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