MacArthur's Jet Tour of the Book of Revelation, plus Rev 17

John MacArthur did a one-sermon "Jet tour of the Book of Revelation" sketching out the entire book in a little over an hour, which is very helpful for approaching that complicated subject.  I've listened to many of the sermons in his vey lengthy series on Revelation but still have many to go.  Having an overview like this is very helpful.

He doesn't try to identify the Antichrist or even the Harlot Church, which I understand to be the Pope and the Roman Church, as I've spelled out in many posts.  I also believe the "666" is the sum of Roman numerals in a title of the Pope, which I've also argued here, though MacArthur says it means only the number of Man.  Which doesn't tell us which man of course, which I thought was the whole point of giving us such clues.   None of it will be clear until it happens of course.

Added later:  Listening to MacArthur on Revelation 17 done back in the 90s he's talking about how risky it is to try to predict who the Antichrist will be from current events, naming a number of attempts to do that in those years.  And of course he's right so although I favor this current Pope, and have given my reasons for it, I know I may be wrong.  MacArthur mentions that in the early years of Christianity some offered various Popes as the Antichrist, and certainly the Bishop of Rome had been identified as Antichrist by "pope" Gregory on the occasion when Byzantine emperor Phocas made the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop in the year 606 AD.  And I did a post here a while back showing tha the Popes have been identified as Antichrist down the centuries.    Which makes a particular Pope at the right time a very likely candidate for the Final Antichrist of the Tribulation period.  Francis is the current Pope and although he has some stellar qualifications for the role he is also old enough to make it unlikely.   What it means of course is that if he is that final Antichrist all these things would have to unfold rather soon.   Very soon.  If he has the health to live to ninety or more that's still pretty soon.

Chris Pinto I think believes the Antichrist will be a Pope.   As I recall Pinto identifies "the mark of the Beast" as the sign of membership in the Roman Church, which he argues from a historical usage of the idea in reference to the ceremony that brings one into that Church.

Anyway here's MacArthur's jet tour of the book about the final days of Planet Earth:
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Well, now I want to add his sermon on Revelation 17 since the question of the identity of the  Harlot Church has come up here.  He first describes the final Harlot Church, "Mystery Babylon" as an amalgam of all the false religions that come together to form the final World Religion.  Then (around 15:00 on the counter) he does finally identify the Roman Catholic Church as possibly the main form of that final world religion, and quotes Martyn Lloyd Jones who called it Satan's greatest achievement, even greater than Marxism.  He points out that Pope John Paul who was Pope at the time he gave this sermon, was totally devoted to "Mary" and that the RC version of Mary is derived from the religion of Babylon.  (See "The Two Babylons" by Alexander Hislop which traces the history of all the false religions from Babylon to Catholicism).  He goes on to describe all the false doctrine that contradicts Christianity, that may well characterize the final world religion.
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.Added on June 24:  Hm.  Wild thought hit me after hearing MacArthur's latest teaching which is all about the Antichrist..  What if Obama is the final Antichrist?  And Pope Francis the False Prophet?  I could defend the thought, using many bits of information I've collected in earlier posts that show his qualifications for the job, some going back years, but I think I'll just leave it at that for now.

A Pastor Talks on Cultural Marxism

Cultural Marxism explains so much of today's politics from the Left I often bring it up in discussions.  Political correctness is my usual emphasis.  I just found this talk about it by Pastor Voddie Baucham which gives the historical background:
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A Brief Explanation of Why the Rioting is not about injustice but is the imposition of Marxism.

I just want to give a brief sketch of the Marxist ideology that is the real foundation of Black Lives Matter.  I realize it needs more evidence than I'm up to providing but I should at least give a hint.  

Someone read the Black Lives Matter website over the radio recently, which is full of Marxist terminology, like "collective" and even "comrade."  There is no doubt that this and probably Antifa as well are expressions of Marxism which is an ideology that couldn't be more opposed to the principles of the American Constitution.  

It isn't about black lives as such, which is easy enough to see just in the fact that it's only a few black men arrested for petty crimes that inspired it while black policemen who have died trying to enforce the law are not included.  And it isn't about injustice either since the murder of George Floyd got the policeman charged with murder and others with aiding and abetting him.   The others like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin died while trying to harm the policeman arresting them.  So it isn't about injustice.   What it's really about is the revolutionary aims of Marxist/Communism that got quite a kickstart in the sixties and has continued through the universities ever since as sixties Marxists became university professors.   They go out an preach the false idea of injustice and encourage the tearing down of society in its name to people who are ignorant of American history.  

You can feel the Marxist totalitarianism even in Political Correctness which aims to control people's speech, intimidate everybody into silence.  This sort of anti-freedom is really the hallmark of all Marxist-inspired movem3ents.  It started as a shaming indignation against those who refuse to accept the ideology, then escalated to getting people fired from jobs who don't toe the party line, and now we see it tearing down the whole society it defines as contrary to its utopian vision.  By one means or another it enforces conformity to whatever they decree is necessary to their utopian concept.   And destroying the culture it defines as the oppressor is a big part of the plan.  There is no respect whatever for other human beings who disagree with them, none whatever, they are to be eliminated in one way or another.

Utopias themselves are totalitarian.  Human beings are flawed and diverse and the American Constitution allows for a society of flawed people in a way that prevents any one ideology from dominating others.  Marxism is an ideology that refuses to tolerate anything that it doesn't approve which means it must intimidate dissenters, imprison them and murder them to enforce its vision.  Rioting and arson are just an expression of the same violence to impose their will on everybody else.  It is absolutely anti-freedom, anti all the freedoms that are supposed to be protected by our Constitution.  Get enough screaming rioting looting violent revolutionaries together with the self-serving ideology that has been  incubating for decades in our universities and they will just overthrow our Constitutional freedoms by force.   

Marxism must control everyone, freedom to be oneself is impossible.    You see this in every Communist regime because you can't have your utopia unless you force people to accept it.  It is sad to see this happening in our wonderful bastion of freedoms that is, or was, America.  

Fallenness: The Buddhists (and others) have it All Wrong

Can America recover this time?  Such evil uprisings of the Marxist ideology* that has been growing in the universities since the sixties at least have occurred before and eventually die out as some semblance of normality resumes for a while.  But each new phase of "normal" is really undermined at its core by the irrationality that is just waiting for another opportunity to burst out and destroy and kill everything good.  

This time around it's more virulent than ever as the usual forces of restraint are compromised and intimidated into ineffectiveness and some of them have even joined with the forces of destruction.  

What's going to happen now?  I pray pray pray for reason to return, but it's possible that God may have reached the point where he is going to let it all play out, and woe to all of us if that is the case.  If we are really approaching the Rapture, to be followed by the Day of the Lord which will be the final pouring out of God's wrath against an evil world, this may be a foretaste, or a preliminary phasing-in of that coming Great Tribulation period.  If not I shudder to think how much worse it could get before that happens.

It's the way sheer evil is being justified that is the worst of all of this.  Evil will always rise up, rampages of vandals and looters and murderers can always happen in a fallen world, but they are usually confronted by forces of good and this time those forces are weakened and silenced and treated as if they are the evil.  How can we survive this?

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This is a fallen world.  It is taken for normal by most people, even by Christians who should know better.  In a fallen world good is always undermined to some extent by evil.  We are all sinners, "there is no one good, no not one" says the scripture.   This is why we need a Savior, this is why Jesus came.  But the devil is highly intelligent and knows how to work on the sinful human soul so that we justify ourselves at the expense of others and at the expense of the entire fabric of security that protects all of us. 

I was pondering this as I listened recently to some teaching by the Tibetan Buddhist nun Robina Courtin at You Tube.  I got very interested in her teaching on karma, seeing how it is similar to the workings of God's Law as taught in the Bible.  They teach four precepts that are almost identical to four of the Ten Commandments for instance:  don't steal, don't lie, don't commit wrongful sex, don't murder, to which she adds don't misuse speech which is treated as more of a subcategory in the Bible rather than a separate commandment.  That is, speech can be a vehicle for all the other sins. 

It was the Buddhist teaching against killing that got me thinking about fallenness and how Buddhists have no clue about that.   They treat it as an evil thing to kill anything at all, insects, even bacteria.  E coli?  Apparently so.   

In a fallen world this blanket rejection of all killing is dangerous.  It may be that in the Kingdom of God it would make sense.  That is it would make sense in the ideal world where all living creatures are in harmony without doing any harm to each other.  That is biblically when the lion lies down with the lamg and the child can play int he viper's den without being hurt, when weapons of war have been turned into tools for constructive purposes and so on.

But in this fallen world, no.  Nature in this world is "red in tooth and claw," killing and eating each other, or in the case of insects and bacteria causing disease and death.

The biblical revelation tells us that when our first parents disobeyed God they lost their original idyllic world in which all forms of life lived in harmony, and from that point on death entered the universe.  We are told this in the New Testament, in ……………    Death entered as God said it would and since then we've been governed by the rule that says "the wages of sin is death."  Sin brought death and it continues to bring death, death in many forms including diseases and threat from predatory animals and injury by the environment.  Childbearing became painful and even life-threatening for women, the earth grew thorns and thistles and made growing food arduous.  Weather is both a blessing and a threat.

In fact that is a way of saying something about the nature of the sin that brought it all on:  eating of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  Adam and Eve had known no evil until then, but their disobedience made it known through experience from then on.  In a world of both good and evil we are subject to the rising up of evil when good is demonized as it is now in this current rampaging of rioting and arson and vandalism, when the police are treated as the bad guys and the criminals as the good guys.

Back to the Buddhist teaching against all killing again, you have to restrain ALL threats by living things and that may mean killing them.  You can die of the diseases carried by rats and insects, so letting them live makes no sense in such a world as the one we live in now.  This is also why the death penalty is necessary, so that even killing human beings who kill other human beings is righteous in this world.

According to Robina Courtin the Buddha learned about everything by looking into his own mind.  He learned about the cause and effect of karma, which is how our actions produce consequences, bad actions producing suffering.  It can be described in fairly simple terms as receiving the same kind of treatment you mete out to others.  Jesus tells us we will reap what we sow which says something very similar.  Ending suffering by learning to stop producing bad karma is apparently a major goal of the Buddhist practice of watching the mind, as I understand it.

Apparently Buddha did not discover a Creator God through his meditations.  He did confirm the ancient Hindu teaching of reincarnation though.  The Buddhist view is that there is no beginning or end to anything, reality is beginningless and endless.  So every living thing just keeps getting recycled throughout aeons of time, the goal of each to reach the cessation of karma (I think).  Which raises the question wouldn't there be an end when absolutely every living thing has reached that point?   If everything is beginningless then no new living beings are being brought into existence so ultimately all of them should eventually make it to the goal of ending suffering and the cycles of reincarnation would be at an end.

It may be a legitimate question but it's a rabbit trail I allowed myself to pursue for the moment, but I have another question I'd like to ask and that's how the Buddha explains death?  Why is there death at all?  Why is there a portion of existence lived by each creature in a physical body, from which the usual exit is through death?  Perhaps there is a Buddhist answer but it doesn't seem to be a very important part of the teaching if so.  

By observing his mind there is very little the Buddha discovered that is similar to the Biblical revelation though there is the similarity between the four precepts and four of the Ten Commandments.   owever, I do think there is a  general similarity between the idea of karma as the Law that Runs the Universe and the Law of God which we'd describe in the same terms.   So it seems to me the Buddha was able to observe God's Law in operation in his own mind, however imperfectly.  The suffering that is caused by bad actions is in the Biblical frame of reference God's judgment against our sins.

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*  Why do I say this is an uprising of the Marxist ideology?  I'll do a separate post about that I think.  

To be continued. 

How the Charismatic Movement maintains its hold on otherwise doctrinally sound Christian leaders

Why was it so hard for me to give up the charismatic movement for so many years despite having mostly left it behind?  I just couldn't convince myself that it was totally false.  It took the Strange Fire Conference to finally shake me loose from it, and it was through the simple obvious observation that what they call the "gifts of the Spirt" have nothing in common with those gifts as described in the Bible.  The "tongues" are not Biblical tongues, the "prophecies" are not Biblical prophecy, and so on.  I'm not sure why that observation wouldn't disengage anyone from the movement as it did me, but I think I understand its pull in any case.

That is, I had "supernatural" experiences almost from the time I started thinking about religion.  At first they were pretty clearly demonic, some rather frightening.  After I was a Christian I had some that seemed to come from God, though there is no way to be absolutely sure..  If you've never had such experiences your biblical frame of reference will be more intellectual,   Experience is of course generally untrustworthy anyway, but if you don't have a clear way of determining the source of such experiences you remain in fear of discounting something that really did come from God and being guilty of the "blasphemy of the Holy Spirit."

The problem is of course that the devil can also give supernatural experiences, and he can do a good job of counterfeiting experiences in such a way as to make them seem to be from God.  But if we don't have the ability to determine the source of our experiences, and we fear getting it wrong we will be loathe to bring them into question.  That way we can remain in a sort of limbo about them and never be able to decide one way or the other.    

In my case the recognition that the Charismatic Movement has the "gifts of the Spirit" all wrong did disengage me from that movement, but I still remember many  personal experiences of my own that I have no way of judging.  At least they no longer keep me tied to that false theology, and that is a huge relief.   It is now possible to see how most of it is false.  Even then it is possible to cling to it for those other experiences that don't seem false or you don't know for sure where they came from.  You may not call them "the gifts of the Spirit" but they still made a deep impression on you at the time as a communication from God Himself.

Having now rejected the Charismatic Movement I still have memories of such experiences, and the best I can do with them is avoid letting them determine anything to do with my theology, allow that they may have been from God and yet He wants His Word to be the standard, not any such experiences.  As long as they don't contradict the Word I have no reason to reject them as false but I also know I'm not to let them determine anything I believe.

that's the best I can do with it.  I don't know for sure if I'm right about why some doctrinally sound Reformed teachers can't bring themselves to denounce the Charismatic Movement but this is my guess.  They've had such experiences and they don't know what to do with them and since the Charismatic Movement is the only branch of Christianity that affirms such experiences at all they can't bring themselves to reject it completely.  I still think the Strange Fire Conference should be enough to convince anyone that the movement itself is invalid even if we don't know how to judge a particular experience.

It's possible I've written blog posts on this subject before but I don't remember.  Probably did a better job of it too.  Oh well.

Later (June 13):  I found one of my posts on that subject which is pretty comprehensive:  "Getting Free of the Deceptions of Charismatica."
https://watchpraystand.blogspot.com/2013/11/getting-free-of-deceptions-of.html

The Cause of the Riots (plus a sermon about false salvation)

John MacArthur in this talk addresses the current lawlessness from a thoroughly biblical perspective:
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.After listening to the above I went on to the following preaching by MacArthur on how many Christians are deceived about their salvation.  This topic always puts me in fear because of my sinfulness which causes me to doubt my salvation from time to time.    MacArthur as usual lays it out in all the necessary bibilical detail:



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Part 2 of the above preaching can be heard separately and it's searing:

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How long Lord?

How bad does it have to get before Jesus comes to get us?   It's pretty bad already, to the point that I fear for my family and friends.  Law and order have broken down, they are even directly under assault by elected officials, so criminals are given free rein and that has to destroy the whole nation if it continues.   And there doesn't seem to be any sign of anything coming along to stop it.

It seems selfish to want to escape it knowing that others will be left to suffer terribly in this hateful environment.  If there were any hope at all of changing it that's what we should be doing, but there is very little hope of that sort.  Might as well say hone.  The irrational ones have the upper hand and they just shout us down and marginalize us.  If Trump doesn't win the election the deterioration of all civility is scary to think about but it would continue in any case because they are driven by an animus that is nothing short of satanic.

When the Rapture begins there will be only seven years following it before Jesus returns to rule the Earth.  Many will be converted to Him durintg those seven years but many of those will be martyred for their faith.  They will live forever though so I have to hope and pray for the courage to face that reality, for all those friends and family who have to go through the seven-year Tribulation period.

It must be close, I can only hope it's close, because I don't see any way at all to bring sanity back to this world as it is now.  Nobody can wish the horrors of the Tribulation on anyone, that's not the point here, the point is that the sooner it comes the sooner all this escalating evil will finally have an end to it.

How long, Lord?  How long?