Babylon in Bible Prophecy

Let's go ahead and put up the first slide here. I have some slides I want to show today, although I don't have a pointer. And Mr. Puckett's out of town, and he has the pointer and the clicker to change slides, so I have to give them instructions. In Revelation 17, the Apostle John wrote, talking about the end-time power that fights Jesus Christ when he returns. He calls it, mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots, and of the abominations of the earth. Now, we know what Babylon is. It's a small town in Iraq, right? So why would he call this Babylon? When Babylon has no importance, really, today, it's interesting when Saddam Hussein was in power. There were numerous Protestant churches that actually announced there were books written on it, that he was this fulfillment of this. That he was going to bring about some kind of world war, and he was the fulfillment, and that was Babylon, since he ruled out of Babylon. That Babylon was going to bring down, bring this world power about, and bring Jesus Christ back. Of course, that's not what happened. Why this Babylon? What I want to do today, I looked over the sermons I've given on prophecy over the last three years. I tried to give a prophecy sermon about every three months. Some of them were on different aspects of prophecy. Some of them were about prophecies concerning Jesus Christ. Some of them were about prophecies concerning the abomination of desolation. Most of the prophecies, sermons I've given, fit into the framework of the beast power, the end-time beast power. I gave a sermon on Daniel 2. I gave a sermon on Daniel 7. We talked about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I gave a sermon on that. I gave a sermon on Revelation 13, and that beast, and who that beast was. All of those sermons fit together to give an overview. There were some details I didn't cover because I wanted to give an overview, which is more important in understanding this. Understanding the prophetic timeline as we approach closer and closer. I don't know when Christ comes back, and it was not coming back tomorrow because there are too many things that have to happen. But looking at that timeline, where are we on that timeline, we can only guess, but there are certain things we have to be aware of. Today I want to talk about why the symbol of Babylon. Now, in doing the symbol of Babylon, I want to show and we'll go through parts of all the sermons I've given over the last three years on this subject. So you're going to hear some things you know. You can even see a few slides that you've seen. But what I want to do is show how this starts with ancient Babylon and ends with ancient Babylon. And what does that mean? Because it doesn't mean the city of Babylon today that's in Iraq. Iraq isn't the center of what's going to happen in the future as far as prophecy. But why would he use that? Knowing that will help us understand. So where do we start? Let's go to Genesis chapter 10 and let's look at where Babylon the city came from.

Verse 8 of Genesis chapter 10.

In other words, if someone had a certain personality or did certain things, people would say, you're like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. Now this mighty hunter is usually a reference to a warrior. It's used as a reference to a great leader. It can be used as a reference to a tyrant, even. So here we have a strong leader, a mighty warrior, and he stands before the Lord.

What does that mean? That he actually worships God by standing before the Lord? If you look at the Hebrew phrase here, most people who know Hebrew say that what this actually means is he's standing in opposition to the Lord. He's actually standing up to God. Here's a man who stood up to God. I want to look at how in the world did he stand up to God? He says, at the beginning of his kingdom, now this is important, because this is the first kingdom after the flood.

There were kingdoms before the flood. We know that they found archaeological remains of certain cities and groups of cities that existed before the flood. But this is the first kingdom after the flood. And it says, at the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Eric, and Akkad, and Kalma, and the land of Shinar.

From that land, he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehobooth, Ur, and Cala, and Resin between Nineveh and Calon, that is the principal city. So he must have, either through political means or military means, brought a group of cities into his domain, which was ruled from Babel, and then he built other cities. Now, Nimrod, the name is very interesting, because it simply means, we will revolt. It is a word that actually means someone who is a rebel and is in violent opposition.

So it's violent opposition to God. He's in violent opposition to God, and he created the first kingdom. Now, we know it started in Babel. So if we go through the rest of chapter 10 as genealogies and talking about people who spread out after Noah and his family came out of the ark, we go down to chapter 11, and now we have some more information about Babel, which became what we call Babylon. They're the same cities. Now, the whole earth had one language and one speech.

They had different languages before the flood. What we know is that after the flood, Noah's family, I mean, it was one family. They all spoke the same language. They come out of the flood. They have one language. And so they all understand each other. He says, And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens.

And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. So what we have is a concept. And according to all Jewish history, Nimrod was the leader of this. Because he was the founder of the city, and they're building the city, so it only makes sense.

He's the leader of this, and they have a concept. And that is, we can work it out together. If we stay together, and we work together, and we build a city together, we won't be scattered. We'll be right here. We'll stay together as a people. And they build a tower into heaven. First of all, let me show you a map here. Next slide, please. I wish I had a pointer. If you look down here, to give you a context of the map, this is Egypt. You can see the Sinai, Arabian Desert, which is Saudi Arabia. Up here, Asia Minor, that's Turkey today. So you start to understand this. You see Palestine, that's where Israel is.

You see Phoenicia and part of Assyria, that's where the nation of Syria is today. All that land or area north, or I'm sorry, south of that, in that green, is Iraq today. Iraq is ancient Babylon. And you can see Iran, Iran over there. Iran is a huge country, and that's where ancient Persia was. So this land here, as people, as they came out of the flood, people settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It was an area where they really could grow a lot of food. It's mainly desert today. There is some ability to produce foods there because of the rivers, but that was a very fertile area at the time. That's why history calls it the Fertile Crescent. This is where they were. Where that red arrow is, that's Babylon. This is where they build this city of Babel. And of course, little towns and cities, I say cities, this is a town.

This isn't 100,000 people. They're not that long far out of the flood. Now, there was a population explosion, but still, there aren't millions of people on the earth yet. And so they move down to here, and he begins to build this city, and they say, let's build a tower that goes up into Heavens. According to Josephus, who lived in the first century, now, there always has to be a little bit of warning about when you read any historian who writes thousands of years of after the fact.

He wasn't there, so you don't know if it's true or not. What Josephus did, though, was write down... Now, what he says about the first century is pretty accurate because he was there. What he does is he takes all of Jewish history, and he writes it down in relationship to the Bible. And Jewish history is that the reason they built this up into the Heavens was because they thought if we build a tower, a building tall enough, the next time God says a flood, He won't be able to get us.

We'll go up into the tower. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but it sort of makes sense. So that's... Josephus says that was the reason. But obviously, we don't know exactly the reason from the Bible. We do know He's confronting God. There's a confronting of God here in his viewpoint.

Verse 5, The Lord came down to see the city, and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, indeed the people are one, they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now, nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. In other words, they're starting to think in ways that's going to produce evil, and more evil, and more evil, and they're just going to keep doing evil. So we've got to stop this before I have to destroy the earth with another flood.

We have to stop evil from just being perpetuated here. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one in their speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the whole face of the earth, and they ceased building the city.

Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them all over the face of the earth. So what we have is that with the confusion of languages, people begin to spread out all over the place. And if you look at history, what we know up until about 2500 B.C., it's fascinating how over about a five, six hundred year period, you have civilizations growing up like the Mayans, like Aztecs, like people in China.

I mean, people are just being scattered all over. And this is where the scattering of humanity started from, as people began to move out. Babel was still there, as were the ruins of the Tower of Babel.

Now, this next slide, this is a painting from the 1500s, and this is the most reproduced painting of the Tower of Babel ever done, because this is what everybody for hundreds of years thought it looked like. It's very interesting. If you could take from where you're sitting, you probably can't see it. But if you get up and look at the town back here behind this, it looks like 1500 Europe.

I mean, there's wooden structures with little windows. The ships down here are ships from the 1500s. All the people here are dressed like the 1500s. It's interesting. They all have trousers on, and trousers were not something that you find in ancient Middle Eastern culture. So, once again, how culture gets stamped on history. No, it didn't look like this, and it wasn't built by Europeans in the 1500s. But they drew it like they thought. That's what they would look like. Actually, what it was probably was a ziggurat.

The Egyptians built pyramids, which were remarkably designed and engineered. Through this part of the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran is today, and Syria, they built pyramids a little less complicated, but still amazing designs and amazing from engineering feats. They were stepped pyramids, though. You see these same things in Central America. They were built by the Aztecs and the Mayans. They built stepped pyramids. Let's look at the next picture. This is a stepped pyramid that's thousands of years old, maybe clear back to not long after the time of Nimrod, although it would have taken quite a large number of people to build this.

And of course, you see the ruins now. The top of it is just huge amounts of dirt. This is probably what it would have looked like, but you start to get an idea how large this is and how large the tower of Babel could have been as it went up in steps with huge blocks.

Show the next picture. I think this is the same ziggurat. I'm not sure. I've looked at it at different angles, and this looks like the same one. It was just a picture done years later. If not, there are a lot of them like this. But you start to see how huge these things could be. This is what Nimrod was doing. We don't know how big or what grand design it was, but it was still, he was mobilizing the great population of the earth at the time, because that's where most people lived, to do what?

We're going to build a tower so high that God can't mess with us anymore. That we could be protected from his wrath. It was an interesting idea what he had in terms of a dream. What we find in this very first seed of Babylon, it would not grow until later, is that the first attempt to unite humanity into one group of people for the betterment of everybody.

And that's going to develop into an empire system later. Let me show one more slide here. This is an artist rendition, and we don't know how true it is, but of what Babylon would have looked like. The hanging gardens of Babylon are described by people who saw it years and years later, and it's actually considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

And you see a ziggurat in the back. See it back there? So this is just an idea of what it would have looked like at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Not at the time of Nimmon, but at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, because it was going to grow out. Years went by, Babel stayed basically a little village, but it grew and it grew and it grew, and it became a city-state. Now, a city-state means it's a city that controlled all the area around it, all the villages around it, all the farming land around it.

It controlled that. And so it was the largest city-state in that part of the world. And in the 1700s BC, you don't have to remember the date, there's no test afterwards, in that century, a king came along and said, you know what? We need to expand our territory. And we have now, in Babylon, a concept of creating an empire, and they begin to take the other city-states around them.

The most famous king during that period was a man named Hammurabi. Anybody remember Hammurabi from your Western civilization class? Okay, a few. He's not one of those guys, you know, you don't hear his name mentioned that often, right? Hammurabi decided that the only way you could govern an empire was through a rule of law. You have to have laws. And he wrote the most comprehensive set of laws that had been created yet by any human government. In fact, secular historians, because we know this isn't true, but secular historians believe that Moses, who came hundreds of years later, basically took Hammurabi's code and stole it to make his code from, because there's certain similarities. And that's not true at all.

God gave him, gave Moses the law that he gave him. But the code of Hammurabi was this intensive attempt to say, okay, we need laws so that we know how we should conduct ourselves in every situation. And what are crimes? Murder was a crime. Okay? Robbery was a crime. And so there were punishments. In fact, there was a death penalty for murder. There was a death penalty for kidnapping. It was considered a capital punishment. Looting was death penalty. Now, robbery could or could not be, depending on how serious your crime. If you stole from the government, death penalty. If you stole from your neighbor, it would be a different penalty.

Okay? Because we've got to understand what's really important here. There was laws that governed commerce. Now, when I say commerce, don't think in terms of Soviet Union. There is no, there are no concepts of communism, Nazism. Those things don't even exist yet. There's not even a concept of capitalism. Okay? The idea was everybody should make money.

But you have to govern that somehow. So there was, there were laws concerning how you couldn't cheat people. You couldn't, you know, you couldn't just have weights for something and say, oh yeah, that weighs a certain amount and it doesn't. You know, so you're cheating people that way. There were laws concerning marriage, divorce, adoption, assault. I think it's very interesting. There are really important liabilities for builders and surgeons.

If you were a doctor and you messed up then, or they just didn't have to mess up, they just accused you of messing up, you could be put to death. That's a little scary. I mean, and builders, where's Mr. Horvath? Builders, you talk about if your building collapsed on somebody, you could be held liable.

Now, we understand that's today, right? There's actually liabilities that, I mean, doctors do have huge liabilities in terms of what they have to do with insurance. There's huge things that they have, builders have to do today. That's not a modern concept. That comes from Babylon. These ideas of Hammurabi had, of how you have to govern life to try to create some kind of equity in life.

Now, during this time, this first empire now, because Nimroz didn't last very long. God stepped in and Nimroz collapsed. Hundreds of years later, you got Hammurabi. And it lasted a while, and then the Assyrians took it over. If you remember the map we looked at, the Assyrians lived north, part of the Tigris-Euphrates River. The Assyrians lived north, the Babylonians lived to the south. The Chaldeans also lived down there. So, the Assyrians take Babylon, and for a couple centuries, the Assyrians rule them. The Assyrians and the Babylonians had a very similar religion, very similar language and culture. They knew the difference between each other. A lot of other people couldn't tell the difference, but they were different. But there was also a lot of similarities. In the 600s BC, the Babylonians overthrew the Assyrians and created a real empire. Every one of you know the name of the king, the second king of the Babylonian empire in the 600s. Anybody want to guess? Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar. You all know him.

So, when he comes along, there's a long dream of empire that goes clear back to Nimrod, that's been part of this Babylonian and Assyrian culture back and forth, back and forth. And the Babylonians now have a real empire with a real emperor. This new empire was built on a number of important things. One, a military that could enforce what they want. And Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and for a while, their military was the most impressive military in the world, the known world. Once again, I say the known world because no one really knows a lot of what's going on in China at the time. There is Chinese history, but we don't study it in terms of the Bible because the Bible doesn't deal with it.

He also wanted to create an economic system of total free trade.

They say, oh, capitalism? No, there's no concept of capitalism. We know it. But you want free trade. Here's why. The empire is going to be funded by two means. Taxes and conquering somebody else. Because when you conquer somebody, you make them pay you taxes.

So the only way the government grew in wealth was through taxes. And it grew through taxes, through taxing people and conquering people. In fact, the best thing to do was make someone your ally and tax them so you didn't have to conquer them because you did not want to ruin the milk cow. Why shoot the milk cow? So if you conquer people, it ruined their land. They can't pay your taxes. So you don't want to force everybody into conquering them. What you want to do is make everybody understand that being an ally of Babylon is absolutely the best thing that could happen to you. For one thing, you have free trade with Babylon, and wealth will come back and forth. They just pay us a tribute. Every year, we send down all kinds of wagons, and we load it up with loot, and when they come back home, but your neighbors get in a fight with you, our army comes and beats up your neighbor for you. So, hey, what more do you want? So they didn't want to conquer people unless they had to. One of the things they did was, and this is why the Babylonians invaded Judah three times. The reason why is, the first time was, you're not understanding what it means to be our ally, and Judah said, well, we don't want to be your ally, so they just punch them in the nose and go back home. And then they revolt, and they come back, and they punch them even harder, and they go back home. The third time, they revolt, and they say, fine, they come down, and what do they do? They take them all out and move them someplace else. See, the Assyrians did that, too. That's why the Samaritans, when you go into the New Testament, they're part of Judah. To everybody else, the Romans say, okay, it's the province of Samaria, but they're the Jews. No, they're not Jews. The Jews say they're not Jews, and they say they're not Jews. Why? The Samaritans were the people the Assyrians brought in when they took the Israelites out. You know, the Assyrians didn't take Israel out the first time they invaded either.

Because why shoot the Melchized? Just become our ally. Babylon was much more sophisticated than Assyria was. So what happens is, when they finally say, okay, you won't be our ally, they literally destroy your nation, and then move everybody out and move some other people in. And there's a reason why. We want to break your culture. We want to break your religion. As long as you are an ally with Babylon, you can have whatever culture you want, and you can have whatever religion you want. As long as you worship the emperor as a demigod, remember they did not tell Daniel to stop worshiping your god. They just said, for a certain amount of time, you can only pray to the emperor. Well, it wasn't the emperor or the king. In other words, we're not saying your god doesn't exist. We're saying, you have your religion, but this has to be your primary religious concern.

You've heard me talk about the Roman Empire this way, too. Roman Empire allowed all kinds of free... I mean, you want to make money living in the Roman Empire. All kind of free trade. They had no restrictions, practically, on free trade. They didn't even have a lot of restrictions on if you could cheat... I mean, they didn't try to govern the empire with economic standards. They didn't care if you used slaves and killed them in manufacturing your product. They only cared if you paid taxes for manufacturing your product.

The Babylonians were somewhat the same. We just want everybody to make money, and everybody have their own religion, but it can interfere with the state or the religion of the state, and the religion of the state has to do with recognition of the king or the emperor as semi-divine.

So remember that. The city of Babylon, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, grew into a city of about... They're not sure. They looked at the size of it. It could have had anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 people. You think, well, that's not very big. By world standards of the day, it's huge. It's absolutely huge.

It's where the major cities in the world, probably in the entire west, is the major city. They irrigated the Euphrates River. They could grow food to export out. The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Here we have the hanging waters of Babylon. Let me see the next slide. I can't remember what the... Yeah, there's just another hardest rendition no one really knows. But I think that first one is probably very close. Now, once again, I'm not going to a lot of scriptures right now. We've covered this. I'm just trying to remind you of it because there's some concepts. There's a few concepts I want you to walk away with when we get to Revelation 17. God warned Judah through the prophets like Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel that if they didn't repent, he was going to let the Babylonians punish them and take them into captivity. Over and over he told them that was what was going to happen. And so in 605 Nebuchadnezzar comes in and attacks and takes many captives from Judah. Not all of them yet. He would come another time. But he takes them into captivity. That's where Daniel and his friends went there.

In 586 Nebuchadnezzar came back and said, you people just don't get it, do you? So he burned Jerusalem and hauled them all off.

You just don't understand. All we want you to do is worship your God, have your temple, do or circumcise your kids. We don't care about any of that stuff. All we want you to do is be our ally and pay us money. It's a simple contract here.

Now we know that Nebuchadnezzar had a dream, and I gave a whole sermon on this. He had a dream and there's a statue and there were... God gave Daniel the ability to tell him what the dream meant. This is very important because we're moving on beyond Babylon, because Babylon would fall again. Babylon would fall again and never really become great again, ever, until this day. Never become great again. So let's look at the next slide. He said a reading... Oh, I forgot about this one. If you ever go to Germany and Berlin, you have to go to the Pergamum Museum in Berlin.

Many of these are actual bricks. When you get up close, you can see the ones that are a little different color or ones they had to fill in. This is what they found in Babylon. They stargate. This was back in the 1800s when European archaeologists would haul off whatever they found and take it to Europe. They reconstructed this gate.

When we were there filming for Beyond Today, there was nobody else in the room. Well, there was nobody else in the entire huge museum, so we had it to ourselves. I just kept walking through that gate and saying, Daniel walked through this gate. Nebuchadnezzar walked through this gate. To give you some perspective, though, there were two gates. There was one that sat behind this that was about twice the size of this one. This was the introductory gate, the Ishkar gate, into the center of the city. But it really is something to see and realize. You're right, looking at something that Daniel would have seen as he walked through the city. Okay, next slide. So we understand then, when we talk about this... This was the sermon I gave. We understand that God told Nebuchadnezzar, this is what this means, that there's going to be four great empires. We also know what the second one was because Daniel was alive when the second one happened. He was alive when Babylon was the first great empire. And God told Nebuchadnezzar, the first of these great empires is you. It's Babylon. Persia conquered Babylon and Daniel was alive when that happened. Daniel saw that happen. Greece destroyed Persia. He didn't live long enough, of course, to see that because that was many years later. But he received, if you read all through the book of Daniel, he received a prophecy that Greece was going to conquer Persia.

We know that Greece was conquered by Rome. So these four things have already happened. We know that Europe then was divided into two. The Roman Empire fell. Now everybody says, well, the Roman Empire fell in 410. No, it didn't. The Western Empire fell in 410 because the Roman Empire had split into two, just like this prophecy said it would. The eastern part of the Roman Empire did not fall until 1451. The capital of the eastern part of the empire was Constantinople, Istanbul today. It wasn't until 1451 that a Muslim army actually took Constantinople. It lasted all those years ruling over empire. They kept it big and small, and big and small. And they called themselves Roman. That is why today in Eastern Europe there is a country called Romania. They see themselves as descendants of the Romans because they were the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Russia was never part of that, but Ukraine actually was part of the Roman Empire. We know from the statue from the prophecy that at the very end, these two legs of iron, something happens to them. One, they never totally unite, and they end up partly strong and partly weak. And it's at this time in this divided empire that Christ comes back. Remember? A rock comes and hits it at the feet, and the whole thing falls down. Christ comes back at the time when this idea starts up here with Nimrod, and works through all this until the very end. And it doesn't quite come together. It doesn't actually quite work. But it does create an empire at the end time. So, by the way, history repeats itself so much. You hear that all the time.

In 1000 AD, around 1000 AD, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church separated from each other over doctoral issues and over who was in charge. The Eastern Orthodox leader of the Russian Orthodox Church is attacking the Pope for helping Nazis, because he says everybody in Europe and the United States are Nazis. And the Pope is telling him, you know what you're talking about, the Russians are murdering and killing babies. The Old Divide has come up again. The Old Divide is out. There is an actual religious element to what's going on in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is splitting from the Russian Orthodox Church because they say you're supporting the Nazis. So everybody's a Nazi. Everybody's saying everybody else is a Nazi. So we're finding this, and they're all Christians, that the difference in beliefs between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Church is very, very tiny. And the difference in beliefs between the Russian Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox is zero.

Their doctoral beliefs are zero. But they're still fighting over who gets to be in charge here.

Now, in Daniel 7, I'm not going to go there because we did this in a sermon, too. In Daniel 7, Daniel receives more information about these four empires. So let's look at the next slide. Babylon. Okay, hit it again.

Daniel's vision of the four beasts from the sea. The first beast is like a lion with eagle's wings. Next. Nebuchadnezzar in the scripture is called compared to a lion and an eagle. Now, let me say something here. People try to say, okay, what does this mean? There's only one way to understand almost anything in the Bible, and that is through continuity, okay? How they fit together. If this isn't talking about the same things as Daniel 2, then I have no idea what it means. In fact, people make up all kinds of things. I mean, if I go through here, I can say, okay, let's see. For the last 300 years, the symbol of England has been a lion. So this is a prophecy about England. You see what I mean? If I don't have someplace to base this on, I can make up whatever I want. We use Daniel 2 as the basis for understanding all the things that happened in prophecy since then, or after that. I've actually seen these in that museum. It's amazing. Oh, a lion with eagle's wings. And that was one of the symbols of ancient Babylon. Okay, next. The bear. Now, once again, if I'm going to make this up, and I don't have any place to start with, well, the first one, oh, that's England. This is Russia. So, you know, the Russians just last week threatened to launch atomic weapons off the coast of England, causing a radioactive tsunami that would wash over England, and you couldn't live in it for 100 years. I'm not making that up. That actually came out from the Russian television. They threatened to do that. Well, see? What's happening right now is a fulfillment of prophecy. England and Russia are about to go to war. You see, if you don't have—what we always do is we look at what's immediately happening to us, and that's how we look and then explain prophecy. No, it has to be seen in this bigger picture. We have to see it as the Bible builds its continuity. Okay, who's the bear? Next. Okay, a bear—a beast that looks like a bear. Next. The bear was raised on one side, which we illustrate the dominance of Persia over media. The first one's Babylon. The second one has to be Persia. We're just back to the continual teaching how all this fits together. Next. It had three ribs in its mouth, which illustrate the three major empires—Persia, conquered, Babylon, Egypt, and Lydia. Now, the Bible doesn't say that, by the way. I can't stand here and say that's what the Bible says, because I want to make sure you realize there are certain things you make interpretations of. That's either true or I have no idea what it means. See, I don't know. So I have to tell you, it may not be true, and if it's not, I have no idea what it means. But I do know who this bear is, and it's not modern-day Russia is the issue. Next one.

The bear was commanded to devour much flesh. Persia was—they conquered everybody they could. I mean, they went clear over into India, conquered much of the Middle East. The problem they had was with the Greeks. Those Greeks with that heavy armor and a phalanx, they could not defeat them. And when they did, it cost them so many men, like the Battle of Thermopylae. It just cost them too many men. And eventually, this little country defeated this huge empire. And so the next beast—next—the leopard—next is the kingdom of Greece. Now, the four wings illustrate the speed of Alexander the Great, and I went through that before. I'm not going to go through that now for lack of time. Next. And the four heads represent that the country or the empire of Greece was divided into four. Now, you say, well, that doesn't seem like it's very important, but it is. And we'll have to give a sermon on that. According to the Scripture, at the very end time, the world is being pulled into three major power centers. And understanding what happened to Greece will help us understand what those power centers are. So there's three major power centers that are created during the Great Tribulation. So we once again find the continuity. Every step of the way, we're looking at something that goes clear back to Nimrod, the dream of Nimrod. We're all going to work together. We're going to build a city, and we're going to take over all the villages, but not just take over all the villages. Remember what it said? He built villages all over the place. He went around and built towns for people so that they could have farming communities, and all the wealth could come in and they could trade. And guess who got a piece of the action? Babylon? They always got a piece of the action. But just like the Romans, there was this belief that what we're doing for you is good for you. In fact, all of these empires believed what they were doing. I mean, there was this insane, sometimes, insanity happening at the top of it. And there was a brutality to all these kingdoms. But there was also this belief that they were somehow bettering mankind. They were bettering mankind by creating this sort of...everybody could get...participate in this thing that's going on here. Especially the Romans. Pax Romana. Russian peace. They were bringing peace to areas of the world that hadn't had peace for generations. And they did until you did something against Rome and then they came in and burned your village to the ground. But as long as you participated, had your own religion, had your own local government, they didn't care. I mean, think about Pilate. When they brought Jesus before him, he said, that's not for me to take care of you. I didn't take that over to Sanhedrin. That's your government. That's not a Roman issue. That has nothing to do with Roman law. Take it over there. You people figure out what to do with this man. Why would he say that? Because I'm not going to interfere with your government as long as you do what we want. Oh, by the way, there's 5,000 Roman soldiers in Caesarea in case you don't do what we want. Otherwise, everybody's at peace, everything's great, and we hope everybody makes money.

So let's look at what's... there's so many differences, though, between these four empires, especially in culture. The Babylonian Empire would seem strange to us. The culture would seem incredibly strange. As would the Persian. The Persian Empire in many ways was more oriental than it was Western. But the Greek Empire we would understand because so much of our civilization comes from Greece. The Roman Empire we actually understand because there's much of our culture that comes from Rome. And if you don't believe that, just go drive through the city of Washington, D.C. and notice that most of the original buildings built there are built like Greek and Roman buildings. And that's because of the belief that Greek philosophy and the Greeks are the ones who came up with democracy. So they're the ones we're modeling our country after. And in England they thought that at the time, too, that they were carrying on Western civilization. Western civilization comes from the Greeks and Romans. And one other thing, fortunately for us in this country, there was one other factor that changed the trajectory of that for a while. That was the Bible. The Bible influenced the development of Western civilization to a certain degree. But that's being lost. And besides, even with the Bible, Western civilization has not followed God in any long-term real way. I mean, the United States has never converted. Never converted. So what are some of the ways these civilizations are the same? Next slide. Oh, I forgot robe. How could you forget robe? Okay, next one. Especially with the weird beast. Okay, next. Next. Okay.

My wife always says, Gary, I just don't like prophetic sermons. So I made a whole slide presentation for you. You should like this one. So I got in the car and said, how was it? She said, well, the slides were nice. But we have to have this overview, right? We have to be able to see what the Bible tells us to see, to understand. Okay, similarities between the four empires. Culturally, they could be quite different. In administration, they could be different. But there are some similarities that are real important. One is power rested in a union of state and religion. State and religion tied together in communal life. So they allowed freedom of religion as long as the king or emperor was worshipped as a demagogue. Remember, the Christians weren't persecuted because of their religion. They were persecuted because they were bad citizens. And they would refuse to worship the emperor. That's why. They thought they were weird. Just like they thought, well, the silly Jews are weird. They think there's only one God. But they didn't persecute the Jews who believed in one God. They persecuted the Jews because they refused to sacrifice to the emperor. There's no, as far as I know, organized persecution of Jews during the Republic before there were emperors in Rome. Now, there weren't any Christians because by the time Christians came along, there were already emperors. The economic systems promoted free trade. Government wealth was accumulated through taxes and warfare. You gather taxes, and when there weren't enough, you just conquer somebody else and take their taxes. The idea, though, that everybody gets to enjoy, everybody benefits from being part of this. Don't think of these four empires as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Now, that doesn't mean they can't be cruel. It doesn't mean that they killed people. They're evil places. But they made sense to a lot of people, too. A lot of people benefited from being part of Babylon. A lot of people benefited from being part of Persia. Greece just went around a planted culture. They never even tried to actually govern their empire. Many people liked Rome because it gave them some good things in life. There's a great deception to this evil. There's a great deception to this evil. Next, at the height of their power, all four empires had a dominating military, both in training and technology, not always in numbers, although at times even in numbers, they had a dominating military. And all four empires participated in making slaves of people who opposed them. That's really important to understand. All four of these empires had these things in common. One is, you oppose us, we enslave you. Well, those who we don't kill, we will enslave you. Why? Well, if we can't make money off of you one way, we'll make money off of you in another way. We'll be slaves.

Now, there's other things too, but I picked these four because they tell us something. Go back one. No, back, back. Yeah, back. There we go. So you have to have a union of state and religion. Now, understand, this union never at times didn't get along at all. In Babylon, there was always tension because, you know, they ended up... the temples of the different gods got so rich, they were in competition with the government for money. And the same thing happened in Rome after... now, this is very interesting. Rome never enforced a single religion until after there were Catholic emperors. Before that, you could believe anything as long as you worshipped the emperor.

After there were Catholic emperors, you didn't worship the emperor, but you couldn't worship have any other religion either, including another form of Christianity. So actually, the Christian emperors over Rome were much more strict about religion in some ways than the pagan ones were. But when you look through the attempts to resurrect the Roman Empire... remember I talked about before that during that period of two legs, there's a constant attempt to resurrect that empire. Justinian, Charlemagne, I mean, there's all these attempts to do that.

Adolf Hitler and Mussolini tried in a very just violent evil way. There's all these ways that they attempted to do that. None of them were very nice. There's nothing good about it, even though they claim to be Christian. There was always a battle between the Catholic Church and the civil government.

There has always been... in fact, there's been wars between the Catholic Church and the civil government. The Catholic Church plays a part in this because we know that from Revelation 17. There were wars between them. The Catholic Church used to have an army, by the way. Or they would call on a nation to help them, and they would go lead that army out against another European army.

That happened all the time in the Middle Ages, constantly. And many times they didn't have any power because some... like the Holy Roman Empire, the German just said, We're in charge now. We've set up an empire, and we decide who the Pope is. So after their empire took over, the first Pope was named Bruno, which isn't exactly a Latin name. It's a German name. Kicked out the Pope, put in Bruno. So they fought each other. There's always this tension between them. And of course, these economic systems... well, we won't...

I'm going to run out of time. Okay. Let's go on now. This is just covering what we've covered. Next slide. Okay. Revelation 13. Let's go to Revelation 13 and let me read a couple verses here. Any questions? I feel like... any questions? I know this is a lot to digest, and if I hadn't covered this... because what I'm hoping is by doing this, your memory will start remembering some of these things that we've covered.

Because I want to talk about the three centers of power during the tribulation at some time here in the next few months, but I sort of got to do this first. Verse 1. Then I stood at the sand of the sea, and I saw the beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on its horns ten crowns, and on its heads a blasphemous name. Now the beast which I saw... now look at this... was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, his mouth were like the mouth of a lion, and the dragon gave him power.

Do those three animals seem like... you've heard of them before? We just looked in Daniel 7, right? And this was a description of the first three empires. This is that fourth empire. If it is not the fourth empire, what is the empire of Revelation 13? In all honesty, I don't know. There is one major Protestant religious group that says it's the United States. That this is a prophecy about the United States. If I look at this and say, wait a minute, this has to be some attempt to resurrect the Roman Empire.

Because why? It's the fourth empire that keeps trying to come back until the very end, and it never really right comes together. It has to come together. It doesn't last very long. Of all these empires, the last resurrection of the Roman Empire lasts the shortest.

It doesn't last three and a half years. That's it. It falls apart and is involved in a world war that's going to destroy the world, and it just falls apart. And Christ comes back. So this tells us about how the final beast power has components of all the other empires. And if you read through chapter 13, it has a political leader and a religious leader. All the other ones were religion and the emperor were tied together. You couldn't separate them. Next. The religious leader... well, you could. They fought each other, but what I mean is they never could exist completely one without the other.

The religious leader causes the people to worship the political leader. That's what Revelation 13, it talks about that in 1 Thessalonians 2. What it tells us. The religious leader causes people to worship the political leader.

Once again, the other three empires, they all did that. Because the religious or the political leader is a personal representative of God. What's interesting is in Western Europe, all the kings who tried to resurrect the Roman Empire said they were the personal representative of God. And the pope figured out how to stop that. He started crowning them. And once he crowned them, he said, nope, I'm the personal representative of God. And they had lost their ability to say it. In Eastern Europe, in the Eastern Empire until 1451, the emperor was the personal representative of God. And the patriarch of the Orthodox Church was not. That is why the Patriarch of Russia is supporting Mr. Putin. I think they're back to the old concept. He's the personal representative of God, not me. Because that's how the Orthodox Church was. The emperor is the representative of God. And I'm here to support him. You read Revelation 13. That's exactly what happens. The religious leader, who will be the leader of a Christian-type religion. We know that because it says so in Revelation. He will have horns like a lamb, speak like the dragon. He looks like a Christian church. But he's also going to not shut down all of the churches or other religions. He's going to try to work them together. And there will be some kind of acceptance as this emperor. And it will make sense at the time to a lot of people. He's God's personal representative on this earth. He's come to save us. The economic system will require submission to the state to participate in the economic system.

Babylon. I can't say Greece was like that. They weren't organized enough. Persia, Babylon. Once again, by the way, you could be a total atheist in Babylon or Rome or Persia. They didn't care. You just had to pretend to worship the emperor. That's it. They actually begged Christians, don't worship the emperor. Just pretend to worship him. There were judges that begged. Then I don't have to punish you. Come on, I'm an atheist myself. I don't really believe he's divine. Just pretend to. No one cared if you just pretended. Bob over here is pretending. If I think of a Latin name, I'll use that instead of Bob. The empire involves an economic system that requires submission to the state. Then we get to Revelation 17. Let's get to Revelation 17. I've done all this to read these verses. We've done all this for...oh, I still might end in 55 minutes.

Just to cover this. Now one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked to me, saying to me, Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth commit fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication. We know that throughout the scripture, God refers to his true people as a chaste virgin. The church is called a chaste virgin. He refers to corrupt pagan religion as a harlot. That's common. He accused ancient Israel, you've prostituted yourself by going after your foreign gods. He told Judah the same thing. So this is a false church. But what's interesting in this false church is that the kings of the earth committed fornication and the inhabitants of the earth...what happens here... Let's just briefly go back to a sermon I gave not too long ago on the beginning of sorrows. That the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the beginning of sorrows that's in the Sermon on the Mount, that happens. 25% of the earth dies through war and famine and disease epidemics and all the things that's going to be happening. And at that point is when the beast power comes up. It comes up because of the emergency that's going on. And it says the ten kings give their power to the beast, but for a season. This season is even a long-term contract. It's just, okay, we all agree to do this. And they get control of the world economy and they fight some wars. We know that. They fight some terrible wars and they get a hold and start controlling the world economy. They don't control it entirely, but they bring trade back. Everybody's happy because, oh, trade's going on. There's food coming in. I got my Cheetos and my beer. This isn't such a bad guy.

So he carried me away, John says, in his 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. Okay, so we're back to the beast of Revelation 13. The political power, written by the religious power. They have to work in conjunction. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and adored with gold and precious stones and pearls, having on her hand a golden cup, or 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. 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 was marveled with great amazement. Okay, we begin to see then what happens here. In this emergency, a group forms to save the world from the mess it's in. And when they do, it's a combination of religious and political powers. And you can participate, and your life can maybe be saved from what's going on around you. But if you want medical help, if you want food for the table, if you want a job, you have to participate in the worship of the demigod, this emperor. Because you read Revelation 13, that's exactly what it says. It's quite obvious what it says. So that's what has to happen. That's unbelievable to us. But remember, and that's what Paul said in 1 Thessalonians. He will sit in the temple of God as God. In other words, he's going to claim some kind of divinity. Somehow God is using him, and there will be great miracles. Remember that? Great miracles that if it was even possible, the elect would be deceived. Because you know why? It looks like he's saving the world from the mess that has happened, the mess that it's gone into. And we now have the very dream of Nimrod happening. And we just bring everybody together. We all love each other. We all work together. And everybody will have a better life. And if you don't do what we want, if you resist us, especially in this religious sense, because remember the Mark of the Beast has to do with religion. If you resist us in this religious sense, you can't participate in the economic system. I guarantee you, if you resist them in the military sense, they will devastate your country and make you into slaves, because that's what all the other ones did. But if you participate, hey, I get to keep my house. But remember, this is going to be happening during a deteriorating world. It never really works. It never really works.

You know, the great Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, where this really took off. Nimrod tried it, but it didn't work. It lasted not very long at all. That great idea keeps popping up throughout the Western world. Through Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, through the constant attempts by Western civilization to bring it back around. There is one more time that's going to happen. There's going to be one more time where there's going to be an attempt to live the dream of Nimrod, who stood against God and said, we can do this ourselves. We know how this works. We can do this.

But you know what? It's going to fail. And God's people will be taken out of it. And God's people will be taken care of. That's a whole other sermon. Well, I say some. Some of us may have to be martyred, but that's happened all through history. That can happen tomorrow, too.

But there is something to remember in all this. Instead of living in fear of this, we need to simply live every day thanking God for today. Today is the day God's given to you. Today is the day God's given to you. I was walking the other day, and my neighbor came by and said, it's a beautiful day. And I said, it's the day that was given to us. And he literally stopped, and he said, that's right. It is. It was the day that was given to us. I said, yeah. Tomorrow you may not have one, so get the most out of this one, because this is the day God gave to you. And he smiled and walked on.

God has given you and I this day, and all the blessings of it, and the knowledge of Him, the ability to have a relationship with Him, the ability to be part of a congregation. He's given that to us today. Do you realize all that could be taken away from us sometime in our lifetime? But that doesn't matter, does it? Today matters. Because if we stay right with God today, and we stay focused today, we'll know those things when they happen. We'll weather those things when they happen. God will help us through whatever His decision is when they happen. And we will also know this, a command that we're given in the Scripture about this coming Babylon, where God says to His people, Come out of her, my people.