The Antichrist and the New World Order
Marvin Moore Pacific Press(r) Publishing Association Nampa, Idaho Oshawa, Ontario, Canada www.pacificpress.com
Originally published in 1993. The author assumes full responsibility for the accuracy of all facts and quotations as cited in this book. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture references in this book are from the New International Version. Heritage Project This book is part of the Pacific Press(r) Heritage Project, a plan to re-publish classic books from our historical archives and to make valuable books available once more. The content of this book is presented as it was originally published and should be read with its original publication date in mind. You can obtain additional copies of this book by calling toll-free 1-800-765-6955 or by visiting www.adventistbookcenter.com. You can purchase this as an e-book by visiting www.adventistebooks.com. Copyright (c) 2012 Edition by Pacific Press(r) Publishing Association Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-8163-3343-1 0-8163-3343-2
Table of Contents Chapter 01 - Countdown To The Year 2000 Chapter 02 - Who Is The Antichrist? Chapter 03 - God Predicts The Fall Of The Antichrist Chapter 04 - Conquering The Antichrist Chapter 05 - Some Lessons From History Chapter 06 - Some Lessons From Christian History Chapter 07 - A Summary Of The End Time Chapter 08 - The First Beast Of Revelation 13 Chapter 09 - The Second Beast Of Revelation 13 Chapter 10 - An Image To The First Beast Chapter 11 - The Antichrist's Clever Plan To Deceive You Chapter 12 - The Mark Of The Beast Chapter 13 - A Threefold Union Chapter 14 - Making Sure You Conquer The Antichrist Chapter 15 - The Close Of Probation Chapter 16 - The Antichrist And The New World Order Chapter 17 - God's New World Order
Chapter 1 Countdown to the Year 2000 If even a fraction of what I've heard in the last two or three years is true, you and I don't want to be around on January 1, 2000. Consider these sobering suggestions of what may happen: A depression leaves millions of Americans jobless, hundreds of millions worldwide. Many are homeless, with no food and no way to get any. Scores of the nation's largest companies and thousands of smaller ones are bankrupt. The Big One devastates southern California, leaving fifteen thousand dead and tens of thousands injured. Downtown L.A. is a pile of rubble. Highways and freeways are devastated. State and federal governments stretch their resources to the maximum to provide relief. A killer asteroid a mile in diameter impacts in the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles off the North American continent, creating savage forest fires in the western part of the United States and Canada.1 A massive tidal wave washes the coastlines of North and South America, destroying billions of dollars' worth of property and killing millions. To cope with the crisis, the world's leaders establish a one-world dictatorship under the auspices of the United Nations and ration food supplies and other essentials worldwide. Does all this sound farfetched? Not if you've been keeping up with what's going on in the world. What the Experts are Saying You'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know that the United States government is in debt more than four trillion dollars (early 1993). On top of that, America's banks have loaned $214 billion dollars to foreign borrowers. And many of the governments involved will never pay back their loans, especially third-world nations that are struggling to survive. When the truth is finally out, everyone will be broke. The 1929 economic collapse pales into insignificance when compared with the depression that many experts believe is almost certainly coming between now and the year 2000. According to Dr. Ravi Batra, internationally known expert on world economics: Ever since the Second World War, the world has been spared a severe economic crisis. To be sure, there have been a few recessions, some of them severe, but none has displayed the length and ferocity of the Great Depression that afflicted the world in 1929 and lasted more than eight years. I believe that a disaster of the same, if not greater, severity is already in the making.2 Dr. Batra was incorrect in his prediction that this depression "will occur in 1990 and plague the world through 1996."3 However, that such a depression is near can hardly be doubted. Nobody knows when the Big One - the granddaddy of all earthquakes - will hit southern California, except that it will happen sometime in the next few years. In the meantime, each earthquake that strikes the region (two in quick succession in late June 1992) means that "tomorrow, next week, next month, next year are all more dangerous than they were."4 If you haven't heard of asteroids, keep watching your TV. Scientists assure us that these "doomsday rocks," as they call them, will inevitably strike the earth sometime in the future.5 Two scientists have already predicted that there is a greater chance the average American will die from a meteorite or asteroid impact than that he or she will die in a major airplane crash!6 And about the United Nations dictatorship - did you ever hear of George Bush's "new world
order"? Bush is no longer president, but whether you and I like it or not, in one form or another, that new world order is coming. What Religious People are Saying So far I've pointed out what the scientists, the economists, and the politicians are saying about the future. What you may not know is that religious leaders are saying every bit as much. According to Pat Robertson, in his book The New World Order: In 1991, the world owed an unbelievable $25 trillion dollars in private and public debt. The exponential compounding of debt based on fractional reserve banking has created a monster that no central bank, no combination of banks, no single government, and no world government - especially the inefficient and corrupt United Nations - can solve. When the bubble finally bursts, the financial wreckage will be the worst in the history of the world.7 Robertson believes that for the past two or three centuries the world's financial barons have been building toward a new world order under their control, and he sees these plans coming to maturity in the next few years. He claims that American money helped finance the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia because the aims of the world's bankers for Communism are parallel to their aims for America and the West. "Until we understand this commonality of interest between left-wing Bolsheviks and right-wing monopolistic capitalists," Robertson says, "we cannot fully comprehend the last seventy years of world history nor the ongoing movement toward world government."8 It's irrelevant to this discussion whether Mr. Robertson is right about the world's bankers manipulating the world's economy for political ends. The point is that he is a religious leader who is saying some of the same things the world's politicians and economists are saying: An economic collapse is coming that will push the human race toward a one-world government. Even more interesting is the vision of the future held by many Roman Catholics. Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit priest who has become a popular American author, recently wrote: He [Pope John Paul] is waiting... for an event that will fission [divide] human history, splitting the immediate past from the oncoming future. It will be an event on public view in the skies, in the oceans, and on the continental landmasses of this planet. It will particularly involve our human sun, which every day lights up and shines upon the valleys, the mountains and the plains of this earth for our eyes.... Fissioning it will be as an event, in John Paul's conviction of faith, for it will immediately nullify all the grand designs the nations are now forming and will introduce the Grand Design of man's Maker.9 John Paul's faith in this "fissioning event" stems from a vision that three children in the Portuguese hamlet of Fatima claimed to have received from the Virgin Mary in 1917. According to Malachi Martin, John Paul accepts the validity of that claim, and he believes that the children's vision will be fulfilled in his lifetime. Furthermore, Mr. Martin believes that a one-world government is just around the corner and that Pope John Paul will rule that new world order: Willing or not, ready or not, we are all involved in an all-out, no-holds-barred, three-way global competition.... The competition is about who will establish the first one-world system of government that has ever existed in the society of nations.... Those of us who are under seventy will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive, and judiciary authority and control.... It is not too much to say, in fact, that the chosen purpose of John Paul's pontificate... is to be the victor in that competition, now well under way.10 Another religious group with significant views about the near future is the New Age religion that
has swept into the Western world from the East. Many New Age devotees believe in an imminent catastrophe that will involve our entire planet: Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century prophet whose enigmatic riddles describing future events have long challenged translators and interpreters, wrote of a massive earth catastrophe to be followed by a great peace among the peoples of earth while the devil is confined to the bottom of the abyss. Clues as to the timing of this event have led many to calculate that it may occur in July, September, or October of 1999.11 Former White House correspondent Ruth Montgomery became an ardent follower of New Age ideas during the early 1960s and wrote profusely on the subject for many years thereafter. Her book, Ruth Montgomery: Herald of the New Age, was coauthored with Joanne Garland. Says Garland: Ruth Montgomery's Guides have begun warning of a shift of the earth "shortly before the year 2000," ever since dictating material for A World Beyond in 1971.... This global catastrophe, the Guides claim, will cleanse the earth of pollution and evil people and will usher in the long-awaited New Age of a thousand years of peace.12 What the Bible Says These are some of the ideas of religious -people. But what does the Bible say? Amazingly, far more than most people realize. Many people overlook the real significance of a statement by Jesus that was quoted by Luke: There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken (Luke 21:25, 26). Notice that according to Jesus, signs in the sun, moon, and stars will cause panic - anguish and perplexity - among the nations, particularly at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Luke goes on to say that the entire human race will be terrified by this shaking of the heavenly bodies. We cannot say exactly what Jesus meant, though again it comes close to the signs in the heavens that Malachi Martin and Pope John Paul predict. I pointed out earlier that in recent years scientists have begun warning of the devastating effect a major asteroid impact would have on our planet. Whether this is what Jesus meant remains to be seen, though it would certainly fit His words. Numerous references can be found in Revelation of massive physical damage to our planet, along with terrible ecological devastation. If Revelation is correct, the shifting of the earth on its axis as predicted by the New Age, with a resulting breakup of the earth's crust, could well happen: The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and... 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.... Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found (Revelation 16:17, 18, 20). Ravi Batra and Pat Robertson anticipate a terrible economic collapse in the near future. Most people are not aware that Revelation is entirely in agreement: "'Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!' "The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more.... "They will say, 'The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your riches and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.' The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn.... "They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out:
" 'Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth! In one hour she has been brought to ruin!' " (Revelation 18:10, 11, 14, 15, 19). And notice the following description in Revelation 8 about terrible ecological devastation: The seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water - the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter (Revelation 8:6-11). But does the Bible speak of a one-world government? Absolutely. Notice the following passages from Revelation: I saw a beast coming out of the sea.... The whole world was astonished and followed the beast.... And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation (Revelation 13:1, 3, 7). 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 (Revelation 17:12, 13). That sounds amazingly like the United Nations, in which the various nations retain their independence yet give some of their authority over to the world body for the common good. With scientists warning about the potential for massive catastrophes in the near future, and with various religious groups predicting the same, will it happen in our day? I can't prove it to you, but I believe that the answer to both of these questions may very well be Yes. But the really big question is this: If these things are true, what will they mean when they happen, and what should they mean to us even now, before they happen? Jesus said, "When you see these things [the signs in the sun, moon, and stars that He predicted] happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near" (Luke 21:31). In the context of the entire chapter in which He spoke these words, Jesus meant that these signs would mean that the second coming of Christ is near. Many Christians today are convinced that Christ will return in the very near future. If this is true, then the Bible's prediction of the reign of the antichrist over a new world order is also about to happen. I believe the terrible depression and the devastating natural catastrophes that I described earlier in this book will propel the world into the coming one-world government far more rapidly than today's most ardent proponent of a new world order would dare to dream about. Fortunately, there is hope. For out of the chaos of these calamities, and out of the ruins of the antichrist's new world order, God Himself will establish the ultimate "new world order" that will last forever. However, all of this is getting ahead of our story. It will take the rest of this book to develop these thoughts. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, the story began many millenniums ago in a part of the universe that is hundreds, perhaps millions, of light years away from planet Earth. 1. As it plunged toward the earth, an asteroid a mile in diameter would create a fireball hundreds of miles in diameter.
2. Ravi Batra, The Great Depression of 1990 (New York: Dell, 1987), 9. 3. Ibid. 4. The Idaho Statesman, 1 July 1992, 3A. 5. According to Donald Yeomans, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, "Earth runs its course about the sun in a swarm of asteroids. Sooner or later, our planet will be struck by one of them" (Newsweek, 23 Nov. 1992, 56, 58). Yeoman's opinion is shared by nearly all scientists who have studied asteroids. It's not a question of whether, they say, but only of when, another major asteroid will strike planet Earth. See, for example, Clark Chapman and David Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes (New York: Plenum Press, 1989), 36. 6. See Clark Chapman and David Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes, 283. Clark Chapman is a planetologist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and an advisor for NASA and the National Academy of Sciences. David Morrison is chairman of NASA's Solar System Exploration Committee and chairman of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. 7. Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas: Word, 1991), 133. 8. Ibid., 71. 9. Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 639. 10. Ibid., 15-17. 11. Ruth Montgomery with Joanne Garland, Ruth Montgomery: Herald of the New Age (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986), 233. 12. Ibid., 233, 234.
Chapter 2 Who Is the Antichrist? "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." So read the opening words of Star Wars, the first in what has become a popular line of fictional space odysseys. In the film, Ben Kenobi and Luke Sky walker are among the last survivors of a race of good warriors called the Jedi. An Evil Empire has destroyed their planet, killed off the rest of the Jedi, and is seeking to destroy Ben and Luke. In due time the pair find themselves trapped with their friends inside the Evil Empire's monster spaceship. In a hand-to-hand fight with Darth Vader, the sinister leader of the Evil Empire, Ben Kenobi sacrifices his life, making it possible for Luke Sky walker and the other survivors of the Jedi to escape. Luke Sky walker and his companions are still not safe, though, because the Evil Empire takes after them in hot pursuit. From their base on a distant planet, Luke Skywalker attacks the Evil Empire's spaceship at its one vulnerable point and destroys it, ending the drama. The most striking aspect of Star Wars is the close similarity between the film and the conflict between good and evil that has been going on in the universe for thousands of years. You and I see this conflict alive in our neighborhoods and even in our own lives. And, as in Star Wars, evil seems to have the upper hand. The more prisons we build, the more criminals there are to fill them. For every plug the government jams in the dike to stop the torrent of cocaine and marijuana gushing into the country, the drug lords blast two more. Human passions seem impossible to control - a fact that is evident not only in the riots that occasionally erupt in our cities, but in the everyday events in the lives of millions of addicted, depressed, angry people. Where Did Evil Come From? How did this happen? Where did it all begin? Did God plan for our world to be like this, or, as in Star Wars, is there a sinister "evil empire" behind it all? The Bible has an explanation. Its story also begins a long time ago in a "galaxy" far, far away called heaven. These are the opening words in Revelation's chilling account: 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 (Revelation 12:7-9). Notice that Michael leads the forces of justice and right, and Satan leads the forces of evil, and each is supported by other beings called "angels." According to the prophet Ezekiel, Satan at one time held the very highest position in heaven, next to God Himself. He was "anointed as a guardian cherub" who was "on the holy mount of God" and "walked among the fiery stones" (Ezekiel 28:14). At that time he was known as Lucifer, which means "light bearer" (see Isaiah 14:12, King James Version). The exalted position Lucifer held suggests that God must have loved him very much. Many people wonder why God created the devil. He didn't. Speaking of Lucifer before his rebellion, the Bible says, "You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you" (Ezekiel 28:15). God created Lucifer a perfect, blameless being. Lucifer originated sin within his own mind and heart. God didn't put it there. He found it there. This leads us to one of the most important principles that God uses as He directs His efforts to
resolve this universal conflict between good and evil: He forces no one. God did not make Lucifer evil. He made him good. However, when Lucifer chose to make himself evil, God did not stop him. I believe that the ability to understand moral issues, to tell the difference between right and wrong, is one of the chief characteristics that makes humans different from the animals. Another difference is our ability to choose between right and wrong. Without this ability we would not be human. God has a tremendous respect for the power of choice that He has given to the intelligent beings He created. Each one is free to choose which side he or she will be on. When Lucifer rebelled against God, it was by his own choice. God obviously did not force Lucifer to remain loyal, or there would be no Satan today. Neither did He force him to rebel, nor did He force the other angels to choose His side or Satan's. Each made his own choice. Why Lucifer Rebelled The next question we need to ask is why Lucifer rebelled. What was the issue in this conflict between himself and God? Isaiah tells us that Lucifer said in his heart: "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of the assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High" (Isaiah 14:13, 14). When one person aspires to another's throne, we call it treason - rebellion against the existing government. Apparently Lucifer rebelled against the very government of God! He rebelled against God's laws and against His authority. He wanted God's position; he wanted to be like God; he wanted to be God. Does the idea that God has a government come as a surprise to you? It shouldn't. Even our science fiction assumes that beings in other parts of the universe have their governments with rulers and subordinates and laws to be obeyed. The Bible makes it clear that Lucifer made a free choice to rebel against the government of God and that a large number of the angels in heaven made a free choice to join him in his rebellion. The fact that Michael had angels on His side is evidence that many of the angels chose to remain loyal to God's government. Think of how it happens when humans rebel against each other. At first, the issues are unclear, and people are confused about who is right. However, as time goes on, the issues become more and more clear, and people start taking sides. Opinions harden, till eventually it becomes almost impossible to persuade anyone on either side that the other might be right. That, I believe, is how it happened in heaven. Warfare broke out when Satan and his angels maintained their defiant stand against God's government in spite of the fact that the issues in the conflict had become clear and rebellion was exposed for what it truly was. Revelation tells us that when rebellion had reached full maturity, Satan "was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him" (Revelation 12:9, emphasis added). Evil in the World The Bible does not tell us why God chose this earth as the new home for Satan and his angels. When history in this world ends and life in the next begins, one of the first questions I intend to ask God is why He chose to cast Satan onto our planet. All you and I can do is assume that God in His wisdom knew this was best. Be that as it may, God's choice to cast Satan to our earth had tremendous consequences forus humans. Suddenly the universal conflict between good and evil became, not a theoretical war off in a place called heaven, but a battle you and I have to fight and choices we have to make. We can't get out
of it. This became apparent immediately after God created the world. God planted a tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden and said to our first parents, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die" (Genesis 2:16, 17). This tree became a test of obedience for Adam and Eve. I seriously doubt that there was anything poisonous about the fruit itself. The issue was loyalty, not chemistry. The whole thing sounds so simple that many people think God was horribly unjust to exact such a severe penalty of the human race for such a minor infraction. But when you stop to think about it, the very simplicity of God's requirement is the greatest reason why Adam and Eve should have obeyed it. God did not ask them to do something profoundly difficult like jumping off a three thousand-foot cliff. All He said was, "Don't eat of that tree." Suppose that God had required Adam and Eve to do something terribly dangerous, which in our human judgment would be a real test of trust. This would actually have obscured the real issue, which was loyalty. Adam and Eve could have begged off: "The task you assigned us was too hard. We couldn't do it." But by making the test so utterly simple, God ensured that if they disobeyed, it would be obvious to the entire universe that the issue was loyalty and not the difficulty of the test. Adam and Eve were not banished from the garden so much for eating the fruit as they were for distrusting God. This becomes clear when we read what happened. Satan was extremely crafty in his approach to Eve: "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1). Notice the subtle doubt of God's word. The implication was, "You've got to be kidding! God didn't really say that, did He?" Notice, also, that the serpent misquoted God. He asked, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The serpent knew good and well that God had told Adam and Eve that they could eat of any tree in the garden save one (see Genesis 2:16). The serpent's question was cleverly worded not only to cast doubt on God right from the start, but to practically force Eve to respond in order to correct his wrong statement. When Eve pointed out the truth - there's only one tree we can't eat of - the serpent told an outand-out lie: "You will not surely die." And he followed it up with the very temptation that caused Lucifer to rebel - the desire to be like God. "For God knows," he said, "that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (verses 4,5, emphasis added). Unfortunately, Eve fell for the deception. "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it" (verse 6). The result of their disobedience was immediate. They felt ashamed. Before they sinned, the Bible says that "the man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame" (Genesis 2:25). However, as soon as they sinned, "the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves" (Genesis 3:7). And this wasn't all. Later in the day "the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden" (verse 8). Adam and Eve were actually afraid of God! Adam even admitted it. When God asked why they had hidden, he replied, "I was afraid" (verse 10). No evil emotion is more basic than fear. It is the exact opposite of love, the foundational motive of all that is good. The key point to notice here is that Adam and Eve did not say to themselves, "Now that we've disobeyed God, it's time to be afraid." They didn't decide to be afraid. They didn't choose to be afraid. Fear happened to them. The only choice they made of their own free will was to disobey God. Fear was the inevitable spiritual, psychological result of that choice, and over this they had absolutely no control.
The moment Adam and Eve chose to sin, and the moment shame and fear entered their hearts as a result of that choice, the entire human race was doomed to the same fate. The Bible says that "sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). This is the source of the evil that has plagued the human race since the world began. It is crucial for you and me to understand that we cannot put fear - the foundational motive of all that is evil - out of our own minds and hearts. We are born sinners at the core of our being, and we are powerless to change that. Sinners we will be, for sinners we must be. If we are ever to escape from this fear - this sinful nature with which we are born - we must have help. I will have much more to say about this later. For now, I would like you to notice one other point about the serpent's temptation of Adam and Eve. The real tempter was not a snake. It was Satan, who used the snake as a medium through which to talk to Adam and Eve. Revelation 12:9 identifies the dragon who warred against Michael as "that ancient serpent called... Satan." The point we need to keep in mind as we try to understand how evil developed in our world is this: Satan communicates with human beings through mediums, almost never as Satan. He used the serpent as a medium in the Garden of Eden, but he has used many other mediums throughout history. One of his most successful mediums has been people - not wicked people, but God's own professed followers! Had Eve realized to whom she was really talking, she would almost certainly have fled from the spot. But because she seemed to be conversing with a serpent and not Satan, she felt no fear. In fact, she was probably quite intrigued by the fact that a serpent could talk. My guess is that she actually wanted to keep up the conversation, out of curiosity, if nothing else. Identifying the Antichrist We are now ready to talk about the antichrist. Who is he, and where did he come from? The answer to this question is so important that I'm going to isolate it for you: The antichrist is Satan himself. Satan was the antichrist when he rebelled against God and Michael in heaven. Satan was the antichrist when he approached Adam and Eve in the guise of a serpent in Eden. Satan was the antichrist when he killed Christ on the cross. And Satan will be the antichrist in the one-world government that is coming upon the world in the near future. If you have any doubt that Satan himself is the antichrist, please read the words of Paul, which Christians for two thousand years have claimed is one of the best descriptions of the antichrist anywhere in the Bible: That day [the second coming of Christ] will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness [the antichrist] is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He opposes and exalts himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, and even sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God (2 Thessalonians 2:3, 4). Notice that this antichrist has exactly the same motive that Lucifer had in heaven - rebellion against God, the desire to be like God and to set himself up in God's temple as if he were God. And Paul, who wrote the words I quoted above, went on to clearly identify this antichrist as Satan: "The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan" (verse 9). It's now time to ask one of the most important questions in this book: If Satan is the antichrist, and if he always presents himself through mediums, through what medium will he present himself as Christ at the very end of time? Jesus gave us the answer when He warned that just before His second coming false Christs "will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if
that were possible" (Matthew 24:24). Amazing! Satan will masquerade as the real Christ! Yet doesn't that make sense? Everyone would reject a false Christ who looked like a false Christ or told us he was a false Christ. In order to deceive the world and if possible God's own people, the coming false Christ will have to look as much like the real Christ as possible. This principle is clearly found in Revelation: I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon (Revelation 13:11). In Revelation the dragon is always a symbol of Satan, and the lamb is always a symbol of Christ. However, notice that in this case the lamblike beast actually speaks like a dragon. Here is a being, a power, a force in the world, that presents itself as Christ the Lamb when it is actually Satan the dragon. The world will fail to realize that this "beast," whom they accept as Christ, is actually Satan, the antichrist. The point of our discussion is this. For thousands of years a conflict has been going on in our world, and indeed throughout the entire universe, between good and evil. The leader on one side is Jesus Christ, and the leader on the other side is Satan. Each has his loyal angels, and each has his loyal people on earth. Revelation is simply a description of the final phase in this universal conflict as it will be played out on our own planet between the human forces of good and evil. The language Revelation uses to describe this final conflict is highly symbolical, but the events themselves will be very, very real to those of us who experience them. However, before we discuss the final phase of this conflict in your day and mine, we need to understand more about its beginning and how it has developed through the millenniums since it began.
Chapter 3 God Predicts the Fall of the Antichrist One of the most intriguing aspects of Star Wars - type science fiction is that just when the bad guys think they've won, they discover they've lost. That's what happened in the conflict between Christ and Satan on this earth. I can just see Satan strutting around, bragging about how he has seduced Adam and Eve. "The human race is mine, mine, mine!" he exults. Then, with his leading fellow demons, he retreats to his lair to plan his future strategy. Suddenly a demon scout enters with a startling announcement: God has just arrived to visit with Adam and Eve. Satan and his leaders rush out to listen to what God has to say. As it turns out, though, God addresses Satan rather than Adam and Eve. "I will put enmity between you and the woman," He says, "and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel" (Genesis 3:15). What on earth do those words mean? They are full of meaning, for they predict that Satan, the antichrist, will ultimately lose his war against God. Let's begin by comparing this verse in Genesis with a similar verse in Revelation: Genesis 3:15 I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. Revelation 12:17 Then the dragon [serpent] was enraged with the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring. God spoke the words in Genesis 3:15 at the beginning of world history, while Revelation 12:17 foretells the end of world history. Notice the following similarities between these verses: 1. Both mention "the woman." 2. Both mention "the serpent." 3. Both mention the woman's "offspring." 4. Genesis speaks of "enmity" between the woman and the serpent, which is similar to Revelation's statement that the dragon/serpent "was enraged at the woman." Notice that the author of Revelation reached back into Genesis, drew out the very symbols God gave at the beginning of the conflict between good and evil in our world, and applied them to its end. In order to understand the end of the conflict between God and Satan, we must understand its beginning. So let's examine those strange words in Genesis 3:15 more closely. Who Are "You" And "The Woman"? First, we need to ask who God had in mind when He said to Satan, "I will put enmity between you and the woman." Who was the "you" in this equation? Who was "the woman"? The "you" was obviously Satan himself, the serpent, whom God was addressing at that very moment, and in the most immediate sense the woman was Eve. However, God went on to say that He would put enmity "between your [Satan's] offspring and hers [Eve's]." God was obviously talking about more than one demon and one woman. He was talking about the future history of the human race. And He divided humanity into two parts: the descendants of Satan and the descendants of Eve. However, God did not have in mind genetic descent. After all, Satan cannot be a father or mother to babies. God had in mind spiritual descent. When we humans divide up our race, we do it according to the part of the world where we live,
the color of our skin, or the language we speak. But God divides the human race into those who believe in Him and those who reject Him. Those who believe in Him are descendants of the woman, and anyone who rejects Him is automatically a "descendant" of the serpent, or Satan. What Is The "Enmity"? God said that He would put enmity between Satan and the woman, and between his descendants and hers. That doesn't sound very friendly, does it? Actually, this brief sentence is one of the most significant in all the Bible, because in just fifteen words it states a principle that underlies the whole conflict between good and evil. Here is that principle: The battleground is the human heart. The side you're on depends on the condition of your heart. While we humans have many good traits, we are far from perfect. One good look at the evening news will tell you that! Every one of us is born with a tendency to do wrong - to sin, if you please. Some of us are born with a tendency to get mad, others with a tendency to abuse the sexual part of our nature, and still others with the tendency to overeat. However, the evil we are born with goes beyond the tendency to do certain wrong things. We are born selfish. Different ones of us manifest this selfishness in different ways, but selfishness lies at the core of what's wrong with all of us. God didn't make Adam and Eve selfish on the inside. He made them full of unselfishness and love and joy. However, when they sinned they took on the same selfishness that lies at the core of Satan's nature. Satan was absolutely right when he said that by eating of the tree they would understand both good and evil. Before Adam and Eve sinned, they liked the things God liked, and they hated the things God hated. Their thoughts and feelings were the opposite of Satan's thoughts and feelings. If Adam and Eve had never sinned, their thoughts and feelings would forever have been like God's - unselfish, loving, and kind. Not only that, their children and their children's children would forever have been like God on the inside. No human being - not even one - would ever have known what it was like to think and feel the way Satan does. However, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they became like Satan on the inside. They now loved the same selfish things that he learned to love after he rebelled against God. There was no enmity between them and him. They were in harmony with him. Not only that, when Adam and Eve sinned, they doomed their children and their children's children forever to also be like Satan on the inside. That unfortunate inheritance has passed on from generation to generation, till it has finally come to you and me, and we've passed it on to our children. Satan is the god, the ruler, of this world because he is at work in human hearts. He became the god of this world when he made Adam and Eve like himself in Eden. The whole human race became like him and therefore belonged to him. How God Responded But God promised to change all that. When He said that He would put enmity between the serpent and the woman, He meant that He would change Adam and Eve and their spiritual descendants so that they would be like Himself again, on the inside. God meant that those who choose to put themselves back on His side would once again be able to think and feel the way He does. Satan and his descendants, on the other hand, have remained selfish all through the centuries. And this brings us to the very heart of the conflict between good and evil. That conflict is not just between people who do good things and those who do bad things. It's a conflict between those who are good and those who are bad on the inside. The side you are on depends on the condition of your heart, and the condition of your heart depends on your choice. I pointed out earlier that every descendant of Adam and Eve is born on Satan's side - spiritually
evil. And that includes you and me. The question is, how can we be like God on the inside when we are born into this world like Satan on the inside? Jesus answered that question in one brief sentence: "No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" (John 3:3). The new birth that Christians talk about so much is the spiritual change from being like Satan on the inside to being like God on the inside. When Revelation says that at the very end of time the dragon was enraged at the rest of the woman's offspring, it's talking about the final conflict between those who have chosen to think and feel like God versus those who have chosen to think and feel like Satan. Now here's a principle that's so crucial, I want to bold-face it for you: Those who want to be on God's side in the final conflict of earth's history must experience a change of heart now. Otherwise, they will end up on the side of the antichrist, and then it will be too late to change. You and I can't wait till the last minute to ask God to make us like Himself on the inside. The time to ask Jesus to bring His "new birth" experience into your life is now, before it's too late. Foreshadowing the defeat of the antichrist At the beginning of this chapter, I said that one of the most intriguing aspects of Star Wars - type science fiction is that just when the bad guys think they've won, they discover they've lost. This brings us to the final words in Genesis 3:15: "He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." These cryptic words actually foreshadow the ultimate defeat of the antichrist. The language is so symbolical that you have to follow carefully to understand it. I'll try to make it easy for you. "He will crush your head." The "you" whose head will get crushed is Satan. But who is "he" that will do the crushing? God started out by saying that He would put enmity between Satan and the woman, but now He switches and says that he will crush Satan's head. Did He mean Adam would do the crushing? No. The "he" in this sentence refers to the woman's offspring.* And notice carefully what he will do: "He [the woman's descendants] will crush your [Satan's] head." *In the Hebrew language the word offspring (literally, seed) is masculine, not feminine. So the masculine pronoun he in the last part of the verse has to refer to the offspring, not the woman. What happens when you crush someone's head? He dies. What did God say next? "And you [Satan] will strike his [the woman's offspring] heel." What happens when you strike someone on the heel? You injure him, but he recovers. He doesn't die. Thus, in highly symbolic language, God predicted that eventually Satan, the antichrist, will be crushed out of existence along with all of his followers. On the other hand, Eve and her descendants will survive. Satan may hound them and persecute them, but he will never be able to destroy them. And eventually they will regain the eternal life that Adam and Eve lost in Eden. Here is how Revelation describes the final crushing of Satan, the antichrist: The devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown (Revelation 20:10). On the other hand, Revelation says that God's people will dwell with Him forever: The dwelling place of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.... For the old order of things has passed away (Revelation 21:3, 4). Did you notice the last phrase in that verse? "The old order of things has passed away." The old order is Satan's kingdom, his dominion, not only over earth's political systems, but also over human hearts. When that day comes, Satan - the antichrist - will have been totally crushed, and God will reign
supreme in every heart. The question each of us must ask is, Which world order will I be a part of when that day comes? From time to time I can feel the conflict between good and evil going on in my heart. I can feel Satan pulling me one way, and I can feel God pulling me the other way. Sometimes the choice to stay on God's sidp is painfully difficult. But when I make that choice, I find that I gain the victory over my temptations and sins. And I find that this is a very satisfying way to live. You may wonder how you can experience this satisfying way of life. For me, it happens when I talk to God each day in prayer and stay close to Him through His Word, the Bible. Those who pray each day for guidance and who ground themselves firmly in the truths of God's Word will not be deceived by the antichrist in the end time. That is my desire for myself, and it's my great desire for you.
Chapter 4 Conquering the Antichrist Years ago I heard a touching little story. A boy was playing with his model sailboat at the edge of a river one day, when suddenly a gust of wind blew the boat out into the current. The child jumped into the water to rescue his toy, but it was too late. He watched it disappear around a bend in the river. A month or two later he happened to pass by a store, and he glanced in the window and gasped. For on the other side of the glass was his sailboat. It even had a price tag on it! He ran home and told his parents. They gave him some money, and joyfully he rushed back to the store and bought his sailboat. Think how strange that must have felt - buying a boat that he had made and that he knew was rightfully his. Yet if he wanted it, he had no choice but to pay to get it back. That's a faint reflection of what God had to do when Satan defeated Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan stole the human race from God. In order to get us back, God had to become a man Himself, come down to this dark world, and do hand-to-hand combat with His adversary. Finally, he had to pay with His life. No fiction writer has ever come up with a more dramatic plot! We obviously cannot adequately consider Christ's entire life in one short chapter or even in this book. We shall have to content ourselves with a couple of the high points. We will especially discuss what these events tell us about Christ and the antichrist. The two aspects of Christ's life that I want to discuss with you are His temptation in the wilderness and the last few hours of His life on this earth. The temptation in the wilderness The Bible tells us that after Christ was baptized by John the Baptist, He spent forty days alone in the Judean desert. During this time He did not eat anything. Can you imagine how hungry He must have felt by the fortieth day? Satan - the antichrist - shrewdly chose this time to approach Him. Please pay careful attention to what Satan said, because it gives us an important insight into how the antichrist will try to tempt you and me in the end time. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "tell these stones to become bread" (Matthew 4:3). Notice the first phrase in that sentence: "If you are the Son of God." That's an undisguised doubt about whether Christ was really God's Son. Satan knew perfectly well who Christ was. Hadn't he known Christ in heaven? Hadn't he been present just forty days earlier, at Christ's baptism, when God's voice proclaimed from heaven, "This is my Son, whom I love"? (Matthew 3:17). Why did he question Christ's true position now? Because the issue with Satan was not evidence but faith. It wasn't a question of whether he knew Christ was the Son of God. The real issue was whether he would believe it. In heaven, Satan had claimed that he had a right to be "like the Most High." Notice, though, that he did not repeat that claim to Christ in the wilderness. He didn't say, "You know, of course, that I'm the real king of this world." His approach was much more clever than that. He tried to get Christ to doubt who He was: "If you are the Son of God." The real temptation for Christ was not food. It was faith. Would He believe who God had told Him He was - or would He doubt? Disbelief. Doubting God. Satan took the very same approach with Eve in the Garden of Eden. God had said plainly, "You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." But Satan
said, "Has God really said, 'You must not eat fruit from any tree in the garden'?" Do you see the doubt? "Has God really said...?" Or to put it in modern terminology, "You've got to be kidding me. Surely He didn't say that!" The issue in Eden was God's word. Satan didn't doubt God's existence. He chose to disbelieve what God said. He tried to get Eve to doubt what God said, and several thousand years later he tried to get Jesus to doubt what God said. You can be sure that when he appears at the end of time, he will try to get you and me to doubt what God has said too. Which means that we must be very well acquainted with God's word in the Bible if we want to conquer the antichrist. For example. God has made it very clear that we are His sons and daughters. The Bible says it plainly: "Now we are children of God. To those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God" ( 1 John 3:2; John 1:12). During the tribulation. Satan will do everything he possibly can to get you and me to doubt God's love for us. He will try to get us to believe that our sins are so terrible God couldn't possibly accept us as His children. Will we. like Jesus, resist the temptation? Let s examine another aspect of Satan's strategy. Food wasn't the real issue in his temptation of Christ. We've just seen that the issue was faith in God and His word. Yet food was an extremely clever part of the temptation. Satan hoped to achieve through the back door what he could never have achieved through the front door. For had Jesus performed a miracle to satisfy His hunger, He would have agreed to Satan's doubt without ever saying so. He would have fallen into Satan's trap. The antichrist will come to you and me in the end time with this same back-door strategy. He may do it through friends or even relatives. For example, someone may say to you. "If you really loved me, you'd give up that crazy faith of yours." The implication will be that you can't maintain your faith in Christ and at the same love your husband, your wife, or your parents. I've read a number of books on the end time, and it amazes me how few people understand that the real issues will be spiritual. I've read all kinds of predictions that the antichrist will incite Russia to invade Israel: the antichrist will set up his throne in Jerusalem: the antichrist will head up the new world order. We seem to be utterly fascinated with the externals of what the antichrist w ill do, failing to realize that the real issues will not be those that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. The external will be Satan's mask. His real battle will be for your soul and mine. That's exactly what the Bible predicts: The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved (2 Thessalonians 2:9, 10, emphasis added). The whole point of the final conflict will be the truth that saves. And notice Satan's strategy to distract you and me from the truth: miracles, signs, and wonders. But the real issue won't be miracles that we can see. It will be your faith and mine - what we are like on the inside. Will we love the truth, or will we refuse it? The temptation at the end of Christ's life The decisive battle in God's war with Satan was fought two thousand years ago on a hill called Calvary. Only the two main participants understood what was really going on, but most of the world could see only one of those participants. The other one kept himself way out of sight. And this skewed the outcome horribly. This decisive battle began in a garden near Jerusalem called Gethsemane. If you've read the story, you will recall that as Jesus was praying, a delegation from the high priest came to apprehend Him. Peter, thinking to defend Jesus, lashed out with a sword. But Jesus said, " 'Put your sword back in its place.... Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than
twelve legions of angels?' " (Matthew 26:52, 53). That must have seemed like the strangest statement to those standing around. At least it would have sounded that way to me had I been there. Here's a Man about to be arrested, and He claims to have a Daddy standing by with a whole battalion of soldiers to save Him. "Just give the word, Son, and they'll be there." Who does this fellow think He is, anyway? Who does He think His Father is - God? Yes, as a matter of fact. That's the whole point. Jesus understood that the final conflict of His life, into which He was entering at that very moment, had to do with God and Satan, not just Himself against the few mortals standing in His presence. An hour or so after His encounter with the mob in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was standing trial before the Sanhedrin, the highest legal body in Israel at the time, and many false witnesses came forward to testify against Him. But He refused to say a word. In exasperation Caiaphas, the high priest, said, "'I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God'" (verse 63). Finally Jesus spoke, and again He revealed that He understood the issues to be much broader than met the eye. "'It is as you say,' He replied. 'But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven' " (Matthew 26:64). To all human appearances Jesus' case was hopeless. Yet He saw beyond the people in that courtroom; beyond Jerusalem and the borders of Judea; beyond the boundaries of our planet; beyond the moment He and they were standing there. Jesus' vision penetrated to the court of heaven and the end of time. Jesus warned the high priest that the conflict in that room extended far beyond its four walls. The whole universe was involved. "You'll understand this one of these days," Jesus said in effect, "when our roles are reversed and you see Me coming in the clouds of heaven" (see Matthew 26:64). The high priest refused to accept the warning, because he couldn't see with his eyes what Jesus saw with His faith. The question you and I have to ask is this: Which was more real - the conflict inside four walls that the high priest saw with his eyes or the conflict in the universe beyond that Jesus saw with His faith? The issue was the same a few hours later when Jesus stood before Pilate. The Jews brought Him to the Roman governor with the accusation that He claimed to be a king. Pilate asked Jesus the obvious question: "Are you the king of the Jews?" (John 18:33; see also Luke 23:1, 2). Jesus' reply shows again that He understood the issue in the conflict to go far beyond the obvious circumstances of the moment. "'My kingdom is not of this world,'" He said. "'If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place'" (John 18:36). Jesus understood that His trial before Pilate was part of the universal conflict between God and Satan that had broken out in heaven millenniums earlier. It was part of the same conflict that Adam and Eve lost in the Garden of Eden. An invisible, hand-to-hand battle to the death was going on at that very moment between Jesus and Satan, and the issue was whether the serpent would crush the head of the Offspring, or whether the Offspring would crush the head of the serpent. Satan tried desperately to draw Jesus' attention away from this universal conflict and get Him to focus His attention on the here and now. He tried desperately to get Jesus to protect Himself from the threat that He could see and thus let go of the threat that He could not see. I'd have been so terrified of the obvious that I'd have done almost anything to protect myself. But Jesus understood that "faith is being... certain of what we do not see" (Hebrews 11:1). That principle is easy enough to live by when you're asking Jesus to pardon you for your sins. It's tough when your
system is saturated with adrenalin and every nerve in your body is screaming at you to save yourself from a horrible death. Another few hours, and Jesus hung naked on a cross. In our pictures of the scene we are modest enough to put a cloth around His waist. There was no cloth on Calvary. Can you imagine anything more humiliating? Could the most perverse author of horror fiction have conjured up a worse way to have his most despicable character lose a battle? The Jews were right when they bragged, "He saved others,... but he can't save himself" (Mark 15:31). Jesus had gambled everything and lost. Or so it seemed to all those looking on, including His own followers. But two things that Jesus said near the end, while He hung on the cross, tell us otherwise. "'Father,'" He said, "'into your hands I commit my spirit'" (Luke 23:46). That was the secret of Jesus' calmness in the face of circumstances that would have driven you and me into insanity. Uppermost in His mind was His relationship with God. He trusted His Father to take care of Him, even in death. Finally Jesus breathed His last. But just before He did, He spoke three words of vast significance: "It is finished!" (John 19:30). I like to believe that Jesus flung these triumphant words into Satan's face: IT... IS... FINISHED! Why? Because the war that Satan had started in heaven thousands of years before was now decided! Another crucial issue was involved in that cry. Jesus had triumphed in His plan to save the human race from sin. In Eden He warned Adam and Eve that if they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge they would die. "The wages of sin is death," the Bible says. But it adds that "the gift of God is eternal life" (Romans 6:23). Jesus Himself explained it in these words: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16, King James Version). On the cross Jesus bought back what was rightfully His in the first place. He paid with His life to get back what He had made. He earned the right to forgive Adam and Eve, and you and me, of our sins. All we have to do is claim that forgiveness by faith, and it is ours! Here's how Revelation describes the victory that Christ won on Calvary: "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" (Revelation 12:10). By going to the cross, Jesus defeated Satan. He earned the right to place enmity between the woman and the serpent, making it possible for you and me once again to love the things God loves and hate the things God hates. The last days of this world's history may very well occur within your lifetime and mine. And the issues in the conflict ahead will be just as spiritual, and just as unseen, as they were for Jesus. However, we can't wait till then to settle the conflict, because it's raging in our hearts right now. If you don't think so, just notice how you feel the next time you're tempted- - the conflicting thoughts that go through your mind: Should Iy or should I not? The only ones who will make it through the final conflict on God's side are those who through faith in Jesus are settling the conflict in their hearts today on God's side. The choices we make today are determining the choices we will make then. The decisions we make now will affect our destiny throughout eternity.
Chapter 5 Some Lessons From History Do you remember how you felt the day the Berlin Wall collapsed? If your reaction was like mine, you felt a profound sense of awe, as though the world would never be the same again. I'd like to suggest that Christians in A.D. 313 felt the same sense of awe, of history in the making - a sense that the world would never be the same again. For a revolution occurred that year that transformed Europe even more profoundly than did the collapse of Communism. For the first three hundred years after Jesus established the Christian church, Satan fought the new religion with a vengeance. But for every Christian he killed, two more joined the faith. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. Then the revolution occurred: The Emperor Constantine became a Christian. The electrifying news must have sped through the Christian community at the speed of light: "The emperor has become a Christian! The emperor has become a Christian!" Even our shock at watching the Berlin Wall tumble down fails to convey the excitement these people must have felt. During those three hundred years of persecution, the Christian church was separated from the state by a wall of intense hatred on the part of the empire. But when Constantine became a Christian, that wall came crashing down, and soon church and state were locked in each other's arms. At first the state dominated the church. For example, Constantine presided at the opening session of a church council that was held in the city of Nicaea (in what is now Turkey) in 325. The purpose of the council was to settle a doctrinal dispute that threatened to divide the Christian church, and the emperor strongly influenced the settlement. However, within two hundred years the church gained the upper hand, and for the next twelve hundred years the state was the servant of the church. Oddly, what seemed like a victory for the church when Constantine accepted the faith turned out to be its greatest defeat. Not without reason is the period of the Christian domination of Europe called the Dark Ages. The church controlled all knowledge, both religious and secular. What the church said, you believed. If the church didn't tell you, you didn't know it. That is an extreme way of putting it, yet in a very real sense it was true. For centuries the church controlled the sources of knowledge, including the Bible itself, which was chained to monastery walls. Even in matters of science, the church claimed to be the spokesman for truth. However, the church's control over European society and politics was not to last forever. Another revolutionary change began with the recovery, during the thirteenth century, of the Greek classics. Suddenly, Aristotle became the authority to believe in matters of science. The importance of this development lay not in the fact that Aristotle was right - because often he was wasn't - but in the challenge his ideas posed to the church's authority and its claim to be the sole possessor of all truth. A major advance in the revolution against religious despotism occurred shortly before the year 1500, when Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. This created an explosion of knowledge. The Bible was the first book to come off the primitive press. The church tried desperately to prevent its distribution, but to no avail. Then came the Protestant Reformation in 1517, and again the church tried, and failed, to stamp it out. Science was another area in which the church suffered great losses. During the Dark Ages the church taught that the earth was the center of the universe. The proposal in 1543 by Copernicus that the earth was not the center of the universe threatened this view, and the church fought it with a passion. Galileo, the first scientist to investigate the universe with a telescope, agreed with Copernicus
and was hauled into court for heresy. Galileo lost in court, but he won in the minds and hearts of people who were willing to forget dogma and examine the facts. And thus the stage was set for a conflict between Christianity and science, between religion and secularism, between dogma and what people can observe with their eyes and ears. The real question that had to be settled was one of authority: Who has the best information about what is ultimately real in life, the preacher or the scientist? Religious people believe the Bible has the answers to life's deepest questions. Secular people believe human beings can figure out their own answers to these questions. Secularization is the process by which a society changes from seeking ultimate truth from religion and inspired documents such as the Bible to seeking it from humanity itself. By the end of the eighteenth century secularism had largely won in the minds of the world's thought leaders. The French Revolution, which crowned rationalism as queen, was simply the culmination of a process that had been going on for centuries. It broke the political power of the Roman Catholic Church. Increasingly, from that day to this, people have sought rational answers to life's questions. Thus, the revolution of ideas that began innocently enough in the thirteenth century finally conquered the Christian religion and the church, and for the last two hundred years secularism has dominated the thinking of Western people. The average person today, if he wants to know what's really true, won't go to the preacher. He'll go to the doctor or to the scientist. We must not suppose that secularism is all bad. In spite of the fact that it leaves God out of its thinking, it has given the world two outstanding benefits. One is a standard of living in the world's developed countries that far surpasses the wildest dreams of any previous generation. The other is a degree of individual freedom heretofore unknown in human history. The standard of living we in the West enjoy today could not have existed without freedom of thought and freedom of economics. You and I are so much a part of the secular society in which we live that it is difficult for us to imagine living under any other system. We simply cannot comprehend a church that would put people to death just because they happened to disagree with its doctrines. We take our freedom for granted, without realizing where it came from. It came from Protestantism and secularism, which several hundred years ago challenged and conquered the religious system that for nearly a millennium and a half had shackled men's minds. And the freedom that secularism and Protestantism provided was founded on church-state separation.* We are so accustomed to this freedom that the idea that any other philosophy might take control in our society almost sounds foolish. After all, didn't the most recent experiment with totalitarianism just collapse in Eastern Europe and Russia? Isn't our world on a roll toward freedom? I would like to suggest that a system based on a radically different philosophy is about to replace the system based on secularism and freedom that you and I are so familiar with. This is clearly evident in current trends in our world, as we shall see in future chapters. It is also evident in Revelation: And I saw a beast coming out of the sea.... The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast - all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb (Revelation 13:1, 5-8). Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth.... He ordered [the inhabitants of the earth] to set up an image in honor of the beast who was
wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed (Revelation 13:11, 14, 15). Three things stand out in these verses: (1) the political powers these beasts represent are horribly intolerant; (2) they are dominated by religion; and (3) their influence is worldwide. That's precisely what's so utterly incomprehensible to the modern secular mind and to most Protestants. Even if our freedoms should be threatened, we think that if we'll throw a demonstration or two, collect a few thousand signatures on petition sheets, and cast our vote at the polls, everything will return to normal. People who proclaim that Revelation 13 really will be fulfilled someday sound like mere alarmists. We're quite happy to let the men in the white coats haul them off! Unfortunately, we forget that the world of freedom and prosperity that we live in hasn't always been here. And because we forget, it won't always be here. Actually, the demise of our present system won't come just because we've forgotten. It will come about because of a fatal flaw in the present secular system. Secularism and Protestantism have indeed provided the world with a degree of freedom unheard of in past history. Secularism's fatal flaw is its inability to solve the problem of human depravity. To succeed, the freedom that secularism offers depends on human beings controlling their passions and impulses. But only the power of God can do that, and secularism denies the power of God.2 The rampant crime rate and the proliferation of addictions in our culture during the last half of the twentieth century are evidence enough of the moral failure of secularism. The failure of secularism is even now pushing the world back to a spiritual way of life. The New Age movement, which has spread so rapidly in the West during the last twenty-five years, is above all else an evidence of the failure of secularism to meet the yearning of the human soul for spiritual roots. Yet right here lies the danger. Will we, in our effort to return to a spiritual way of life, choose a false system? Worse yet, will we try to return the world to right thinking and acting by force? Revelation suggests that these two ideas - the establishment of a false religious system and the effort to return the world to right thinking and acting by force - will combine in the last days to produce a world order that you and I can only conceive of in our worst nightmares. Yet if we keep our eyes open, we will see this new world order developing in the trends that are even now taking place around us. 1. It's important to understand that neither secularism nor Protestantism alone created the freedoms we today enjoy. By itself, secularism easily leads to totalitarianism, as the Communist experiment during most of the twentieth century demonstrates. And by itself, Protestantism would never have created religious freedom as we know it in America today. The first Protestants were almost as intolerant as the system they broke away from. 2. Protestantism recognizes the power of God to change the heart, but an important segment of contemporary American Protestantism is dedicated to providing a political rather than a spiritual solution to the problem, and that can easily lead back to totalitarianism. See chapter 9.
Chapter 6 Some Lessons From Christian History "I am not determined whether the Pope be Antichrist himself or only his apostle, so cruelly is Christ corrupted and crucified in him."1 So thundered Martin Luther nearly five hundred years ago. And Protestant leaders all over Europe agreed. "The Roman Pontiff, with his whole order and kingdom, is very Antichrist,"2 said Melanchthon, Luther's associate. And John Calvin declared that "the head of that cursed and abominable kingdom, in the Western Church, we affirm to be the Pope."3 I don't know about you, but those words sound terribly bigoted to me. How could anyone ever say such awful things against another person's religion? Before we judge the Protestant Reformers too harshly, let's take a look at our own time. Prolifers call pro-choicers baby killers, and pro-choicers call prolifers bigots. Blacks hate whites, and whites hate blacks. Israelis grind their teeth at Arabs, and Arabs grind their teeth at Israelis. And all of us in the West have condemned Communists for the last seventy-five years. Human nature is the same today as it was five hundred years ago when the Protestant Reformation broke out. Only the issues we lash each other about are different. Regardless of how bigoted the Reformers' words may sound to our ears, had we lived back then, we would probably have felt just as worked up over their issues as we are today about our own. There were reasons why Protestants condemned Roman Catholicism so harshly five hundred years ago. Those reasons are still valid, and we need to be aware of them, even if we don't react so harshly to them. We will begin by reading from Revelation 12. As the chapter opens, we see a pregnant woman clothed with the sun and standing on the moon. A dragon (Satan) enters the scene in verse 3, intent on devouring the woman's child as soon as it is born. The child, of course, was Jesus, and He was "snatched up to God and to his throne" (verse 5). This is an obvious reference to Christ's ascension to heaven forty days after His crucifixion. When the dragon saw that he could not destroy Christ, "he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child" (verse 13). A woman in Bible prophecy represents God's people. So when Satan failed at destroying Christ Himself, he attacked His church. As we noted in the previous chapter, during the first three hundred years of Christian history, Satan used the Roman Empire to carry out this persecution. But then Constantine legalized the Christian religion, and Christianity replaced paganism as the dominant religion of the empire. By the year 500, the church had become a powerful force in European politics. During the three hundred years of persecution by the Roman Empire, Christians had placed their hope for relief in the biblical promise that Christ would establish His eternal kingdom at His second coming. But as Christianity gained more and more political power, a subtle shift occurred in prophetic interpretation. No longer was the kingdom of God a thing of the future. The kingdom of God was the church, and this present world was the sphere where His kingdom operated. Earthly kingdoms were God's kingdom, ,and the church was God's agent to keep those kingdoms on a morally correct path. As a result, the church became deeply enmeshed in secular politics. For the next thousand years popes and emperors vied for political supremacy in Europe. A turning point in papal political power was reached in 1077 when Henry IV, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, crossed the Alps in the dead of winter and stood barefoot for three days in the snow
in order to gain an audience with the pope. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica: Canossa meant a change. By doing penance Henry had admitted the legality of the Pope's measures and had given up the king's traditional position of authority equal or even superior to that of the church . The relations between church and state were changed forever.4 Unfortunately, between 1000 and 1500 the medieval church increasingly used its vast political power to persecute those who disagreed with its teachings. Hundreds of thousands, and by some estimates, millions, of innocent Christians died at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. In France, thirty thousand Protestants were killed in one night - an infamous day that is known in history as St. Bartholomew's massacre. At the very least, I wish I could tell you that the teachings this persecution defended were true. Unfortunately, the "heretics" were generally closer to the truth than the church that persecuted them. The following list of Catholic teachings that Protestants consider to be false is drawn from an article that appeared in Christianity Today5 several years ago: That Christians are saved by a combination of grace and good works. That saving grace is obtained through the sacraments (baptism, the Mass, ordination, etc.). That the bread and wine in the Mass become the literal body and blood of Christ. That the teachings of the church are equal in authority to the Bible. That Christians should worship Mary and the saints, make images to them, and pray to them. That there is a place called Purgatory, where Christians go at death for further purification from sin. Two other teachings of Roman Catholicism with which Protestants unanimously disagree are the role of Mary as a co-mediator with Christ6 and the claim that the pope is the vicar of Christ.7 It's important to understand that today' s Roman Catholic Church regrets the excesses of the Inquisition. We must not hold today's Catholics responsible for what their forefathers did. Neither must we use the excesses of their forefathers or the teachings of the church that we today consider to be false as an excuse for bigotry against Catholics. However, I do not consider it bigotry to say, "This is what Catholics believe, and here's why I disagree." When done in a reasonable, unimpassioned way, such an exercise can be very helpful. Some of my clearest insights into truth have come through dialogue with those with whom I most strongly disagreed. I find it extremely significant that fifteen hundred years before the Roman Catholic Church reached the zenith of its political power, the ancient prophet Daniel predicted this very development. The Bible's own interpretation of his words leaves no doubt that this is what his prophecy meant. Daniel was sleeping peacefully one night when he was awakened by a terrible nightmare. Four terrible beasts rose out of a turbulent sea. Here is what Daniel saw: A lion with two wings. A bear with three ribs in its mouth. A leopard with four wings. A dragon-like beast with iron teeth and ten horns. An angel told Daniel that these four beasts represented four kingdoms that were to appear on the earth (see Daniel 7:17). Daniel certainly had no trouble identifying the first beast. He lived in the city of Babylon at the time, and winged lions appeared on murals all over town. After Babylon fell, Persia, Greece, and Rome ruled the Middle East and the Mediterranean region. Daniel said that the dragon-like beast he saw in his dream was "terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot
whatever was left" (verse 7). This brings to mind the persecution that the Roman Empire inflicted on Christians during the first three hundred years of Christian history. However, the central focus of Daniel's dream was a "little horn" that rose up among the other ten horns on the dragon's head. In fact, this little horn had to uproot three others in order to make way for itself - something on the order of the adult teeth that push aside a child's baby teeth. Here's how Daniel described this little horn: I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast,... and it had ten horns. While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth that spoke boastfully (verses 7, 8). Daniel felt as puzzled about this little horn as you and I would have. An angel gave him this explanation: The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on earth. It will be different from all the other kingdoms and will devour the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it. The ten horns are ten kings who will come from this kingdom. After them another king will arise, different from the earlier ones; he will subdue three kings. He will speak against the Most High and oppress his saints and try to change the set times and the laws. The saints will be handed over to him for a time, times, and half a time (verses 23-25). Obviously, the little horn was against God. But who or what does it represent? The Bible gives a number of specifications that help us to identify it: It appears after the other ten. It is different from the other ten. It uproots three of the ten to make room for itself. It speaks out against the Most High (God). It oppresses (persecutes) God's saints. It tries to change God's laws. It endures for "a time, times, and half a time." These specifications led the Protestant Reformers to conclude that the pope was the antichrist. Here's why. It appears after the other ten. The dragon's ten horns represent the barbarian nations that invaded the Roman Empire between A.D. 300 and 500. The Bible says that the little horn appeared after the other ten, and the Christian church emerged as a major political force in Europe after A.D. 500. It is different from the other ten. The major difference between the barbarian tribes and the church was the fact that the church was both political and religious, whereas the barbarian tribes were political powers only. It uproots three of the ten horns. As the barbarian tribes invaded the empire, the church Christianized them. However, three tribes accepted a teaching that the Roman Church considered to be heretical,8 and the church influenced Europe's political and military leaders to destroy them. It speaks against the Most High. A good example of this is the Catholic claim that the pope is the vicar of Christ - His personal representative on earth. In a sense, all Christians consider themselves Christ's representatives. But the papal claim is that men and women can be saved only as they unite themselves to the vicar of Christ. The Bible, on the other hand, says that Christians are saved through Christ alone.9 It oppresses God's saints. I have already discussed the Roman Catholic persecution, during the
Middle Ages, of those it considered to be heretics. It tries to change God's laws. In its catechisms, the Roman Catholic Church makes three major changes in the Ten Commandments: (1) The second commandment, which forbids image worship, is cut out entirely; (2) the tenth is split into two (in order to keep ten); and (3) the fourth commandment, about the Sabbath, is drastically shortened. It endures for "a time, times, and half a time. " The Aramaic word for time is the same as the word for year. Thus the angel actually told Daniel that the little horn would endure for "a year, years, and half a year." Scholars unanimously agree that this means three and a half years. In symbolic prophecy a day usually stands for a year (see Ezekiel 4:6; Numbers 14:34). By calculating the number of days in a year (a prophetic year has 360 days), we can tell how many years are involved: 1 year - 360 days 2 years - 720 days 1/2 year - 180 days Total - 1,260 days 10 According to the year-day principle, 1,260 days is actually 1,260 years, and this is approximately the time that the medieval church held political power over Europe. The church took a major step in acquiring political power in 538, and 1,260 years later, in 1798, following the French Revolution, the pope was taken prisoner, and the church's power over European politics was broken. This is the basis for the Reformation charge that the pope was the antichrist.11 Now let's compare Daniel's little horn with three verses in Revelation 12: There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon [Satan], and the dragon and his angels fought back (verse 7). When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child (verse 13). The woman was given two wings of a great eagle so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times, and half a time (verse 14). Notice that each of these verses matches one of the specifications of the little horn: Daniel's little horn attacked God, and in Revelation the dragon, who was Satan, attacked God (Christ). The little horn attacked God's people, and the dragon (Satan) attacked God's people. The little horn held power for 1,260 days, and the dragon (Satan) persecuted the church for 1,260 days. It seems very clear that in some sense Daniel 7 and Revelation 12 are talking about the same thing. And this leads us to a most startling conclusion: The power behind Daniel's little horn was none other than Satan himself - the antichrist. Thus, if Daniel's prophecy of the little horn was fulfilled by the medieval Christian church, we can conclude that Satan infiltrated the church, distorted its teachings, and turned it into an instrument that he could use for his own purposes. So successful was Satan that he actually got the church to persecute those who held to the truth of the gospel! Now do you understand why Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others during the Reformation era of history claimed that the Roman Catholic Church was the antichrist of Bible prophecy? Unfortunately, many people have used these facts to support bitter anti-Catholic feelings. I am absolutely opposed to that. While I speak out in the strongest possible terms against the Inquisition and hope the world never forgets, I also recognize that the Catholic Church has changed in many ways from what it was during the medieval period of history.
We must also remember that Satan's strategy against the medieval church was typical of his strategy against every other group of God's people that has ever existed. The Israelites apostatized over and over, till God finally had to allow the Babylonians to take them captive. Every church must be on guard against infiltration by Satan and his emissaries. I see ways in which he has made deep inroads into Protestantism. So in pointing my finger at any other church, Catholic or Protestant, I must always remember that three other fingers point back at me and my church. David P. Scaer, a professor of systematic theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said it better than I ever could: "In reapplying Reformation insights to the problem of the modern papacy we also need an honest evaluation of the same problems within Protestantism."12 1. Martin Luther, Schriften, vol. 21a, col. 156. 2. Philip Melanchthon, Disputationes, no. 56, "De Matrimonio," in Opera (Corpus Reformatorum,) vol. 12, col. 535. 3. John Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, 314. 4. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1978 edition, s.v. "Henry IV, Emperor." 5. Christianity Today, 23 October 1981, 12-15. 6. Christianity Today, 12 December 1986, 19. 7. Vicar of Christ is a title that Catholics give to the pope. It means that in Christ's absence from earth the pope is His personal representative, and that people can find salvation only by uniting themselves with the pope. 8. The heresy was called Arianism - the teaching that Christ was not fully divine nor equal in all respects with God the Father. 9. For example, Acts 4:12 says, "Salvation is found in no one else [than Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." 10. This conclusion is confirmed in Revelation 12. Verse 14 says that the woman was taken care of in the desert for "a time, times and half a time" - the very same words used by Daniel. Verse 6 says that the woman was cared for in the desert "for 1,260 days." 11. The Reformers had no way of knowing that the power of the Roman Catholic Church over European politics would be broken in 1798. But the rest of the specifications of the little horn in Daniel's prophecy were enough for them to identify it as the Roman Catholic Church, and thus to call the Catholic Church the antichrist. 12. Christianity Today, 23 October 1981, 66.
Chapter 7 A Summary of the End Time Most evangelical Christians would probably agree with what I have said thus far about Satan's rebellion in heaven, his deception of Adam and Eve in Eden, and his effort to conquer Christ when He was on earth. Also, many would probably agree, in principle at least, with my conclusions about the role of the church in medieval politics. However, while these thoughts are important as background information, they are not the real purpose of this book. This book is about the final events of earth's history. What you need to know Before you continue reading, though, it is very important to me that you understand two things about the religious perspective from which I am writing. A Seventh-day Adventist view of the end time. First, you need to know that I am a Seventh-day Adventist, and therefore what I say from here on in this book is an Adventist view of end-time events. You may be asking yourself, "What difference does the Adventist understanding of earth's final events make to me? Why should I spend my time finding out?" That's a fair question. Actually, many Christians today believe the second coming of Christ is near. If there is any truth to this belief at all - or even if it just might be true - then all of us need to learn all we can about that important event and how to prepare for it. And one of the best ways to do that is for each of us, regardless of our religious persuasion, to share with others what we understand about the time of the end. I believe that if through reading this book you understand the Bible's teaching about earth's final events better, your time will have been well spent whether or not you agree with all of the Adventist conclusions. Ellen White. Adventists have always tried to base their teachings on the Bible. Much of my reason for writing this book was to share with you the biblical basis for our belief about the second coming of Christ and the events that will immediately precede it. However, it's also very important to me that you understand that Adventists believe God gave the gift of prophecy to a woman named Ellen White, who claimed to have received some two thousand visions during her lifetime (1827-1915). Ellen White was one of the most prolific woman writers of all time, and one of her greatest interests was end-time events. We believe God showed her many details about the end time that Christians today need to understand. Thus, while our basic teaching about the end time is based on the Bible as we understand it, we also take what she said very seriously. It would be very difficult for me to give you a complete understanding of what Adventists believe about the end time without sharing with you some of the things that Ellen White said. For that reason I will quote Ellen White from time to time throughout the rest of this book. Please understand, though, that I do not expect you to accept Ellen White as an authority on end-time events or anything else unless you choose to do so. Just take her as one of the most representative spokespersons for the Adventist beliefs we'll be talking about. The Adventist scenario The diagram below gives the basic outline of the end time as Seventh-day Adventists understand it. We call these events "the final crisis," and we divide the them into two parts:
The Final Crisis Final Crisis Begins * Little time of trouble Close of Probation * Great time of trouble Second Coming Adventists believe the final crisis will be characterized by great economic, political, and religious upheaval, accompanied by severe natural disasters. Notice that the first half of the diagram is called the "little time of trouble" and the last half is called the "great time of trouble." As we understand it, there will be worldwide chaos during the first half of the final crisis and far greater chaos during the second half. Between these two times of trouble is a point in time that we call "the close of probation." Later in this book an entire chapter is devoted to the close of probation, but briefly, here is what we mean by it. Most evangelical Protestants agree that those who accept Christ must do so during this present life. Those who do not accept eternal life through Him before He comes the second time will not have an opportunity to do so later. Thus the second coming of Jesus is the dividing line. Acceptance of Him is possible prior to that time. It will not be possible after. Seventh-day Adventists agree with this view, but with the slight adjustment that I indicated on the diagram above. We believe that the final moment to decide for or against Christ will actually precede the second coming of Christ by a short time - perhaps a few months. We call this moment, after which all spiritual decisions will be fixed for eternity, "the close of probation." This is one of the most fundamental points in the Adventist teaching about end-time events. Let's add two more elements to the diagram and then discuss them: The Final Crisis Final Crisis Begins * Little time of trouble - Seal of God - Mark of the beast Close of Probation * Great time of trouble - Seven last plagues Second Coming During times of chaos the human mind always turns to spiritual things. Revelation makes it utterly clear that the months and perhaps years immediately prior to the second coming of Christ will be a time of severe chaos in the world, and that spiritual concerns will dominate people's thinking. It is also clear from Revelation that those who are on God's side in this crisis will receive the seal of God, while those who side with Satan, the antichrist, will receive the mark of the beast. All choices for or against God and for or against the antichrist will be made before the close of probation. When God's people make their final decision for Him, they will receive the seal of God, while those who make their final decision on the side of the antichrist will receive the mark of the beast. The seal of God and the mark of the beast are symbolic of the sides people join when their probations close. Adventists believe that human beings all over the world will make their final decisions for or against God during the "little time of trouble," which comes before the close of probation. That is why I have placed "the seal of God" and "the mark of the beast" under the little time of trouble. After the close of probation, during the great time of trouble, God will pour out seven final plagues on those who have chosen to receive the mark of the beast. Revelation 13,
On the next two pages I have quoted Revelation 12:17 and all of chapter 13. Unless you are very well acquainted with these verses, I recommend that you read them carefully before continuing with this chapter. The dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring - those who obey God's commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?" The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast - all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world. He who has an ear, let him hear. If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity he will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, With the sword he will be killed. This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints. Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is a man's number. His number is 666. 1 The first thing to notice is that this passage describes a vicious spiritual battle between the forces of good in the world and the forces of evil. Chapter 12:17 says that the dragon, who is Satan or the antichrist, "was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring [God's people]." Chapter 13 describes that war. Revelation 13 describes two great beasts. The first one comes out of the sea, and the second one arises out of the land. Obviously, each of these beasts is on Satan's side, because each of them persecutes God's people. The first beast "was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them," and the second beast refuses anyone the right to buy or sell except those who receive the mark of the beast. This is spiritual warfare of the highest order. Worship is a prominent feature in the description of both beasts, which suggests that the final
crisis will be a time of profound religious expression and commitment. The shocking thing is that almost the entire world will be on the wrong side, worshiping the wrong way. Revelation says that "all the inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast - all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb." "Everyone's doing it" won't be much of an excuse during the end time! It's also extremely important to notice that Revelation 13 describes a close union between the political and the religious powers of earth. The first beast is unquestionably a religious power, because it receives the worship of the whole world, and it blasphemes God and slanders His name. However, it is also political, because Revelation says that it "was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation." The second beast also represents a union of political and religious powers, because it "forces everyone... to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Generally speaking, neither religious nor political powers can enforce religious worship alone. Political powers aren't interested, and religious powers don't have the authority. It takes a union of the two to enforce worship. Notice, also, that the second beast has economic clout - a prerogative of governments. It can grant or withhold the privilege of buying and selling. Yet the right to buy and sell will be determined by a religious test. Again, this is a clear indication of a union of religious and political authorities. Or, to put it in terms that Americans are familiar with, it will be a union of church and state. A time of worldwide crisis In their book The Addictive Organization, Ann Schaef and Diane Fassel make a statement that is extremely significant to our discussion: In [times of) crisis we allow people to take over and enact unusual procedures. Crisis feeds on the illusion that control can bring the situation under control. Crises are used to excuse drastic and erratic actions on the part of managers.... Individuals have fewer responsibilities in crisis as management gathers power to ride out the problem. When crisis is the norm, management tends to assume an unhealthy amount of power on a daily basis.2 Revelation 1 3 does not mention a crisis, but the fact that its two beasts demonstrate such a high level of control and that people allow them this control gives us pause to ask whether a crisis exists. Consider the following statements from Revelation 13: "The whole world was astonished and followed the beast " (verse 3). As intolerant as this beast is, why do the vast majority of people all over the world follow it? The answer: There is a worldwide crisis. But what is it? "All the inhabitants of the world will worship the beast" (verse 8). People turn to spiritual things in a time of crisis. "He was given power to make war against the saints " ( verse 7). For some reason, these people are a threat to the existing order. Why? "He was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation " (verse 7). People usually turn over this degree of authority only in a crisis. What will be happening in the world at this time? The second beast causes all who refuse to worship the image [to the beast] to be killed (verse 15). Again, for some reason, these people are a threat to the existing order. Why? "He also forced everyone... to receive a mark" or suffer economic boycott (verse 16). Rationing. This is an economic crisis of the highest order.
Revelation does not tell us what the crisis will be that brings about this intense level of religious, political, and economic control. However, there are clues in other parts of the Bible. The prophet Daniel predicted that just before the end of time the world will experience "a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of the world until now" (Daniel 12:1). Jesus, almost certainly with Daniel's words ringing in His ears, said that "there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now - and never to be equalled again" (Matthew 24:21). He went on to say that this distress will be so severe that "if those days had not been cut short, no one would survive" (verse 22, emphasis added). Jesus described a global crisis of such vast proportions that when it comes, the survival of the human race will be at stake! Jesus was quite specific about the nature of this crisis. To get the full impact of His words, we need to read them in both Matthew and Luke. In Matthew He said: Immediately after the distress of those days "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken" (Matthew 24:29). Here is the same prediction from Luke: There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken (Luke 21:25, 26). Jesus' words as Luke recorded them make it clear that He had in mind a time of worldwide panic and chaos. A summary of His words will help to make the point clear: The nations will be in anguish (they will be in severe pain). The nations will be in perplexity (their leaders will have no idea what to do). The entire human race will be terrified. The cause of their terror will be "what is coming on the world." The cause of the things coming on the world will be the shaking of the heavenly bodies, which in Matthew's parallel passage Jesus identified as a darkening of the sun and moon and the falling of the stars. These words suggest horrible natural disasters that will leave the world's political, religious, and scientific leaders aghast. And today's scientists provide us with a scenario that fits exactly with what Jesus said: comets, meteorites, and asteroids. We know, for example, that if an asteroid one kilometer in diameter were to impact in the heart of Brazil, the fireball and the winds it generated would level cities for hundreds of miles in every direction. It would incinerate most, if not all, of the Amazon jungle, which is a major source of the world's oxygen. The shock wave from the impact would be felt as an earthquake for thousands of miles, crumbling cities throughout much of Latin America. And within twenty-four hours a pall of smoke and dust would shroud the earth, drastically reducing the amount of light reaching the planet from the sun and possibly precipitating an ice age. If the impact were to occur in the ocean, it would create a giant tidal wave that would sweep over the coastlands of adjacent continents.3 Revelation 8:6-12 gives an accurate description of the ecological devastation that would result from an asteroid impact on land or in the ocean. If this is what Jesus had in mind in Luke 21:25, 26, the anguish and perplexity that He described are also very realistic. Already scientists are calling asteroids "doomsday rocks," because they realize that a major asteroid impact would threaten the survival of the human race. This helps us to see in a new light Jesus' words in Matthew 24:22 that "if
those days had not been cut short, no one would survive." And in this context, the extreme power assumed by the two beasts of Revelation 13, and the willingness of the earth's inhabitants to submit to their power, suddenly makes sense. In today's world, with freedom on a roll even in the former Communist nations of Europe, I believe it will take just such a crisis to precipitate the response that Revelation 13 describes. And while the picture is not pleasant, the Bible seems to be telling us that a crisis of this magnitude will be necessary in order to bring every human being to the point of making life-and-death decisions. For only then can human probation close so that Jesus can return. 1. Taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1978 by the International Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. 2. Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel, The Addictive Organization (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988), 160. 3. See Newsweek, 23 November 1992, 56-61; National Geographic, June 1989, 662-687; Comets, Asteroids, and Meteorites (Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1990); Clark Chapman and David Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes (New York: Plenum Press, 1989).
Chapter 8 The First Beast of Revelation 13 One of the first questions that any student of Revelation has to ask is whether its mysterious symbols describe real events that have happened in the past or that will happen in the future. John addressed his book to the church of the late first century A.D., and there can be no doubt that his readers assumed the symbols applied to events and world powers of their time. First-and secondcentury Christians generally interpreted the first beast of Revelation 13 as the Roman Empire. However, much of Revelation, including the thirteenth chapter, seems clearly to describe events that will immediately precede Christ's second coming, and Christ did not come in the first or second century A.D. Two thousand years later we have to conclude that whatever Revelation may have meant to first-century Christians, those parts that deal with earth's final events are more relevant to a later time. There is a strong feeling among conservative Christians today, both Protestant and Catholic, that the second coming of Jesus is imminent. If this is true, then those parts of Revelation dealing with the end of the world should be particularly relevant to our time. The question is, if the symbols of Revelation 13 apply to events and institutions of our own time, how could John have known about them two thousand years ahead of time? John most certainly did not know about our institutions. I believe God in His foreknowledge did, but He did not name them. Rather, He gave us the characteristics of those institutions, and He leaves it for us to figure out which institutions in our day have those characteristics. This book is written on the premise that you and I, in the last decade of the twentieth century, live in the end time, and therefore the primary application of Revelation 13 and succeeding chapters is to our time.* I am writing on the assumption that these chapters refer to institutions of our time and events that will occur in our time, and that we need to try to understand them. Indeed, I believe that we can understand them. The religious and political realities that Revelation describes should be evident in today's emerging trends. *This book was written during the last half of 1992. Revelation 13 describes two beasts. The first comes out of the sea and the second out of the earth. When you read the description of the first beast in verses 1 to 10, there can be no question that it is a religio-political power with worldwide influence and that it uses its power to persecute God's people. (If you are not familiar with these verses, this is a good time to read them.) The question is, who or what is that power in our day? Seventh-day Adventists have historically identified it with the Roman Catholic Church, and we continue to hold that view. I will explain to you the scriptural interpretation by which we arrive at that view, and then we will examine it in light of current trends. Where do we find this idea in the Bible? A careful analysis of Revelation 13 shows that its first beast has several characteristics: It is a religious power - it receives worship (verses 4, 8). It is a political power with worldwide authority (verse 7). It commands worldwide respect (verse 3). It blasphemes God (verse 5 - same as the little horn of Daniel 7:25). It persecutes God's people (verse 7 - same as the little horn of Daniel 7:25).
It continues its power for 42 months or 1,260 days1 (verse 5 - same as the little horn of Daniel 7:25). Notice the following similarities between the description of this beast and the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican is both a religious authority and a political state. It commands the respect of the whole world. It has worldwide religious authority, and at the present time it has worldwide political influence. And the last three specifications above are carbon copies of three specifications of the little horn of Daniel 7 that we studied two chapters back. I explained in that chapter why the Protestant Reformers interpreted Daniel's little horn as medieval Christianity, or the Roman Catholic Church. Seventh-day Adventists still accept that interpretation. The tact that three of the seven identifying marks of Daniel s little horn are also characteristics of the first beast of Revelation 13. including the 1,260-day period, lends strong support to identifying the two as the same power. Catholics, for obvious reasons, are not particularly fond of this view. And. unfortunately, it has created a horrendous amount of anti-Catholic bigotry over the centuries. I do not hesitate to admit that many people in my own church have shared this prejudice, and I apologize to my Catholic friends for our abuse of their faith However, whether you are a Catholic, a Protestant, or the adherent of some other faith. I hope that by the time you finish reading this chapter you will recognize that this interpretation of Revelation is not mere religious prejudice, but that it has a solid basis in facts that can he discussed dispassionately by reasonable minds. The first thing we need to recognize is that it is impossible to characterize the Roman Catholic Church, or any other church for that matter, as one thing. Every religious body is made up of a complex mix of human beings with a variety of mind-sets. This is certainly true of my own Seventhday Adventist Church. We have liberals and conservatives and quite a variety of groups in between. I feel quite comfortable being identified with some of these groups. Others I do not particularly wish to be identified with, and I can think of several fringe groups who claim to speak for my church that I under no circumstances intend to be identified with. The same is true of Roman Catholicism. It would be grossly unfair of me to characterize all Catholics by what I will describe in the rest of this chapter. For example. Roman Catholicism is strongly divided today between those who support the liberal reforms of Vatican II and those who deplore them. Moderate American Catholics in particular tend to give strong support to the statement on religious liberty that came out of Vatican II. while conservative Catholics, both in the United States and in other parts of the world, are opposed, some quite passionately. The rest of this chapter discusses two issues relative to Roman Catholicism. The first has to do with the church as a worldwide political force, and the second has to do with the possibility of the church becoming a persecuting power at some point in the future. A worldwide political power As I stated in a previous chapter, the Roman Catholic Church dominated European politics for hundreds of years, especially during the first half of the present millennium. By the time of the Protestant Reformation this political power had begun to wane, which explains why the Reformation succeeded in the sixteenth century when similar efforts in previous centuries failed. The church's political power continued to decline for the next several hundred years until 1798, when the French general Berthier, under command of Napoleon Bonaparte, took the pope prisoner. Adventists have maintained throughout their history that the fatal wound received by the first beast of Revelation 13 (see verse 3) refers to this loss of political power by the papacy in 1798. This interpretation is not original with us. It was held by many Protestants during the late 1700s and early 1800s. We simply adopted it and worked it into our prophetic framework.
Notice, however, that Revelation says the fatal wound was healed. If the infliction of the fatal wound was the Catholic Church's loss of political power in 1798, then the healing of the fatal wound would have to be a restoration of the political power of the Roman Catholic Church shortly before the end of time. And that is exactly what Adventists for 150 years have said will happen shortly before the second coming of Christ. The idea that the Catholic Church would become a political power with worldwide influence stretched one's imagination to the breaking point back in the 1850s, when our founders began advocating it. Americans were strongly anti-Catholic at that time and continued to be so for at least another fifty years. At the time we began making this prediction, the fatal wound was still hemorrhaging. Nobody in his right mind would have thought that Roman Catholicism would gain political control of this country or even of Europe, to say nothing of the whole world. Mussolini signed a concordat with the church in 1929 that restored the church's independence over the Vatican and gave it the status of "nation," and since that time the church has been a small but increasingly powerful political force in the world. The United States formally recognized the Catholic Church as a legitimate government in 1984, and the former Soviet Union did essentially the same thing in late 1989, when then President Gorbachev visited the pope in the Vatican library. Boris Yeltsin moved quickly to establish ties with the Vatican after he toppled Mikhail Gorbachev during the final days of 1991. These facts are clear evidence that Roman Catholicism is an increasingly powerful political force in the world, though it hardly suggests that the church will ever rule the world as Revelation 13:7 suggests ("He was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation"). However, let's keep going. Communism in Eastern Europe collapsed during the last half of 1989 and the early days of 1990. We all watched in disbelief as one country after another broke away from the Communist orbit, and we were stunned when the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989. You may not have been aware of the powerful influence the Roman Catholic Church had on these events, but the world's journalists knew. Notice the following statement that appeared in Time magazine, December 4, 1989: John Paul helped inflame the fervor for freedom in his Polish homeland that has swept like brush fire across Eastern Europe.... While Gorbachev's hands-off policy was the immediate cause of the chain reaction of liberation that has swept through Eastern Europe in the past few months, John Paul deserves much of the longer range credit? The world's politicians are also aware of the church's role in the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The February 24, 1992, issue of Time carried these words on the cover, flanked by pictures of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II: "HOLY ALLIANCE: How Reagan and the Pope conspired to assist Poland's Solidarity movement and hasten the demise of Communism." The article on the inside gives an utterly fascinating account of how the pope and the president did it. But does this mean that the pope will be a world ruler someday, along the lines of the first beast of Revelation 13? Recently I read a book called The Keys of This Blood, written by Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit priest. The book was published by Simon and Schuster, a major secular New York publishing house, so it is not a National Enquirer - type production. I'd like to repeat a quote from the first page of the book and a short paragraph from the third page that I shared with you in chapter 1: Willing or not, ready or not, we are all involved in an all-out, no-holds-barred, three-way global competition.... The competition is about who will establish the first one-world system of government that has ever existed in the society of nations.... It is not too much to say, in fact, that the chosen purpose of John Paul's pontificate - the engine
that drives his papal grand policy and that determines his day-to-day, year-by-year struggles - is to be the victor in that competition, now well under way.3 Does that sound incredible - that John Paul II should aspire to rule the world? The rest of Martin's book - all seven hundred pages, all twenty-five dollars' worth - is written to support that one point. By the time you get through reading the book, you become convinced that it's really true. Whether he ever achieves it or not, John Paul's goal is for his church to gain worldwide religious and political power. Martin has close ties to the Vatican, and there is every reason to believe that what he says is true. I must hasten to add that I personally admire John Paul as an individual with great charisma who has made a powerful and, in many ways, a very positive moral impact on our world. You don't have to be God to know that our world desperately needs some sort of moral influence for good. John Paul wants to be that influence, and in many ways he has been that influence. So can we rest assured that the future under John Paul's benign rule will be good? Revelation 13 suggests otherwise, because it tells us that the first beast, which Adventists identify as the papacy, will be a persecuting power. Yet John Paul does not sound like a persecuting individual. In fact, he has voiced strong support for the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom. There can be no question that if John Paul ever gets the kind of geopolitical power that Malachi Martin says he wants, the Roman Catholic Church will have fulfilled the specifications of the first beast in Revelation 13 that "the fatal wound was healed" and that the beast "was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation" (verses 3, 7). Unfortunately, if the first beast of Revelation 13 is the papacy, as Adventists claim, then the Roman Catholic Church will also become a persecuting power. John Paul's frequent statements in support of freedom of conscience make this seem unlikely. But a close look at the evidence makes it clear that it could happen. A persecuting power It's easy to suppose that only bad people persecute others. However, religious persecution seldom arises out of bad people trying to make other people bad. It arises out of good people trying to make other people good. I think it is fair to say, for example, that the people who ran the Inquisition in the Middle Ages viewed themselves as very altruistic. They were trying to guard the faith of their fathers. They wanted to keep the church pure. They wanted to protect society from corruption. Yet this very desire led to severe persecution, because they wanted to force people to be good. The question is whether that same attitude characterizes modern Catholicism. The answer is No, if we mean that every priest and every Catholic church member wants to persecute those who don't agree with them. However, please consider a statement by Roman Catholic author Louis Veuillot that was published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference: When the time comes and men realize that the social edifice must be rebuilt according to eternal standards, be it tomorrow, or be it centuries from now,... Catholics will... reestablish certain laws of life. They will restore Jesus to His place on high, and He shall no longer be insulted.... Respect will not be refused to the Creator nor repose denied to the creature simply for the sake of humoring certain maniacs, whose phrenetic condition causes them stupidly and insolently to block the will of the whole people.4 These ominous words were written in 1928, which was long before the more liberal winds of Vatican II. But please follow through with me on a group of statements from Malachi Martin's The Keys of This Blood, which was published in 1990: It is axiomatic for John Paul that no one has the right - democratic or otherwise - to a moral wrong; and no religion based on divine revelation has a moral right to teach such a moral wrong or
abide by it.5 The question that jumps out at me as I read those words is this: If no one has a right to believe or teach a moral wrong, who is going to decide for the rest of us what's morally right and wrong? Martin has the answer to that question: The Roman Catholic Church has always claimed - and, under John Paul, claims today - to be the ultimate arbiter of what is morally good and morally bad in human actions.6 John Paul does not claim to be the arbiter for what is morally good and bad in the actions of Catholics. He has every right to that role if his church members want it that way. But John Paul and his church claim far more. They claim that the pope is the ultimate arbiter - the court of last appeal, if you please - of "what is morally good and bad in human actions." The pope claims moral authority over the entire human race! That includes you and me, which is fine if you're Catholic and not so fine if you're not. So what do John Paul and his church propose to do about people who choose to teach and abide by a moral wrong? Martin's answer and his church's answer to that question are sobering to contemplate: The final prerequisite for geo-religious capability [translate: religious domination of the world] is authority. The institution [Roman Catholic Church], in its organizational structures and undertakings, must have unique authority: an authority that is... autonomous vis-a-vis all other authority on the supranational plane; an authority that carries with it such sanctions as are effective in maintaining the unity and the aims of the institution as it goes about its business of serving the greatest good of the community as a whole and in its every part.7 Martin claims that for a religious entity to have global authority, it must be autonomous - that is, it must be able to exercise its will without interference from other nations, and it must be able to impose sanctions. Sanctions are what the United Nations imposed on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. Iraq was not allowed to buy or sell on the international market until it met the U.N. demands. Sanctions are a very tough way of enforcing a law. Stop and think for a moment what Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit priest, has said. John Paul's highest aim is for his church to control the one-world government that is coming. Once that goal is achieved, John Paul's key objective will be to impose moral order on the world, with whatever sanctions are necessary to achieve it. That moral order will, of course, be governed in harmony with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. And all this will be in the interest of "serving the greatest good of the community as a whole and in its every part." That's a perfect setup for good people trying to make other people good. And the name of that game is persecution. On the authority of one of Catholicism's own best authors, that is John Paul's ultimate goal. So we come back to the question, Is the Roman Catholic Church capable of persecuting those with whom it disagrees? I don't think any Catholic today is saying, "We're going to persecute people who disagree with us." But remember that the Catholic Church has a long history - in the distant past, to be sure - of trying to make "bad people" (those who disagreed with Catholic dogma) good. Unfortunately, in spite of recent vows in support of religious freedom, official church teaching still retains many of the attitudes that made the Inquisition possible. Will the Roman Catholic Church fulfill all the specifications of the first beast of Revelation 13 in the end time, including the one about persecution? The facts persuade me that the danger of this happening is very real. And I'm not alone in that conclusion. In his book Power Shift, futurist Alvin Toffler expresses the same concern. In the chapter "The Global Gladiators," he points out that Ayatollah Khomeini's threat on the life of author Salman Rushdie was a message to the world's political leaders that he
would impose his version of religious fundamentalism onto their societies whether they liked it or not. "What Khomeini was really telling us," Toffler said, "was that 'sovereign' states are not sovereign at all, but subject to a higher Shiite sovereignty, which he alone would define - that a religion or church had rights that supersede those of mere nation states."8 Toffler then went on to say: It is no accident that, to much of the world, Khomeini seemed a cruel throwback to the preindustrial era. He was. His assertion of the rights of religion over nation-states paralleled the doctrine medieval Popes expressed during centuries of bloody church-state conflict. The reason this is important is that we may well be circling back to the kind of world system that existed before industrialism.... This is an immense leap that carries us forward and backward at the same time, and propels religion once more to the center of the global stage. And not just Islamic extremism. A totally different case in point is the growing global power of the Catholic Church.9 Toffler does not go so far as to say that the Roman Catholic Church will dominate the world politically and reinstate the Inquisition. But he recognizes the possibility. Will it really happen? Time will tell. In the meantime, you and I and all people who love freedom need to support those Catholics who stand for true religious freedom. 1. Forty-two times thirty equals one thousand two hundred sixty. 2. Time, 4 December 1989, 74. 3. Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 15, 17. 4. Louis Veuillot, The Liberal Illusion (Washington, D.C: National Catholic Welfare Conference, n.d.), quoted in Adventist Perspectives, 6:2:27. 5. The Keys of This Blood, 287. 6. Ibid., 157. 7. Ibid., 138. 8. Alvin Toffler, Power Shift (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 451. 9. Ibid., 451,452.
Chapter 9 The Second Beast of Revelation 13 The Old Testament prophet Daniel told us about a vision he had in which God showed him four great beasts rising out of the sea. As we noted in a previous chapter, these four beasts represent four kingdoms. Most Christians agree that these kingdoms were Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. The point is this: A beast in Bible prophecy represents a kingdom or nation. Revelation 13 talks about two beasts. The first one I already identified as the Roman Catholic Church. Even though most people think of Catholicism primarily as a religion, it is appropriate to think of it also as a nation or a political power. Tiny though it is, the Vatican is a legitimate nation that exchanges ambassadors with more than 150 nations. And Rome's political influence in today's world extends far beyond what most people imagine. So what nation does the second beast of Revelation 13 represent? It has to meet several criteria. An end-time power. The most obvious is that it must exist at the end of time. The mark of the beast, which is enforced by the second beast of Revelation 13, is an end-time phenomenon. Therefore the power that enforces it must be an end-time political power. Worldwide political power. The nation represented by the second beast must also have worldwide political power, because it "deceived the inhabitants of the earth" (verse 14). A Christian nation. Notice also that when this second beast arises, it has "two horns like a lamb" (verse 11). In Revelation the lamb is always a symbol of Jesus Christ. However, here it does not represent Jesus Himself but an entity that is like a lamb. The nation that this beast represents must have the characteristics of Jesus. It must be a Christian nation. On the North American continent. Let's take a brief detour into Revelation 12, where we will find a most significant clue to the identity of the second beast of Revelation 13. Chapter 12 begins with Jesus and Satan (the dragon) in conflict from the time that Jesus was born till He ascended to heaven after His resurrection. When Satan saw that he could no longer persecute Christ, he began persecuting His people. The first three hundred years of the Christian religion were a time of intense persecution by the Roman Empire. However, Revelation seems to be more interested in the later persecution of Christians by the Christian church itself, because it says that the woman (the church) would be persecuted for 1,260 days, or years. This is a clear reference to the medieval church's persecution of dissenters that was predicted by Daniel (see Daniel 7:25; see also the explanation of this time period on page 44). This 1,260-year period began in 538 and continued till 1798. This is the approximate time when the Roman Catholic Church was a major political influence in Europe. Now notice Revelation 12:15, 16: From his mouth the serpent [the dragon or Satan] spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. Adventists believe the river that the dragon spewed out of its mouth to sweep the woman away represents the Inquisition and similar persecutions that dissenters endured during the Middle Ages. And we believe that the earth helping the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth represents the discovery of the New World, which provided dissenters in Europe a place to escape for religious freedom. The United States and Canada are the only nations in the New World that have historically offered a haven of religious tolerance to all
people. South of the Rio Grande, the Americas have been dominated from the beginning of colonization by the Roman Catholic Church - the very agency that was the persecuting power from which Protestants were trying to escape. Thus North America, with the exception of Mexico, is the land that is indicated by the prophecy. Now let's return to Revelation 13 and read what it says about the origin of the second beast: "Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth." Let's compare the two references to "the earth" in Revelation 12 and 13: The earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the flood (Revelation 12:16). Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth ( Revelation 13:11). Notice: The earth that helped the woman in Revelation 12 is the same earth from which the second beast of chapter 13 arose - North America Thus far we've examined five specifications of the second beast of Revelation 13.Let's put them together: 1 Because it is a beast, it must represent a nation 2 Because it will enforce the mark of the beast, it must be an end time nation 3 Because it will deceive the inhabitants t of the earth, it must have worldwide political power. 4 Because it has two horns like a lamb (a symbol of Jesus), it must be a Christian nation. 5 We can look for it to arise in the New World, especially North America, which gave European Christians freedom from persecution This interpretation of the second beast of Revelation 13 has led Adventists for 150 years to identify it as the United States of America. Even if we leave off the fifth specification, the United States is the only Christian nation on earth today - the end time - that has worldwide political power. Notice, however, that though this beast has two horns like a lamb, it will speak like a dragon. That is, at some point in its history it will cease to be a lamblike beast and will become a dragon-like beast. And Revelation makes it clear that in its dragon-like phase it will persecute Gods people. That is why Adventists have said throughout their history that the United States will eventually become a persecuting power. Notice also that this beast will cooperate very closely with the first beast - so closely, in fact, that it will set up an image to the first beast (see verse 14). If the second beast is indeed the United States, as Seventh-day Adventists claim, and if the first beast represents the political power of the Roman Catholic Church, then we can expect that the United States will cooperate with the Roman Catholic Church to enforce its religious dogmas. And that is exactly what Adventists have said would happen someday. Ellen White was very clear on this point: The religion of the Papacy will be accepted by the rulers [of the United States], and the law of God will be made void.1 America, the land of religious liberty [will] unite with the papacy in forcing the conscience.2 Does it sound strange to you that the United States government would actually cooperate with the Roman Catholic Church to enforce its unique doctrines? It's already happening. In the previous chapter I called your attention to the cover story of the February 24, 1992, issue of Time magazine titled "The Holy Alliance." Here I want to point out an item that appeared in a box at the bottom of page 35. The title says, "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control." This immediately raises a question in my mind: What business has the United States government meddling in the Vatican's policy on birth control? Or, to turn the question around, What difference does (or should) the Vatican's policy on birth control make to the U.S. government? Quite a lot, according to the report in Time:
In response to concerns of the Vatican, the Reagan administration agreed to alter its foreign-aid program to comply with the church's teachings on birth control. So the United States government has now accommodated official government policy to meet the demands of a religious policy that is uniquely Roman Catholic. Specifically, the government has agreed to withhold U.S. funding from any nation or organization that encourages the use of contraceptives or abortion. Many American Protestants agree with the Catholic Church's policy on abortion, but almost nobody in the American Protestant community goes along with the church's birth-control policy. Neither do Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or any other religious group large or small that inhabits this country. The Agency for International Development (AID) was the U.S. government agency that negotiated the policy change. American ambassador to the Vatican William Wilson is quoted in the Time article as saying: I'd accompany them [representatives of AID] to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and in long discussions they finally got the message. But it was a struggle. They finally selected different programs and abandoned others as a result of this intervention. I protest! What business has the United States government changing its foreign-aid program to accommodate a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church that nobody but Catholics in this country goes along with? I believe the vast majority of Americans, Catholics included, if they gave it a moment's thought, would say, "None whatsoever." Yet it happened.3 Please read again the statements Ellen White made more than one hundred years ago, that "the religion of the papacy will be accepted by the rulers [of the United States]." A beginning has already been made. So we come back to the question, Is the second beast of Revelation 13 the United States, as Adventists have claimed for nearly a century and a half? Only time can tell whether all that we have anticipated will come to pass, but trends in the United States since about 1980 encourage us to maintain that view. 1. Ellen G. White, Manuscript Releases (Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald, 1990), 7:192. 2. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1948), 6:18. 3. One of Bill Clinton's first acts as president was to rescind this policy of the Reagan-Bush administration. Obviously, though, a future administration with Reagan and Bush's political philosophy could reinstate it.
Chapter 10 An Image to the First Beast Revelation 13 talks about two beasts, both of which will persecute God's people in the end time. And it speaks of a third entity - an image of the first beast - that will also persecute God's people. Here's what Revelation says about the image: I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon .He ordered [the inhabitants of the earth] to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed (Revelation 13:11, 14, 15). Adventists have traditionally understood the image of the beast to be American Protestantism in the final days of earth's history. We have concluded this for two reasons. What does it resemble? First, we can identify an image by what it resembles. In Revelation 13 the image is a likeness of the first beast: "He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived" (Revelation 13:14, emphasis added). Two characteristics of the first beast stand out: 1. It is a religio-political power. 2. It is a persecuting power. To be a true image, an image of the first beast would have to be distinct from the first beast, yet like it in at least these two characteristics. Who sets it up? We can also identify the image of the beast by who sets it up. The Bible says that the second beast of Revelation 13 sets it up. If this beast is the United States, as Adventists have said, then the image will be set up by the United States. And if the image is a religious power, then two more conclusions seem logical: 3. The religion of the image will be similar to that of the first beast, since it looks like the first beast; yet in order to be an image and not the real thing it must be different from the religion of the first beast. 4. The religion of the image would most logically be the same as the dominant religion of the power that sets it up. Given these four criteria, and given our understanding of the second beast of Revelation 13 as the United States, Adventists have had no trouble identifying the image. Protestantism is the dominant religion of this country (criterion number 4), and it is like Roman Catholicism in that it is Christian, yet different in that it is Protestant (criterion number 3). So far, so good. However, when we review the first two criteria, they do not fit historic American Protestantism. First, to be an image of the first beast of Revelation. 13, American Protestantism would have to be political, but historically it has been nonpolitical. And second, American Protestantism has never been a persecuting power, yet persecution is a prime requirement for any entity that is an image of the first beast. This dissimilarity of American Protestantism to the persecuting beast of Revelation 13:1-10 led one of our opponents of one hundred years ago to object that nothing can be more absurd than their [the Adventists'] interpretation of current events, and, especially, their belief that our general and state governments are about to be converted into engines
of religious persecution and despotism.... Such a change would be a great[er] miracle than for God to grow a giant oak in an instant.1 That's a reasonable objection, given the historic Protestant tolerance of other religions in this country. Yet in spite of the apparent incongruity, Adventists have never abandoned their view that the image of the first beast of Revelation 13 is American Protestantism. However, we do not say that the image to the beast is just American Protestantism. We believe the image is a union of American Protestantism with secular government for the enforcement of religious laws. The following statements by Ellen White are typical of what our thinking has been since the 1850s: When the Protestant churches shall unite with the secular power to... enforce the decrees and sustain the institutions of the church - then will Protestant America have formed an image to the papacy, and there will be national apostasy, which will end only in national ruin.2 When the leading churches of the United States, uniting upon such doctrines as are held by them in common, shall influence the state to enforce their decrees and to sustain their institutions, then Protestant America will have formed an image of the Roman hierarchy, and the infliction of civil penalties upon dissenters will inevitably result.3 The question is, Why have Adventists insisted for 150 years that the image of the beast is American Protestantism, when this conclusion seemed so contrary to the facts of American Protestant history? Keep in mind that we never did say that historic American Protestantism was the image of the beast. Revelation 13 is an end-time prophecy, and our position has been that at the very end of time, just before the second coming of Christ, American Protestantism will become political and persecuting. Amazingly, the very thing we have predicted these 150 years, which seemed so absurd during almost that entire time, is now coming to pass. I say this confidently, without fear of contradiction, because of three developments that have taken place in the religious life of our country within the last ten to fifteen years. First, an important segment of American Protestantism is waging a relentless war on the foundational principle of church-state separation. Second, this same segment of American Protestantism has become deeply enmeshed in the political process. And third, this element in American Protestantism is demonstrating many of the attitudes and agenda items that are common to those fundamentalistic religions that persecute dissenters. Opposition to church-state separation. Baptists have historically been among the staunchest supporters of church-state separation in America. Baptists came to this country in the seventeenth century to escape the religious oppression of Anglicanism in England. Roger Williams, the father of religious freedom in America, was a Baptist. As recently as 1960, Southern Baptists showed their support of church-state separation when they led out in demanding that Roman Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy take a vow in support of church-state separation. But all that has changed in the last fifteen to twenty years. Today the most conservative element in America's Protestant community (including but not limited to Southern Baptists) has turned its back on church-state separation. Please read the following quotation: Contrary to contemporary belief, the "separation of church and state," as defined by recent United States Supreme Court decisions, is not in keeping with the beliefs and desires of the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution and the First Amendment.... Not only is the word separation absent from it [the first amendment], there is no reference or allusion to it. Their amendment did not mandate separation in 1787; it does not authorize it now.4 That statement came from the now defunct Fundamentalist Journal, whose editor, Jerry Falwell, was the founder and director of the Moral Majority (also now defunct), and pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.
W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas - the largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention - was once asked what he thought of church-state separation. Criswell said, "I believe this notion of separation of church and state is the figment of some infidel's imagination."5 One of the strongest evidences of the erosion of Southern Baptist support for church-state separation requires a bit of background information. A number of years ago the various Baptist denominations in America pooled their resources to form what is known as the Baptist Joint Committee for Public Affairs. The primary purpose of the Baptist Joint Committee was to support church-state separation in the courts of the United States. Because they are the largest Baptist denomination in America, Southern Baptists naturally were the largest supporters of the Baptist Joint Committee (BJC). For many years they contributed $400,000 a year to the committee's budget. However, in 1990 the messengers (delegates) to the church's annual convention voted to slash their support for the BJC from $400,000 a year to $50,000 a year, and a year later they cut out the $50,000. Their support now goes to an organization that advocates a much greater entanglement of religion and politics. Why did the messengers cut their support for the Baptist Joint Committee? Because, said the convention's leaders, "The BJC, a pro-separationist agency, was too liberal and out of touch with the reigning ideology among Southern Baptists."6 Southern Baptists are not the only Christians in America that are attacking the wall that separates church and state. This is a major agenda item of the entire right-wing Protestant community, especially Pat Robertson, founder of an increasingly powerful political organization called the Christian Coalition. David Nelson, the director of Robertson's Christian Coalition in Colorado, recently declared that "there should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America."7 Enmeshment in the political process. A second characteristic of today's fundamentalist American Protestantism is its deep enmeshment in the political process. Robertson declares confidently that "before the end of this decade [the 1990s], the Christian Coalition is going to be the most powerful political organization in the entire United States of America."8 A key strategy of the coalition is to target politically vulnerable areas for grassroots political action. One of the most successful to date has been San Diego County in California. The Coalition's method in San Diego was to influence fundamentalistically minded candidates to run for political office at the lowest levels - public school boards, zoning committees, fire and irrigation districts, etc. - where voter apathy tends to be the highest. These candidates held highly conservative views, and they entered the race with the intention of influencing government to implement their conservative agenda. The result has been impressive. In 1990, far-right sectarian forces elected sixteen new trustees to the county's forty-eight public school and community college districts. Of the eighty-eight candidates they fielded for public office in all branches of government, more than half won. Ralph Reed, the Coalition's executive director, whom Christianity Today has called a master political activist,9 boasted that the San Diego County effort was "a model of what Christians and evangelicals and profamily Roman Catholics are attempting to do around the nation."10 Across California fundamentalist Christians are infiltrating the Republican Party to such an extent that they may soon control the party's central committee in that state. When they do, California will become a model to be repeated in other states. And, in fact, it is being repeated in other states. For example, Iowa sent forty-eight delegates to the Republican National Convention in Houston in August 1992, forty-three of whom were members of Robertson's Christian Coalition. Pat Robertson worked hard to make the religious right a major influence in the 1992 election. In
an October 17, 1991, letter to Coalition constituents he said, "Since the founding of the Christian Coalition in 1989, I have felt that 1992 would be one of the most critical election cycles of our lifetimes." He went on to point out what he felt was at stake: Control of the White House, with the possibility of more Supreme Court appointments. Control of the United States Senate. Retention of the prolife plank in the Republican Party's platform. Filling dozens of new Congressional seats with representatives sympathetic to the right-wing cause. Calling 1992 "the year to achieve victory," Robertson invited his constituents to "join me at [a]'Road to Victory' Conference and Strategy Briefing." He announced that he had invited leading political strategists to the conference "to discuss building coalitions, voter ID, get-out-the-vote, party delegate selection, and party convention strategy. " The goal, Robertson said, was "to identify and turn out an estimated 20 million pro-family and Christian voters in 1992 at every level," and "to ensure the largest turnout of Christian voters in history." In a fiery speech at the Road to Victory Conference, "Robertson promised the standing, roaring, clapping crowd, 'We'll be back in 1993. We'll be back in 1994. We'll be back in 1995. We'll be back in 1996. We'll be back in 1997. We'll be back in 1998. We'll be back in 1999. We'll be back until we win it all!"11 Does that sound like religion, or does that sound like politics? It's little wonder that Christianity Today has called the Coalition and its allies "a new generation of well-organized, politically sophisticated Christian activis[ts] that is rising up across the country," and which is "applying savvy new techniques to state and local politics."12 Never mind that Bush lost in 1992. The religious right aims, in Robertson's words, to "win it all." Whether they actually reach this goal, one thing is certain right now: America's religious right is deeply enmeshed in the political process. Fundamentalist attitudes and agenda items. The third significant difference between Protestants yesterday and today is in attitudes and agenda items. Today's Protestant political activists are fundamentalist to the core. The word fundamentalist needs definition before we proceed. The word appeared back in the early part of the twentieth century, when conservative Protestants were reacting against the liberal Protestant accommodation to biblical higher criticism and science's theory of evolution. These Protestants affirmed certain fundamental truths, which they vowed never to abandon. Hence the name fundamentalist. At that time it was conservative Protestantism's own label by which to define itself. More recently, however, the word fundamentalist has been picked up by the American public as a whole, and it is now used to name any right-wing religious group that is perceived as radical. Thus it is common to hear news reporters speak of "the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran." As I write this book, a study is being conducted called the Fundamentalism Project. The study is directed by the noted scholar Martin E. Marty, a professor at the University of Chicago. Its purpose is to study fundamentalist movements around the world, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu. The study has identified certain characteristics that are common to all fundamentalist movements, among which are the following: Fundamentalism is a reaction against an ideology or trend in society (such as humanism or secularism) that threatens the traditional cultural and religious beliefs of the society. Fundamentalism is characterized by a determined effort to change society, to impose the
fundamentalist's ideology onto the society as a whole. Fundamentalism tends to see itself as a "savior" of the land in which it lives. Its purpose is to save the land from its present corruption and return it to the "good old traditions" of the past. Fundamentalists tend to believe that they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. They often believe theirs is the only true religion. Fundamentalists often preach freedom as an ideal, but they will resort to force and even violence when they believe that moral deterioration justifies drastic action to save the land and the society from moral ruin. Freedom to the fundamentalist means the freedom to live according to the teachings of true religion, which by definition is his religion.13 If you will reflect for a moment on what you know of the fundamentalist Islamic society in Iran and other parts of the Moslem world, you will probably recognize many if not all of these characteristics. Notice, for example, the following statement: "Everything ought to be the way Allah ordered. No deviations are to be tolerated." That statement was made by the leader of Tajikistan's Islamic Renaissance Party.14 We Americans react quite strongly against such thinking among Muslims, failing to realize that it is also present in our own Christian culture. Statements such as the following are common among right-wing Christian fundamentalists: "You cannot have a right to do what is wrong," and "Those opposing our views are the new fascists." Those statements were made at the Christian Coalition's 1992 Road to Victory II conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia, by Keith Fournier, the executive director of Pat Robertson's American Center for Legal Justice.15 We especially tend not to recognize repressive fundamentalist attitudes for what they really are when we share the fundamentalist's concern for the moral deterioration of our society. For example, many American Christians would nod their heads in vigorous agreement at the following statement: "This is our country, and you can no longer take it away from us." Those words were written by Pat Robertson in a recent letter appealing for funds for his Christian Coalition. But I ask, Who gave America to Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition? What claim to ownership over this land do he and his followers have that the rest of us don't have? We can recognize the persecution that these thought patterns lead to in Muslim countries, yet be blind to the fact that they will lead to the very same persecution in our own society if we allow them to control our government. Farther away from the general public's eye are individuals and organizations even more radical than Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition. Operation Rescue's Randall Terry claims that "abortion is just the beginning. We're moving to completely reconstruct society on Christian lines by mobilizing people on this issue on the local level."16 The Christian Reconstructionists, under the leadership of R. J. Rushdoony, are determined to turn America into a theocracy based on Old Testament law. If they had their way, the following activities would be punishable by death right now: adultery, incest, homosexuality, blasphemy, Sabbath (Sunday) breaking, and propagation of false doctrines.17 The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to make the state the enforcement arm of the church. This is the Inquisition with a vengeance! Another hard-core, right-wing Christian organization is the Coalition on Revival (COR). Founded in 1982 by Jay Grimstead, COR wants nothing less than to make Christianity the government-enforced religion of the United States, with Old Testament law imposed on all of society.18 According to Church and State magazine, COR's plans call for a grassroots effort to elect their kind of Christians to county boards of supervisors and sheriff's offices, and disturbingly, once in power, to establish county militias.19
Pat Robertson has certain theological differences with the Christian Reconstructionists. But Reconstructionist founder R. J. Rushdoony is a frequent guest on Robertson's "700 Club" program. Several of the faculty members at his Regent University are sympathetic to Reconstructionist and COR philosophy. And Robertson's political methods are strikingly similar in many ways to those of these more radical organizations. After Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 election, some political observers predicted the demise of the religious right as a viable force in American politics. But according to University of Maine professor Matthew Moen, "It is just extraordinarily shortsighted to proclaim them dead on the basis of the November 3 election results." Moen, who is the author of the book The Transformation of the Christian Right, sees right-wing Christians as "better organized" today, "better led," and with "a clearer vision of what they are trying to do and where they are headed."20 We must not forget Robertson's pledge at his 1992 Road to Victory II conference, that "we will be back in 1993.... We will be back in 1996.... We will be back in 1999. We will be back until we win it all!" So we return to the Seventh-day Adventist teaching since the 1850s that at the end of time American Protestantism will become a religio-political persecuting power. That sounded so farfetched one hundred years ago that one Adventist critic proclaimed it less likely to happen "than for God to grow a giant oak in an instant." But consider a warning by Barry Lynn, an attorney, an Episcopal clergyman, and the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State: It's very easy for Americans to think that the problems of the Ayatollah Khomeini... are not problems that will ever be replicated here in the United States. They think this country somehow at some point down the road won't let things get out of hand. I think that's a very dangerous and false idea. All you need to do is read the books and the writings of people like Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue. He's a man who radically wants to transform America on the basis of the biblical understanding that he and many people share. He's not going to be satisfied by outlawing abortion because he will admit to an agenda that's far more far-reaching than that.21 Because religion has never held the reins of politics in this country, Americans tend to underestimate the political power that is latent in religious organizations. But if America ever allows fundamentalist religionists to get their hands on that power, they will immediately take legal steps to preserve it, and it will be next to impossible to restore this country to the freedom that you and I enjoy today. Based on our understanding of Revelation 13, Seventh-day Adventists have predicted for 150 years that America's Protestants will become a persecuting power just before the end of time. You can disagree with our interpretation of Revelation if you wish. The political realities of the early 1990s demonstrate that our interpretation, which seemed so absurd one hundred years ago, is ominously closer to fulfillment today than even we could wish. 1. The Rev. Theodore Nelson, writing in the introduction to Seventh-day Adventism Renounced, by Dudley M. Canright. 2. Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald, 1980), 7:976. 3. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif: Pacific Press, 1911), 445. 4. Fundamentalist Journal, July-August 1984, 28, 30. 5. Church and State, October 1984, 23. 6. Church and State, July-August 1990, 15. 7. Church and State, October 1992, 16. 8. Christian America (the newsletter of the Christian Coalition), November/ December 1992, 7.
9. Christianity Today, 20 July 1992, 43. 10. Quoted by Robert Maddox, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a November 1991 fund-raising letter. 11. Liberty, November/December 1992, 5. Italics in the original. 12. Christianity Today, 20 July 1992, 42. 13. Adapted from Church and State, July/August 1992, 8-11. 14. This statement was quoted in an International Bible Society fund-raising letter dated October 1992. Tajikistan is one of the republics that broke away from the former Soviet Union. 15. From a report by Ed Reid, who attended the Road to Victory II conference September 11, 12, 1992, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and took extensive notes. 16. Church and State, July-August 1992, 11. 17. Church and State, September 1988, 9. 18. Church and State, January 1991, 9, 10. 19. Ibid., 11, 12. 20. Christianity Today, 14 December 1992, 62. 21. Church and State, July-August 1991, 9.
Chapter 11 The Antichrist's Clever Plan to Deceive You One dark night in 1848, in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York, Margaret and Kate Fox heard strange rappings on the walls of their home. The sisters checked the house inside and the yard outside and found no one, but the rappings continued. Finally one of the girls asked whoever was making the noise to rap in a particular pattern, and she got what she asked for. Thus began for the Fox sisters a lifelong communication with spirits. Within two years Ellen White heard about these rappings, and in 1850 she wrote: August 24, 1850, I saw that the "mysterious rapping" was the power of Satan.... I saw that soon it would be considered blasphemy to speak against the rapping, and that it would spread more and more, that Satan's power would increase and some of his devoted followers would have power to work miracles and even to bring down fire from heaven in the sight of men.1 Ellen White continued to warn against the delusions of spiritualism. In 1888 she wrote: Satan has long been preparing for his final effort to deceive the world.... Little by little he has prepared the way for his masterpiece of deception in the development of spiritualism. He has not yet reached the full accomplishment of his designs; but it will be reached in the last remnant of time . Except those who are kept by the power of God, through faith in His word, the whole world will be swept into the ranks of this delusion.2 A spiritualist movement on the order of today's New Age was popular in America during the 1850s.3 Thus Ellen White's predictions made a lot of sense at the time. The movement faded after the Civil War, but Adventist predictions of end-time spiritualism continued. Throughout her life, Ellen White boldly proclaimed that spiritualism would dominate the religious world at the end of time, and she identified the rappings heard by the Fox sisters as the beginning of that movement. Significantly, a recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica confirms that the 1848 rappings were indeed "the impetus that brought [modern] Spiritualism into organized form."4 Ellen White was hardly alone, though, in predicting that spiritualism would dominate the religious world at the end of time. The Bible predicts the same thing, including two prominent New Testament writers. Paul wrote: The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing (2 Thessalonians 2:9, 10). And notice what John, writing in Revelation, said would happen just before the battle of Armageddon: I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. They are spirits of demons performing miraculous signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty (Revelation 16:13, 14). Jesus Himself predicted that "false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible" (Matthew 24:24). It should come as no great surprise, then, to see the New Age movement - the modern version of ancient spiritualism - exploding all over the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This is in exact fulfillment of the predictions of the Bible. It is, in fact, one of the greatest signs that the end of the world is near and that Jesus is about to come.
I hardly need to go into detail about the New Age movement. It's everywhere: on television, in the newspapers, and in our schools. In some cases even our clergy are teaching the philosophy of the New Age! One of the most foundational teachings of the New Age is that each human being is a god in his or her own right. According to Shirley MacLaine: We are not under the law of God. We are as the law of God. We are God. We have to totally accept ourselves - to accept the laws of self which are divine. Then we become God. And God and self are one.5 On one occasion MacLaine claimed to have had a mental conversation with a spiritual guide who called himself her higher, unlimited self. Here is a short piece of that conversation: "What is the difference between you and God?" I asked. "None," it said.... "We are all part of God. We are all individualized reflections of the God source. God is us and we are God."6 Mormons have always taught that human beings can progress to become God. However, today, some Protestants are proclaiming the same New Age philosophy. For example, Earl Paulk, senior pastor of Chapel Hill Harvester Church in Atlanta, Georgia (ten thousand members), and a bishop in the International Communion of Charismatic Churches, said: Adam and Eve were placed in the world as the seed and expression of God. Just as dogs have puppies and cats have kittens, so God has little gods. We have trouble comprehending this truth. Until we comprehend that we are little gods and we begin to act like little gods, we cannot manifest the Kingdom of God.7 And notice following statement by Paul Crouch, president of Trinity Broadcasting Network: I am a little god. I have His name. I am one with Him. I'm in covenant relation. I am a little god. Critics be gone!8 Casey Treat, pastor of Seattle's Christian Faith Center (2,500 members), said in a sermon: The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost had a conference and they said, "Let us make man an exact duplicate of us." Oh, I don't know about you, but that does turn my crank! An exact duplicate of God! Say it out loud - "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" [The audience repeats it a bit tentatively and uncertainly.] Come on, say it! [He leads them in unison.] "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" Say it again, "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" [The congregation is getting into it, louder and bolder, with more enthusiasm each time.] Say it like you mean it! [He's yelling now.] "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" Yell it out loud! Shout it! [They follow as he leads.] "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" "I'm an exact duplicate of God!" [repeatedly].... When God looks in the mirror, He sees me! When I look in the mirror, I see God! Oh, hallelujah!9 In addition to predicting that spiritualism would become a worldwide religious influence at the end of time, Adventists have also insisted that the whole world - Christians included, both Protestant and Catholic - would fall under the delusions of spiritualism. Ellen White made the following startling prediction: As spiritualism more closely imitates the nominal Christianity of the day, it has greater power to deceive and ensnare. Satan... will appear in the character of an angel of light. Through the agency of spiritualism, miracles will be wrought, the sick will be healed, and many undeniable wonders will be performed. As the spirits profess faith in the Bible, and manifest respect for the institutions of the church, their work will be accepted as a manifestation of divine power.... Papists, who boast of miracles as a certain sign of the true church, will be readily deceived by this wonder-working power; and Protestants... will also be deluded. Papists, Protestants, and
worldlings will alike accept the form of godliness without the power, and they will see in this union a grand movement for the conversion of the world and the ushering in of the long-expected millennium.10 Seventh-day Adventists have predicted, and continue predicting today, that in the near future the vast majority of the Christian world will join with spiritualism, more popularly known today as the New Age. This is already beginning to happen among some Protestants, as I pointed out a few paragraphs back, and we predict that it will become almost universal. This no doubt sounds impossible to today's evangelical Protestants, the large majority of whom strongly oppose the New Age movement. Books and tapes that expose the satanic foundation of the New Age have flooded the evangelical Christian market in the last ten to fifteen years. How could Christians who read these books and listen to these tapes ever fall under the deception of this modern form of spiritualism? The answer is very simple. Christianity as it is understood by the vast majority of Christians has an Achilles' heel: its teaching about life after death, which is identical to the teaching of New Age spiritualism. It's no secret that the vast majority of Christians today, both Catholic and Protestant, believe that every human being has an immortal soul. Only the body is mortal, we are told. The soul goes to heaven or hell immediately at death, where it continues a conscious existence. Spiritualism teaches exactly the same doctrine. Spiritualists believe that in their seances - channeling is the modern term - they communicate with the immortal spirits of those who have departed this life. This common belief in the immortality of the soul and its continued consciousness after death forms a perfect bridge between popular Christian teaching and spiritualism. Adventists have predicted for nearly 150 years that at the very end of time Satan will use this bridge to deceive God's people, including conservative Catholics and Protestants. He will make it appear that they are communicating with their departed loved ones, when in fact they will be communicating with demons. Most Christians think that their belief in the conscious existence of the soul after death is found in the Bible. However, this is not what the Bible teaches at all. This short book does not permit a full investigation of the biblical teaching about life after death, but we can note some of the highlights. The Old Testament knows nothing of an immortal soul that survives the death of the body. To the contrary, "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing" (Ecclesiastes 9:5). And speaking of death the psalmist said, "His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish" (Psalm 146:4, King James Version). Clearly, consciousness ceases at death. Many Christians believe that the New Testament supports the popular view of life after death. However, of all the New Testament occurrences of the word soul, not one says it is immortal. To the contrary, a number of texts make it clear that when the body dies, the soul dies with it.11 A number of New Testament texts seem to suggest that when a person dies, he or she goes to heaven immediately. One of the best known is Jesus' promise to the thief on the cross that "today [crucifixion Friday] you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). However, on closer examination, this supposition proves to be quite false. There is no punctuation in the Greek, and the wording allows for translation in either of two ways: 1. "I say to you/today you will be with Me in paradise" (New King James Version), or 2. "I say to you today, you will be with Me in paradise." Notice that, depending on where you put the comma, (1) Jesus promised the thief that he would be with Him in paradise that very day, or (2) He made the promise that very day that the thief would be with Him in heaven. So which way should the verse be translated? The answer is simplicity itself: Jesus did not go to heaven the day He made the promise to the thief, so how could He and the thief have been there together? Let's examine the evidence. The first person Jesus saw after He rose from the grave was His friend Mary, and when she saw
Him she fell to the ground and clung to His feet. But Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father" (John 20:17). Obviously, Jesus could not have meant that the thief would be with Him in paradise the Friday they both died, since He Himself did not go to heaven till after His resurrection. His promise to the thief should be punctuated to reflect this reality.12 Adventists continue to insist that their understanding of life after death will be a crucial safeguard against the deceptions of Satan in the days just before Jesus comes. As Ellen White put it, "Except those who are kept by the power of God, through faith in His word, the whole world will be swept into the ranks of this delusion [spiritualism].",3 The "faith in His word" that she had in mind was faith in what the Bible says about life after death. It may not make much difference right now what you and I believe about life after death, but the day is coming when it will make all the difference in the world. Do not take comfort in the fact that you oppose the New Age movement with great vigor today. In earth's final conflict, only the truth about life after death can preserve you from the deceptions of New Age spiritualism. Falsehood will lead you straight into Satan's trap. 1. Ellen G. White. Early Writings (Hagerstown. Md.: Review and Herald. 1882). 59. 2. Ellen G. White. The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press. 191 I ). 561. 562. 3. See Christianity Today. 14 December 1992, 20-24. 4. Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. s.v. "Spiritualist Groups." 5. Shirley MacLaine, Dancing in the Light (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), 247, emphasis in the original. This statement was actually made by a friend of Shirley's as a part other instruction in New Age philosophy. She obviously agrees with it. 6. Ibid.. 339. 7. Earl Paulk. Satan Unmasked. 97: adapted from a quote in The Agony of Deceit (Chicago: Moody Press. 1990). 90. 8. Paul Crouch. "Praise the Lord," Trinity Broadcasting Network, 7 July 1986: quoted in The Agony of Deceit. 45. 9. Casey Treat. "Believing in Yourself," audiotape from Seattle Christian Center: quoted in The Agony of Deceit. 91. 10. The Great Controversy. 588. 589. 11. The Greek word psuche (pronounced sue-kay) is translated "soul** in the New Testament, and sometimes it is translated "life." In the following texts the words soul or life are associated with death: Matthew 10:39: 16:26: Luke 9:56. KJV: Mark 3:4: Romans 1 1:3: Revelation 12:1 1. 12. If you would like to know more about the New Testament teaching on life after death, call 1 -800-765-6955 and ask for the book What Happens When You Die. by Mars-in Moore. 13. The Great Controversy. 562.
Chapter 12 The Mark of the Beast Twenty-five years ago I was the pastor of a small Adventist congregation in south Texas. One afternoon I was visiting in the office of a Baptist businessman who was also a good friend, and we got to talking about the second coming of Christ. I asked him if he'd be interested in hearing what Adventists believe is coming in the future, and when he said Yes, I told him what you will read on the next few pages. After I was through, he just sat there smiling, so I asked him what he thought. He drew a deep breath, and then said, "It sounds stupid." I was not surprised at his reply, and I appreciated his honesty. I'm glad to tell you that in spite of our differences over theology and prophecy, we continued to be good friends as long as I was the pastor of that church. And I want you to know that if you disagree with what I say in this chapter, you and I and all other Adventists will still be friends. That's the way we want it. So let's talk about what my Baptist friend thought was so incredible. Most Christians recognize that Saturday is the actual Sabbath of the fourth commandment. However, they believe that the observance of Sunday is acceptable to God as a proper way to observe the commandment. Adventists disagree, and here's why. Experts in the history of the calendar tell us that the weekly cycle has continued unbroken in Middle Eastern and European culture for at least three thousand years. So we know that today's Saturday is the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. And Adventists believe God still wants His people to keep the Sabbath on the actual seventh day. We believe this principle is so important that it will be the dividing line between those who follow God and those who refuse to follow Him at the very end of time. We believe the day is coming when the United States government will pass laws enforcing the observance of Sunday and that in quick succession all the nations of the world will follow our country's example. When this happens when Sunday observance is commanded by the law of the land - then the observance of Sunday will become the mark of the beast. This is what my friend in south Texas found so utterly incredible. The following statements by Ellen White express what Adventists believe: The Sabbath question is to be the issue in the great final conflict, in which all the world will act a part.1 A time is coming when the law of God is, in a special sense, to be made void in our land [the United States]. The rulers of our nation will, by legislative enactments, enforce the Sunday law.2 It is not until the issue is thus plainly set before the people, and they are brought to choose between the commandments of God and the commandments of men [Sabbath versus Sunday], that those who continue in transgression will receive "the mark of the beast."3 You may wonder why anyone would want to enforce a day of religious observance. Ellen White answered that question: [Religious leaders will] put forth the claim that the fast-spreading corruption is largely attributable to the desecration of the so-called "Christian Sabbath," and that the enforcement of Sunday observance would greatly improve the morals of society.4 Is anyone in America today thinking like that? Southern Baptists are. The messengers (delegates) to their 1992 annual convention in Indianapolis voted a resolution urging Southern Baptist churches to "teach the importance of the
proper use of The Lord's Day," in view of the fact that "much of the moral breakdown in our society has come since keeping the Lord's Day holy has been largely disregarded."5 And read the following words by Walter Chantry, the author of Call the Sabbath a Delight - a well-known Christian book on the observance of Sunday: Whether or not people keep the Sabbath holy is not an incidental or insignificant matter. When God issued this fourth commandment he understood humanity much better than we do. Failure to practice this moral law is a root cause of moral decline, social disorder and widespread human suffering. No successful recovery of mankind can be devised without the inclusion of the fourth commandment in the remedy.6 Everyone knows that America's morals are in disarray. No one is more concerned about that than the religious right, who propose to restore moral sanity through legislated morality. They call it "family values," but beneath the surface is a broad agenda for transforming America into a Christian state with the legal enforcement of fundamentalist Christian values. I want to make it clear that I agree with the majority of the family values that right-wing Christians are talking about. But I do not want laws in my country that compel unwilling citizens to live by religious values they don't believe in. Unfortunately, the idea that the government should legislate Christian values is rapidly gaining support among conservative Christians. Adventists are simply saying that one of these days, Sunday observance will become one of the "family values" that fundamentalist Christians want the American government to legislate. The scenario is not implausible. Why Saturday is important I would like to share with you some of the most important reasons why Adventists keep the Sabbath on the seventh day. God told the Israelites why He gave them the Sabbath, and the reason is most significant: "You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the Lord, who makes you holy "(Exodus 31:12, 13). God said that the Sabbath was a sign that He made them holy. God's people become holy by developing a close relationship with Him through Bible study, prayer, and fellowship with other Christians. The Sabbath gives us time to do these things. This principle was so important that God established it in the Garden of Eden (see Genesis 2:13). Later He placed it in the heart of the Ten Commandments. "'Remember the Sabbath day,' " He said, "'by keeping it holy'"(Exodus 20:8). And He made it plain which day He had in mind: For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:11). Some people say, "I go to church every day." Adventists think that's a wonderful idea, but it has nothing to do with the Sabbath. God did not say, "Remember the Sabbath day to go to church." He said, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." The significance of the Sabbath lies in the fact that God set it aside as holy time. When God makes a day holy, we can't say that another day is holy. To illustrate, suppose that Adam and Eve had pointed to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and said, "We know God told us not to eat of this tree, but there's another tree one hundred feet away that we'd like to set aside for that purpose." Suppose they had then used this reasoning as justification for eating from the tree God chose and abstaining from the tree they chose. Would God have accepted that? Of course not! Once God designates something and makes a command about it, we have no right to change it. Neither can we substitute the first day of the week for the seventh.
Every now and then I read of Sunday-keeping Christians who genuinely keep Sunday holy. Some pastors even keep Monday holy, since Sunday is their busiest day. The day is irrelevant, they say. Whatever day you choose is fine with God. Just keep it holy. I commend these Christians for spending time with God. But have they really kept the fourth commandment? I think not. And the reason lies in the fact that the Sabbath is a community day, not just a day for the individual. In the Old Testament the entire congregation of Israel was to celebrate the Sabbath together. But that would be impossible if each person chose his or her own day of the week for the Sabbath. The entire congregation was also supposed to work six days. The commandment says, "Six days you shall labor and do all your work" (Exodus 20:9). Imagine the chaos that would result if each oneseventh of the American population were to choose a different day of the week to keep holy! For very practical reasons, the Sabbath has to be a community day, not a day each person can choose for himself. By choosing the day for us, God cut through a million arguments over which day His community of believers ought to keep. The mark of the beast But what biblical basis do Adventists have for saying that the observance of Sunday, when it is enforced by law, will be the mark of the beast? The mark of the beast is described in Revelation 13, so let's examine that passage. Please notice that whatever it is, the mark of the beast will he forced upon people: He... forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark (Revelation 13:16-18). The mark of the beast is also related to worship. Revelation 14:9 says, "If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark...'" Obviously, the mark of the beast has to do with worship, and the context leaves no doubt that this will be false worship. The theme of false worship pervades chapter 13. It begins in verse 4, which says, "Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast." And verse 8 says that "all inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast - all whose names have not been written in the book of life." In these verses false worship appears to be optional. There is no suggestion that the inhabitants of the earth will be forced to worship the dragon and the beast. However, the image to the beast in Revelation 13 forces people into false worship: "It... cause[s] all who refused to worship the image to be killed" (Revelation 13:15). But this still does not tell us that the false worship has anything to do with the fourth commandment. Where do Adventists get that? Let's look at Revelation 14:6, 7. Verse 6 tells about a mighty proclamation that an angel from heaven makes to the inhabitants of the earth: "Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water" (Revelation 14:7, emphasis added). This verse obviously refers to the true worship of God, in contrast to the false worship that is enforced by the image to the beast in Revelation 13. Now let's compare this verse with the last part of the fourth commandment: The angel said: Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water (Revelation 14:7). The commandment says: For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day (Exodus 20:1 1). Do you see the similarity? In Revelation 14:7, when the angel from heaven commands God's
end-time people to worship God, he practically quotes from the fourth commandment! Now put this together with the fact that twice in this part of Revelation we are told that God's endtime people will be a commandment-keeping people: The dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring - those who obey the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus (Revelation 12:17, emphasis added). This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God's commandments and remain faithful to Jesus (Revelation 14:12, emphasis added). If God's end-time people keep His commandments, they will obviously keep the fourth. And if the true worship of God at the end of time is drawn from the fourth commandment, what would the contrasting false worship of God be? It would have to be worship in violation of the fourth commandment. And how is most of the Christian world today violating the fourth commandment? By the day they keep. Furthermore, this false worship is said to be a mark of the first beast of Revelation 13. In an earlier chapter I explained why Adventists believe this beast is the Roman Catholic Church. You may not know this, but the Catholic Church claims to have changed the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day of the week. Not only that, the church claims to have received the authority to make this change from God. In other words, the change of the Sabbath to Sunday is a sign or mark of Rome's authority. There can be no question that the change from observing the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week developed among Christians after the Bible was written. There is no biblical command for keeping Sunday. If a human organization is responsible for the change from Sabbath to Sunday, it would have to be the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, in his book From Sabbath to Sunday, made the following positive assertion: The Church of Rome... appears to have played a leading role in inducing the adoption of Sunday observance. This we found indicated not only by the introduction and enforcement of the new EasterSunday festivity (closely related to the weekly Sunday) but also by the measures Rome took to devaluate the Sabbath theologically and practically. The Sabbath was in. fact reinterpreted to be a temporary institution given to the Jews as a sign of their unfaithfulness. Therefore Christians were enjoined to show their dissociation from the Jewish Sabbath by fasting on that day, by abstaining from the Lord's supper and by not attending religious assemblies.7 A test of loyalty I'd like to conclude this chapter with one further thought. You will recall that God gave Adam and Eve a very simple, clear-cut test of loyalty. He said, "Don't eat of the tree that I point out to you." Adventists believe that the issue God will use to test earth's final generation will be just as simple and clear-cut as the issue He used to test earth's first generation. And nothing could be more clear or simple to understand than the day one chooses to worship. Both the tree and the Sabbath were arbitrary choices by God. He could have chosen any one of a hundred trees in the Garden of Eden and told Adam and Eve not to eat of it. He could also have chosen any day of the week and made it the Sabbath. But once He chose a tree, and once He chose the day, His arbitrary decision became a divine mandate for the human race that we have no authority to change. Revelation 13 tells us that at the end of time God's people will be faced with a choice: Worship the false way, or you will be killed. Adventists believe that the issue in this conflict will be a divine mandate with no logical reason behind it other than God's choice, His command. We believe we understand what that divine mandate will be. Once God has chosen, the only question is whether you
and I will obey or disobey. Now you understand what my friend in south Texas found so impossible to believe twenty-five years ago. There's one important difference, though, between twenty-five years ago and today. The religio-political climate back then made the Adventist scenario seem highly unlikely. Today anyone who is familiar with the political drift of this country knows that it could happen. Adventists still believe it will. 1. SDA Bible Commentary (Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald, 1957), 7:977, emphasis added. 2. Ibid. 3. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1911), 449. It's important to understand that Adventists do not believe those who are keeping Sunday at the present time have the mark of the beast. Sunday observance can become the mark of the beast only when it is enforced by law. 4. Ibid., 587. 5. Southern Baptist Convention, Indianapolis, Indiana, June 9-11, 1992, "Resolution on Keeping the Lord's Day." 6. Walter Chantry, Call the Sabbath a Delight (Carlisle, Pa.: The Banner of Truth, 1991), 12. 7. Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday (Rome: The Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 212.
Chapter 13 A Threefold Union Many Protestants today, as well as some Catholics, look to events in the Middle East as signs that the second coming of Christ and the end of the world are near. Seventh-day Adventists tend not to do that. From what I have said thus far in this book, you can see that our focus has been on what is happening in the United States, particularly among conservative Protestants, and what is happening in Rome. In this chapter I will discuss with you the united front that we believe these various entities will develop in the near future. Specifically, we believe that there is coming a grand ecumenical movement that will especially include Roman Catholics, Protestants, and spiritualists. Here is the evidence for that conclusion. In chapter 111 pointed out that at the very end of time Christians will fall under the influence of New Age spiritualism. When we look carefully, we discover that the second beast of Revelation 13 is also involved in spiritualism. The following texts in other parts of the Bible also describe spiritualism in the end time: False Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible (Matthew 24:24). The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders (2 Thessalonians 2:9). I saw three unclean spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. They are spirits of demons performing miraculous signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty (Revelation 16:13, 14). Notice that each of these texts describes demonic end-time entities - Jesus called them false Christs - that will perform miracles. Clearly, spiritualism as it manifests itself during the final months of world history will use these miracles to deceive. Let's return now to the second beast of Revelation 13: He performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven in full view of men. Because of the signs... he deceived the inhabitants of the earth (Revelation 13:13, 14). A few pages back I pointed out the Adventist belief that the United States will cooperate with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. From the verses I quoted above, we conclude that in the final days of world history our country will also come under the influence of the dark forces of spiritualism. Please read the following ominous words by Ellen White: The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this three-fold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.1 The United States of America "trampling on the rights of conscience"? That sounds incredible! Hasn't our nation always stood for freedom of speech, assembly, and religion? Haven't we been the model of freedom all over the world? For as long as we've been a nation, we've stood for the right of people to worship as they please without interference from government. How could our nation ever "trample on the rights of conscience"? Quite easily, according to one expert whom I quoted earlier: It's very easy for Americans to think that the problems of the Ayatollah Khomeini... are not
problems that will ever be replicated here in the United States. They think this country somehow at some point down the road won't let things get out of hand. I think that's a very dangerous and false idea.2 The American people are largely ignorant of the tremendous political power that is locked up in religion. Because we have never experienced that power in its harsher forms, we tend to think that it can never manifest itself in our land. I have a friend who is an expert in church-state affairs. He is a strong supporter of the wall that has historically separated church and state in this country. We were talking one day about the current trend toward bringing church and state together, and he said, "I think the American people will have to actually experience the problems that come from a form of church-state union before they vote it back out." I asked him how long he thought it would take us to vote church-state union back out and separation back in, and he surmised it would take about twenty years. The problem with this view is that it does not take into account the powerful grip that religious entities could get on the governmental institutions of this country once they gained political power. They could so manipulate the laws of the nation, including the Constitution, that voting them back out would be next to impossible. Now you know what Seventh-day Adventists believe about the mark of the beast and the role that Protestantism, Catholicism, and the United States government will play in the final days of earth's history. The scenario we have predicted is not full blown yet. But much of it has developed since the early 1980s, and we believe the rest will happen in due time. 1. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1911), 588, emphasis added. 2. Attorney Barry Lynn, quoted in Church and State, July-August 1991, 9.
Chapter 14 Making Sure You Conquer the Antichrist I've always been fascinated by the bar codes on the products that I buy at the supermarket. I enjoy watching the clerk at the check stand run these products across the window on her counter and listening to the beep that signals that the laser beam has "read" the bar code. Several months ago a friend gave me a book about the last days that discussed the mark of the beast. According to the author, every human being will be marked either on his forehead or his hand with a "bar code" that can be scanned with a laser beam. The "bar code" on the foreheads of those who are in harmony with the existing world government will be able to buy and sell. The "bar code" on the foreheads of those who are not in harmony with the government will not be allowed to buy or sell. It's possible the world's governments will use something like that to enforce a boycott against those who do not have the mark of the beast. But to suppose that the mark of the beast is a bar code is to miss the whole point of what Revelation is saying. Satan would like nothing more than for you and me to believe that the issue in the final conflict will be over externals that can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. Even the Sabbath/Sunday question that I explained a couple of chapters back will, in one sense, be an external symbol only. The real issue will be the condition of your mind and heart. The mark of the beast will be placed on those who oppose God. Those who remain faithful to God will receive a mark that the Bible calls the seal of God (see Revelation 7:1-4). Revelation 14:1 says that those who receive this seal will have God's name written on their foreheads. However, again, the Bible is not talking about the word God stamped on people's foreheads. The forehead is a symbol of the mind. The real issue will be the condition of your mind and heart. According to Revelation 14:3, those who receive the seal of God have been redeemed from the earth. To be redeemed means that God has transformed you on the inside. The mark of the beast and the seal of God Think back with me for a moment to our discussion earlier in this book about Genesis 3:15. Do you remember who the serpent and the woman were? And do you remember what the "enmity" was that God said He would put between them? The serpent is Satan, and his descendants are the wicked throughout all ages. The woman and her descendants are God's people on the earth throughout all ages. But what about the enmity? God made Adam and Eve just like Himself on the inside. They liked the things He liked, and they hated the things He hated. If they had never sinned, their thoughts and feelings would forever have remained like His. But when they sinned, they took on the same selfishness that lies at the core of Satan's nature. They now loved the same selfish things that he loved. There was no enmity between them and him. They were in harmony with him. And you and I and every other human being have been born in harmony with him. Fortunately, God made it possible for us to escape from this terrible condition. When He said that He would put enmity between the serpent and the woman, He meant that He would change Adam and Eve and their spiritual descendants so that they would be like Himself again, on the inside. Those who choose to put themselves back on His side will once again be able to think and feel the way He
does, making them "enemies" of Satan. The seal of God will be placed on those who choose to become like God on the inside, and the mark of the beast will be placed on those who choose to remain like Satan. Please notice that I said "those who choose." The issue in the final conflict will be whether we choose to be like God or Satan on the inside. Those who conquer the antichrist will be those who have chosen, by God's grace and with His help, to conquer the darkest part of their own evil natures. Revelation makes this utterly clear when it says of those who receive the seal of God that "no lie was found in their mouths; they are blameless" (Revelation 14:5). I would like to warn you of something, though. You cannot continue rejecting God and His transforming power in your life today and expect to receive it when the final crisis comes. I don't mean that there won't be last-minute conversions. The problem won't be with God's willingness to accept you at the last minute. The problem will be with yourself. If you keep choosing the easy path today, tomorrow, and the next day, who's to say you will make a different choice during the end time, particularly in the face of the life-threatening pressure that will be brought against those who refuse the mark of the beast? The first thing you must do to make sure that you conquer the antichrist is to place yourself firmly on God's side right now. You must commit yourself to follow wherever He leads you, to let Him transform your mind and remove your sins. This is not easy to do when your evil instincts are crying for expression. At the moment of strongest temptation, you must ask for His Iransfonriing power. Disaster and spiritual choices The final crisis will be a time of natural disaster so horrible that the human race will be threatened with extinction. Revelation 13: 16, 17 suggests that the resources that are left will have to be rationed worldwide in order to provide for everyone's needs, and those who refuse to worship the beast and his image will forfeit their share of the rations. If you and I are choosing the path of least resistance day after day now, we are setting ourselves up to make the same choice during this time of terrible crisis. I do not believe that the calamities just before Christ's second coming will be caused by either God or Satan. They will be the forces of nature out of control. Scientists will be able to give a perfectly logical explanation of them. Yet this does not mean that God will be uninvolved. I believe that the destructive forces of the future exist right now, but at the present time God is holding them largely in check. However, as the world rebels more and more against Him, He will gradually withdraw His protection, and these natural disasters will continue to increase in severity. During 1992 the United States experienced two level-5 hurricanes within one month - Andrew in Florida and Louisiana and Iniki in Hawaii. The experts tell us that a level-5 hurricane occurs about once a century. Two in one month, one of which was the costliest natural disaster in American history, suggests that God has already started removing His protection from the earth. Ellen White made the following comment about natural disasters at the end of time: It is God that shields His creatures and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer. But the Christian world have [sic] shown contempt for the law of Jehovah, and the Lord will do just what He has declared that He would - He will withdraw His blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those who are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to do the same.1 God doesn't hate people. He loves them. So why would a loving God allow such terrible trouble to come upon the whole human race? This question has perplexed religious people and philosophers
for millenniums, and the Bible gives the answer. In Deuteronomy 28 God told the Israelites that if they obeyed Him they would enjoy prosperity, but if they disobeyed they would suffer the invasion of foreign armies and terrible natural disasters. Then, in chapter 30, He said: When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart,... then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you (Deuteronomy 30:1-3). God does not want to see us suffer, but He sometimes allows disaster to overtake us, because He knows that in the process some of us will turn to Him. The natural disasters that strike the earth at the very end of time will be God's way of screaming at us the way a parent would scream at a child about to chase a ball in front of a speeding car. They will be His voice crying out, "Wake up! Your opportunity to be saved is almost over!" Satan will also have a very attractive spiritual program to offer the world. This will be a time of intense spiritual activity on the part of the forces of evil, complete with boycotts and death threats against those who refuse to worship the world's way. The intensity of the natural disasters that occur at that time will drive the entire human race to desperate measures to deal with the crisis. Some of these measures will be spiritual, and the vast majority of the human race will choose Satan's false spiritual solution. Jesus linked the disasters at the end of time with Satan's deceptions. In Matthew 24 He described the world's final conflict as a time of distress "unequaled from the beginning of the world until now." This crisis will be so severe that if it were not cut short "no one would survive" (Matthew 24:21, 22). Then He said: "At that time if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect - if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time" (Matthew 24:23-25).2 Jesus was warning us that Satan's spiritual solution to the final crisis will sound very reasonable, like just the right thing to do - and it will all be a terrible deception. The only one way you and I can avoid being deceived at that time will be to place implicit trust in the Bible. Notice the following words by Ellen White: So closely will the counterfeit resemble the true that it will be impossible to distinguish between them except by the Holy Scriptures. By their testimony every statement and every miracle must be tested.3 Fearful sights of a supernatural character will soon be revealed in the heavens, in token of the power of miracle-working demons.... Are the people of God now so firmly established upon His word that they would not yield to the evidence of their senses? Would they, in such a crisis, cling to the Bible and the Bible only?4 It's imperative that you and I be learning the truths of the Bible now. Otherwise we will be unprepared to respond correctly to Satan's deceptions in the final crisis. This is another way to be sure you conquer the antichrist in the end time. On the forehead and the hand Those who receive the mark of the beast on the forehead will truly believe what the beast power stands for. Those receiving it on the hand will not necessarily believe in the beast power. Some of them may even believe the truth intellectually. But all their lives they will have chosen the path of least resistance, and when earth's final crisis comes, they will make that same choice. If you want to be sure of conquering the antichrist during earth's final crisis, when devastation is raging all around and when the mark of the beast is enforced, it's crucial that you ask God to reveal
your sins now so you can deal with them. When He does reveal them, it's crucial that you confess them and ask Him to forgive you and cleanse you on the inside. The Bible says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9, King James Version). Everyone will receive the seal of God who is willing to make that a daily practice now. Those who refuse are in serious danger of receiving the mark of the beast. The Sabbath-Sunday conflict If this is true, then why do Seventh-day Adventists say that the Sabbath is the seal of God and Sunday observance, when it is enforced by law, is the mark of the beast? Let me call your attention again to a verse from the Old Testament that I quoted in the chapter on the mark of the beast: You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign... that I am the Lord, who makes you holy (Exodus 31:12, 13, emphasis added). The Sabbath is a sign that God makes us holy. It is a visible symbol of our choice to let Him transform us on the inside. The danger to Adam and Eve in Eden was not in the tree. The issue was their willingness to obey God. The fruit didn't change them on the inside. The change was brought about by their choice to disobey God. The tree was simply a visible way of demonstrating that choice. In the final conflict, you and I won't be transformed on the inside merely by going to church on Saturday or Sunday. At that time, our choice of a day will be a visible symbol of the transformation God has already made inside us. Revelation informs us that God's end-time people will be a commandment-keeping people: Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring - those who obey God's commandments (Revelation 12:17). This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God's commandments (Revelation 14:12). Many Christians think that obeying the commandments means you don't lie and steal and commit adultery. But that's mere outward behavior. Lots of people in the world appear to order their lives by those principles, yet they have never been transformed on the inside. God's end-time people will keep the commandments from the heart. If the Bible says they shouldn't commit adultery, and the Holy Spirit points out lust in their hearts, they will ask Him to remove that lust. Their choice to keep the Sabbath when the world is trying to force them to keep Sunday will be an outward symbol of all the choices they have made throughout their lives to let God transform them on the inside so they can keep His commandments from the heart. Perhaps it still sounds impossible to you, the way it did to my friend in south Texas twenty-five years ago, that the burning issue during the world's final crisis will be whether to keep Sabbath or Sunday. Time will tell whether Seventh-day Adventists are right or wrong on that point. However, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the choices you and I are making whether to allow God to transform us on the inside today will make the difference whether we receive the seal of God or the mark of the beast tomorrow. 1. Ellen G. White, Counsels on Health (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1951), 460. 2. See also 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11; Revelation 13:11-14; 16:13, 14. 3. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1911), 593. 4. Ibid., 624, 625.
Chapter 15 The Close of Probation I've always enjoyed playing the game Monopoly. I think there's a reason why this game is the alltime favorite board game in America. It's both a game of chance and a game of choices. And winning or losing depends partly on the choices you make - whether to buy a piece of property, whether to improve it - and whether these choices cause you to go broke and lose or get rich and win. Life is also made up of both chance and choices. However, the Bible makes it very clear that winning or losing depends, not on chance, but on the choices we make as we "play the game." Our most fundamental choice is whether or not to accept Jesus as our Savior; whether or not to allow Him to forgive us of our sins and transform us on the inside. Those who make the choice for Jesus will gain eternal life. Those who refuse Him will not. This is what Jesus meant in John 3:3 when He said that "no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" - that is, unless he allows God to transform his or her heart. The second coming of Jesus will bring to an end the opportunity to choose sides. All choices for or against God and for or against Satan will have to be made before He comes. We cannot change sides after He comes. From the beginning of the world until now, human beings have had the opportunity to choose between God and Satan. This opportunity is called "probation," and the time to make these choices is probationary time. The "close of probation" is the moment when this opportunity ends. In the chapter "A Summary of the End Time," I pointed out that most Christians believe this opportunity to choose will end with the second coming of Christ. However, Seventh-day Adventists find significant evidence in the Bible that probation will end a short time before the second coming of Christ. Because this is such a crucial point, I will explain it in some detail. The explanation is somewhat technical, but the spiritual implications are profound. In the world that you and I know, there are three classes of people: those who have accepted Christ; those who have made a conscious choice to reject Him; and those who have not made a decision either way. However, at the end of time there will be just two classes: the righteous and the wicked. There will be no class of people who have not made a choice, because everyone will have made a final choice. This is one of the most consistent teachings of Christ's parables. If you are not familiar with the following parables, you will probably understand the rest of this discussion better if you take a few minutes to look them up before going on. The wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43). The fish in the net (Matthew 13:47-50). The ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). The men with talents (Matthew 25:14-30). The sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46). Notice that Jesus said there will be only two kinds of people at the end of time: The wheat and the weeds, the good and the bad fish, the wise and foolish girls, the sheep and the goats. The idea that probation will close someday is based on this idea. Everyone will have made a final choice. That's why there will be only two classes of people. Everyone in the third class - those who have not made a decision either way - will have been sorted into one of the other two classes. The traumatic events in the world during the final crisis will force everyone who has not made a choice to do so. Jesus' parables seem to suggest that this close of probation will come at His second coming. For
example, at the conclusion of His parable of the good and bad fish He said: This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:49, 50). And at the beginning of the parable of the sheep and the goats Jesus said: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him,... he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31, 32). Notice that in these parables the separation of the righteous and the wicked into two classes comes "at the end of the age," "when the Son of Man comes in his glory." This suggests that the opportunity to choose between God and Satan will end with the second coming of Christ. However, might it be that the opportunity to choose will end before His coming, with only the physical separation of the two groups from each other taking place at His coming? In Revelation we discover that this is in fact what will happen. Revelation agrees with Jesus that the world will be divided into two classes at the end of time. Those who are on God's side will receive the seal of God, while those who are on Satan's side will receive the mark of the beast. The question is, when will this division come? According to Revelation it will come before the outpouring of God's wrath in seven last plagues. The evidence is really quite simple to understand. Let's begin by looking at the first plague: The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image (Revelation 16:2). Since the first plague is poured out on those who have received the mark of the beast, the separation between those who receive the seal of God and those who receive the mark of the beast will have to be made before the first plague is poured out. We know that the seventh plague will occur at the time of the second coming of Christ.1 Thus it is evident that the close of probation - the final separation of the world into just two classes - must occur a short time before the second coming of Christ. This is the biblical basis for the Seventh-day Adventist teaching that probation will close a short time before Christ's second coming rather than at His coming. The following short sentence by Ellen White summarizes her understanding and ours: "Probation is ended a short time before the appearing of the Lord in the clouds of heaven."2 This biblical teaching is extremely important for God's people to understand at the present time. While the second coming of Jesus will be an earth-shattering event that everyone will be aware of, only God will know when every human being has made his or her final choice. Thus only God will know when probation closes. We must be ready at all times. That's why Jesus said, "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour' (Matthew 25:13). I cannot say it strongly enough: The time to choose God is now. The time to accept Jesus as your Savior for the forgiveness of your sins is now. The time to choose the transformation of heart and the cleansing from sin that Jesus offers is now. I urge you to make those choices now before it is forever too late. 1. In Revelation 6 we learn that a great earthquake will occur at the second coming of Christ. This earthquake will cause the mountains and the islands to move out of their places (see Revelation 6:12-17). Revelation 16 uses similar language to describe an earthquake that will occur at the time of the seventh plague (see Revelation 16:17-20). This is the basis for my statement that the seventh plague occurs at the time of the second coming of Christ. 2. Ellen G. White. The Great Controversy (Mountain View. Calif.: Pacific Press, 1911). 490.
Chapter 16 The Antichrist and the New World Order The antichrist's new world order will be fully established in the last remnant of time, just before Jesus comes. We read about it in Revelation 17 - a chapter that Seventh-day Adventists generally recognize will be fulfilled during the time of the seven last plagues, after the close of probation. This chapter begins with a fearful description: One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries." Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things, and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus (Revelation 17:1-6). What do these strange words mean? A woman in Bible prophecy represents God's people, His church. We first encountered this symbol in Genesis 3:15, when God said to Satan, "I will put enmity between you and the woman." The pure woman that Revelation shows us in chapter 12:1 represents God's people when they are loyal to Him. A wicked woman represents God's people in a condition of apostasy. The woman in Revelation 17 clearly represents the church in deep apostasy, because she was "drunk with the blood of the saints" (verse 6). Please notice the nature of that apostasy: The woman commits adultery with the kings of the earth. Kings represent secular government - the state. The adultery that Revelation describes between the woman and the kings of the earth represents a relationship, a union between the church and the state, that God condemns. Revelation is telling us that just before Jesus comes, Christianity as a whole will form a tight union with the state. The church will practice this spiritual adultery with every nation in the world, even in the United States, which has been so careful to keep church and state separate for two hundred years. Revelation 17:3 also says that the beast has ten horns on its head, and verse 12 interprets these ten horns: 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 (verses 12, 13). The beast is the antichrist, and the ten kings represent the governments of the world at that time, who "will give their power and authority to the beast." This is the antichrist's new world order. And what will be the purpose of this new world order? "They [the beast and the ten kings] will make war against the Lamb" (verse 14). The Lamb, of course, is Christ, which means that the antichrist will attack Christ Himself! The antichrist's war against Christ will actually begin with an attack on those who have chosen to
remain true to God. This will be a time of intense spiritual trial for God's people.1 Revelation 17:6 says that "the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints." Chapter 13:7 says that the world will "make war against the saints and... conquer them." Daniel 12:7 says that "the power of the holy people [will be] finally broken." Those who are faithful to God between the close of probation and the second coming of Christ will see every source of human support cut off. Every government on earth will be aligned against them. They will have no place to turn for protection or for food, clothing, and shelter. To all outward appearances, their situation will be utterly hopeless. Many of them will be threatened with death. The antichrist's new world order will be determined to wipe them from the face of the earth. This will be the wrath of the dragon against those who "obey God's commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 12:17). The people in the world will not understand what is going on, but Satan will. He will know that Jesus is about to come and tear the kingdom of this world from his hands. In a desperate final effort to keep his hold on the world, he will try to eradicate God's people from the earth. In many respects the trial of God's people during the tribulation will be similar to Christ's trial from Gethsemane to Calvary. Both the Roman and the Jewish governments turned against Him. He lost all earthly support. From a purely human point of view, His case appeared hopeless. Yet Jesus did not despair, because He looked at His situation from God's point of view. Satan tried desperately to get Jesus to view matters from a purely human point of view and give up. But Jesus saw beyond the visible. He saw beyond this world. He recognized that He was engaged in the battle that had been going on in the universe since Satan rebelled in heaven. Everyone around Jesus jeered and told Him that He was stupid. But He rejected the ridicule because by faith He understood what they refused to know. It will be the same with God's people during the days just before Jesus comes. To all human appearances, their situation will be hopeless. Yet they will recognize that they are engaged in the final hours of a battle that has been raging in the universe since before the world began. They will recognize the dragon's roar, and they will trust God to deliver them. Jesus said, "He who stands firm to the end will be saved" (Matthew 24:13). At the end of Jesus' long fast in the wilderness following His baptism, Satan tried to get Him to disbelieve who He was. "If you are the Son of God," he said (Matthew 4:6). He tried to use Jesus' hunger to get Him to give up His faith that He was God's Son. In earth's final conflict, Satan will try the same tactic on you and me. God has assured us that we are His sons and daughters (see 1 John 3:2). But Satan, through his human agents, will ridicule us and threaten us and try to get us to give up our faith. We will be on God's side in the final battle of the universal conflict between good and evil, but only Satan's side in that battle will be visible to the eyes and audible to the ears. God's side, our side, will only be perceptible to the eye and ear of faith. Satan will try desperately to shake our faith, but he will not succeed in shaking the faith of those who are truly God's. All of His people will be saved. You and I must not suppose that we can come up to that time spiritually unprepared and go through it on God's side. We must learn to trust God during life's difficult trials now. That's the only way we will ever maintain our faith in Him then. Those who give in to discouragements and doubt now will do exactly the same then. Those who blame God for their difficulties now will blame Him for their difficulties then. We must learn to trust God implicitly now, because during the final days and weeks before Jesus comes, we will have to trust Him to provide the very food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the shelter over our heads. It will be impossible to recognize the universal battle between good and evil that is invisible to human eyes then if we are not learning to recognize that battle in our lives now.
For a short time, the antichrist's new world order will appear to have won the day. The dragon will appear to have conquered. But Jesus says, Help is on the way! "Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed" (Revelation 16:15). 1. Most Christians call this time "the tribulation." Seventh-day Adventists call it "the time of trouble." The name we give it doesn't really matter. Many Christians believe that the church will be "raptured" (carried away) from the world to heaven before the tribulation begins. However, Revelation makes it very clear that God's people will pass through this time. Notice, for example, Revelation 7:9-14; 12:17; 13:5-7; and 16:15.
Chapter 17 God's New World Order He should have been terrified, standing before the monarch who had threatened to kill him. Only hours before, a dozen senior advisors had been condemned to die. They had begged for time, but the king had brushed their plea aside with a wave of his hand. What hope did this young intern have that the king would honor his request for time? Amazingly, though, the king did. Just why, the Bible doesn't say. Maybe it was Daniel's calmness in the face of death that impressed the king. He was not begging for his life the way the others had. He was willing to die. He just didn't want to die for the wrong reason. The oddest part of the whole thing, though, was the cause of the king's anger. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream one night, but the next day he couldn't remember it. When was the last time you threatened to kill a dozen people because you couldn't remember a dream? Nebuchadnezzar did just that. When his most trusted advisors could not tell him the dream he'd forgotten, he condemned them to die. Daniel asked for an audience with the king and promised that his God could answer the king's question. Sure enough, that night God gave to Daniel the same dream He'd given the king the night before. The next day Daniel appeared before Nebuchadnezzar again, and here's the strange story he told. In his dream the king saw an awesome statue. Its head was made of gold, its arms and chest of silver, its waist of brass, and its legs of iron. The feet were made of iron and clay mixed together. For all its imposing grandeur, though, the statue was doomed. A boulder appeared out of nowhere, struck the statue on its feet, and destroyed it. After relating the dream, Daniel interpreted it. "You, O king,... are that head of gold," he said (Daniel 2:37, 38). I can just see the king swelling with pride. "This fellow really knows what he's talking about!" But Daniel's next words laid to rest any illusions the king might have had about his own greatness: "After you, another kingdom will arise, inferior to yours" (verse 39). That's like telling the American president that his country will be conquered by Zimbabwe. Nebuchadnezzar had established a new world order, and he wasn't anxious to believe that it would end someday. Back when he was president, George Bush didn't say, "We're going to establish a new world order that will last for fifty years." Bush will be lucky if the coming new world order does last that long, but he didn't announce it that way. The statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream represented the nations of earth that would rule for the next two and a half millenniums. The four metals represented Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. The feet of iron and clay represented the breakup of the Roman Empire into the many nations of Europe that we know today. And, said Daniel, "in the time of those kings [the nations of Europe], the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed" (verse 44). The conclusion is obvious: God's world order will be the only everlasting world order. Sooner or later, every human world order will fail. In this chapter I'd like to summarize the Adventist understanding of how God will establish His world order. The battle of Armageddon Satan has been in charge of this world since he got Adam and Eve to join him in the Garden of
Eden. He was determined back then to establish a world order based on his principles of government. However, he is aware - painfully aware, I'm sure - of all the predictions the Bible makes that his kingdom will come to an end someday. But Satan isn't about to yield without a fierce fight. In a very real sense, Revelation is simply a description of Satan's final, desperate struggle to hang onto his world order. In the previous chapter we read about ten kings - ten world rulers - who will throw their whole support behind the beast of Revelation 17 (see verses 12, 13). Revelation goes on to say that these kings, or kingdoms, "will make war against the Lamb" (verse 14). In its first phase, this war against the Lamb will actually be against God's people on earth. That is the phase of the battle that we discussed in the previous chapter. However, before the battle is over, the beast and its allied nations will make war against Jesus Christ Himself. Revelation says, "I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse [Jesus] and his army" (19:19). What I say next is speculative, so take it for what it's worth. I suspect that the war Revelation says the earth's nations will wage against the Lamb will be much more real than most of us realize. If this is true, I would expect it to be a desperate attempt to block Jesus from coming to earth the second time. This seems ludicrous at first. Won't Jesus bring with Him the full power of His divinity? And won't He be accompanied by a vast army of angels? Who in his right might would suppose that puny human beings would even think of fighting against God and all those angels? Yet that's what Revelation says when we take it literally. And a literal interpretation is beginning to make sense. Even as you read these words, scientists are scanning the skies, searching for a hostile asteroid that might impact the earth. Should they detect one, they are beginning to make plans to send nuclear weapons into space to divert the asteroid so it won't strike the earth. Thus it is not unrealistic to suppose that as they scan the skies with their telescopes, astronomers will detect Christ on His journey from heaven to earth. Neither is it unrealistic to suppose that the world will aim its nuclear weapons on the heavenly army as it approaches planet Earth. By this time in history Satan and his angels may have introduced themselves personally to the world as extraterrestrials from another part of the universe. The Bible says that the spirits of devils will "go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty" (Revelation 16:14). This is the battle of Armageddon. Obviously, Satan will do his best to prevent Christ's second coming from happening. I can imagine him telling the world's leaders that their nations are under a death threat from an alien race that is headed straight toward them on a mission of destruction. This will, of course, be all too true. And members of the human race, accustomed as they are in science fiction to thinking in terms of intergalactic warfare, will have no difficulty believing what they are told. Military leaders from all over the world, who have been hostile toward each other for years, will suddenly become allies against the common foe. Does that sound farfetched? Read again what Revelation says: I saw three unclean spirits like frogs;... they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle of the great day of God Almighty (Revelation 16:13, 14). Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army (Revelation 19:19). This will be the famous battle of Armageddon that you've heard about all your life. The second coming of Christ Of course, Satan and his agents will not be able to prevent Christ from returning to the earth. He will come, just as He promised He would (see John 14:3, for example). And when He does, He will do
two things. First, He will raise to life all of His followers who have died through the ages. The Bible says: The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first (1 Thessalonians 4:16). The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed (1 Corinthians 15:52). The second thing Christ will do when He comes is to defeat Satan and his armies. Here is how Revelation describes it: The kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called on the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" (Revelation 6:15-17). Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army. But the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet .The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. The rest of them were killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh (Revelation 19:19-21). At the very least, it is clear that all the followers of Satan, the antichrist, will be destroyed at the second coming of Christ. The millennium The description I gave above is somewhat different from the more commonly held view of the second coming of Christ. The majority of Christians believe that the wicked will not be completely destroyed at Christ's second coming, but that many of them will continue living on earth during the millennium. These Christians also believe that Christ will establish His kingdom on earth at this time, and that, with His people, He will rule the world during the millennium. According to this view, the righteous and the wicked will be on the earth together, but instead of the wicked having the upper hand, as they do today, the righteous will be in control. They will rule over the wicked. Seventh-day Adventists believe that when Christ comes He will take all of His people to heaven to be with Him, and the wicked will all be destroyed. This will leave the earth completely depopulated of humans. We take this position for several reasons. First is the fact that in several of His parables Jesus made it clear that the righteous and the wicked will be separated from each other at the end of the world. That can't happen if they continue living together on the same planet, and saying that the righteous will rule over the wicked doesn't change matters. Nowhere does the Bible give the slightest hint that God's people will continue to live in close contact with evil and evil people after the second coming of Christ. Rather, from beginning to end it teaches that God will separate the righteous from the wicked at that time. Jesus' parables about the end time teach this principle very consistently (see Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, 47-50; 25:31-46). Second, Jesus promised His disciples before He left this earth two thousand years ago that "if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you may be where I am" (John 14:3, emphasis added). All Christians agree that Jesus is in heaven today. And He said that He will take us to be with Him, that we may be where He is. He did not say He would come to be with us where we are. It's difficult to reconcile these words with the idea that God's people will live on earth, ruling over the wicked during the millennium. If it's true that God's people will spend the millennium in heaven and all the wicked will be slain
at the second coming of Christ, then obviously the world will be depopulated during the millennium. Actually, when we read Revelation carefully, we discover that it could hardly be otherwise. Revelation predicts that a series of devastating plagues will shatter the earth's ecology just before Jesus comes (see Revelation 8:6-12; 16: 1-10). And at His coming the worst earthquake in history will cause all of the world's mountains and islands to flatten out. An earthquake of this magnitude, combined with the terrible ecological devastation of the plagues, will leave the world completely uninhabitable. If God were to leave His people on this earth during the millennium, they would have to live under unbelievably terrible conditions. For these reasons, Seventh-day Adventists believe that God will take His people to be with Him in heaven during the millennium and the wicked will be destroyed, leaving a shattered world totally devoid of human population. After the millennium Earlier I said that the final battle between the forces of good and evil in the world will be fought just before the millennium, when Jesus comes the second time. This is true, with one qualification. The battle will resume after the millennium. Revelation says: When the thousand year are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth - Gog and Magog - to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God's people, the city he loves (Revelation 20:7-9). Perhaps you're wondering how "the nations in the four corners of the earth" and "the camp of God's people" can be on the earth at the end of the millennium if they were not here during the millennium. That's a good question that has a good answer. Revelation says that two things will happen at the end of the millennium: (1) the wicked will be raised to life (see Revelation 20:5), and (2) the New Jerusalem in heaven, where God's people have spent the millennium, will come down to this earth (see Revelation 21:2). At this time all the forces of evil that ever existed will be aligned against all of God's people who ever lived. This will truly be earth's final battle. I would like to share with you a few paragraphs from Ellen White's description of the scene, as she claimed God showed it to her: Satan consults with his angels, and then with [the world's] kings and conquerors and mighty men. They look upon the strength and numbers on their side, and declare that the army within the city is small in comparison with theirs, and that it can be overcome. They lay their plans to take possession of the riches and glory of the New Jerusalem. All immediately begin to prepare for battle. Skillful artisans construct implements of war. Military leaders, famed for their success, marshal the throngs of warlike men into companies and divisions. At last the order to advance is given, and the countless host moves on - an army such as was never summoned by earthly conquerors, such as the combined forces of all ages since war began on earth could never equal. Satan, the mightiest of warriors, leads the van, and his angels unite their forces for this final struggle. Kings and warriors are in his train, and the multitudes follow in vast companies, each under its appointed leader. With military precision the serried ranks advance over the earth's broken and uneven surface to the City of God. By command of Jesus, the gates of the New Jerusalem are closed, and the armies of Satan surround the city and make ready for the onset. Now Christ again appears to the view of His enemies. Far above the city, upon a foundation of burnished gold, is a throne, high and lifted up. Upon this throne sits the Son of God, and around Him are the subjects of His kingdom. The power and majesty of Christ no language can describe, no pen portray. The glory of the Father is enshrouding His Son. The brightness of His presence fills the City of God, and flows out beyond the gates, flooding the whole earth with its radiance.1
God will allow the armies of the wicked to surround His city. But just before they launch their attack, He will destroy them. Revelation says: Fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown (Revelation 20:9, 10). Many Christians believe that the wicked will burn in hell for ever and ever. However, a careful examination of the evidence makes it quite clear that this will not happen. A full discussion of this subject would require a book much longer than this one, but I will touch on a few of the high points. First is the fact that the hell where God will destroy the wicked is not in some distant part of the universe. According to Revelation, it will be right here on this earth. The entire globe (at least the surface) will be destroyed by fire (see Revelation 20:9, 10; 2 Peter 3:10), after which God will recreate it into the beautiful world He envisioned at the beginning (see Revelation 21:1; 2 Peter 3:13). But how could God re-create the world into the eternal home of His people if it is also the place of eternally burning hell? Second is the fact that the Bible says the wages of sin is death, not eternal torment. Death and eternal torment are mutually exclusive ideas. Death means the absence of life. If the wicked burn consciously in hell throughout eternity, then they can't at the same time receive the wages of sin, which is death. Third, and perhaps most important, it would be utterly contrary to the character of a God of love to allow anyone to suffer throughout eternity for the sins committed during a few years on earth. Who would wish such a fate on his worst enemy - even on a Hitler, a Stalin, or an Idi Amin? Finally, consider the conflict between good and evil that we've been discussing in this book. Satan rebelled in heaven several thousand years ago, creating a terrible problem for God. Evil had never existed in the universe before, and God did not want it when Satan introduced it. However, the intelligent beings He created - we know about angels and humans, and there may be others - had free wills, the power of choice. To force Satan to serve Him would have destroyed Satan's free will. Rather than do that, God allowed Satan to continue his plans - to make this world a demonstration of his form of government. Once Satan demonstrates the absolute evil of his plan for ruling the world, why should God continue to allow the terrible experiment to continue? He won't. If God were to burn sinners in hell for eternity, then quite aside from the cruelty of the idea [even Hitler put his victims to death eventually], sin would continue to reign in some part of His universe. But God's plan is to eliminate sin from the universe. He wants to eradicate the disease, not just seal it off and keep it alive.2 The re-creation of the world Several passages in the Bible, including the two quoted below, inform us about the new world that God will re-create after He destroys this present world with fire: The day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare....That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness (2 Peter 3:10, 12, 13). Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away (Revelation 20:14, 15; 21:1). It's difficult to imagine what it will be like living in a universe that has no evil, no pain, no death.
But the Bible assures us that that's what God's new earth will be like. The amazing thing is this: Our world, which for thousands of years has been the home of sin, will become the administrative center of the universe, the capital city of God's government, the home of God Himself. That's what Revelation promises us: I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men; and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God" (Revelation 21:3). This will be God's new world order, and it will stand throughout eternity. This will be the most complete fulfillment of Daniel's prediction to Nebuchadnezzar that "in the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed" (Daniel 2:44). Ellen White describes God's new world order in the following poignant words: The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love.3 1. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1911), 664, 665. 2. I recommend two books for those who want more information on the subject of hell and the eternal fate of the wicked. For a brief study, I suggest the thirty-two page booklet Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, by Ralph Blodgett. The best complete study of the subject that I know of is The Fire That Consumes, by Edward William Fudge. Fudge is not a Seventh-day Adventist. He originally held the more widely accepted view that the wicked will burn in hell throughout eternity and arrived at the conclusion that they will not only after an exhaustive personal study of the question from the entire Bible. Both of these books are available by calling 1-800-765-6955. 3. The Great Controversy, 678.
