The Revelation – Chapter 15 and 16

CHAPTER 15 and 16

THE SEVEN BOWLS or Vials

“Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and wonderful, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is ended.   And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands.  And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying,

“Great and wonderful are thy deeds,

O Lord God the Almighty!

Just and true are thy ways,

O King of the ages!

Who shall not fear and glorify thy name, O Lord?

For thou alone art holy.

All nations shall come and worship thee,

for thy judgments have been revealed.”

After this I looked, and the temple of the tent of witness in heaven was opened, and out of the temple came the seven angels with the seven plagues, robed in pure bright linen, and their breasts girded with golden girdles.  And one of the four living creatures gave the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the wrath of God who lives for ever and ever; and the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were ended.”Rev 15:1-8  (RSV)

There is a great multitude around the sea of glass.  They are the ones who have conquered the beast, its image and the number of its’ name.  This congregation is the bride whose wait has been long and fraught with many terrible persecutions and shrewd deceptions to overcome. Her beloved has provided a perfect cleansing (mikvah/Baptism) through water (His blood) and fire (Holy Spirit).  [Jn 3:5]  Finally she has unmasked and turned away from all who would deceive her by pretending to be her beloved and steal her away.   Now she is able to presents herself before the throne of her beloved, having passed through the final mikvah (cleansing) wearing white as fresh as newly fallen snow, spotless and pure.

Faithful unto Death, 'Christianes ad Leones!' by Herbert Schmalz 1888

The Apocalypse presents us with two companies of martyrs. [Rev 7:4-8]  One group is slain by pagan Roman emperors on account of their testimony against heathen idolatry. The other is slain by Christian Popes on account of their testimony against Christian idolatry. [Rev 14:1]

Ermordung und Verbrennug von Heiden und Hexen im Namen der Inqusition

The congregation holds harps and sings both the Song of Moses [Ex 15:1-18; Deut 32:1-43; Ps 90] and the Song of the Lamb. [Rev 5:9-10; 15:3-4]  These songs are songs of triumph, ascribing power, glory and salvation to God.  They point to the One whose right hand had delivered mightily, the one who delivered Israel, the Lamb.

The surprising new development, in this picture of heaven, is what the congregation is singing.  We must ask why is Moses mentioned here and why first?   The answer is very simple; everything is based on those first five books.   Without those first five books you cannot possibly understand sin, redemption, and that prophecy (God’s plan for man) is revealed and fulfilled in His commanded Sabbaths and festivals.  This must be a pivotal fact as Moses is mentioned first even before the Messiah.

Whether looking forward or backwards to the Blood of the Lamb, all of these people are saved.  It seems poignant here that this congregation understands that, in order to fully worship, they must both obey God’s commandments and accept His Messiah as their redeemer.

This sea is crystal, grander than the Brass Sea, or laver, of The Tabernacle. [Lev 11:32-33; Num 31:21-24]  It is where the Priests ceremonially washed before serving at the temple.   This congregation is clean, and is a Holy Priesthood. [Matt 3:11; II Tim 2:21; Rev 1:6]  In the end there is no sea for we are clean. [Rev 21:1]

Just as the Israelites sang praises to God on the banks of the Red Sea, after being saved from their enemies, the Bride now sings for all her enemies have been destroyed. She praises God for His great deeds, for being Just and True.  She calls Him holy and declares that all the nations shall worship Him.  [Rev 15:3]

The Bowls

Seven angels come out of the temple clothed as High Priests. Each one is given a golden bowl or vial, just as the High Priest would have had on the Day of Atonement.   (Remember, on the Day of Atonement it is only the High Priest whom enters the Holy of Holies with a golden bowl.)   No one may enter the temple until the seven plagues are ended.  Do you not suppose that this is because only the Lamb can redeem, only the Lamb can open the seals, and only the Lamb can execute judgment?  There is no man, nor angel who can usher in any act of God.  God alone executes judgment. The bowls of the temple were used to carry the blood into the Holy of Holies.  These bowls are now filled with the wrath or judgments in answer to the prayers of the Saints for vengeance and justice. [Rev 14:19-20]

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord.   No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.    Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Rom 12:19-21RSV

The bowls are similar to the plagues in Egypt. As the plagues upon Egypt were executed upon an ungodly and false religious system, so too these bowl judgments are upon a false and apostate Church.  The first five bowls mead out their judgment upon the Roman Church, exacting retribution for the injustice she has enacted upon the Protestant Church.  The kings and merchants, who had once found it lucrative to ally with her, now turn against her.

“The more deeply and earnestly the French Revolution is considered the more manifest is its pre‑eminence above all the strange and terrible things which have come to pass on this earth. . . . Never has the world witnessed so exact and sublime a piece of retribution . . . If it inflicted enormous evil, it pre‑supposed and overthrew enormous evil…In a country where every ancient institution and every time‑honored custom disappeared in a moment, where the whole social and political system went down before the first stroke, where monarchy, nobility, and Church, were swept away almost without resistance, the whole framework of the State must have been rotten; royalty, aristocracy, and priesthood must have grievously sinned. Where the good things of this world, birth, rank, wealth, fine‑ clothes, and elegant manners, become worldly perils and worldly disadvantages for a time, rank, birth, and riches must have been frightfully abused.  The nation which abolished and proscribed Christianity, which dethroned religion in favor of reason, and enthroned the new goddess at Notre Dame in the person of a harlot, must needs have been afflicted by a very unreasonable and very corrupt form of Christianity. The people that waged a war of such utter extermination with everything established, as to abolish the common forms of address and salutation, and the common mode of reckoning time, that abhorred ‘you’ as a sin, and shrank from ‘Monsieur’ as an abomination, that turned the weeks into decades and would know the old months no more, must surely have had good reason to hate those old ways from which it pushed its departure into such minute and absurd extravagance.  The demolished halls of the aristocracy, the rifled sepulchres of royalty, the decapitated King and Queen, the little Dauphin so sadly done to death, the beggared princes, the slaughtered priests and nobles, the sovereign guillotine, the republican marriages and the Meudon tannery, the couples tied together and thrown into the Loire, and the gloves made of men’s and women’s skins; these things are most horrible; but they are withal eloquent of retribution, they bespeak the solemn presence of Nemesis, the awful hand of an avenging power; they bring to mind the horrible sins of that old France, the wretched peasants ground for ages beneath a weight of imposts, from which the rich and noble were free; visited ever and anon with cruel famines by reason of crushing taxes, unjust wars, and monstrous misgovernment, and then hung up, or shot down, by twenties and fifties, for just complaining of starvation, and all this for centuries!  They call to remembrance the Protestants murdered by myriads in the streets of Paris, tormented for years by military dragoons in Poitou and Bearn, and hunted like wild beasts in the Cevennes; slaughtered and done to death by thousands and tens of thousands in many painful ways through many painful years. . .

“In no work of the French Revolution is this, its retributive character, more strikingly and solemnly apparent than in its dealings with the Roman Church and Papal power.  It especially became France, which, after so fierce a struggle, had rejected the Reformation, and perpetrated such enormous crimes in the process of rejection, to turn its fury against that very Roman Church on whose behalf it had been so wrathful, . . . to abolish Roman Catholic worship as she had abolished the Protestant worship: to massacre multitudes of priests in the streets of her great towns: to hunt them down through her length and breadth, and to cast them by thousands upon a foreign shore, just as she had slaughtered, hunted down, and driven into exile, hundreds of thousands of Protestants; . . . to carry the war into the Papal territories, and heap all sorts of woes and shames upon the defenseless Popedom. . . . The excesses of revolutionary France were not more the punishment than the direct result of the excesses of feudal, regal, and papal France… In one of its aspects the Revolution may be described as a reaction against the excesses, spiritual and religious, of the Roman Catholic reaction from Protestailtism.   No sooner had the torrent burst forth than it dashed right against the Roman Church and Popedom. . . The property of the Church was made over to the State; the French clergy sank from a proprietary to a salaried body; monks and nuns were restored to the world, the property of their orders being likewise gone; Protestants were raised to full religious freedom, and political equality; . . . the Roman Catholic religion was soon afterwards formally abolished . . .  Bonaparte unsheathed the sword of France against the helpless Pius VI . . . the Pontiff sank into a dependent . . . Berthier marched upon Rome, set up a Roman republic, and laid hands upon the Pope.  The sovereign Pontiff was borne away to the camp of the infidels . . . from prison to prison, and finally carried captive into France.  Here . . . . he breathed his last, at Valence, in the land where his priests had been slain, where his power was broken, and his name and office were a mockery and byword, and in the keeping of the rude soldiers of the unbelieving Commonwealth which had for ten years held to his lips a cup of such manifold and exceeding bitterness . . .  It was a sublime and perfect piece of retribution, which so amazed the world at the end of the 18th century; this proscription, of the Roman Church by that very French nation that had slaughtered myriads of Protestants at her bidding; this  mournful end of the Sovereign Pontiff, in that very Dauphine, so conse­crated by the struggles and sufferings of the Protestants, and near those Alpine valleys where the Waldenses had been so ruthlessly hunted down by French soldiers; this transformation of the ‘States of the Church’ into the ‘Roman Republic’, and this overthrow of the territorial Popedom by that very French nation,  which just one thousand years ago, had, under Pepin and Charlemagne, conferred these territories.  Multitudes imagined that the Papacy was at the point of death, and asked, Would Pius the Sixth be the last Pontiff?  and if the close of the 18th century would be signalized by the fall of the Papal dynasty.  But the French Revolution was the beginning,  and not the end of the judgment; France had but begun to execute the doom, a doom sure and inevitable, but long and lingering, to be diversified by many strange incidents, and now and then by a semblance of escape, a doom to be protracted through much pain and much ignominy.”  The Papal Drama Book X  By Thomas II Gill

 

First Bowl

“So the first angel went and poured his bowl on the earth, and foul and evil sores came upon the men who bore the mark of the beast and worshiped its image.” Rev 16:2-4

Earth has always indicated the Roman earth or the Roman Empire, which now has become the Roman Church.  These sores represent spiritual maladies.  What once was a glorious, powerful entity controlling the spiritual essence of the populous was now crumbling from within and from without. [Rev 17:15-17]

In the middle of the 18th century, the teachings of Paine, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau (1755) were popularized.  This was called the Age of Enlightenment, the root of Humanism.  These cankerous philosophies plunged all of Europe, especially France, into riots, civil wars, and finally revolutions as the populous became restless.  Where once the Roman Church had successfully controlled general thinking, knowledge and science, now there arose an intellectual community that would not be subdued and would rise up to poison men’s souls with their own enlightened, free-thinking.

John Locke

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Voltaire

“In the 1700s, European intellectuals revamped the millennium-old system for discerning truth: instead of grounding all knowledge in biblical revelation, they tried to build on the foundation of human reason.

This “enlightened” method [thus the name for the period and movement, the Enlightenment] produced some startling conclusions.  David June [d. 1776] reasoned that God’s existence could not be “proved”.  Immanuel Kant [d 1804] and Friedrich Schleiermacher [d. 1834] argued that religion was not so much about God as about people’s religious experiences.  G.W.F. Hegel [d. 1831] said God was not the personal being described in the Bible but an impersonal force.

The Enlightenment championed the scientific method, where everything – including the Bible – was subject to rational, empirical analysis.  In this environment, the discipline of biblical criticism grew up.  It was also the context in which Charles Darwin concluded the world wasn’t created in six days but was the product of millions of years of evolution.

Such European developments made their way across the Atlantic only slowly, but by the end of the 1800s, many American thinkers had become Enlightenment rationalists, or “liberals” or “modernists”.”

Article by Harold Carl   Christian History [a periodical  Vol.XVI, no. 3]

Second Bowl

“The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man, and every living thing died that was in the sea.”

Rev 16:3

The sea represents peoples, nations and tongues. Therefore, since the sea is symbolic; so the death of every living thing in it must be symbolic of spiritual death.  With the rise of the Enlightenment man no longer fears God but he believes he is God.  Where previously the Mystery Religions had many gods to pray to and the Roman Church had taken those gods and renamed them as Saints now man believed everyone could be his own god.

Turmoil could be seen in England and Ireland, 1780-81 and a revolt in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, 1783-87.  There was a revolt in Belgium 1787-90 and riots in Geneva 1782 and France, 1787.   The revolution was revived again in Belgium in 1792 spreading to the German Rhineland, then on to the United Provinces, 1795; to Italy, 1796; and on to Switzerland, 1798.

The Estates General

The French Revolution starts with the meeting of the Estates General May 5, 1789, at Versailles, and the destruction of the Bastille, July 14, 1789.  The common people believed the king had betrayed them, so the royal family was imprisoned in The Temple in Paris.  Riotous crowds broke into The Temple and killed all the aristocrats and clergy that had been imprisoned there.   Louis XVI was brought to the guillotine on Jan 21, 1793.

France declared war on Austria and Prussia on April 20, 1792.  Once started, the wildfire of warfare continued throughout Europe until 1815.   Many of the conquered nations perceived the French as great liberators because they abolished feudalism and the authority of the Roman Church over their lives.  This then is the deceit that while the Roman church needed replacing, it was replaced with a new deception, which left a spiritual vacuum in the souls of men.

THE REIGN OF TERROR

The REIGN OF TERROR began in May of 1793.  In the spring of 1793 England, Austria, and Prussia form a coalition and France began to suffer military defeats.   On Oct 16, 1793 Marie Antoinette was beheaded.  In the Cathedral of Notre Dame a prostitute was crowned on the altar as the GODDESS OF REASON and the crowd worshipped her, Nov 10, 1793.  see French Revolution

As the community became aware of the perversions of the church, they turned on her.   We are then told twice that God’s judgment is true and just.  Historians call this one of the bloodiest moments in history, but God calls it “just”.

Take Note: France adopted the New Republican Infidel Calendar, Nov 24, 1793.   Note that this is 1260 Solar years from the Decree of Justinian in March 533.  This replaced the Christian calendar with a secular calendar.

Third Bowl

“The third angel poured his bowl into the rivers and the fountains of water, and they became blood.” Rev 16:4

The rivers and the fountains of water symbolize spiritual living waters. As rivers and fountains feed the larger bodies of waters, such as the seas, these spiritual waters feed the populace and lead the kings. This bowl represents the imminent decline of the authority of the apostate Roman Church.  The Church of Rome would no longer exercise complete rule over governmental or secular institutions.

Napoleon and Pius VI

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte dethroned Pope Pius VI. The French Republican army under Berthier seized Rome in Feb of 1798 and a Roman Republic was proclamation on March 20, 1798.

Take Note: From the siege of Samaria (March 19, 721BC) by Shalmanezer king of Assyria (when the 10 northern tribes of Israel were exiled), to the ruin of the Papal government, March 20, 1798, is an interval of 2520 Solar years or “seven times”.

This bowl represented fiery judgment upon the authority of the papacy, which overflowed onto the common people.  With Napoleon’s capture of Pope Pius VI in 1798, the succeeding popes stayed under a form of house arrest, virtual prisoners within the Vatican, with limited access to the outside world.   Thus severing the temporal authority of the papacy.   Italian dictator Mussolini freed the Pope in 1929, restoring limited authority of the Vatican State to the succeeding Popes.

Fourth Bowl

“The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch men with fire; men were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory.” Rev 16:8-9

In the parable of the sower [Mat 13:6; Mk 4:6] there are plants growing among the rocky soil that when scorched by the sun, wither and die because they were unable to root in the rocky soil.  So too Europe, with the removal of the temporal power of the Pope, became as wanton as beasts rather than embracing the truth of God’s word.  In order to quell the ramped immorality and crime Napoleon restored some of the Roman Churches authority in 1801.  Even this staunch military man recognized the need for a religious basis to keep order on the baseness of mans nature.  However, the weeds of discontent and Secular Humanism had taken root and Europe has never been the same since.

Napoleon inflicted further insults upon the Church of Rome by making it on the same level as all other sects of religion.  Where a thousand years earlier Charlemagne had been made the Holy Roman Emperor by decree of the Pope, now this same faith was merely tolerated.  Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor on May 18, 1804.  He then crowned himself king of Italy the following summer, May 26, 1805, in the cathedral of Milan.  He embarrassed the Pope by snatching the crown out of the hands of Pius VII and placing it on his own head.

Emperor Napoleon

From Nabonasser being crowned King of Babylon Feb 747BC to Napoleon being crowned emperor May 1804 there are seven times and thirty years.   2520+30 years

Fifth Bowl

“The fifth angel poured his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was in darkness; men gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores, and did not repent of their deeds.” Rev 16:8-12

Pope Pius VII

On Aug 7, 1814, Pope Pius VII re-established the Inquisition and the Jesuit order.   Fortunately, the civil powers of Europe did not respect this Inquisition, having no more interest in fighting Rome’s petty little wars.  Nobody came!

Italian civil insurrections led to the murder of the Pope’s Prime Minister in 1848, causing the Pope to flee yet again.  Temporal authority was lost over the Italian Papal States and in 1849 Italy became a sovereign republic.

“1864, Dec 8: When the temporal power of the papacy was tottering to its fall, Pius flung down the gauntlet of defiance to the new social and political order in the encyclical Quanta cura, with the appended Syllabus errorum.  The pope censured the “errors” of pantheism, naturalism, nationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, freemasonry, and various other 19^th century views.  He claimed for the Church the control of all culture and science, and of the whole educational system; rejected the liberty of conscience and worship enjoyed by other creeds, and the idea of tolerance; claimed the complete independence of the Church from state control; upheld the necessity of a continuance of the temporal power of the Roman See, and declared that ‘It is an error to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and contemporary civilization.’   The Ultramontane party was loud in its praise of the Syllabus, but the Liberals were amazed, and treated it as a declaration of war by the Church on modern civilization.  It was also a blow aimed at the Liberal Catholics, who were reconciled to religious liberty and democratic government. . . . . . . At his death in 1878, Pius left the Church shaken to its foundations and in feud with almost every secular government.”    An Encyclopedia of World History,    compiled and edited by William L. Langer pg 664

Sixth Bowl

“The sixth angel poured his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east.” Rev 16:12

The river Euphrates represents the Ottoman Empire.  The Ottoman’s were forced to agree to the Decree of Toleration with European powers on March 21, 1844.  This agreement allowed Jews nd Christians to live within their borders without reprisal.

This is 1260 lunar years after the start of the Islamic era (The Hegira).  It is exactly 2300 solar years from the new moon of March 20, 457BC from the commencement of the seventy weeks. Exactly 391 years (1+30+360, “a day, a month, and a year” Rev 9) after the rise of the Ottoman Empire, as dated from the capture of Constantinople and the end of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire continued to decline in power and finally fell apart (without human hand Dan 8:25) at the end of WWI.  The European powers divided the Ottoman Empire into numerous small sheikdoms and Israel; thus, paving the way for the repatriation of the Jews to Palestine.   These kingdoms (kings of the east) slowly became independent in the last half of the 20th century.

Foul Spirits That Are Like Frogs

William Cuninghame 1776-1849 English, said that the “voice of prophesy has been, in some measure, quenched by Irvingism and Puseyism” i.e. Futurism   ” as we approach the season of midnight, when the Bridegroom comes, deep sleep will pervade the spiritual atmosphere, intermingled only with the croaking of the three frogs ch.16:15″.  The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, Val III LeRoy Edwin Froom

The Angel of the church in Laodicea wrote three things about God, He is the Word of Truth, the witness, and the architect of creation.  The three frogs are a counterfeit of God’s authority in these three areas. They speak as a prophet would, one from the mouth of the Dragon, one from the beast, and one from the false prophet. The three are in opposition to the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Dragon Frog struck at the heart of the Biblical teaching that God the

Charles Darwin

Father is the Architect of Creation so that men no longer felt they needed to submit to His authority.  In 1859 Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. In 1871 he wrote his sequel “ The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”.

Karl Marx

The Beast’s frog attacked God the Son as the Head of His Church. Christ’s authority as the faithful and true witness is being questioned.  He is striped of being God in the flesh, as men champion self-deification under the banner of humanism. In 1867 Karl Marx published his book Das Kapital.  By 1870 his ideas were becoming popular.  He stated that the church is the opiate of the masses.  The governments that adopted Marxism replaced the church with a worship of the state.

Pius IX

The False Prophet frog attacked Scriptural authority, which is not vested in any one person or church body, but in the words of the Amen. God the Spirit is the true enlightenment of men’s minds and spirits. During this time higher criticism within the seminaries of Europe began undermining the authority of the Word of God as absolute and infallible.  The twenty-first Ecumenical Council declared papal Infallibility in 1870.

“They went out from us, but they were not of us.” 1 John 2:19

“At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of consciousness of sin.  The consciousness of sin was formerly the starting-point of all preaching, but today it is gone.

“Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness; the religious literature of the day is redolent of that confidence.  Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world’s evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world’s good; no help is needed from outside the world.

“Despite all superficial continuity, a remarkable change has come about within the last 75 years.  The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life.

“In speaking of “paganism,’ we are not using a term of reproach.  Ancient Greece was pagan, but it was glorious, and the modern world has not even begun to equal its achievements.  What, then, is paganism?  Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties.

“Very different is the Christian ideal.  Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

“The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten.  There was always something to be covered up; the enthusiasm of the architect was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin.

“In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up.  The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all and is dealt with by the grace of God.  But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him…….”

reproduced by Christian History [a periodical  Vol.XVI, no. 3]

Do you recognize any of these in the church of today?

No Middle Ground – Only a Chasm

“The Faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints.” 1 – The Bible IS the Word of God. “The Book judges man.” 2 – Jesus Christ is THE Son of God in a sense which no other is. 3 – The birth of Jesus was SUPERNATURAL. 4 – The death of Jesus was EXPIATORY. 5 – Man is the product of special CREATION. 6- Man is a SINNER fallen from original righteousness, and apart from God’s redeeming grace is hopelessly lost. 7 – Man is justified by FAITH in the atoning blood of Christ, result-supernatural regeneration from ABOVE.

Modernist Theology 1 – The Bible CONTAINS the Word of God.“Man judges the book.”2 – Jesus Christ is A Son of God in the sense which allmen are.3 – The birth of Jesus was NATURAL.4 – The death of Jesus was EXEMPLARY.5 – Man is the product of EVOLUTION.6 – Man is the unfortunate VICTIM of environment but through self-culture can “make good”. 7 – Man is justified by WORKS in following Christ’s example; result – natural development from WITHIN.

“In this way, the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes.  The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith.  Upon the rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom.

The grace of God is rejected by modern liberalism.  And the result is slavery – slavery of the law, the wretched bondage by which man undertakes the impossible task of establishing his own righteousness as a ground of acceptance with God………Emancipation from the blessed will of God always involves bondage to some worse taskmaster.”  Christianity and Liberalism,  Article by J. Gresham Machen 1923

Armageddon: The kings of the whole earth are gathered, by the frogs, to the place called Armageddon.

There is no historical reference to a literal town of Har-Megedon or mountain / hill of Megedon.  However, there are ancient ruins called Tel Meggiddo.  Tels are the ruins of ancient towns that have been built one upon another, eventually appearing as hills.

Since there is no literal place of Har-Megedon lets break down the word.  The root word for cutting, Megedon, was the name for the ritual cutting of human flesh, as part of the worship of Baal by the Canaanites. The word was also used for a cut of troops (i.e. a division).  Solomon kept a cut of troops at Meggiddo.

So Armageddon implies either idolatrous worship or military movements.  The League of Nations (1920-1946) followed by the United Nations (inception April 25 – June 26^th, 1945), representing the kings of the whole earth, fits this description.  As a group these kings have promoted Secular Humanism and are in control over the movement of peacekeeping troops throughout the world.

Seventh Bowl Rev. 16:17-21

This bowl is poured out over the air (Eph. 2:2 Satan is the prince of the air)

The time has come for you the reader to try out all your newfound wisdom.  We are now in the Seventh Bowl of The Revelation and in current history.  As your final, we request that you fill in the blanks yourself and submit your interpretation for our appraisal.

Institute of Advanced Scriptural Studies

Prophesy Examination

The Revelation 16:17-21

Scripture Says:                                     Symbolic Interpretation:                   Your Interpretation:

A loud voice from the Throne out of the temple saying, “It is done”.	The Lord
There were flashes of lightening,	Gods judgment or War
Voices or sounds of saints
The peals of thunder	Judgment
Earthquake	In the old testament this would be a sacking of Jerusalem.In The Revelation this has been a sacking of Rome
The great city splits in three partsRev 11:8  (3 parts  – Ezek 5:1-6)	Babylon the GreatApostate Church
Cities of nations fell	Spiritual Powers or authorities
God remembers Babylon to make her drain the fury of his wrath	Mystery religion, Papal Rome – this will be judgment of some kind.
Every island fled away	Governments disappearing
No mountains to be found	No kingdoms left
Great hailstones of 100 lb.
Till man cursed God for the hail, so fearful was the plague	Man indicating spiritual man