them to join the Church in the greatest revival the world has ever
known. Many who have not received the mark will see the
martyrdom and hear the word of God, and recognize the Two Witnesses as
the fulfillment of prophecy, and millions will flood into the Church during
this time. The truth will become more popular than
Satan’s lies, and it will ruin the kingdom of the antichrist. Once
their testimony is complete,
God will take His Church to heaven in the Rapture and then the bowls of
His judgment will proceed in response to the world martyring the
saints. That is, the world will bring upon themselves the Bowls of God’s
judgment as a consequence of their hardness of heart and their
unwillingness to repent of their murders, their sorceries, their
immorality and their thefts (Rev 9-21). The Bowls are not meant to
correct but to butcher those who butchered the saints without mercy or
remorse.
God
will salvage Jerusalem in the last days from total annihilation and save
a remnant, who have not taken the Mark of the Beast,
who will come to their senses and repent and be saved after the Rapture.
God will call them to Jerusalem before He unleashes the Bowls of His
fierce wrath, making Jerusalem the only safe haven in the world. He will protect His remnant under the nose of the
antichrist, while they wait for Christ's return to the Mount of Olives,
and these will be the seeds that will repopulate the earth during the
Millennium.
Listen
to the angel speak to His disciples as they watched Jesus ascend into heaven, "why do you
stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken
from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him
go into heaven" (Act 1-11). The angel was saying that the events
leading to His return will occur in reverse order of His ascension. The
disciples gathered in the upper room and waited for the promise of the Spirit at Pentecost. Afterward, the saints had a powerful ministry for a
while, until they were dispersed into all the nations in 70 AD. That entire process will repeat itself
in reverse order in the last days starting from apostasy, leading to
the Great Endtime Revival, followed by a post-rapture remnant gathering
in Jerusalem, waiting for the return of Christ.
Jesus' Ascension
-
The disciples and others
watched as Jesus ascended into heaven
from the Mount of Olives
-
They huddled in the upper
room waiting for the promise from the Father
-
There was a great
outpouring of the Spirit effecting the first century's revival
-
The Church was later
dispersed into all the nations
Jesus’ Second Coming
-
The Church is still fragmented throughout the nations
-
The Church will unite during
the Great Endtime Revival
-
After the Rapture, there
will be a remnant gathered in Jerusalem that will relive the upper room experience,
waiting the promise of His return
-
Jesus will return to the
Mount of Olives and establish His
thousand-year reign
The
Church will have done irreparable damage to Satan’s empire, but Satan
himself is destined to destroy his own kingdom, which works on
opposite principles of God’s kingdom, fostering jealousy and
alienation, until it collapses under its own weight, like Nebuchadnezzar’s statue
that fell as a result of poor footing, with its head of gold being very
top-heavy.
The
ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but
who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast.
They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the
beast…. The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute.
They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh
and burn her with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to
accomplish his purpose by agreeing to give the beast their power to
rule, until God's words are fulfilled. The woman you saw is the great
city that rules over the kings of the earth. Rev 17-12,13;16-18
NIV
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In
these verses the city that is being destroyed refers to Rome, namely the
Vatican, and the one destroying it is the false prophet, who gave his
power to the antichrist (the pope) in hope that he might establish his
kingdom around the antichrist’s religion, so they might rule the world together. However, because the antichrist
is Satan incarnate, instead of directing the world toward the economic
and political system of the false prophet, the antichrist will betray
his interests and rally the world around himself as their religious
leader, and receive the glory and power to himself through selfishness and greed. The false prophet will deeply
resent him for this and will come and destroy Rome, but
the antichrist will have already migrated to Jerusalem after faking his
assassination.
The
antichrist will suddenly appear in Jerusalem as Israel’s long-lost
messiah, returning in the flesh as Savior of the world (though Jesus
warned He would not return this way), claiming to have risen from the dead, and
he will use his
popularity with the people to shelter himself as a fugitive of the False
Prophet, who is seeking to destroy him. The armies of the world that
were coming to destroy the antichrist will besiege the remnant in the plains of
Megiddo, and Christ will rescue them there in the war of Armageddon, forever ending the
empires of men and will set up His millennial kingdom that will act as
the first thousand years of a kingdom that will never end. The purpose of the millennium is to
demonstrate to the world how to establish a peaceful society and a
kingdom that will remain.
As
the false prophet continues to assimilate nations and economies, growing
wealthier and enslaving the people, the world will turn to religion for
guidance and comfort. Through these very arduous times a massive
Christian revival will develop, giving people hope. This will cause the
antichrist to switch gears, forcing him to abandon his plans of becoming
a global, fascist, totalitarian dictator to becoming the spiritual leader
of the world. The dragon will orchestrate the circumstances to guide the
pope into the role of religious tyrant for the purpose of enslaving the
people, but he will deny all allegiance to the Beast and seek his own glory through
a new vision of himself as
spiritual leader of the world. He will fulfill his vision of living a luxurious and
pampered life by channeling the wealth of the Beast to the Vatican, thus
betraying the False Prophet, turning the moneylenders into puppet
rulers, because he is unwilling to share his glory even with his inner circle of power.
The
armies of the world, which are financed by the false prophet, will seek
to level Jerusalem to get at the antichrist. God will put a stop to the
nations’ insanity in the war of Armageddon. For this reason it says in
Revelation chapter nineteen that the Beast will hate the whore and will
destroy his city with fire, the Vatican of Rome. He will use the
destruction of the city to stage his own death, and then rise from the
ashes and migrate to Jerusalem, where he will pose as
Israel’s messiah and savior of the world. His intensions are to
put out the fire of revival started by the 144,000 Jewish Christians who
rallied the Church together on a global scale. It won’t take long for
Satan’s lies and deception, his lack of character and self-destructive
attributes that he used against the kingdoms of men to usurp his own
kingdom. This will prove once and for all that the ways of God are not
just better; they are the only way to run a kingdom. Jesus will
proceed to establish his own kingdom on the earth, beginning in
Jerusalem and fanning in every direction until the whole earth is filled
with His glory (people) during the millennium.
The worthy Lamb and the
Judgments of God 41:08
Mark of the Beast:
Dr. David Jeremiah 11:36
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James
R. Wuthrich
www.jeansbiblestudy.com
COM
