43: World News & Prophecy - Revelation 13:11-15

[McNeely] Welcome back to class. We are in the middle of the 13th chapter of Revelation. Moving through this — a lot of pretty deep material here in this chapter — with two beasts. Last time, we talked about the first beast of Revelation being the political power that comes up out of the sea — the nations and the peoples of the world. And I’ve got a great deal talking about the wounding of the beast and Justinian and his recovery. We’re going to go back to Justinian a bit here today in some other material as we move through here. So let’s go ahead and jump into it.

At verse 11 — this may be a bit of review off of the last one, but it’s a good place to begin here — it says in verse 11, “I beheld another beast.” So this is the second beast of chapter 13.  “Coming up out of the earth.” A little different from the first beast which came up out of the seas. Again, the nations and the peoples of the earth is what thats talking about. “And he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon.” (Revelation 13:11)

And so we have the images of a lamb — two horns, one representing or being like a lamb — and the two horns did. And yet he spoke as a dragon.

“He exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.” (Revelation 13:12)

We identified that deadly wound in the last class as the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire — the city of Rome in the year 476 A.D. I’ll put that back up on the board just so we all know that that’s an important date to remember.

There are some dates from history that are important to remember — and 476 is — because that’s the fall of Rome. It’s not technically the fall of the Roman Empire. As I told you then, the Roman Empire continued on in the East with its capital at Constantinople — later Byzantium — for another thousand years and did not fall until the 1400s.

And so 476 is the deadly wound. We talked about that being healed in the year 554 during the time of the emperor — I said “B.C.” before, this is A.D. — with Justinian, the emperor in the East, a very significant, consequential emperor of the Roman Empire and of the prophetic story here in Scripture.

And so this beast comes up here, and two horns — signifying a kind of a two-pronged authority, both civil and religious. “He exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.” (Revelation 13:12)

It says it exercises the authority of the first beast — the authority of the initial beast which we’ve identified as the Roman Empire — and causes all to bow to that power after it is revived, the deadly wound being healed.

And so the second beast performs miracles and deceives people into making an image to the beast. “He does great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.” (Revelation 13:13) “And deceives them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast which had the wound by a sword and did live.” (Revelation 13:14)

All right, so let’s kind of follow along with that. The deception is created by the second beast as it causes people to worship the first beast. So there’s a symbiotic relationship here with these two beasts. They’re very closely intertwined.

And at times, while they are distinct, the second beast is a miracle-working beast and causes people to worship the first beast — and form, while it is a part of that system. So, in a sense, it’s worshiped as well.

What we are looking at here and seeing is a political power and a spiritual power. The first beast is a political power. The second beast is a spiritual power — a religious power. And they join forces. That’s a combination of church and state — something that we, in the modern world, don’t identify with because, in America at least, and many other countries — not all the English-speaking, I could say I guess — in the UK, the Church of England is the official church of Great Britain, while at the same time the UK — and Britain, England — rather secular.

But in other parts of the English-speaking world, there is a separation of church and state. And particularly in America, we have that quite distinct — baked into our Constitution.

But that’s not what is being described here. This is where the religious power uses the arm of the civil power to enforce teaching — religious teaching.

And this is where we come back, we pull back into the story, the fourth beast of Daniel 7 and that little horn that came up there that we identified as the papacy at that time that sought to “change times and seasons.” (Daniel 7:25)

 

So I’ll reference back to that, which fits here with what we are seeing and are going to move into as we get into the mark of the beast here later in the chapter.

Verse 12 talks about causing people to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And verse 14 talks about making an image to the beast which had a wound by the sword and did live (Revelation 13:12, 14).

What is this image? Let’s talk about that for a few minutes. The original Greek word here — eikon — E-I-K-O-N — from which we get the word icon (I-C-O-N) as a figure or image that is revered or worshiped in that sense.

Icon, in the Orthodox Church — the Eastern Church — they have their iconicism or icon worship embedded. They will have an image of Mary or a saint, and that’s a very integrated part of their ritual. And iconoclastic means that you kind of destroy people or things that are put into an iconic-type status.

Anyway, this image here comes from that word that means likeness or a representation of. You know, a statue can do that. A statue can represent a person, an event, or at least be dedicated toward an event. And a statue can be, you know, a form of icon or worship as well.

But that’s not what is really being talked about here in this case. Because when you look at the facts of history in terms of this image of the beast, the explanation that — and what our teaching is, and what I think is correct — the explanation that best fits the facts concerns what happened at the time of the fall of the Western Empire in 476, and between there and the time of Justinian’s restoration, and events that began and continued on largely in the western part of the empire, pertaining to this idea of an image to survive and to continue on.

What that seems to fit is that the authority in Western Europe continued through a union of church and state. And by authority, I mean the authority that was Rome, but collapsed in 476. But you have at the same time this other second beast image, which is spiritual — or a church — and it is the Christian church that we know in history as the developing Roman Catholic Church.

Not the Church of God identified in Scripture — the Book of Acts in particular. It’s a different form of Christianity. We can say that it is a Nicene Christianity.

All right — going back to the — to what? Where do you get the term Nicene? Anyone? No? Yeah, Sarah? Yeah. The Council of Nicaea in 325. All right, now 325, you’ll see, is before 476, which puts it back in the time of Constantine and his adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire — and what that then meant to the development of the church, and particularly from that Council of Nicaea, which we talked about in another class — the codification of teaching: the Trinity, Easter, worshiping of Easter, and beginning to condemn those who keep the Sabbath or “Judaize” by keeping the Sabbath — really begins to snowball with the Council of Nicaea.

And so, with that, this church is a post-Nicene or Nicene Christianity.

And I can’t remember if I — I think I did tell you, identify — one of my fellow pastors years ago kind of got me onto this, to describe in a sense our form of Christianity in the Church of God.

If you’re talking to an intellectual, a theologian, somebody who knows the terminology, drop this on them sometime. Say, “You know, we’re not a part of Nicene Christianity. Our faith, our belief — keeping the Sabbath, keeping the Holy Days — we’re pre-Nicene.”

Before that — you go back to the time of the apostles, Christ, first century — you’re pre-Nicene. And just tell somebody, “Look, I’m really not a Nicene Christian.”

And oh — then they’re going to slot you into a place. And it’s quite frankly pretty helpful in the discussion, because they think you know more than you may know by using that term pre-Nicene.

And when they say, “Well, I’m post-Nicene Christianity,” you can basically say, “Hey, you know your stuff. And don’t mess with me — I know what I believe. And I don’t believe all that Nicene stuff forward in terms of Christianity.”

But that’s what happens. That’s what begins to develop — to create this image of the beast from that period, snowballing with the events of 476 and, let’s say, that middle of the fifth century A.D. — to create this image.

I want to give you a quote from a historian. His name is Will Durant — well-known historian, long since dead — but he wrote a series of books about the history of Western civilization. I’ve got all of them. You used to get a free copy of that if you joined the Book of the Month Club. They would give you the fifteen volumes of Will Durant’s History of Civilization.

But it’s well written. It’s really, really, really very good. But Will Durant, in writing about this particular period of time, he says this — and here’s the quote:

“The survival of ecclesiastical organization appeared even to the emperors as the salvation of the state. In the year 554, Justinian promulgated a decree requiring that, ‘fit and proper persons, able to administer the local government, be chosen as governors of the provinces by the bishops and chief persons of each province.’”

In other words, the appointment of civil authority — Justinian is saying — should be done by the bishops, by the ecclesiastical authority. So there’s a wedding of the two. There’s a merging of the two.

And so Durant chronicles this quite well. What we’re talking about here is the system of Roman church governance that was established as a model — a copy — or an image of the former empire, the former Roman Empire.

And so, the best way to understand then this image that people worship — this image of the beast that is described here in verse 14 — “that had a wound by a sword, and did live” (Revelation 13:14) — is describing the image of the beast, and the beast is the civil power, Rome, and its image is its structure — its governmental structure.

All right? That’s the image. And I think that is the accurate explanation for that.

Durant — going on with Durant — quote, he says, “It became a triumphant church by inheriting the organizing patterns and genius of Rome. It gave it organization. The Roman gift was, above all, a vast framework of government which, as a secular authority failed — fall of Rome, 476 — became the structure of ecclesiastical rule. Soon the bishops, rather than the Roman prefects or Roman councils, would be the source of order and the seat of power in the cities. The metropolitans,” — which is an office of the church, today they’re known as archbishops — “and they are ‘arch’ — over other bishops. And a bishop is over, you know, let’s say two or three churches. And the archbishop would be the leader of a multitude of bishops — he’s over, ‘arch,’ over the other bishops.”

So what you’re saying here is that the archbishops would support, if not supplant, the provincial governors, and the senate of bishops would succeed the provincial assembly.

All right, this is taken out of Volume 3 of Durant’s History of Civilization, beginning at page 618 and other places that he talks about this here as he goes through it.

And so, in looking at this image — there’s another, you know — when we kind of look at this, this beast does a large number of miracles. Reading on, we’ve already read this. “He does great wonders, making fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceives them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles.” (Revelation 13:13–14)

And I think I told you a story of happening upon the current Pope, Francis, in Rome a few years ago. Steve Myers and I and Scott Ashley were there. Did I tell this story about coming upon a scene in the middle of Rome? Did I not tell you that? That was another Bible study that I was on recently.

All right, this is a picture here of the Vatican — St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. And notice again verse 13 — “He does great wonders, making fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceives them that dwell on the earth by the means of these miracles.” So this power — this church power — is a miracle-working power that is here.

So let me go ahead and tell you this quick story at this point to illustrate this.

This goes back, I think, to about 2015. We had been on a study tour in Italy — of the footsteps of Paul in Italy — which, there’s a lot to see there and learn about when Paul was there and understanding the Roman culture, first-century culture background.

We were having dinner at a little restaurant in Rome, in the streets. And so, we were outdoors — very nice evening, June — good pizza too. And we heard this big commotion — music, choir, singing. We asked the waiter, “What’s going on?” He said, “Oh, the papa — the pope — the papa! He’s down here a few blocks, and he’s having an outdoor mass.”

We said, “Oh, great! Well, let’s run down there.” So we paid our bill real quick and ran a couple of blocks. And we come out into an open plaza in front — not of this church here, St. Peter’s — but another large Catholic church in Rome.

And here on the steps of that cathedral was Pope Francis, with a big choir behind him, bishops all around him, dressed in his big robes. And the plaza was filled with thousands of people. He was just finishing up an outdoor mass. They had lights positioned — it was dramatic. And here was this big cathedral. Here were thousands of people taking part in this mass and just kind of looking at the pope.

Here he was, just finishing it up. And I’m watching, and I’m thinking, wow, you know, they know how to put on drama. They know how to set a scene.

What if he called fire down from heaven? I thought about this verse. What if he did a miracle? What would those thousands of people in front of him — “Oh, papa! Papa! Papa!” — as they get themselves worked up, kind of like the people did in Ephesus when Paul was being dragged, you know, into the amphitheater? “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:28) Three hours of chanting that. That can get people worked up.

And I thought, man, this is a moment. This is a scene. And I thought of this verse here because something like that could likely happen in the future — to begin to draw people into a worship of a civil power that arises on the world scene ahead of us today — that is an answer to the crisis of the moment.

And promises to bring things back into order. Maybe a major war has developed into such a degree that people are fearing a civilizational collapse — total economic collapse. You can’t go to Disney World anymore — that would really get people’s attention!

And yet, here comes an authority in the world that rises up — a coalition — that says, “Hey, we can fix this. We can put it all together. You can go to Disney World. Yeah, your credit cards will still work. All the digital stuff still works.” Oh, everybody’s relieved.

And then you couple that with some miracle-working powers that says, “Hey, this is the way to go.” And there’s a spiritual figure there. You’ve got something that the world has not seen quite like that since the Middle Ages — since the early years.

And you’ve got a wedding of two powers there. So this image of the beast is telling us about something that began to develop in this period of time. And I want to go back to another episode and another personage here. This puts us at about, let’s say, 450 A.D.—just a rough number, mid-fifth century. Rome has not quite fallen, but it’s wobbly. Coming down from the north are the Huns. These Germanic tribes have come out of the Asian steppes, and they’ve come down, they’ve ravaged, pillaged, burned, and everything else that the hordes do like in those days.

They were marching down the Italian peninsula toward Rome, and it was Attila the Hun. You ever heard of Attila the Hun? He was the scourge of God, they called him, and laid everything completely waste in front of him. He is about to attack Rome, and there’s a man called Leo I, pictured here. He is known in history as the first great pope—Leo I. Leo I loved the form of Roman government.

Now, Rome has not fully collapsed yet—it’s not 476—but the papacy has grown in prestige, grown in power from 325. Bishops, archbishops, their structure beginning to take shape—they’ve already changed teaching, doctrine, times, and seasons. They are a part of this Christian empire now. But Rome is wobbly, and here comes Attila the Hun.

And Leo—here’s the thing about Leo. Let me read another quote about Leo I. “To him, Leo I, the form of government of the Roman Empire was the most marvelous thing on earth.” Leo advocated the complete organization of the church on the model or the image of the Roman civil government. The pope is the religious head. He said that resistance to his will, as the pope, was worthy of hell and advocated the death penalty for heresy. You don’t want to do what I say? To the gallows. Chop his head off. Burn him at the stake.

Going on, he finally accomplished his goal by organizing the church into a government, thus forming the papacy and the entire bureaucracy. This is from the Encyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature. And other histories—I’ve read already from Will Durant—but other histories chronicle this. Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall says the same thing.

And another quote from Will Durant here—this is a different quote: “The survival of ecclesiastical organization appeared even to the emperors as the salvation of the state. Justinian promulgated a decree requiring fit and proper persons able to administer the local government…” I’ve read that already.

So what you have here is the system of Roman governance. Caesar’s at the top. The Senate of Rome is under him and theoretically has its own power, but the ultimate power in the time of the empire is vested in the Caesar, beginning with the big guy. Who was the big guy—the first of the Caesars? Andrew. Augustus. All right, got it. Augustus—the big guy—and the subsequent emperors.

Augustus’s great genius—I told you this—was that he had all power, but he let the Roman Senate think they still had power. Because in the Republic period, the Senate would appoint the consuls every year, two of them every year, and they rotated them out. But Augustus’s great feat was to assume all power but let everybody else think that they had their own power as well. And that was the way it worked.

And so here’s what developed from this time. Let me bring you to this picture here. Here’s what Leo—who was in love, you remember, Pope Leo here—he’s in love with this image of the beast. And so here’s what was set up.

Here’s what we have today. A title of the Caesar—this is a statue on your left of Augustus—one of his titles was Pontifex Maximus. Pontifex Maximus. Well, that was a religious title given to the emperor. Later they began to not use it, and the pope adopted it. Today they call the pope—not only do they call him the pope—but he’s also called the pontiff, coming from this word pontifex. He’s the supreme pontiff. He’s the supreme religious leader of Roman Catholicism.

So what you have is the pope, in a sense, on the church side, as the equivalent of the Caesar from the state side. Get the point? How it all marries together? Take it a step further.

On your left is a picture of how the Roman Senate might have been. These were the leading citizens of Rome that became senators. That was kind of the top class in Rome—certainly in the Republic and still during the empire. Things were decided by the Roman Senate. On the right is a picture of the College of Cardinals. The cardinals are the top—right under the pope—they are the top level of authority and rank within Roman Catholicism.

If you hear about Cardinal Sullivan, Cardinal Rancoli, or Cardinal whatever, you know, on the news, he is a member of this collegial College of Cardinals. They elect the pope, all right? Now, the picture you’re looking at is a picture on the right of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, where the cardinals gather whenever a pope dies or abdicates, as Pope Benedict did a few years ago, and they come together into a secret conclave. All right? That’s what they call it.

They’re locked into the Vatican area in apartments, rooms. Every day they go into the Sistine Chapel. Anybody here been into the Sistine Chapel and seen it? It’s got paintings by Michelangelo all over. It’s one of the great scenes in world architecture today. But they close the doors, and here’s where they vote on the pope.

They start taking ballots, and if they don’t have the number of ballots—enough to elect any one pope on the first ballot—they bind them all up, they put them into a stove, and I think they put a chemical in there that helps to produce black smoke. There’s a smoke stack that’s coming up out of the ceiling. People are gathered out in Vatican Square and they’re watching.

If they see black smoke, they know that there’s not a pope yet. And this can go on for several days. It can take multiple votes—black smoke, black smoke, black smoke. Finally, they will come to a conclusion in conclave on a pope. When they elect a pope, then they burn the ballots and they put another chemical in that produces white smoke.

And so you see the white smoke going up, and everybody—they all rush into Vatican Square and they wait for maybe an hour or two hours, and out on the balcony will come the new pope and he’ll address the crowd. It’s one of the great scenes of history and of anything in the modern world.

We’re probably close to that right now. The current Pope Francis has been very, very ill in recent weeks, and they’ve kind of got a watch going. I haven’t heard anything in the last few days about the state of his health. But he could die. He’s up in his 80s. He might abdicate. Some say that he likely won’t. We’ll see what happens. But you’ll probably sometime soon see another Roman Catholic conclave of the cardinals coming together.

Not your run-of-the-mill bishops and priests that are out here doing the work in the Catholic cathedrals and churches—these are the top people. They are over vast regions of the world and as it’s all divided up within the Catholic hierarchy.

And this is what they have done here. Just one note before I leave this: put this movie on your movie-to-watch list. It’s called Conclave. Anybody seen it here? Okay. It’s on all the streaming services right now and probably you can find it for free. But it’s a fictional story of this actual event.

And it shows you how they do it. And it’s—you know—I can totally recommend the movie for everybody. It shows you the intrigue, the politics that go on behind the scenes among these groups, the groups of cardinals when they come together. You should watch that. So that’s called Conclave.

Anyway, if you take it down to another level, you’ve got the archbishop, the cardinals, and then an archbishop. And the Roman proconsul would be on the right. So in our book—in our study in the book of Acts—we’ve come across two Roman proconsuls, all right? Sergius Paulus and Gallio, the wine guy, all right? They were proconsuls, meaning that they ruled in Cyprus and, in Gallio’s case, in Achaia (or where Corinth was). They ruled for the consul—the people appointed Rome. They were pro or for the consul. And they were like governors.

Well, that’s a lower-class bishop within the church. So the whole point of this is, this is how the church was organized—this image of the beast that kept the power of the church going and frankly even held together the empire in the West and civilization after Attila, after the Goths came in, and continued to grow.

One of the Internet podcast historians that I listen to regularly described what happened in 476 with the fall of Rome—he said it was like the Internet going down, the equivalent of the Internet going down, all right? In the ancient world, things collapsed—trade, rule, a lot of things of everyday life. Imagine if the Internet in the world would go down. Where would we be? Your credit cards are not going to work. ATM machines go up. Drive up to the gas pump—they’re not going to work.

And so many other things would be cut off—trade, commerce, banking, finance. Airplanes couldn’t fly. I mean, it would be mayhem. It’s an interesting analogy. The fall of Rome in 476 was kind of the ancient equivalent of the Internet going down. And the church helped get it back to life. It breathed life back into it and caused the world to worship the beast.

That’s what we’re talking about. And that’s how this all comes together.

Now, let me take you back. Let me tell you one final story here about Leo—Leo I here at 450—and the scourge of God, Attila the Hun. He’s marching toward Rome, probably going to sack Rome, destroy Rome, kill everybody.

What happens? Leo doesn’t want this to happen. So Leo gets on his donkey, horse, or whatever he had, and he goes out from Rome—somewhere up north—and he intercepts Attila the Hun and his armies. And he persuades them to not do it. Spare Rome. Don’t come down. Don’t do it. Don’t burn, pillage, and all the other things that you do.

And surprisingly, this great power—Attila the Hun with all of his hungry armies wanting to get into the next fray—turns around and goes back north. He spares Rome. What happened? What happened?

Well, here’s an interesting story. This is a picture painted by the painter named Raphael. It’s called The Meeting Between Leo the Great and Attila. It’s in one of the churches there in Italy. And if you look at it—look at it carefully—down on your lower left on a white horse, not a donkey, is a guy with a Pontiff, pope-type hat—Leo the First.

And right in the middle of the picture, on a darker horse, is Attila the Hun. But if you look up in the sky above the two, you see two figures with swords kind of floating up there. When asked why he didn’t go on down to Rome, Attila says, “I was afraid of the two beings that I saw above the head of the pope behind him.”

And it’s an interesting story. Did it happen? Did he actually see two spirit-type beings—two images brandishing swords behind the pope as he was pleading to not go and do Rome? And Attila was fearful that he couldn’t fight against the spiritual army—spiritual beings, angels, whatever they were. Some say they were Peter and Paul.

But he said he saw something. This is recounted in the histories of the time. It’s an interesting thing to consider.

I gave a Bible study recently to the members in the Southwest region of the United States. We’re doing a series of prophetic Bible studies right now, and I did one about the unseen hand in history—where we know from history that there are stories of spiritual events that take place that transform the historical moment.

There are plenty of them in the Bible. You know the story of Sennacherib’s army coming around Jerusalem during the time of Hezekiah, and it was 186,000 who were killed because an angel of God went through in the night and killed all the Assyrian army, and Judah was spared—about 100 years or more before they finally fell to Rome. It wasn’t God’s time.

The story of Elisha’s servant told in 2 Kings. You’ve gone through that one—where the armies of Syria come looking for Elisha, and they surround the home that he’s in. The servant comes out, sees all these Syrian armies, and gets all worried, thinking that everything’s going to collapse—they’re going to die.

And Elisha comes out and prays, “God, let him see what he can’t see.” And there’s chariots of fire in the sky—angelic beings above. And the Syrians are kind of blinded, and they’re led off. And Elisha and his servant are spared. One of the great stories.

And there are many others. We’ve talked about Daniel 10, where the two angelic beings—the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece—withstand the angel coming from God to give the message to Daniel. The Bible and secular history tell us stories of events that have a divine component, some spiritual component—of angelic, sometimes maybe God’s angels, maybe sometimes demons manifesting themselves to protect their power, as in this particular case here with Leo I.

Personally, I lend a lot of credence to those stories. And we could talk for another two hours just on those.

And so in looking at this, it helps you to see the growing power of the papacy in the church, the collapse of Rome in the East, and understand this power that is developing here that is both a religious and a secular civil power developing along the lines of what we have here.

So go ahead and read verse 15 here of Revelation 13: “He had power to give life to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”

And so you’re looking at the ability of the religious power to put to death people who do not conform to their teaching here.

An Inquisition—that becomes a feature of Christianity, the Nicene Christianity—this image of this beast down through history. And that’s another story of people that have been hunted down, persecuted, killed because they did not conform to the orthodox teachings of Rome—the Roman church—with the Sabbath, with the Holy Days, with the Trinity.

To go deeper into the story of the development of the Trinity, as we’ve done in other classes—when you study the story of the Trinity, I think I made this comment at the time—history records that more people died over the arguments about the Trinity than martyrs in the Colosseum of Rome in the heyday of that period. You can go right down the list.

When I go to the site of the ancient city of Laodicea, as I will in a few weeks with another tour of people, there’s a basilica there. It’s a Byzantine basilica, and it could very well be on the site of an earlier church. But sometime in the 340s, 350s A.D., there was another church council called the Council of Laodicea.

And that council had a number of what they called decrees, or canons. And they were very specific. They have a plaque with all of them listed there. And I point out to my tours what was said.

There, they basically explicitly said that people in the Roman church were forbidden to Judaize and to keep the Days of Unleavened Bread with the Jews. It’s right there in plain writing. You can look it up on the Internet later—look up The Canons of the Council of Laodicea—they’re all listed there.

And it shows you that as late as the middle of the fourth century, people in Laodicea, that part of Asia, they were still keeping the Sabbath. They were still keeping the Holy Days. And the church was trying to stamp it out.

That’s what this power described in Revelation 13 will do. They did it, and it was over religion. It was over faith. Truth.

And the church could do that because they had a military arm. When you read your stories about the Crusades that came later—1100s, 1200s—the armies of Europe marching out under the banner of Christendom to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels, the infidels being the Muslim armies and peoples that had taken Jerusalem.

Before they ever got to Jerusalem, those Christian armies killed a lot of people in some of the mountain regions of Europe who were “heretics.” They sent them against them first to kind of sharpen their swords. And then they went on down toward the Middle East and Jerusalem. And they fought among themselves.

But earlier, there were Crusades sent out to wipe out communities of people in the Italian, French, and Swiss Alps who were not conforming to the orthodox teaching of Rome. And among those peoples, we can, I think, have confidence were remnants of the Church of God.

I don’t think that every one of the groups that are identified in history were necessarily the church in total—we just don’t have that much information about them. But when you study into it, you can pretty well think and realize that, yeah, there were people there that we would probably identify with—Sabbath keepers, not worshiping Mary, not believing in the triune God, things like that.

Did they have the full package of truth that we have? Probably not. The problem that you have with a lot of those groups is that their records were destroyed by the victors, who were the Catholic Church. One of the principles of history is that the victors write the history.

And so what we have are scraps and bits and pieces that have come down, and I don’t think we have the total story. And I find that to be just the fact of the way history is written. And I find it to be true even today.

Look—you pick up any book that talks about “cults,” “unorthodox Christianity”—you’ll find Worldwide Church of God, United Church of God listed there. And inevitably, they don’t get a correct explanation of what we believe, what we teach, what we are—even in the modern world. And all they have to do is read our literature and at least quote it right.

But many that I’ve read through the years, I’d say, that’s not true. That’s not what we believe—or you’ve twisted that. So you see that even today. Go back 1,500 years, 1,600 years, whatever—they destroyed all the writings of these people, whatever they did have.

And so what we know about them are scraps and bits and pieces. But that’s what happened during that period of time.

And so with that as a background, we’ll pause here. And in the next class, we will then—let’s get into this big thing of the Mark of the Beast and talk about that as that relates with this as a background.

So next time—the Mark of the Beast. Stay tuned. Here we go.