Babylon of Revelation 17-18

I mean, all the apostles would have spoken Aramaic, right? And some Hebrew, and some Greek. And the only way you could reach people all over the Roman Empire was through Greek. And the reason why is the Romans were so enamored with the Greeks. I mean, when they conquered Greece, it was like, wow! They have architecture, and they have literature, and they have carvings. And they, I mean, they're art. They have philosophers. See what they did? They stole all of it and made it Roman. There wasn't a single household of any wealth. I mean, we're talking about middle class. Even poor people in Rome had slaves. Now, it wasn't like in the United States where slavery was based on race. It was based on, if we conquered you, the Romans said, well, we can make you slaves. It was sort of equal opportunity slavery. They just made slaves of everybody. And everybody had a Greek slave. You know what? They teach their children Greek culture. Greek culture became the foundation of the Western world. You and I have things we do that comes from Greek culture. We don't even know it. Things like education system for everybody. Sports. Organized sports? That's Greek. Where do you think the Olympics came from? So, the Hellenization of Europe is very important, and it plays a huge part in the Bible. That's another subject. When I cover at ABC, I teach a class on early church history, and we go through the effects of Greek culture on the world at the time of the Bible. It's huge. We have to understand that if we're going to understand any parts of the Bible. Rome comes along, and of course, Greece wasn't hard to defeat because their army wasn't very big, and the Romans figured out the best way to attack a phalanx was to attack it from the rear because you can't turn guys around when they're carrying 20-foot spears. So, the phalanx collapsed. The new technology of warfare that lasted for quite a while was collapsed, and you have Rome. This is where some people say it's not Rome. The problem is, if we're going through four successive empires, and the first one is Nebuchadnezzar, which Daniel said God said, then it has to be Rome. It has to be Rome. Rome now spread the other way. Rome never conquered Persia. They never conquered Persia. They fought them for hundreds of years. They never took Germany. To them, it wasn't worth the trouble. The Germans were just... no matter if you defeated them, the next tribe just fought just as hard. The one thing the Romans said about the Germans was they're big. The average person in the Mediterranean was about 5'6". The average German was about 5'10".

And they were big. They wouldn't give up. They'd fight to the death. And once you killed them, you had to fight their women and children because they'd all fight to the death. And it's like, who wants to fight these people? Besides, they smell bad.

The reason they smell bad is because they wear animal clothing and they cook their meat in fat. And then they use the fat to put on their long hair. And they said, those people are weird.

Roman-German relationships are an interesting subject.

Now, this is really not the complete empire. The empire went up here into Gaul, which is France.

Of course, it took all of Spain, and that's what that is right there. Spain and Portugal. It went up in what is now modern-day Belgium. And much of England was all conquered by the Romans. Adrian built a wall across England because they said the Picts and the Irish weren't worth fighting. So they just built a wall all the way across.

And this is the most powerful empire the ancient world ever knew. They, once again, used Greek culture. And then the Romans were really good at developing technology and developing a road system. They built a road system all over the world. I mean, when I'm talking about the world here, because I'm talking about Western world. They didn't go as far as Persia or India.

So they built... they had free trade.

Now, they worried about their taxes. But unlike the other empires, it's like, let's just promote free trade. Everybody trade. Everybody... I mean, any economy is boomed. They had free trade all over the place.

You could buy or sell anything throughout the Roman Empire. They had a monetary system. The monetary system would eventually collapse because of inflation, because they didn't know what inflation was. But that's another story.

They had engineering. I mean, there are aqueducts and bridges and buildings that the Romans built 3,000 or 2,500 years ago that still exist today.

They still exist today. They were just geniuses. But you know what really kept that empire together? The Roman legions.

They built an army that was technologically and training-wise. Because if you were in the Roman army, you were in there for 20 years.

So you learned how to fight. And they learned how to fight as units. And there's a few occasions where a German army or a Hannibal with the Carthaginians would destroy a Roman army. You know what the Romans would do?

Retrain, create new technology, and go out on the beach the next time. They just wouldn't give up. And they maintained this power in the world.

And Rome became the greatest city on the earth.

Jesus was, of course, born during the Roman Empire. In 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

The Roman Empire weakened over time.

And they were attacked by Germanic tribes that came down from what is now Germany.

And it fell in 476. Now, I want to talk about this a minute because you all learned that in history.

But there's something else that happened here that has to do with the Book of Revelation.

There's something else that happened.

In the early 300s, an emperor comes along named Constantine.

Christianity... What was Christianity like at the end of the first century?

Read Revelation 2 and 3. Now, we know that Revelation 2 and 3 has prophetic meaning. But there were 7 churches that existed in Asia Minor at that time. I mean, the letter of Revelation was sent to all of them. So if you just set the prophetic meaning aside for a minute and look at the reality of it, you have 7 churches that have all developed differently, don't you? They're all close to each other.

One of them, he says, you've just got all kinds of pagan doctrines in it. So you have 7 churches during the life of John that he sends the Book of Revelation to, and they all are developed differently. Over the next 200 years, Christianity would develop into hundreds of different groups. Now, you say, well, that's weird. Well, what about today? You and I live in a country where, you know, you're Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist or Mormon, right?

Or Jehovah's Witness, seven-day Adventist. We literally have thousands of different groups. All of them saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. Over the next 200 years, Christianity fragmented into dozens and dozens of little groups, all fighting. When I say fighting, I don't mean like today where we argue. I mean, they would form mobs and go out and fight in the streets. And then sometimes the mobs are Jews or mobs of pagans would get involved, and everybody seemed to fight a lot. Constantine comes along.

Constantine says, I believe in this God. Now, Constantine's involved in the Civil War. He's a general. There were civil wars in Rome all the time. Who's going to be in charge? So there's a civil war going on. Constantine calls his army together. Most of them believe in Mithra. The Roman army worshiped Mithra. Others worshiped the sun god, basically. And he comes along and says, we're going to win this battle. We're going to win this battle because the God of the Christians came and told me we were.

So I want you to put you to this special sign on your shields. And they marched out the next day, and they won. To everyone's surprise, Constantine won. So Constantine said, the Christian God was on my side. So he's the biggest, baddest God. Now he continued to have the sun god on the back of his coins. Okay. There's no proof that he gave up belief in all the gods.

He just believed this one was the best God, which was, you know, the way pagans thought. Over time, he did believe that this was the only God. But in a very interesting way, he would not be baptized. Because as an emperor, he would have to do very nasty things. And he knew God would be mad at him. So if he wasn't baptized, he could get away with it. Like when he killed his wife and things like that. So Constantine refuses baptism.

But Constantine now says, you know what? Christians shouldn't be persecuted anymore. But I want you to understand, Christians are a very tiny group inside the Roman Empire. They're very tiny, and there's hundreds of them fighting. You know, different groups. So he becomes now the positive Maximus, because, you know, the emperor is in charge of all religions.

So he's the positive Maximus over Christianity, as well as all the other religions. And he says, you people fight too much, we've got to stop this. So he says, get all the ministers together, and let's solve this problem. Well, they all got together, and all they did was fight. So he comes along and says, what are the biggest issues?

Well, he ended up losing almost all the Christians in North Africa, because he disagreed with them over an issue, and then they got mad at him and said, okay, we're not going to be part of the empire anymore. Well, they couldn't leave the empire, but, you know, he couldn't go... Without killing them, a new Christianity formed. A new Christianity started to form in Asia Minor, in the eastern part of the empire.

Because, well, we don't agree with what you're saying. One group was, we're going to keep the Passover no matter what. We don't believe in this Easter thing. Okay? So they started to form. So finally he got everybody together, and they said, what are the biggest things? We're fighting over the nature of God.

He said, okay, I'm calling everybody together. He got up, and they created a solution. And he, as the emperor, said, this is now the solution.

You've heard it as the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed was officially put into action by a half-pagan, non-baptized emperor, who told the Catholic Church this is what we're going to do. Because right now it's starting to become the Catholic Church. Before then, which is a bunch of churches, but now it's the universal Church. And now you have something different happening, in that Rome had always been freedom of religion, just like the others. It's just our gods are the biggest, baddest gods. But now it's like, well, okay, my god is the biggest, baddest god, but you can stay pagans, but we don't like it. Within a couple generations, because Christianity kept fragmenting, and fragmenting, I tell you how bad it was, they managed to convert a bunch of Germans.

So when the Goths took Rome, the first time it was sacked in 410, the Goths who took Rome were Aryan Christians.

In other words, they didn't believe in the Trinity, and the people defending the were all Trinitarians. But they all believed in Jesus Christ, they all said they believed in the God of the Bible, and so there was Christians finding Christians. You know, you think of the German barbarians, you know, well, by the time they got there, they all were quote-unquote Christians. So they can't bring—once again, the whole empire's in a mess, because Christians finding Christians. So towards the end of the 300s, Theodosius comes along, the first, Theodosius the First, and says, we're going to stop this, I simply outlaw paganism, and I outlaw any form of Christianity that I don't say is okay. Boom! And it was now determined by a Roman emperor what would be believed by Christians. And if you didn't like it, I have legions.

By the end of the 300s, something's happened. The beast and the harlot are doing away with religious freedom. I say, weird thing, under pagans you had religious freedom. You know, do you believe whatever you want? I mean, look in the Bible, where the people would invade Israel and say, we're afraid of the God of Israel.

Now, they didn't believe the God of Israel had any power outside of Israel. The Romans believed in Yahweh. They gave all kinds of special rights to the Jews. They didn't even have to pay taxes from their temple tax, from what was collected there. They didn't have to pay taxes on it. Because we don't want to make Yahweh mad, because then we may have to have to fight Jews, and we don't have to fight Jews. Even the Roman emperors at times, even the pagan ones, couldn't figure out why they were persecuting Christians. They would do it because they were told to.

There's an interesting letter around 112 to Trajan from a Roman governor saying, you know, I took a couple of their women, they said they were deaconesses, which I know what that means, and I tortured them. And here's what I found out. They meet together on some day of the week before sunup, they hide out from us, and they sing a hymn to this Christ character, which they think somehow is God, and then they receive messages on why they shouldn't steal, shouldn't lie, shouldn't murder, and he says, why are we persecuting these people?

They seem like nice folks. And Trajan writes back, now here's the emperor and says, I'm not sure why either, but it's just we've always done it. So just sort of let him alone, you know? They don't even know why they're persecuting them. Something has changed. You have a religious system and a government working together to enforce a lack of religious freedom.

I'll tell you how far it went. Theodosius said that Christians couldn't even talk about certain subjects publicly or they would be arrested. So he took away freedom of speech, which basically the Romans, unless you said something bad against the emperor, they didn't care what you say. Just pay your taxes. They don't even want to pay your taxes. Like everybody make money and we're happy. So something's changed. Rome fell. When Rome fell in the West, now remember, there's two, remember that statue has two parts?

The Roman Empire, beginning with Diocletian, which was before Constantine, Diocletian and Constantine divided it into two parts, the East and the West. We're talking about in 476, the West fell, the East did not. The Eastern Roman Empire lasted up until the 1400s. But a different religion formed there. Instead of Catholicism, they became what is known as the Eastern Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox, the Syrian Orthodox. Talk to any of them and they'll tell you, we're not Catholic, we have serious disagreements with Catholics.

So they all get excommunicated by the Pope. And their patriarch said, that's okay, can we excommunicate you too? And so they had been excommunicated to each other for over a thousand years. Recently the Pope and the Patriarch got together and said, maybe we shouldn't condemn each other to purgatory. Let's back off of this a little bit. So now, I don't know what they're doing, but they don't go to purgatory.

Maybe they go to purgatory. But we won't send you to hell. So they've sort of come together. So this is our template. And we have this history that takes place after the Roman Empire forms. And it's split in two. It's split in two. And you have a different religious formation that literally is enforcing. Now, Nebuchadnezzar forced his religion on Daniel, didn't he? We heard about that today. But remember, it's only because he went against him. You can pray to your God whenever you want.

It's just you have to do this when I tell you. That's because I'm a semi-divine person. Understand? One of the reasons that the Romans persecuted Christians so much is they were atheists. There's all these gods, and they keep saying, just Jesus guy is somehow the son of God, and we killed him. So I guess they don't believe in any god. Besides, they get together once a year, and they kill somebody, and they drink his blood, and they eat his body. They're cannibals. Early Christians were considered cannibals. My Romans. Yeah, I mean, they just didn't understand them.

So what you have now is something different. And then the Roman Empire falls. And you know what all that's left? In the West? When I say the West, we're talking about Italy, France, Spain, a little part of Germany, Belgium, all of North Africa, or most of North Africa, Asia Minor, which is now Turkey. You know what's left after the Roman Empire falls? Catholicism. It's the only glue that holds people together. It's it. It's the only people that are literate within 200 years. Within 200 years, literacy disappears from what had been the Roman Empire, except for Catholic leaders.

That's very important, because all through the Middle Ages, European culture is a mixture of ancient Roman culture, Germanic culture, because they had conquered all of Europe, and Catholicism. And they keep trying to resurrect the Roman Empire. They keep trying to reform it, put it back together. Even in the East, they're trying to put it back together. I mean, haven't you ever heard of the nation of Romania? Romania? They're trying to put it back together.

And nobody can seem to get it back together, because they're either fighting each other, or Muslims, or, you know, Vikings. The Vikings almost destroyed the Eastern Empire. So what do we do now? We have our template. There's another template, and this is important. More than 50 years after King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue, Daniel had a vision of four great beasts from the sea.

A lion with an eagle's wings, a bear, a leopard, and a terrifying, powerful beast. Four. How many did we have in the first one? Four. If I don't use, if we don't use Daniel 2 and lay this on top of it, then I have no idea what this means, except for one scripture in Daniel 8 that talks about Greece and Persia.

Ah! Greece and Persia. Well, I mean, I'm sorry. Persia and Greece. So now, okay, they get mentioned before they conquer Babylon, or before Greece conquers Persia. So we have these four beasts.

We have the lion. Daniel's vision of the four beasts from the sea. The first beast is a lion with eagle's wings. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, his kingdom was compared in the Bible to a lion and to an eagle. What's very interesting are these kinds of things. They're actually carvings into the walls of ancient Babylon. And it's lions with eagles' wings. This is common among the Assyrians, too. The Babylonians and Assyrians have a very similar culture. Then you have the bear. And you have this bear, this beast that looks like a bear. It's raised on one side, which probably illustrates the dominance of Persia over media. That's sort of a speculation on that. It had three ribs in its mouth.

Persia did destroy three other empires, Babylon, Egypt, and Lydia. The bear was commanded to devour much flesh, which Persia did. It conquered the entire ancient world as we know it. Like I said, even part of it over into India. They didn't get into far west Europe, but they conquered the fertile crescent where most people lived at the time. Then you have a leopard. We have the leopard with four heads, four wings representing the kingdom of Greece. Once again, it would take us too much time to go through why.

It's got four wings and four heads, but it's the Greek empire after Alexandria split into four parts. And Alexander was so quick. He conquered the known world so quickly. He was in his early 30s when he died. He was in his 20s when he was conquering the world. It was split into four parts. I'm just going to say something about these four parts. Egypt was under the Ptolemies. I wish I had more time to go through this. They maintained control over Egypt for centuries. We all know of Cleopatra. Actually, she wasn't the first Cleopatra, but the Cleopatra of fame who was with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. She was an Egyptian. She was Greek.

The Ptolemies were still ruling then. She was the last of the Greek rulers. I think she was Cleopatra IV. Don't quote me on that. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt for a long, long time before the Romans finally came. I have to tell you about this beast. When I got to the Roman Empire, I gave this a number of years ago. I had this fearsome beast. Kim said, it scared all the children. This one looks like a Muppet. It's not quite as bad, but I still wanted something that was a little fearsome here. Daniel's vision of a terrifying beast with ten horns.

Interesting enough, the statue...what was it? The statue. Feet with ten toes. Ten toes, ten horns. We're putting this on top of this. This must be talking about the same things. There are ten kings, which the ten toes are called ten kings. The beast will persecute the saints. Eventually, the terrifying beast will be destroyed by the ancient of days.

This is very important because we know through this, in Daniel 2, that statue was destroyed by the kingdom of God. In Daniel 7, these seven beasts are destroyed by the kingdom of God. After seeing the vision of the four beasts in the sea, Daniel saw one like the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. And of course, Jesus approaches...well, we know Jesus.

This man approaches the ancient of days, who was the father, and he's led into his presence. And he's given authority, glory, and sovereign power over all peoples and nations and languages. So this gives us two templates. Are you with me so far? Have I lost you? Okay. There's nothing new here. There's nothing new here. And I better see where I am in my notes. Okay, let's go to Revelation 13. Here's where we make an evaluation and an interpretation, which we have done for 80 years in our background.

Because here we have Revelation 13.1. John says, If all I had was the book of Revelation, who is that? And my answer would be, I have no idea. I honestly don't. Who would that be? And it's interesting because I've read where there's been people throughout the last thousand years have tried to identify that. And usually it's identified by someone or some kingdom that's then at their time. So, well, that must be this. Well, then they die off. And 200 years later someone else says, no, it must be this. But now that we have used Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 as our templates, by the time Revelation was written, remember, when you read anything in the Bible, the first thing you need to ask is, what did it mean to the original audience?

Here's what we do. What does it mean to me? First of all, what did it mean to the people who read it? Now I can discern what God is trying to teach me. When the people who read this, they knew about Daniel 2. In fact, that's one of the reasons why some of the Jews were expecting for the Messiah to come when Jesus was walking around. He's supposed to come during the fourth empire. So even they at that time could have thought maybe that was going to happen.

If you lived at this time and you look back at Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, three of the empires have already come and gone. You're living in the time of the fourth one. So you're saying, this is going to happen and they're probably thinking it's going to happen in their lifetime. And then they would find out, no, it's going to happen in the future. Just like I think throughout the centuries most Christians have believed, this is going to happen in my lifetime.

I think we're supposed to. Because something is going to happen. I think it's going to happen in our lifetime. I really do. And if it doesn't, when I'm dying, I'm going to look at anybody around me and say, you better be ready because it's happening in your lifetime. Because it's going to happen. But notice, here's something very interesting. What are the qualities of this horrible beast that rise up out of the sea?

He was like a leopard, like a bear, and like a lion. What did we see? The first three of the beasts in Daniel 7? What were they? A lion, a bear, and a leopard. This fourth beast is going to have qualities of all of them. And of course, the Roman Empire did have qualities of all of them.

Like Babylon, they collected taxes from everybody. And the emperor was sort of semi-divine. Although they sort of figured out he wasn't because every once in a while the army would kill him and put somebody else in power. But, you know, he had to keep this divinity thing up. They were like Persia in that they tried to administrate a kingdom, I mean an empire, which they did very well, by the way.

They administrated it very well, especially with this economic system they had. It was like the Greek Empire in a lot of ways because they had adopted Greek culture. They had all the elements of all those as part of who they were. So here we have the same components. The same components. Now let's go to...

When we see this, I'm trying to cut things out.

There's another beast here. Let's go down and look at this other beast. Let's go down to verse 11. Now we have something different than any of the other prophecies. We have another beast that these two beasts are working together. You don't see that in the head of gold or silver or bronze. It's not even mentioned that the fourth empire would be split in two. It's not mentioned about the other beasts. Well, in Daniel there is something in there about a religious leader that's going to be part of that fourth empire. And here we see, Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth. He had two horns, like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. Who is the most famous lamb in the Bible? This appears to be Christian but speaks as Satan.

And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence and causes the earth and those who dwell on it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he performs great signs that he even makes fire to come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. And he's to see those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived.

Once again, I'm not going through all the details. What you're seeing here is that, and of course they received this mark, this mark on their forehead of 666. You have a beast that's causing people to worship the other beast. It's a religious system. And then we can go to Thessalonians, where Paul talks about the man of sin that makes people worship another person.

A religious system and a political economic system that works together. This is what we have that's so different then. We look at this Revelation 13, it's like, okay, this is the fourth beast, we get it, but there's another one. And this one is causing people to worship. When you go through Revelation 13, Revelation 17 and 18, what you see is this system that forms, does a couple of things. One thing it does is it brings together different political systems from all over the world.

Now remember, it is a revival of the fourth empire. It's not a fifth empire. It's part of the fourth empire. Part of the east, part of the west. It doesn't really work well because it says the feet, which have ten toes, which are ten kings. Just like there's ten kings in Daniel 7. It doesn't mix together because it's like clay and iron.

It's strong and weak. Which if you try to unite Europe today, that's exactly what it is. Now, the beast power, if it is a revival of the Roman Empire, it's not going to be Islam. And it's not going to be the United States. And it's not going to be some revival of the USSR, although Russia could be part of this because parts of Russia were part of the old Roman Empire.

It's not going to be China. It's going to be the Roman Empire. This is how we've come to this conclusion. Because we've put Daniel 2, Daniel 7, and we've put Revelation 13, and we've stacked them on top of each other. And they all seem to be talking about the same thing. And as this comes together, and people say, what happens to the United States? There's a couple options. One, the United States simply gets absorbed into the beast. Because there are going to be absorbing countries all over the place into the beast. Or it gets destroyed by the beast. Or it manages to destroy itself, which sometimes I think that's the scenario that's going to work out.

We'll just destroy ourselves. But we're not a major player here except under the control of whatever the beast does. So the United States is either going to be absorbed into the beast, or even if we destroy ourselves, we'll come under their control. The resources here will be used. And they bring all peoples and all religions together. This is an ecumenical movement. It's an ecumenical movement. Catholicism, during the Middle Ages, enforced the religion on Europe. The First Crusade wasn't against the Muslims. It was against an alternative form of Christianity that formed inside of France.

And they killed them. When the First Reformers, what we call the Protestant Reformation, stood up against the Catholic Church, they were killed. The only reason Martin Luther wasn't killed was because they put out a contract on him.

Pope put out a contract on him. The only reason Martin Luther wasn't killed in the 1500s is because enough German princes got together and said, you can't have him. He's German, and that's more important to me than Catholic. And the Pope didn't particularly want to have a war on his hands with part of Germany, so he backed out. And that started to break their power.

It broke their power. What happened inside Europe then was nations formed. Very distinct, separate nations formed. And that's what we have today. But there's still this attempt in Europe to bring it back together. And Europe is under attack from Islam. They're under attack from economic reasons. Europe is...we were in Europe doing some Beyond Today programs last July. Well, a year ago. And talking to people in Germany about the state of Europe is very interesting.

Very interesting. In France, it's very... The French could become violent against Muslims very quickly. The French are just...it's illegal to... They passed a law. It's illegal to wear a burqa in public, in France. You can in the Muslim community, but you can't leave it, we'll arrest you.

So what's happening, the Muslims are getting forced into certain areas. They're just...they don't...you know... In the East, Poland has said, we won't take any more. Can't come in here any more. There is a...something brewing, and they don't even know how to describe it. And of course, President Trump's saying, you guys gotta take care of yourselves more often now, I'm not gonna take care of you. It's like, okay, then we're gonna have to form an army.

A European army. And we're gonna have to take care of ourselves, we're gonna have to form a European army. We have no choice. So they're talking about that over there. That's where we...what are we gonna do? When the Russians...they fear the Russians. They fear Putin. They feel that he's another Stalin, just pretending to be something else. So they fear him. Especially if you're Polish, or Ukrainian, or Romanian, or you're from Hungary. You fear him. He wants his pieces of his empire back. And so, the trauma and the things they're going through over there are a little different than what we understand.

I'm only saying that it's because the formation of this beast could happen. It hasn't happened yet. It could happen. It's gonna happen tomorrow. But there are elements of it that are coming. This is what we've always believed. We still believe this. This is the conclusion of 80 years going clear back to the 1930s. That this is what's gonna happen. I don't see...I haven't seen anything that makes me believe differently. Even the rise of Islam. In fact, the rise of Islam helped Europe form in the Middle Ages because they had to fight this common foe.

And so it helped formulate the concept of Europe, you know, that we all sort of worked together. That happened because of Islam. It already happened a thousand years ago. So that could be repeated all over again. So let's go back now to Revelation 17.

There's one last thing I want to bring up.

And that's in verse, let me see.

Verse 9. It's talking about the woman. It's talking about the woman. Here's the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits.

That means nothing to us. But what did it mean to the people who read it?

To the people who read that for the first time, there was one city in the entire known world, the Western world, that was called the City of Seven Hills. Only one. Now there's lots of cities. I think Cincinnati's called the City of Seven Hills today. That's not Cincinnati, okay?

There was only one city, and it was known. In fact, it was simply called sometimes, the City of Seven Hills. Anyone know what it was?

Rome.

So what did it mean to those people? Everybody who read that, when it got that letter from John, would have said, oh, he's talking about Rome.

Now, it is true, this is interesting, Constantinople, when Constantine said, I want to build a new second capital, and he went over and built Constantinople, which survived for a thousand years after Rome fell, because it was the new Rome. It also had seven hills. The east and the west were both connected by cities with seven hills. It's Istanbul today.

And that was Constantinople up until the late 1400s.

We think the Roman Empire fell in 479, and the truth is the Roman Empire didn't fall until Columbus was searching out over here.

It's just the east part of it continued on in bits and pieces before it finally fell to a Muslim army.

There is only one religious group that could create an ecumenical system. In other words, all religions working together.

If you notice this new pope, and I'm not saying he's the beast, I'm just saying he's attempting to do something which could create a series of events that maybe two or three popes from now would do. So I'm not, I'm not, I don't say, well this pope is this, or whatever. I'm saying you look at trends. He's trying desperately to bring religions together, to work together, to bring peace on earth.

He's reached out to the Eastern Orthodox. They've sort of accepted a little bit. He's reached out to Protestants, and a lot of Protestants have accepted it. One major evangelical preacher just said, sometime last year, I can't remember what it was, he said, there is no longer a Protestant church because we are returning to the Mother Church.

Now, a hundred years ago, he's a Baptist. A hundred years ago, guess what all Baptists believe, a hundred years ago? What we went through just now. That was core Baptist teaching a hundred years ago. It's not anymore. It's not anymore.

So, we are watching a Europe that's becoming destabilized under attack internally, externally. That has been under the protection of the United States, and that protection is being removed, and this enemy of Russia is scaring them.

And destabilize Europe, you never know what it's going to do, because why? Because it's a bunch of different peoples, all trying to work together.

But there's a lot of power there. There's almost as many people as the United States. And if you put it all together, you can create an economy as big as the United States. They have nuclear weapons.

They could field an army almost as big as ours.

So, you also have a religious system that's trying desperately to do something it's never done before. I mean, the last pope apologized to the Jews for killing them all these years. Because, you know, according to Catholic doctrine up until 1962, to kill a Jew was okay to God because they were all murderers of Jesus.

That wasn't changed until 1962. Some of you were alive in 1962.

That's why a lot of Catholics did not resist the concentration camps of World War II.

They were just killing the murderers of Jesus. It's a shame, but, you know, they deserve it.

So he apologized.

Because of the way the Jews had been treated.

So the last couple of popes were reaching out to Jews, reaching out to Protestants, Orthodox. Interesting conversation about five years ago now, with a professor in a college in San Antonio. One of the Catholic schools here in San Antonio. He said he was doing a special project. He was a professor. He said he was studying Hinduism. And the more he studied it, the more he realized that there was just so much in common between Catholicism and Hinduism. And he wanted to reach out to them.

An ecumenical movement that says, there's one true God, but all the other ways lead to the one true God.

Now, you know what's really interesting about that idea? It's Greek. If you would have lived at the time of the Roman Empire, and you were a stoic, or anybody to study Greek philosophy, you would have said, Plato said that. There is one true God that nobody really knows, and all the other gods are just ways to get to the one true God. It's not new. It's been part of the beast power for a long time.

Now, I haven't said anything that's meant very speculative, and I haven't said anything that's not history.

But I think we need to know, you know, prophecy is important, and we've got to be careful about speculating too much. That's the reason I've been pretty narrow in what I've said. But what we've covered today is the templates by which we come to the conclusion that Europe is going to be the beast and some kind of ecumenical movement in which the Catholic Church will be part of it. I don't know if the Pope will be the leader, but they'll be part of it because they're the only group that could do this. You have an ecumenical movement with the Catholic Church of Rome, and you're going to have some kind of European system which will probably either drain everything from the United States or destroy the United States or clean up after we destroy ourselves.

Or somebody else. I mean, Muslims, terrorists, can destroy our economy overnight, and we can be in a place where Europe has to come help us. Of course, they're fearful of that too. They know their economy could collapse overnight. They fear that. They fear what could happen over there. And they don't know what to do. If you're in Germany right now, they're having major conflict, riots, between people because some people say, we have to stop the Muslims, and the others say, no, we don't want the world to think we're Nazis. So we've got to treat them really, really good.

And another group's saying, but they're going to kill us. And they're having internal conflict. So, I have a couple more slides. I'm still going to end. I'm not going to go a full hour and a half, Mr. Smith. Okay. So we're back to the statue. The legs were made of iron feet, a mixture of iron clay. We just discussed this. And it would be strong and weak. That's always been Europe.

It's interesting. Last July, we filmed right at the coronation throne of Charlemagne, who established the Holy Roman Empire in the 800s. It was neither Roman nor Holy, but it was an attempt to recreate the Roman Empire. And to be there was just remarkable.

It's a rather beat-up chair now. It's nothing really to look at. But that's where he was crowned. The Kingdom would be divided Kingdom, different from the others, both strong and weak, like iron is strong and clay is brittle. The Kingdom would have a mixture of people that would not be united. Understand something about the beast power. How long does it last? Anybody? Three and a half years. It doesn't last very long. Okay. It can't work. I mean, Christ is coming back too, but the whole thing collapses. If you read 17 and 18, it starts to destroy itself. It just can't work. But the world will become so chaotic that people will follow the beast power because this is the only hope they have. It's all they have. The chaos, the earth, what's facing in the tribulation, the chaos is beyond understanding. Because it's going to be on a global scale. The statue is destroyed, but what we said was the Kingdom of God. Christ comes back. Just like when we went through Daniel 7, the Son of Man comes. The rest of the statue breaks into pieces because there's all these elements. There's a little bit of Babylon, a little bit of Greece, a little bit of Persia, all in Rome. They're all mixed together here. In fact, there literally will be Greeks. Some of these people are going to be mixed into this. The stone that struck the statue became a great mountain that fills the whole earth. This is what we're celebrating now. We don't have to worry. We can feel anxiety sometimes, worry about the things that may come. But you know, this is what we're celebrating. This is what God wants us to zero in on. The Christ thing is coming back to stop us, to stop humanity from destroying itself. It's going to be right on the brink of mass suicide when Christ comes back. Because He says, if I don't come back now, remember He says it in Matthew 24, if I don't come back at this point, nobody will survive. They'll kill each other. The stone represents God's eternal kingdom. Daniel told the king that God will set up this kingdom, will crush all earthly kingdoms and bring them to an end. And God's kingdom will never be destroyed, and will endure forever. Once again, there was nothing new. But this is the template that leads us to the belief that Rome is an ecumenical power. The Catholic Church will be part of it. And some kind of reconstruction of what had been the Roman Empire, which should include parts of Russia, it could include Romania, Hungary, Poland, Germany, would have to be part of it because in France, I don't think you're going to be part of it or not. I tell you right now, the common market... I've been tired, I guess it's time to quit. What's the European Union? The European Union isn't the beast. It's not that good. It's not that powerful. That thing's got to fall apart before something else forms. So, yeah, it's not it. And external pressure on Europe is going to create the crisis. I would guess Islam will be part of it because it was a thousand years ago. I think it's going to repeat itself. But that's my speculation. That's not in the Bible. That's my guess that Islam will at least be part of it. I tried to tell you what my guesses are. Okay. I don't know. We have five minutes. Any questions? I can't answer in five minutes. So I don't know whether that means you're overwhelmed or bored. Okay. Hurry up. I'll get this over with. Okay. Thank you for coming out. And we'll see you all tomorrow at... What is it, Mr. Smith? Two o'clock? At two o'clock.