March, 2021
Part 2
Hi loved Ones…
Here we are back again, with our study. In case you haven’t, make sure you read part 1, so you can catch up with this class.
5- 5 And on her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
One aspect about the way the Prostitute was arrayed, as described in verse 4: in purple and scarlet, may have to do with the religiosity found in the city, having similar colors to the ones found in the Tabernacle of God in the Old Testament, but lacking the color blue & the qualities it represents.
Mystery indeed, as the Babylon of this chapter, has many interpretations from different religious schools, cities such as Rome, Mecca, New York, the Vatican, etc.
Mother of Harlots; as this city reigns over kings of the world, it not only will be considered the capital of the Empire, but will also become the leader in the promotion of the new god, the Antichrist, which will cause all nations to commit spiritual adultery with him. We can say that this harlot will be as the mother that delivers the abominations of the Earth.
Now we find a name written on her forehead. When looking in the Old Testament I found…
Exo 28:36 “You shall make a plate of pure gold, and engrave on it, like the engravings of a signet, ‘HOLY TO YAHWEH.’ 37 You shall put it on a lace of blue, and it shall be on the sash; on the front of the sash it shall be. 38 It shall be on Aaron’s forehead, and Aaron shall bear the iniquity of the holy things, which the children of Israel shall make holy in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always on his forehead, that they may be accepted before Yahweh.
So the Lord himself made Aaron the High Priest to wear a sign in his forehead to proclaim his function in favor of God’s Children. This is the Easy to Read Version of verse 38 (ERV) 38 Aaron will wear this on his head. In this way he will remove the guilt if anything is wrong with the gifts that the Israelites give to God. Aaron will always wear this on his head so that the LORD will accept the gifts of the people.
Jesus is our High Priest Heb 10:14 For by one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.
We see that this woman also wears a sign on her forehead displaying who she is. Instead of Holiness, Abomination, & as I said worshiping other gods as God is a great sin, so this last world abomination will be the greatest one of them all, as it will be before the whole world.
6- 6 And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marveled with a great marveling.
This is another strong characteristic of this city: “drunk with the blood of the saints”. We find passages in the Scripture which say of Jerusalem… Mat 23:34-38 therefore behold, I send to you prophets, wise men, and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify; and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city; 35 that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Most certainly I tell you; all these things will come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to her, how often would I have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! 38 Behold, your house is left to you desolate.
That is a strong statement coming from Jesus saying the Jerusalem is guilty for killing all the saints, even including Abel. We also find that the last Prophets foretold in Revelations who are some of the major good characters in our study will also be killed in Jerusalem.
Rev 11:7 And when they complete their testimony, the beast coming up out of the abyss will make war against them and will overcome them and kill them. 8 And their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. We know our Lord was crucified in Jerusalem.
Jesus also foretold the greatest persecution that is to come upon Christians as starting in Jerusalem.
Mat 24:15-22 Therefore when you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whoever reads, let him understand). 16 Then let those in Judea flee into the mountains. 17 Let him on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house; 18 nor let him in the field turn back to take his clothes. 19 And woe to those who are with child, and to those who give suck in those days! 20 But pray that your flight is not in the winter, nor on the sabbath day; 21 for then shall be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world to this time; no, nor ever shall be. 22 And unless those days should be shortened, no flesh would be saved. But for the elect's sake, those days shall be shortened.
We find that Stephen the first martyr of the Church who was also killed in Jerusalem, said to the Scribes & Pharisees of his day… Act 7:51 O stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so you do. 52 Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you have now been the betrayers and murderers;
We know that there have been many Christians & men of God killed in different nations of the world, but seeing that God in the flesh Himself, Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, & that Jerusalem will be the place where the greatest abomination ever is located, points to Jerusalem as the best candidate for “Babylon the Great”, no wonder why the woman gets drunk with the Blood of the Saints.
7- 7 And the angel said to me, Why did you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, that has the seven heads and ten horns.
The angel asked John… Why did you marvel? I wonder, which one of us wouldn’t? So here the angel proceeds to interpret the vision…
8-8 The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to ascend out of the abyss and go into perdition. And those dwelling on the earth will marvel, those whose names were not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
Here we find that the beast was, is not & is about to ascend out of the abyss, and the people from the earth will marvel after the beast, but not those written in the Book of Life, which are all those who have come to God through Jesus, us, Hallelujah, all glory to God.
When we talk about “the Beast” of Revelations, most scholars agree that since the beast has 7 heads, it is referring to world kingdoms that have been ruled by the same spirit of the devil, but with different manifestations throughout history, and as the angel himself indicates in the next verse, & where I will mention some to give an idea.
We find in other passages that the “abyss” refers to a place located under the earth where spirits are imprisoned. We see for example that the evil spirits in the man Jesus healed asked him … Luk 8:31 and they begged Him that He would not command them to go out into the abyss. So we see throughout the book of Revelations that the angels are given the “keys” to the abyss from where not only the spirit which possesses the Antichrist will come out, but where Satan himself will be imprisoned during the one thousand year millennial Kingdom of Christ on Earth. Rev 20:1-3
Parting from passages like Luke 4:6 And the Devil said to Him, All this power I will give you, and the glory of them; for it has been delivered to me. And I give it to whomever I will. Rev 13:3-4 And I saw one of its heads as having been slain to death, and its deadly wound was healed. And all the earth marveled after the beast. 4 And they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast. And they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with it? We see that Satan is the one who gives his power to the seventh head of the Beast who seemed to have been wounded to death but did live. We see that at times in Scripture the name beast can be referring to a kingdom, or to the man who rules the kingdom, & the context usually helps us see what the case is.
9- 9 And here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sits. 10 And there are seven kings; five have fallen, and one is, and the other has not yet come. And when he comes, he must continue a short time.
So here we see seven kingdoms, where the woman sits, & next we see seven kings. Here I understand that even though Babylon in this chapter refers to the last city that will rule in the last days, the evil spirit within her has existed throughout history in different places.
I see that the war between God & the forces of evil started being fought in the Garden of Eden, where God prophesied the seed of the woman, the woman being God’s Ecclesia & Jesus the seed, Jesus will crush the head of the Serpent, but Satan would wound the Church through persecution.
Gen 3:15 (MKJV = Modern King James Version) And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He will bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.
(ERV= Easy to Read) I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your children and her children will be enemies. You will bite her child's foot, but he will crush your head."
So we find that since the beginning throughout history, the people of God have had to deal with different world kingdoms which have attacked God’s people. I will name Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Mede Persia, Greece, Rome, we see that all these world empires had a direct intervention with Israel, so we can argue that these are seven kingdoms upon which the evil spirit of Babylon the harlot has sited upon & Jerusalem being the actual city where the last world empire will have its capital & which will be possessed by the spirit of Babylon, just as the seventh & last world empire will be possessed by Satan himself, having Satan also being in previous kings before.
The angel says: five have fallen, and one is, and the other has not yet come. At the time John received this revelation, he was living in the kingdom of Rome, so the five previous five world empires had already fallen, Rome was still the world empire, so if Rome was number six, then there is one more to come.
There are some scholars that interpret that of all the kings living in each of those world empires I just mentioned, the most anti-God king within each one of them was a precursor of the Antichrist himself. We read in 1Jn 2:18 Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. Also in 2Th 2:7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. So the spirit of Antichrist has been here all along, only that it will reach his apotheosis in the Antichrist himself, the one who receives an apparent mortal wound & comes back to life.
We have had men that carried the antichrist spirit; I could name some in history such as Nimrod king of Babel (Gen 10), Pharaoh of Egypt in the days of Moses, Sennacherib king of Assyria, king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Antiochus Epiphanes from Greece, Nero in the days of the Roman Empire, who ruled during John’s days also, & could be the one the angel refers too when he says: five have fallen, and one is, and the other has not yet come. In more recent history we’ve had men who many believed could have been the Antichrist also, such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Adolf Hitler, some Popes from the Catholic church, or Xi Jinping in our days, plus quite a few others too.
The good part of this passage is: when he comes, he must continue a short time. This is good news, because other evil kings have ruled for many years, so this one will not last long. We know that when he appears in the scene, he will not last longer than seven years at the most when he gets the nations to confirm an international pact Dan 9:27 And he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week. A week means 7 years. We know that in the middle of the week, is when he will put the Abomination that causes Desolation in the holy place, which will mark the beginning of the three & half years of the Great Tribulation, which will end with the return of the Lord Jesus to take His Elect up to heaven, which will also give place to the Wrath of God upon the world, when God will take vengeance upon those who are trying to destroy the Earth. Please read the following Scriptures which detail what I just said.
Daniel 9:27, Dan 11:31, Mat 24:15-31, Rev 6:12-17. If you would like to make a further study into this period, you can read my letter
There are many Bible interpreters that say that because the Vatican sits upon 7 hills, therefore the “woman” is the Catholic Church.
A question that comes to mind is: Are we to understand that the 7 hills upon which the Vatican sits are kings also? To my understanding that interpretation lays more upon men’s imagination than what the passage is letting us know. Yes the Vatican has been involved in all sort of evil things & committed quite a few crimes throughout history, but that doesn’t mean that because of that it fits the description in this chapter. If that was to be the case then one of the 7 hills where the Vatican lays would become a king?
Another question that comes to mind when considering the possibility of the Vatican being Babylon the Great Whore, as the angel explains to John in verse 17:18, he says she is the great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth; How much influence & power does Vatican City actually have over the nations of the world? There was a time when the Catholic Church ruled almost all of Europe through their religious influence over the European Kings & nations, but that was long ago, in the Middle Ages & at the time of the Renaissance, but it has been declining ever since then more and more, so the Vatican doesn’t seem to fit the picture.
Don’t miss Part 3
Blessings… Alejandro
If this reading has been a blessing to you, please don’t hesitate to share it with the world. We need to be a blessing to others today, tomorrow may be too late. John 9:4 I must work the works of Him who sent Me, while it is day. Night comes when no man can work.
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