The seductive thing about this supposed prophecy of the last Pope to be the one now to follow Benedict XVI is that we've all been watching the end times appear to unfold for a long time and it fits right in with our expectation that the Antichrist is soon to be revealed. I mean by "we" we evangelicals, we Protestants of course. We wouldn't regard any of this in a pro-Catholic light but unfortunately it's turning out to have such implications that get carried along with any sort of affirmation of it, which makes it dangerous to say anything at all in support of the prophecy.
I'm one who was not alert enough to the implications of such a prophecy's coming up at this time, its source in the Roman Church and especially the Romanist support for the prophecy. I've been falling down on the job here, not doing the necessary research. Just seemed to me like Wow, this is of course a false Catholic prophet but this prophecy seems to fit right in with what we've been expecting anyway, so let's just watch and see how it plays out.
It's not that simple. One thing I should have learned by now, especially thanks to Chris Pinto's work that I've been following for a year or so, is that the devil's deceptions with respect to Rome are many-layered and of course subtle, sometimes superficially promoting one point of view while covertly really promoting its opposite. I've been wanting to do some posts on various aspects of the history of these things and just haven't got to them, and the resignation of the Pope has somehow derailed that project at least for a while.
Now I'm becoming aware just how this prophecy plays into Romanist purposes. I don't follow Tom Horn* but I do still sometimes listen to Scott Johnson, who can drive me crazy with his assertions that are not always well backed up with evidence although sometimes he has good stuff nevertheless, and tonight's teaching is on Tom Horn who is supposedly an evangelical but has been leaning to Rome for some time. Tom Horn appears to have some very positive things to say about the Malachy prophecy, couched in very pro-Roman terminology.
This post is not to get more deeply into any of this yet, just to say that it's best to treat this prophecy as false in every possible way, expect that anything that appears to validate it has layers of deception behind it, then sit back and watch and pray that the deception will be exposed to God's people. That's all I'm really up to at the moment and I hope I haven't said anything to this point that contributes to the pro-Catholic propaganda that I now see entwines it all. I may have been clear enough about this already, but felt I needed to emphasize it.
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*Tom Horn's website is Raiders News Network but I found this interview with Horn and Chris Putnam that was done a while back about the book they wrote together about the Malachy prophecy, in which they discuss among other things how they expect the last Pope to take office in 2012. Well, obviously that didn't occur, but the discussion is very interesting as it covers many of the issues related to this that I've only been discovering recently. And I have to say I HATE the tone of that discussion, a very chipper jolly the-end-times-are-upon-us-and-isn't-this-fun sort of tone which I've lately come to dislike if not quite abhor.
While they don't exactly endorse Catholicism they also don't denounce it as they should either. The fact that the Malachy prophecy is taken seriously by Catholics has begun to bother me greatly, and that many of them are expecting some great apostasy to occur over which the last Pope will preside as False Prophet (not Antichrist) even more disturbing because of its obvious paralleling of Protestant belief while at the same time denying the essence of that belief -- that the Roman Church has been apostate since at least the sixth century. Layers of deception must be enbodied in such a notion.
Somehow over the last few months a sense of the evilness of evil has been growing on me in a way I don't remember experiencing before, a sense of an implacable vicious hateful cruelty in Satan and his minions, which of course include the Popes and the Jesuits as well as some American political leaders, that makes me hurt for the human race in a way I never experienced before. I don't know what all has led me to this frame of mind but it takes me far from any atttitude of "isn't this fun." The hardness of people to the gospel is part of it, the crudeness and meanness of people these days, along with all the revelations of conspiracies to destroy the good and install evil in its place.
Seeking God again
7 years ago
