48: World News & Prophecy - The Scarlet Woman & the Beast

[McNeely] As we come to chapter 17, and now we're in another inset chapter, the scene opens in verse 1. “Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me.” So there were seven angels that came out, remember, out of the temple to pour out these bowls of God’s final wrath that’s covered in chapter 16. One of them comes and talks with me, John says, and said, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” (Revelation 17:1–2)

So here then is this final culminating image of all we’ve been studying, beginning in Daniel chapter 2, of these world empires—beginning with Babylon, to Persia, to Greece, and then to Rome. We’ve gone over them many, many times as we come down to this. We find one now final appearance of this system. And it is pictured here in chapter 17 in its final effort, its final configuration, of a woman riding a beast. And that’s what is different here. We had two beasts in chapter 13: the first beast, a political power; the second, a religious power doing great miracles and causing the world to worship the first beast. But now we have it put together with a woman.

And in Revelation, we’ve already studied in chapter 12 the aspect of a woman who is carried away into the wilderness. And we identify that woman as who or what? Anybody remember chapter 12? The woman in chapter 12—what was it? It was the church. All right. The woman was a church, and she’s protected several times mentioned there. Now in chapter 17, we have another woman, but it’s a different appearing woman. It is a woman who’s riding a beast.

All right. So she's mounted this beast. We can go on—it says in verse 3: “So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.” And: “The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication.” And: “On her forehead a name was written: ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.’” (Revelation 17:3–5)

“And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marveled with great amazement.” (Revelation 17:6)

Quite a picture. All right. So she’s riding a beast. She’s got a cup of abominations. All right—so that’s not good. She’s in purple and scarlet, colors that are typically associated with some type of usually royal authority, but also a kingly or priestly authority.

You will remember there was a woman we encountered in the book of Acts living in the city of Philippi named Lydia, who was a seller of purple from the city of… what city? Thyatira. Purple is associated with royalty, and scarlet is usually associated with harlotry. I mean, it’s kind of a regal color too—you’ll see that—but it has kind of multiple uses.

And so John here describes a woman with a name on her forehead called “Babylon the Great.” All right. This is the final appearance of what we have been studying from the time of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel back in the book of Daniel. And it’s the one name that carries through the Bible—I pointed this out at the beginning. It’s not Persia, Greece, and it’s not even Rome, even though Rome is at the heart of it in these final revivals. But it carries the name Babylon.

And Babylon begins all the way back in Genesis with the Tower of Babel and the story of Nimrod and what he did there, and how they sought to build this great culture and civilization that was going to rival that of God’s. And God came down and scrambled the languages, dispersed the peoples—Tower of Babel.

Well, that city and that spot becomes a great city and then a great empire. We encounter it in Daniel, and we continue to bring it along to this point in time at the end of the book of Revelation now. And the name on this particular woman and the entire system is “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth.” (Revelation 17:5)

Tying it to Babylon—out of which comes and is preserved this great river of abominations: religiously, spiritually, politically, even economically, culturally. And you get the point of how God looks at it in this name that is on the woman, embodying this entire system as it has morphed and grown through the ages.

Now just very briefly to kind of pick this up again—so of what I’ve been sketching all along—Babylon is over here where it all begins, then Persia, and then Greece, and then Rome with its various revivals. I talked about this kind of… this system moves like a river to the west, carrying with it exactly what is described here in verse 5: abominations, harlotry. And Babylon is the origin, the mother of it all, and it never really dies.

Even though Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great, even though Babylon was lost to the winds of time and ages and was covered over by sand and dirt only to be rediscovered in modern times and partially excavated, what began there—though the city, in a sense, physically ended—that system didn’t die.

And I go back to the tree that was chopped down in Daniel 4 that was identified as Nebuchadnezzar, who personified Babylon, and an iron band put around it, and the roots still live. And that system—that political, cultural, religious system—continued to breed and give new birth through the ages. And that’s what we are seeing here as we come down here to the scene.

So it’s a prophecy of a great city called Babylon that at the time of the end sits on top of all the other nations that are described figuratively by this beast that the woman rides. And a beast in prophecy is always a political system, except for the one exception in chapter 13 where it’s religious.

And so, as commentators have looked at this through the years, the one overriding fact that emerges from the time of the first-century writing here with John in Revelation, and even into modern commentators, is this is describing Rome.

All right? And while it has the name of Babylon, an ancient city and an empire, when John writes about it in his time, there’s only one city that he would have thought of, and that his readers—they would have looked at Rome. It was the empire, the dominating empire of the time. Now, even commentators into the modern world on Revelation—even those that look at Revelation as historical (and that being that it only pertains to the first century, historical events of the first century, and not a prophetic flow of history to the time of the end with end-time significance)—they still, even with that, identify Babylon with Rome.

Now, other commentators today, we, with our particular view of it, with a post-millennial perspective, we identify it as Rome as well. So there is a consistency in looking at this, as opposed to the minority view of this, that this Babylon will be a revived city of Babylon—literally where the old Babylon was. There are people who do have believed that. That’s not our point of view.

There are also people who have looked at this, and they have ascribed other cities. I’ve heard some people look at it as possibly Babylon described here as New York City, for reasons that I can comment on when we come to chapter 18—sitting on many waters. New York sits on a major water harbor and commerce and everything. But that’s not been our interpretation, and I don’t think that’s correct.

So as we look at this, our traditional view—and I think it’s a correct view—has this being Rome. We can look at this map one more time here, this famous image. And I want to mention that the booklet that I handed out to you in class and is available online (and those of you watching it later, you should know it’s online), The Final Superpower, really encapsulates what we’re talking about here in chapter 17, and a little bit of Daniel 11 as well.

But the various revivals of this empire, this system described in Revelation 17, are graphically and well told in this booklet on The Final Superpower.

And so as we look at this, let’s go ahead and read through it and make a few more comments. John says, “I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” (Revelation 17:6) So that’s speaking of religious persecution, which did begin to take place even during the Roman period, the time of the empire, before the church became legitimized by Constantine the emperor in the fourth century, who adopted Christianity and made it the religion of the empire.

We’ve talked about that with the Council of Nicaea and all of that, but there was still martyrdom prior to that, and even subsequently. The wars of doctrine, primarily around the Trinity, caused the death of a lot of people. Many people were martyred, especially those that would not accept the heterodox teaching of the Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Ghost, third person, three in one. Once that became ensconced in Christianity in the late fourth century, then it set up conflict between those that would not accept it, and it led ultimately to martyrdom for people who would not accept the doctrine of the Trinity.

They were banned from their churches, shunned, and even a great deal of death resulted from that.

So this woman who rides this beast—and what is pictured here is a combination of church and state. A woman pictures a church who rides or is on top of and acting in concert with this political power, which really begins to develop in the fourth century.

And that story—I didn’t go into it quite as large, I think—but it really does begin with a council in Constantinople about the year 381, where they finally lock in on the Trinitarian construct of the current version of the Council of Nicaea. This is 381 A.D. And the church and the state begin to combine at that point. And the church has then the power of the state to enforce doctrinal conformity.

And from that point, you begin to see the emerging Catholic Church—with the worship of Mary, the canonization of dead saints and the worship of dead saints, the vestments of the papacy, and just the entrenchment of this Vatican state, this bureaucracy of the church in Rome—growing large, now having the power of the state behind it to enforce its teachings and to account as accursed anyone who doesn’t go along with it.

Something so alien and foreign to our modern mind that we can’t really conceive it, because we’ve grown up in a Western democratic world where we have separations of church and state.

And the idea of the church having such a close cooperation is only found today in areas where Catholicism is the state religion—many areas of Latin America and other parts of the world—where there is a bit more influence wielded more overtly through the Catholic Church in those areas than, let’s say, in America, even though the Catholic Church does wield a great deal of influence even in America and in the world. We’ve talked about how that image of the beast was transferred to the church with the papacy, the pontiff, and everything.

But as the church—the Roman Church—has grown through the generations, it has become quite wealthy. It’s probably the wealthiest institution in the world in terms of money, land, buildings, gold, silver, art, treasures. How many of you have been to the Vatican and gone through the Vatican here? It’s—I mean, you’re just walking by gold and art worth gazillions of dollars. You don’t even have time to stop and look at it and find out what it is in the way those tours are usually set up.

I’ve not had the time. I’m usually moving through to get to the Sistine Chapel, and it’s just a packed subway-type of existence going through there. But the Vatican is quite wealthy, and they are a state—a sovereign state—within the city of Rome.

Nations send ambassadors to the Vatican, and that structure is there, weakened as it is because of the modern secular world and their own scandals, yet there is still the essence of great power that is there and influence in many different ways.

So as we see this system and as it is described of a woman sitting on this and what happens, let’s read on—verse 7. Let’s pick up here in verse 9. This is a section describing the seven heads that are a part of this one beast that the woman is riding. There’s a bit of ambiguity that is here as we look at it. He says, “I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, and of the ten horns.” (Revelation 17:7)

“The beast you saw was, and is not, and will ascend out of the bottomless pit and go to perdition.” (Revelation 17:8)

This beast has had various revivals, permutations through the years, and ultimately comes up out of this bottomless pit—a bit of a reference possibly to back in chapter 9 of Revelation, of this pit opening and the spirit of this Abaddon coming out, and demonic spirits coming out that create the animating power behind this entire system where “the earth marvels”. Now that’s an echo of chapter 13, where the world will worship the beast.

Those whose names are not written in the book of life from the foundation of world when they see the beast that was and is not and yet is. The system has always been, again, bring in what we studied in Daniel 4, again with that stump that is capped. The system that was, that was not, in that it was eclipsed, but is, in the sense that there’s still life. There’s still something that is there that does come back through various forms, resurrections, however we would choose that.

And so the mind that has wisdom says the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits. This has long been looked at as kind of an allusion to Rome, a city that does sit on seven mountains, but more specifically to seven revivals of this system at Rome, and a mountain symbolizing a great nation on which the woman sits. Now, the woman begins to sit and rule with this power, again, as I described back in the fourth century when it becomes legitimized and then entrenched power-wise with the power of the state behind it to enforce its teaching.

It is also described as a relationship that is based on fornication. Going back up to verse 2, the kings of the earth commit fornication. And I believe I’ve explained that previously—that the use of the term fornication is very specific and appropriate, that this relationship between church and state down through the ages between the church and the state or the Holy Roman Empire is not one of legitimacy through, let’s say, a sanctified godly marriage, but it’s one based on fornication. That is, a relationship without commitment is the best way to understand it—like fornication is sexually. It’s a sexual relationship without, you know, one-off, one-night-stand type thing, without commitment before God.

And as opposed to the word adultery, which is also talking about infidelity, but that’s within marriage. Fornication is immorality apart from marriage and the covenant and commitment of marriage. What it’s really showing is that the church and state don’t have a total commitment. It’s not godly, in other words. And it’s based on convenience, based on the lust for power, the lust for money, control over people—all that you would see historically emanating out of Rome and its history.

And look, it’s all there for anybody to read in all of the histories of the power politics, the venality of the system. There are whole books that are written on this and have been for a long, long period of time. And I don’t need to get into it all here in this class. But sanitized as it might be, moralized as it might be with good works, which can be legitimate—I mean, I do go to a Catholic hospital where my doctor resides, and you will too. But that doesn’t take away the history and the story and what is described in the Bible.

We do live in a complex world, and we must be very careful not to be taken in and deceived by what we may have to, in a sense, work with and around in our everyday life in this particular world. That’s something that God does expect us to be able to distinguish here.

And so in verse 9, the mind that has wisdom is going to look at this.

There are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come. When he comes, he must continue a short time.

Now, these seven kings or seven heads of this beast, we have identified with these seven revivals of the Roman Empire beginning in 554 with that of Justinian, the emperor in the east. We talked about him back in chapter 13 as the first head. And this is a very important one. I’ll come back to Justinian in a moment.

The second head we identified as that of Charlemagne, 800 A.D. On Christmas Day, Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope in Rome as the Emperor of the Romans or the Holy Roman Emperor. And that’s where we have the technical beginning of what is called in history the Holy Roman Empire, which one historian famously said was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. But that can be debated. Certainly it was Roman. And the empire at times was quite large, as it was under the Habsburgs and Charles.

Charlemagne is kind of the figurehead of this entire system historically.

Today in Europe, they give a prize every year—the European Union does—called the Charlemagne Prize. And it’s given to the statesperson who does the most to advance the cause of Europe in the world for that year. And it’s been given to American presidents and other European leaders in the past.

But it’s called the Charlemagne Prize just to speak to the prestige that Charlemagne has in this whole system. And he is a fascinating study. I’ve read a few books about it. I’ve been to his palace in the city of Aachen in Germany. You can go into the church that he built. You can see the throne that is there of the Holy Roman Empire.

Charlemagne’s church is kind of a round church, and it’s very interesting. It’s built over an ancient pagan temple.

And in the original part of the church—I think it’s octagonal shaped—there are two stories there. And in the upper loft, there is this old, old chair on which kings of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned. I’ve seen it. We filmed around it a few years ago. And you’re looking down into the main gallery, and there’s a huge chandelier coming down from the ceiling, and it’s got a large ball, kind of a golden ball hanging down from that. There are windows all around that.

A few years ago, somebody was in there on June 21st, June 22nd, at the time of the summer solstice. And he saw an interesting phenomenon: the sun came in at a particular point in the day—I forgot the time it was—and came in through one of the windows, hit that gold orb, and the reflection went straight up into the gallery onto the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor on the summer solstice.

Now, if you understand the alignment of various things—I told you about the Serpent Mound out here, which is aligned with the sun as well, and other places around the world that are aligned with the seasons and the solstice and the equinox—I thought when I read that story, I was fascinated by it. That on the time of the summer solstice, when the sun is at its peak there, it comes in one particular window and hits that ball and then goes right to the throne. Somebody knew what they were doing when they put all of that together.

Phenomena like that are just not happenstance and coincidence.

So Charlemagne, his church and all of that, his whole story is quite interesting. But he’s the second head here.

The third head has been identified as the empire of Otto the Great beginning in 962.

Charles V, the Habsburg dynasty of the 16th century—and this indeed was a dynasty and it was an empire. I’ve talked about the fact earlier that the Habsburg Empire stretched all the way to California, New Mexico, Arizona—that whole region of the American Southwest—as well as Mexico, Latin America, parts of Latin America, were under the Habsburg Empire or the beast revival of this fourth head at its height. Quite an extensive reach.

Napoleon being the fifth, beginning in 1805.

And then the sixth head—that of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s and 40s and the period of World War II.

Which brings us here to what it says: five have fallen, one is, and the other does not yet come.

What does that mean?

Well, I was taught when I went through this class at Ambassador College that John was seeing this vision at the time of the sixth head—“one is.”

And five have gone before—the previous five we’ve seen here—and another is yet to come.

Is that plausible? Well, it seemed to me at the time, and I can see still that that’s a plausible way to look at this today—that we are living in a time when we have experienced the sixth, which is, and one yet to come. It’s a possibility. I’m not trying to be that dogmatic about it, but if you just take it at that, then at least there’s a way to understand what is said here as something yet to come for us.

Now keep in mind—we take Revelation as a prophetic, futuristic view. I’ve mentioned the historic view. I was actually reading a scholar that I actually know and have toured with in Turkey who believes only in the historic view of Revelation. And when he interprets this verse, verse 10—as well as others who look at Revelation as essentially first century, and that’s it—they say five are fallen. They look at five of the Roman emperors going up, I believe, to Nero, as five have fallen.

One is, and what is yet to come. And their interpretation has Revelation being written earlier than what we say, mid-90s, that it’s written around 70–71 AD. But then they also set it within the context of the first century, and they look at the Roman emperors as being described here, five have fallen, one is, and the other is yet to come, but it's all first century. So I was reading, actually, Mark Wilson, who I've toured with a couple of times in Turkey. And he knows quite a bit about Turkey and biblical Turkey, but he has a historical view of Revelation. And one thing I walked away with—well, at least he's looking at it as Rome, even though Rome of the first century. We look at it as Rome being revived down through the centuries with these various revivals.

And in one sense, there's at least a common ground there, but we take a futuristic view of what is to come. And it says, and when he comes, he must continue a short time. And so a short time being within the context of this tribulation period covered by the book of Revelation, let's say essentially a three-and-a-half-year period, that is being described.

So we look at verse 11 then: Now the beast that was and is not is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and is going to perdition.

Now that’s—wrap your mind around that one. That’s a bit enigmatic right there. What does that mean? The beast that was and is not is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and is going to perdition. All right, let’s break it down.

The beast that was and is not.

All right, the beast is the entire political system, this political power embodied by Rome—was and is not. It was wounded, was not, was revived. But then if you bring this forward into what John is seeing in this woman riding this beast at this point in the end-time scenario—the beast that was and is not is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes to perdition.

We've only got seven heads. All right, and I’ve shown you that we've seen—we interpret—six have already gone and collapsed.

We're waiting for the seventh. So that’s “of the seven”—would be the seven heads. But it says he is himself, the beast is also the eighth. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Well, I'm looking at blank stares here. And don't worry, I've had blank stares on that one. And some of our best minds in the church have had blank stares on that one as well. I've sat in meetings with that, so I know what I'm talking about.

And what is the—if it's the seventh, and yet also the eighth—what are we talking about?

I remember discussing this a number of years ago, and I'll present this as a possibility, not being that dogmatic about it, but that if we look at what is the eighth, it could be talking about the totality of this entire system where there are seven heads or seven revivals.

But then what comes here at its very end is so unique, so different from all of the others, that it is a revival of something that is more of a super-imperial government as an entity, more than it is one specific ruler—like a Hitler or a Napoleon or a Charlemagne. But it's a government that is—then the eighth—encompasses all the seventh, and is its own unique eighth or encompassing system.

That’s a possibility.

When you go back to what Justinian did—and recall when we were in chapter 13, we were talking about Justinian—remember I described that Justinian sought to restore the entire government of Rome that had fallen in the West in 476. And he sent out from Constantinople or Byzantium at that time his armies, and they recaptured the lands of North Africa and over into Italy under his general Belisarius. And for a moment, there was a restoration of this entire system.

It declined again, but it remained in the East.

But what Justinian also did was—remember I told you that he undertook a reform of the Roman civil law code. That was about a thousand years old and had so many pathways and addendums and addendums to addendums and comments and everything that it was just a complex maze that needed to be simplified, refurbished. And he had a very good lawyer that did that, and he created the Code of Justinian.

And I showed you that that became the basis of European civil law, where the king was the state, and how that has carried down its way into the modern world with the heavy bureaucracy at least of the current European Union headquartered in Brussels, and is a distinct legal style from what we are under in the English-speaking world of common law. That’s about as much of the legal code that we really need to get into.

But I think it may help us at least understand what we could be talking about here when it talks about this eighth system—that it is a, it will be a revival of such a scale encompassing what history tells us about Rome and its system—that something that went out of existence but now miraculously revived at the end of the age and presented as this great system that should be worshiped.

I've said this, and I'll say it again: look, I can walk you through all these nice little pictures, okay?

Here's our Daniel 2 image right there, and here's our woman riding the beast. And that's all kind of neat—put together in a nice little picture to illustrate it and to understand it. And it's important that we do that, and we can break it down here—Charlemagne, Habsburgs, and Napoleon—and come down to it.

And we come down to where we are today, and we read scriptures like Jesus says in Matthew 24 that the very elect could be deceived. What does that mean? Why would you be deceived?

You've got it right here, and we're printing off notes for you to look at. We've got a nice little booklet. It's all laid out to describe what to look for, what to watch for. How could you be deceived?

Well, I've told you as well that a lot of other conservative scholars and commentators—Seventh-day Adventists—they’re kind of with us on most of this already.

How can the world be deceived in time? Unless it is something far more powerful, inventive, imaginative than what we can lay out here in all of our pictures and all of our schematics of a great city that reigns over the kings of the earth and identify it as the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy—all of which I believe to be correct.

But then you throw in what Revelation 13 tells us of a miracle-working power.

Would you be deceived by a miracle?
 A miracle?
 Fire coming down from heaven?
 Somebody that appears to be raised from the dead?

What would you think about that?

Especially if you were a little bit caught sideways at the moment in your relationship with God and truth, for whatever reason, and all of a sudden—and you're fearful because of the world situation—and you didn't quite pay attention in class when you were sitting there, and you get, whoa, wait, what's going on? Whoa, is this it? Whoa!

And then something happens that’s so miraculous—well, maybe this is true—and it gives you a false hope to worship some image, to worship and to take that mark.

Would that happen to us?

Well, I have said many times in many different situations, we better not take anything about ourselves for granted. I mean, yeah, we better be close to God. We better know the Bible.

But this system, when it arises, is going to astound the world. And I have seen people get tripped up who were good church members and no longer keep God's truth.
 But I'm talking about people that I've known, close to, and thought had it all together.
 Miracles can trigger something in a mind that may not be quite as watchful and clothed with the right garments of righteousness, as we read earlier in chapter 16, and can cause possibly even the elect to be deceived. Jesus gave that warning, and we need to think about that. So this power of the faith, this imperial government revival is something to at least ponder in the context of all these other verses.

Well, let's move on to verse 12. It says, “The 10 horns which you saw are 10 kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast.” (Revelation 17:12)

Now verse 12 is a key verse that identifies the 10 horns on this beast as 10 kings.
 “They have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with a beast.” (Revelation 17:12)

It goes on, these are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast. So what they do have, they relinquish. They give up to this beast, 10 kings. Now out of this, we have taken the idea that 10 nations in Europe, but I want to caution us that this says 10 kings, not 10 nations. A king can rule over more than one nation. And so to interpret it as 10 nations may not be getting to the point of what is being—or as 10 nations—may not be getting it to the point of what it says. It says 10 kings, and it is specific.

But they give authority to the beast. And again, the beast is supercharged. “These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them. For He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are called, chosen, and faithful.” (Revelation 17:14)

So it would seem that this is the final supercharging influence that is given to the beast at this time. And those who are with Christ are called, chosen, and faithful. Be called, we choose to obey God, then we remain faithful to the end, and we resist all temptation and all deception.

Then He said to me, “The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.” (Revelation 17:15–16)

So there's going to come a time when the beast and its powers will turn, they will hate the harlot. That's the woman riding the beast, the spiritual power. They will hate it and turn on her, consuming her. And probably at that point, this beast personification, whoever this person is, will probably take and assume to himself powers of the divine that would be unprecedented, much like what we would refer to in 2 Thessalonians 2, where this man of sin claims to be God.

And so he would assume then the spiritual aspect of it all into one person. Remember the Roman emperors did that. They were over the religious authority and the church and then ultimately came to be worshiped.

Now verse 17 is important. It says, “For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast until the words of God are fulfilled.” (Revelation 17:17)

Verse 17 is interesting because it tells us that God’s controlling every bit of this. God put it into their hearts. You go back to Ezra 1:1 and you read where God put it into the—moved upon the spirit of Cyrus to issue a decree for the Jews to return from Babylon back to Jerusalem. But God put that into Cyrus’s heart as He moved upon his spirit. God can work through whoever He will, even like Cyrus was over that one section of the entire system, the Persian. Here, at the time of the end, God can put into their hearts—these 10 kings—the idea to give their power, supercharging this beast to fulfill His purpose. God’s in control of all of it, even the actions that are taken by the proxies of Satan himself.

And then verse 18, “The woman whom you saw is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:18)

Drunk with the blood of the martyrs. And there's only one city that has done that, historically, with the powers of the world, and that is Rome.
 And it is quite a story documented throughout history, changing times and seasons, doing all that Daniel said would happen and what John is inspired to record here. A city, a system, a way of life, a spiritual system, unfaithful to God, and yet claims a relationship with God, but is now repudiated before all the world. And this will be quite a moment.

So Revelation 17 tells us the fate of the spiritual religious part of the religious—the spiritual part of the religious—part of the political power of the beast.

All right, keep that in mind. As we move into chapter 18, we are then looking at the decline and the fall of the political economic power of this beast. So chapter 17 tells us how the spiritual eventually will subside. Chapter 18 now will deal with the political aspect of it.