The Displacement of Three Seats of Power by the Antichrist as he Rises to Prominence.

Just heard a well=known pastor describe the Antichrist as understood in the popular current eschatological system,  by which he is an unknown personality who will appear in the future, remaining unknown until revealed just as he rises to power.  

How we need the truth about the Antichrist, known by the Protestant Reformers as well as many other Christians down the centuries as the Pope, to be reinstated in the thinking of the Church.  

But this pastor did remind me that part of the prophecy, which we get from the Book of Daniel, is that Antichrist rises up as a "little horn" from among the nations of the Roman Empire, displacing three of them at the very beginning of his career.  I think it was Richard Bennett in one of his Sermon Audio talks that I heard recently, who explained that the decree of Phocas that made the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop over the whole Church, was done as the resolution of a conflict between four Bishops of the time: Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.  So the Bishop of Rome did literally defeat or displace three other Bishops in order to gain the seat of power over all of them.  

Not nations but seats of power within the Church which was about to replace the Roman Empire itself, eventually acquiringd most of its characteristics including both religious and civil power over nations.  It acquired the vestments, the title "Pontifex Maximus,"  many of the rituals and superstitions of the Roman pagan religions including the rosary, evemtually also elevating "Mary" above Christ, like the Mother Goddess of the pagan religions back to Semiramus; and then by stages and the forgery "The Donation of Constantine" acquired its civil power as well.  

If the displacement of three Bishops is the correct understanding of the prophecy, someone will have written about it somewhere, maybe even one of the Reformers, but at the moment it just seems to me to be a reasonable guess.

Being a Bossy Arrogant Know-It-All as Usual.

We have to understand who the Antichrist is.   True Christians down the centuries knew he was the Pope.  The Protestant Reformers came to the same knowledge.  This idea that he is some future personality yet to be revealed is a terrible deception.  He has been in the world for at least fifteen centuries.   Today's evangelical churches are weak because of embracing false ideas such as this one.  We need spiritual strength now more than ever and we don't have it.  If we want it restored we will have to repent of our errors and sins but we have to know what those errors and sins are in order to repent of them.  God will give us whatever knowledge we earnestly desire and pray for.  

The falseness of Catholicism, the falseness of the Charismatic Movement, the seductions of liberalism, and other forms of apostasy, need to be recognized as deceptions and given up.  Ask God to show us.  He will.  

I also have no question but that women need to resume covering our heads in church after some six or seven decades of abandoning it.  The idea that the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 was telling us that women must cover our heads in church just because one or more of the pagan cultures of his day did so approaches blasphemy it seems to me.    The logic is spurious by which we impute to Paul a teaching given to Jesus Christ' s people  based on the habits of mere culture, especially when he appealed to divine and natural truths as his arguments.   This I've come to believe is one the great deceptions of the Church which has contributed to our current weak condition, is probably a main reason God has not given us the revival we so yearn for, and since it is about God's Creation ordinance of the ordering of the roles of the sexes it has probably had a strong undermining influence in the development of all the sexual aberrations now being treated as normal in the culture.   I wish I could shout this through a megaphone to all the churches.  But they'd ignore me anyway, defend the capitulation to feminism, call me a legalist and so on.  

Another great deception is The Great Bible Hoax of 1881 as I titled my blog on the subject of the foisting of bogus Greek manuscripturs on the Church by two Catholic sympathizers who violated their charge to do a minimal revisiono of the Authorized Version by introducing "new" manuscripts already recognized as false.  This fostered the abandonment of Biblical inerrancy by raising questions about biblical reliability,  made it hard to discuss the truths of the Bible because of all the different and inferior readings of the plethora of Bible versions that resulted, got pastors and churchgoers alike preoccupied with trivial differences in the meaning of words, made it hard to memorize Bible passages when everybody was memorizing a different translation, and just generally interfered with the necessary learning of the Word of God.  A satanic masterpiece of sowing confusion and doubt among God's people.  

If I'm wrong about any of this I'd like to know it but I'm convinced of it after many years of pondering.  

So far I still think the Pre-Trib Rapture thinking is correct, except of coruse for the misidentification of the Antichrist.  

Lord please help us, lead us to the knowledge we need, lead us to repentance of our sins and doctrinal errors, bring us revival.

Here's John MacArthur on the Pope and the Papacy from 2005.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1HdVMvm8wuw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> 

Don't know how to embed it so here's the URL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HdVMvm8wuw&t=74s

Brexit: Adjustments to the Prophetic Scenario Would be Necessary As We Close In on the Grand Finale

 Now I'm listening to Chris Pinto's radio show on February 7th titled "Brexit and Prophecy" in which he discusses the idea that Brexit throws a wrench into the Pre-Tribulation Rapture or the Dispensationalist eschatology.   I guess the idea is that the prophecy is so hard-wired it can't allow for any sort of deviation from it.  Supposedly the EU has to go forward without a glitch or the whole end times system fails.  

Clearly IT IS IN FACT GOING FORWARD.  The post I just up and in fact most of Richard Bennett's teachings, show that the EU is shaping up as the Holy Roman Empire (which in a sense never died anyway since it was carried by the RCC all along in spite of setbacks.)+

Pinto goes on to say he thinks the enormous influx of Muslims intto the west, which has been promoted by the Vatican, is designed to create an army of anti-Christian murderers to do the work of the Inquisition against Bible believers when the papal EU is fully in power.  Or as he put it, to be the agents of the next Holocaust.

There have been many setbacks to Rome's plots over the centuries, so there being another one in the form of Brexit doesn't to my mind call the final scenario into question.  They probably don't even need to reverse Brexit to bring about their plans.  Since when is national aw any kind of real obstacle to the power juggernaut of Rome?   

Pinto also mentions that  the late Irish preacher Ian Paisley, who called out Pope John Paul as the Antichrist in a session of the EU Parliament some years ago, and believed that the Parliamentary chair numbered 666 awaited the coming together of the finale according to the dispensationalist prophetic system I've also been supporting here.  he believed as I do that the Antichrist is the Pope and that didn't dissuade him from that end times scenario as so far it doesn't dissuade me either.

So Pinto is here laying out his eschatology in more detail, but it still doesn't amount to much more than throwing a wrnech into the Pre-Trib Rapture.  To my mind it doesn't undo it.  I've believed and have been growing in the belief, that the Pope is to be the final Antichrist within that very end times scenario.  I don't see how Brexit seriously unddermines that scenario, just as the identity of the Antichrist as Pope doesn't undermine it.  I continue to think that God gave us some special signs by which to mark Pope Francis for a special role in the line of Antichrists, and although because of his age it seems unlikely he'd be THE final Antichrist i still think it the most likely possibility.  The Popes have generally maintained an image of their right to rule in global affairs, and things are most certainly coming together in a way that legally favors papal rule over Europe, as I've been reporting.  The Day of the LORD has not yet come, there is still a Great Tribulation in our future, and the also-unfulfilled Seventieth Week of Daniel is its likely framework.  Global events with the occasional sidetrack like Brexit (there is still some sanity in the huiman race after all, among us weak vessels of clay)  still point to that Finale.  It looks very close it seems to me.   God said we aren't to know the time, that is in God's hand;  however we are always told to watch and wait and be ready which implies there will be signs we can watch for to give us at least the "season" to be ready for.  If any given idea urns out to be wrong then God will surely show us where we are wrong to correct our bearings, but to this point it looks like things are on track toward the Pre-Trib understanding of the Grand Finale, with the necessary adjustment that it is the Pope we should be expecting to fill the seat of the Antichrist.  He's already shown himself to be God in the templew of God according to the Reformers, so that part of the Pre-Trib scenario may also have to go, but there may be room for a literal second fulfillment.  Watch and wait.

I'm going to be listening to more of Pinto's radio shows and may come back to add my comments on them to this post.

It May Be Too Late But We Have to Try

 This is an extra post on the teaching I linked in the last one, Reformation History, Eschatology, WWII etc., because the churches so desperately need to know these things about the RCC that have so effectively been kept from us for at least a century.  My little blog can't reach anybody but I've got to write it here anyway and pray that God will spread it from whatever sources are available..  

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=530111153203

Listen to the laws the RCC has in place that affect INDIVIDUALS, ALL OF US, everywhere, even in the United States where our own laws protect us from the kinds of encroachments on our liberty they intend to enforce when they get the power to do it.  And they already have a lot more power than we imagine, through their Concordats with various nations.  Even the US thanks to Reagan has diplomatic relations with the Vatican although they had been put to a stop because of their support of the Confederacy in the Civil War.  Reagan reinstated this relationship.  

Listen and weep, that's all I can say.  And besides weeping it may turn your stomach as it did mine to hear the power they already have over us, YOU AND ME.

American Christians are such a complacent bunch.  The wolves in sheeps' clothing are circulating among us and ready to pounce and we blithely accept them as sheep.  Listen to this talk please.  At least this one.  It's not really new to me I'm sorry to report, I just gave up on trying to talk about it and let it slip out of my mind.  You havew no idea, you have no idea, you have no idea.  

Lord please please give us revival, bring us back to the Reformation solas in all their power, and correct the many secondary deviations that have been crippling even the good churches so that You can bless us with a real outpouring of Your spirit before all this comes crashing down on this world.  Please grant us the knowledge we've been deprived of, and the zeal to change, and the repentance we need so that You will send us Your Spirit in power.  Please..  

European Union Shaping up as the Revived Holy Roman Empire and some Eschatological Implications of the Pope as Antichrist

 Window on Europe  is the title of a broadcast at Sermon Audio by Richard Bennett in 2003:  

In the first 25 minutes he talks about his personal experiences traveling in Europe with other evangelicals.  From 25 on he talks about the European Union, starting with its new Constitution,, bringing out its Catholic character, which was overtly recognized by the former Pope John, whom he quotes.  European Bible believers/ Protestants are worried about how this is shaping up because of course if the RCC ascends to its former power over the Holy Roman Empire of Europe, which it is believed is what is developing rapidly, they will be persecuted as they were throughout the Middle Ages.  Already the terms of the new Constitution are clearly totalitarian, far from incorporating the great liberalizations of European history.   The Vatican would wield both religious and civil power.

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=117182031410

In other broadcast, this one in 2009, Papal Rome, The European Union, Antichrist, Prophecy, Jesuits  Pope John Paul is said to be preparing to be the Holy Rroman Emperor ruling over Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic.  \

Then there is  Reformation History, Eschatology, Prophecy, WWII, Facts About the Papacy (Antichrist) by Bennett and a guest speaker.  

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=530111153203

It is not so much about Reformation History as Counterreformation history, meaning the work of the Jesuits in their neverending attempts to undo the Reformation, which include becoming teachers in Protestant colleges and tutors in royal families, where by interpreting everything through a Catholic lens they are able tu undermine the Protestant beliefs of the parents of the children in their charge.   The Jesuits have a reputation for being excellent scholars and teachers, so Protestant parents naively send their children to be educated under them, only to find them converting to Catholicism or just having their thinking so changed they no longer share their parents' belief.  

From there they go on to how it was the Catholic Oxford Movement in England that promoted the futurist eschatology that removed the idea of the Pope as Antichrist in modern thinking.  It is certainly true that most modern eschatology has dropped that Reformation understanding completely, now teaching an Antichrist who is to come who is as yet unknown but is expected to be revealed and to emerge into world prominence during the Tribulation period.  This is really a sad development, along with all the other ways the RCC has been getting a pass from evangelicalism in recent years. 

Also discussed in this audio sermon is the Vatican's involvement in Catholic nations during WW((, with Mussolini and Hitler and Franco and Salazar and Pavlik(?) in Croatia, supporting the persecutions and murders of nonCatholics.  In Croatia 700.000 Serbian Greek Orthodox believers were murdered.  So although the Inquisition is no longer in force its practices continue anyway, and if the global political situation continues in the current direction it will no doubt be openly reinstated.  It's been renamed, by the way, from The Office of the Inquisition, to The Congregation for the Doctrines of the Faith.  (I hope I got that right, my memory is good for about five minutes these days.) 

We definitely need a massive return among evangelical churches to the truths of the Reformation and the kowledge that it is the papacy scripture identifies as the Antichrist.  Bennett freequently mentions how we need revival in the churches based on a return to fundamental Protestant principles, especially the Protestant Gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

So far I haven't seen a complete eschatological system attempted by Bennett or others who recognize the Pope as the Antichrist.  Bennett objects to the futurist interpretation of the Antichrist but doesn't address other elements of futurist eschatology.  I don't recall if Chris Pinto does but I don't think so.  I think the general idea is that we have to do away with the whole system of thought  because the papacy is the Antichrist.

But as I've been arguing, there are certainly strong reasons to view the Book of Revelation in particular as describing future events.  The Antichrist most certainly IS to be a Pope, that Antichrist we see in the Book of Revelation, leader of the Harlot Church which is also clearly the Roman Church.  This figure will have civil and religious powers, WHICH THE PAPACY HAD THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES over the Holy Roman Empire.  A Pope is the perfect fit.  Most of the necessary framework is already in place, and the European Union is shaping up only too well to fit right into the papal ambitions.  As I mention above, the Pope would function as Emperor over the revived Holy Roman Empire, pretty much the position he held during the Middle Ages.   After the Roman Empire fell and the Caesars were out of the way, then the Bishop of Rome ascended to essentially the position of Emperior.  They invented a document called "The Donation of Constantine" to take civil power to the papacy.  

In 1798 Napoleon took that civil power away from the Pope, which is understood to fulfill the biblical prophecy of the wound described in Revelation, that was healed, and it was healed in 1929 when Mussolini restored civil power to the papacy.   All they need now is for the European Union to fall into line under the Pope's rule and from what Bennett has been saying in these talks I'm linking, that's well underway.

SO the way I am now looking at all this, the Rapture is still future and most likely shown in Revelation 4, and the Tribulation period is also future, a seven-year period of the outpouring of God's wrath known throughout the Old Tstament as the Day of the LORD.  Paul reassures the Thessalonian Church that the Day of the LORD had not yet come, which had been rumored among them, and that it can't come until the Man of Sin be revealed, who can't be revealed until an unnamed Restrainer is out of the way.  Because of his cautious way of talking about this Restrainer it seems pretty clear he is talking about a temporal power that could punish him and the churches, which makes Caesar the Restrainer since there were no more Caesars when the empire moved to Byzantium.  So the Antichrist was revealed centuries before the Reformation, and even more centuries before our time, probably in 606 AD when the Byzantine emperor resxolved a dispute among the four Bishops of the Day by making the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop.

So Paul says the Day of the LORD won't come until the Man of Sin is revealed.  If he was revealed in the 7th century then that Day could have come any time afterward, but clearly it hasn't.  It is yet future, it fits Jesus' description of great tribultion that God would have to shorten or nobody would survive it, and it fits the Seventieth Week of Daniel that is also as yet unfulfilled.  

It does seem to me that the arguments for a Pre-Tribulation Rapture are pretty solid, the many promises the LORD makes to the Church that we will not go through God's wrath, and the fact that the Church is not mentioned or even hinted at during the Tribulation period when the seals are opened and God's judgments are poured out.  Tribulation in the sense of persecution the Church endures, but not the wrath of God.  So that part of Pre=Trib eschatology remains intact in my mind

BUT I do have one unresolved question and that is how to think about the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 when the fifth seal is opened.  That is, there were tens of millions of martyrs under the papacy during the 600 years of their persecutions of "heretics," and I find it hard to separate those from some future group of martyrs during the Tribulation.  I suppose if I can accept the idea of two different sets of believers anyway, why not two different sets of martyrs?  But it nevertheless remains a question, and one that could potentially undo the whole Pre-Trib point of view.

Rampaging Evil and Questions about the End Game.

 Evil is winning.  Sometimes it overwhelms me, in fact I don't know how I manage any hope for the world at all, must be delusional if I do.  Did you know that Antifa trains in Syria with Islamic terrorists?  Chris Pinto is the source of that kind of information.  No wonder I stopped listening to him for so long, I always cry my eyes out after hearing one of his radio shows.  How can it be that the people of God who have a direct conduit to the omnipotent Power, are so helpless these days?  How did we get into this situation where so many churches aren't preaching the true gospel and we can't even get prayer for revival organized to any effect?  

Pinto's show today is titled "For Such a Time as This," which evokes the theme of the Book of Esther.  The problem is it suggests that we HAVE some kind of provision today for such as this time we are living through and we don't.  He makes a good point that Esthe, who is often understood to represent the Church, was not called to preach the gospel as so many think should be the exclusive engagement of the churches, she was called to save her people from an evil murdering man.  She was able to prevail upon the king and the evil was put down.  What resources do we have for dealing with today's evil when the Church has been so weakened and fragmented?\

I also listened to his show of a couple months ago, "The Curse of Liberalism."   That one makes me sad for the many nice liberals out there who have no clue what they are actually serving.  The powers of evil have certainly done their job at depriving us of the necessary knowledge to counter such an influence, knowledge of history, knowledge of the forces arrayed against us.  Pinto is very good at penetrating even beyond the level of Marxism and Communism to the influence of the Vatican and the Jesuits, an influence so effectively camouflaged nobody would suspect it these days, though even just a hundred years ago there were many who kept the knowledge alive and sounded the alarm from time to time.   What would anyone care who was not a Protestant though?  The few Protestants who are at all aware of it, and that is certainly very few.   The knowledge of the Protestant foundations of America is thoroughly discredited by these very influences that need to be exposed.  

Nice liberals have no clue.  They actually think their nice compassionate motives are the only good and the other side is Hitler, or that there is a Right and a Left and a pendulum that swings between them, when the reality is in our time that there is only good versus evil and the good is not liberalism and the good is hamstrung.

Well, it does no good to sit here and cry about it.   I can pray but we need an army praying.   I can write too, but to what purpose?

Both Chris Pinto and Richard Bennett object to the Pre-Tribulation Rapture scenario.  Pinto mentioned  that he objects to the timing of the Rapture but I couldn't find a discussion of his reasoning about it.  I suppose it's that he thinks the Rapture doesn't occur until Christ returns but I'm not sure.  John MacArthur did a fine job of arguing that one down.

It took me a long time to come around to the Pre-Trib point of view and I still find it persuasive, although at least its understanding of the Antichrist is historically ignorant.  Much of the portrait in the Book of Revelation surely refers to thei historical Roman Church as THE Antichrist force in the world since Christ came.  That can't refer only to a seven-year period of revived Inquisition.  And that raises a question about the martyrs under the altar whose voices are heard when the fifth seal is opened in Revelation 6.  If the Church is in heaven then all martyrs before the Day of the LORD would have been Raptured as part of the Church, tens of millions of them.  Why would there be a separate class of martyrs at the hand of the same evil entity that are murdered only during the Tribulation period?  Could the martyrs already in Heaven still be crying out for God's justice.  I guess that's a possibility but it's not terribly convincing. 

Although I still find the general outline of the Pre-Trib position to be persuasive, such questions do suggest another take on it.  What's most compelling is the fact that the Day of the LORD prophesied in scripture is apparently still unfulfilled, the Time of Jacob's Trouble, if not the Holocaust, is still unfulfilled, and the Seventieth Week of Daniel is still unfulfilled, as is the Great Tribulation Jesus spoke of unfulfilled.  All these prophecies appear to be different terms for one yet-future outpouring of God's wrath.   The timing in the Book of Daniel is too precise to be relegated to rough generalizations, and a tTribulation that God would have to shorten in His mercy simply has not yet happened. 

So there are still unanswered questions.

Richard Bennett gives us information the Church desperately needs

Here i'm posting a few of Richard Bennett's talks at Sermon Audio on subjects that Christians really need to know if there is any hope of reinstating the power of the Church that we should have but lost some time ago.

The false evangelical gospel that is taught in too many churches these days has supplanted the biblical gospel of the Reformers.  Bennett talks about how we need a Revival of the Reformation's five principles of salvation by Grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone based on Scripture alone for the Glory of God alone.   

 https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=1220182237362493

Here is Bennett discussing Pope Francis' Geopolitical ambitions and his duplicitous peacemaking in the Middle East.  Although Bennett doesn't support the futurist interpretation, who is more likely than the Pope to make the covenant with Israel that the Pre-Trib-Rapture scenario expects?

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=81814121215

History of the Papacy -- this is history all of us should know, but there are probably very few Christians who do.   I've had a general knowledge of the history of Romanism for some time but Richard Bennett goes into much more of it.  For one thing he starts earlier than 606 AD when the Bishop of Rome was finally established as Universal Bishop, showing the stages by which the RCC acquired civil power and became the pagan religiopolitical behemoth that had murdered some 50 million "heretics"  by the time of Luther.  Anyone who wants the evidence should listen to this one at least.  He goes on to talk about how the Reformation started up in many different places simultaneously in reaction to the murderous enormities.  As he moves into modern times he discusses how the papacy aligned itself with Catholic dictators to bring about more murders.  

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=116182115296

Bennett died last year at the age of 81 but his work is still online.  This is his website:

Berean Beacon    https://bereanbeacon.org/