Eschatology Note # 5
In the writing of John's Revelation, there is a structure to the presentation of what John saw by means of "a door standing open in heaven" (Rev. 4) My mental picture of this is that he was taken up aboard an aerial craft and shown some "videos". This was a memorable experience for him: he was astonished; he cried; he was perplexed. The text is structured as three nested or "telescoping" sequences of seven, where the seventh item expands into the next seven. Between these expansions are some additional events or descriptions. This structure is itself worthy of some additional investigation.
The seventh seal expands into the seven trumpets. The seventh trumpet is blown (Rev. 11:15) and the next event is the declaration that (to paraphrase) Christ has now become the ruler of the new age (world = age), a kingdom that will be perpetual. Because the Hebrew language and way of thinking, unlike the Greeks, is concrete, grounded in observable events, a red flag goes up in the back of my mind whenever I encounter in Bible translations what I call "infinity-words" such as superlatives or words like "perpetual". (How long is "perpetual"? It does not necessarily mean for infinite time but for the duration of the context in which it appears. A perpetual condition in an agreement lasts as long as the agreement is in force.) I should add that some less intelligent atheists have a field-day with superlatives; all the cows in the plagues of Egypt (in Exodus) die in one plague, only to have boils in the next plague. Conclusion: the Bible contradicts itself. In English, superlatives have a logical meaning; "all" means "without exception" whereas in Hebrew it means "the preponderance of". By paying attention to the meaning of words in the text, additional insight into the meaning of the text can be achieved.
After the seventh trumpet, more goes on before the seven bowls of God's wrath are poured out. He is not only bringing just judgement to the earth but he is also angry, and with the pouring out of the bowls his anger is assuaged by them. But before this occurs, there is an interesting interlude that includes two monsters: the beast of the sea, then the beast of the earth. In the vision of Daniel, there were also beasts and they represented rulers, such as the leopard corresponding to Alexander the Macedonian (the Great) whose conquest was speedy (and short-lived). As rulers over people, the sea and earth must be descriptions of the form that the people took under each beast. The conjecture of the Adventists is that the beast of the sea represents the UK and of the earth, the US. The UK was a seafaring empire while the US spread out in manifest destiny over the continent of the New World which was relatively unpopulated.
Here is a different possibility. If sea and earth are people, what are their characteristics? Seawater has no durable form and is always shifting, moving around. Earth is solid and can sustain structure. The migration of Israelite tribes into Europe fits the "sea". Indeed, one of the holidays that God has given us (that we in the West have replaced with what underneath are pagan holidays) was the feast of succoths; in Hebrew "succoths" means something like "nomad". Translations often call it the "feast of booths" The word "booth" in America brings to mind obsolete public telephones or voting, but this is entirely the wrong sense. I call it the "camping holiday", when Israelites would camp out (and after returning from Babylon, Judeans did so on their rooftops), reminding them that they were a mobile people: "Have God, will travel." And they did, migrating into Europe, where in the 500s AD (CE) all ten barbarian tribes were subjugated to the "beast" in Rome that came to rule medieval Europe. To be precise, he was not yet "the Pope" because that became official in 601 AD, though the primacy and political supremacy of the Bishop of Rome by then had been well-established, with Frankish kings Clovis and then Charlemagne providing him military support for his rule.
In Revelation 13, where the two beasts appear in the text, the first beast is given a duration of "42 months" (v. 8). Following Daniel's time-scale of a day = a year, with the ancient reckoning of a year being 360 days and a month 30 days, then 42 months times 30 days is the recurring 1260, for 1260 years, covered previously. In Revelation 13, the second beast, of the earth, has the authority and power of the first beast, as a follow-on. After the 1260 years of the first beast (ending in 1798 AD, when Napoleon ended rule of the papacy), it was eventually re-established and papal power restored. The Lateran Accords under Italian ruler Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century did more; it established the Vatican as a sovereign state in the world, headed by the Pope. The Rev. 13 text gives some interesting aspects of his rule.
The "mortal wound" that ended the rule of the first beast did not destroy the papal power. It recovered and became even stronger the second time around, as the "beast of the earth". By the time of the second beast, Greater Europe - the West - was well-established and had the solid form of the earth in having established institutions and a developed culture. The second beast (Rev. 12:11,12) "had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon". Horns represent power in the ancient world. This second beast assumes the power of the Lamb - of Christ - but its decrees are of the Devil, who in Rev. 12 is referred to as the dragon. The second beast is not independent of the first beast. Its relationship to the first beast is also stated in Rev. 12:12 as "exercising all the authority of the first beast in its presence". Thus the first beast is still there, but this second beast has the same authority as the first. Only one organization fits that relationship. The leader of the Jesuits is the Superior General - sometimes known as the "black pope" - and though few Roman Catholics know it, he has equal authority to the Pope. This second beast is described as totalitarian, making the earth and its inhabitants to worship the first beast, whose mortal wound (in 1798) was healed (by the Lateran Accords). More follows in Rev. 13 that usually captures the attention of popular eschatologists, highlighted by the "mark of the beast".
In my effort to model the social order of humanity, whether ancient or modern, civilizations all have three classes, just as Rome did: the "general public" or "common man" of the plebian class, the "professional" class of equites such as the medieval knights, and the ruling class of patricians. However, in the power hierarchy, there are higher levels, and they have the advantage of secrecy, such as the high-level Freemasons or elite fraternities such as Skull & Bones of Yale University. The various secret societies, however, are not independent and unrelated. One of them from the Crusades - the Knights Templar - is now an order within Freemasonry. Who is at the top of this secret level of power?
I posit that it is the Jesuits. They have been around for centuries, enough time to infiltrate and subvert Freemasonry and high-level government people including the Money Power itself. Jesuits in the past were expelled over 30 times from states on the grounds of sedition. At the top of the financial hierarchy is the Rothschild dynasty. Although little is leaked about it, my supposition is that the Jesuits are above the Rothschilds in the power hierarchy. It is not a well-kept secret that the Rothschilds are worshipers of Baphomet, another name for Satan or the Devil. High-level Freemasonry - above the 30th level - assigns a spirit guide - that is, a demon - to its high-level members for guidance. Could the Jesuits be the human upper management of the Devil? A black mass is said to have been held a few years ago in St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican. It was held at night and secretively. Who could have had access and control within the Vatican to perform such a ceremony? It was probably not Pope John Paul, and that leaves the Jesuits - the SOJ - as the prime suspect. Perhaps this event inaugurated the rule of the second beast under the Devil.
The world in its present form is not structured with the Vatican as the prevailing empire. Instead it is the collapsing West led by the United States. During Trump's presidency, the expression "deep state" came into vogue. It refers to the immense organization of the administrative branch of the U.S. government and how quasi-official activity within it forms concentrations of power that functionally are outside the purview of official government. Each new President appoints about 8000 people to positions in the administration, listed in a document that has traditionally had a plum-colored cover and is hence called "the Plum Book". The President, as an individual with no more background than a single individual can have, relies on others to make these appointments. They are made by others in positions of political power, and these individuals also have memberships in organizations, usually semi-secret such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission, while others are more secretive such as the high-level Freemasons or the Jesuits, which form another concentration of power. The U.S. government has about 20 covert agencies that operate secretively. Any group of people, whether as an official government agency or a secret society who can keep others from knowing what they are doing, has a great advantage in infiltrating and subverting other groups to their interests. The CIA, NSA, ONI, and other intelligence agencies, civilian or military, also constitute a major part of what is meant by "the deep state".
Consequently, besides the open activities of states in the world there is a substratum of activity that is not known to the general public. This covert level is where much of the power in the world resides that causes events that shape world history. Of the secret groups, one has been around longer than the others and has been able to acquire mastery over them. For centuries, going back to the Crusades plundering the Near East, the Papacy has been acquiring vast wealth which is kept secret. Wealth enables power. Occasionally, some scandal brings some of it to light, such as that of the Vatican Bank-P2 Freemason lodge in the 1980s. As far as I can tell, the Jesuits are the supreme secret society. They control the Freemasons, though the popular impression is given that they are opposed to each other - another Machiavellian ploy. And now for the first time in history, a Jesuit is the Pope and controls the vast wealth of the Vatican. Although it is difficult to investigate the covert substratum of world politics, the Papacy appears to have far more power, wielded away from public attention, than is popularly realized. The beast of the earth as Revelation describes him might very well be the restored papacy under complete control of the Jesuits.
By the way, for those willing to do the two activities involved in truth-seeking, there are only a few actual secrets that cannot be found out with persistent digging. Indeed, the launch codes of nuclear missiles and military satellite frequencies are highly guarded, but much else can be found out through persistent attention to tiny but telltale pieces of information. The Internet has made information mobile and freely accessible, and this reveals what has hitherto been able to be kept secret. For instance, although the UFO-UAP topic is a highly guarded secret within the U.S. government, it is such a large secret that leaks are unavoidable. The JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the shoot-down of Flight 800 from NYC also have much evidence from a multitude of sources that have been uncovered and pieced together, and they overturn the official story (or "narrative"). Evaluating these leaks is the role of the truth-seeker. The same applies to the deep state and its relationship to the beast of the earth.
And the other truth-seeking activity is, once you have dug out the facts constituting the evidence, to think for yourself in putting the facts together to form a plausible explanation.
In the writing of John's Revelation, there is a structure to the presentation of what John saw by means of "a door standing open in heaven" (Rev. 4) My mental picture of this is that he was taken up aboard an aerial craft and shown some "videos". This was a memorable experience for him: he was astonished; he cried; he was perplexed. The text is structured as three nested or "telescoping" sequences of seven, where the seventh item expands into the next seven. Between these expansions are some additional events or descriptions. This structure is itself worthy of some additional investigation.
The seventh seal expands into the seven trumpets. The seventh trumpet is blown (Rev. 11:15) and the next event is the declaration that (to paraphrase) Christ has now become the ruler of the new age (world = age), a kingdom that will be perpetual. Because the Hebrew language and way of thinking, unlike the Greeks, is concrete, grounded in observable events, a red flag goes up in the back of my mind whenever I encounter in Bible translations what I call "infinity-words" such as superlatives or words like "perpetual". (How long is "perpetual"? It does not necessarily mean for infinite time but for the duration of the context in which it appears. A perpetual condition in an agreement lasts as long as the agreement is in force.) I should add that some less intelligent atheists have a field-day with superlatives; all the cows in the plagues of Egypt (in Exodus) die in one plague, only to have boils in the next plague. Conclusion: the Bible contradicts itself. In English, superlatives have a logical meaning; "all" means "without exception" whereas in Hebrew it means "the preponderance of". By paying attention to the meaning of words in the text, additional insight into the meaning of the text can be achieved.
After the seventh trumpet, more goes on before the seven bowls of God's wrath are poured out. He is not only bringing just judgement to the earth but he is also angry, and with the pouring out of the bowls his anger is assuaged by them. But before this occurs, there is an interesting interlude that includes two monsters: the beast of the sea, then the beast of the earth. In the vision of Daniel, there were also beasts and they represented rulers, such as the leopard corresponding to Alexander the Macedonian (the Great) whose conquest was speedy (and short-lived). As rulers over people, the sea and earth must be descriptions of the form that the people took under each beast. The conjecture of the Adventists is that the beast of the sea represents the UK and of the earth, the US. The UK was a seafaring empire while the US spread out in manifest destiny over the continent of the New World which was relatively unpopulated.
Here is a different possibility. If sea and earth are people, what are their characteristics? Seawater has no durable form and is always shifting, moving around. Earth is solid and can sustain structure. The migration of Israelite tribes into Europe fits the "sea". Indeed, one of the holidays that God has given us (that we in the West have replaced with what underneath are pagan holidays) was the feast of succoths; in Hebrew "succoths" means something like "nomad". Translations often call it the "feast of booths" The word "booth" in America brings to mind obsolete public telephones or voting, but this is entirely the wrong sense. I call it the "camping holiday", when Israelites would camp out (and after returning from Babylon, Judeans did so on their rooftops), reminding them that they were a mobile people: "Have God, will travel." And they did, migrating into Europe, where in the 500s AD (CE) all ten barbarian tribes were subjugated to the "beast" in Rome that came to rule medieval Europe. To be precise, he was not yet "the Pope" because that became official in 601 AD, though the primacy and political supremacy of the Bishop of Rome by then had been well-established, with Frankish kings Clovis and then Charlemagne providing him military support for his rule.
In Revelation 13, where the two beasts appear in the text, the first beast is given a duration of "42 months" (v. 8). Following Daniel's time-scale of a day = a year, with the ancient reckoning of a year being 360 days and a month 30 days, then 42 months times 30 days is the recurring 1260, for 1260 years, covered previously. In Revelation 13, the second beast, of the earth, has the authority and power of the first beast, as a follow-on. After the 1260 years of the first beast (ending in 1798 AD, when Napoleon ended rule of the papacy), it was eventually re-established and papal power restored. The Lateran Accords under Italian ruler Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century did more; it established the Vatican as a sovereign state in the world, headed by the Pope. The Rev. 13 text gives some interesting aspects of his rule.
The "mortal wound" that ended the rule of the first beast did not destroy the papal power. It recovered and became even stronger the second time around, as the "beast of the earth". By the time of the second beast, Greater Europe - the West - was well-established and had the solid form of the earth in having established institutions and a developed culture. The second beast (Rev. 12:11,12) "had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon". Horns represent power in the ancient world. This second beast assumes the power of the Lamb - of Christ - but its decrees are of the Devil, who in Rev. 12 is referred to as the dragon. The second beast is not independent of the first beast. Its relationship to the first beast is also stated in Rev. 12:12 as "exercising all the authority of the first beast in its presence". Thus the first beast is still there, but this second beast has the same authority as the first. Only one organization fits that relationship. The leader of the Jesuits is the Superior General - sometimes known as the "black pope" - and though few Roman Catholics know it, he has equal authority to the Pope. This second beast is described as totalitarian, making the earth and its inhabitants to worship the first beast, whose mortal wound (in 1798) was healed (by the Lateran Accords). More follows in Rev. 13 that usually captures the attention of popular eschatologists, highlighted by the "mark of the beast".
In my effort to model the social order of humanity, whether ancient or modern, civilizations all have three classes, just as Rome did: the "general public" or "common man" of the plebian class, the "professional" class of equites such as the medieval knights, and the ruling class of patricians. However, in the power hierarchy, there are higher levels, and they have the advantage of secrecy, such as the high-level Freemasons or elite fraternities such as Skull & Bones of Yale University. The various secret societies, however, are not independent and unrelated. One of them from the Crusades - the Knights Templar - is now an order within Freemasonry. Who is at the top of this secret level of power?
I posit that it is the Jesuits. They have been around for centuries, enough time to infiltrate and subvert Freemasonry and high-level government people including the Money Power itself. Jesuits in the past were expelled over 30 times from states on the grounds of sedition. At the top of the financial hierarchy is the Rothschild dynasty. Although little is leaked about it, my supposition is that the Jesuits are above the Rothschilds in the power hierarchy. It is not a well-kept secret that the Rothschilds are worshipers of Baphomet, another name for Satan or the Devil. High-level Freemasonry - above the 30th level - assigns a spirit guide - that is, a demon - to its high-level members for guidance. Could the Jesuits be the human upper management of the Devil? A black mass is said to have been held a few years ago in St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican. It was held at night and secretively. Who could have had access and control within the Vatican to perform such a ceremony? It was probably not Pope John Paul, and that leaves the Jesuits - the SOJ - as the prime suspect. Perhaps this event inaugurated the rule of the second beast under the Devil.
The world in its present form is not structured with the Vatican as the prevailing empire. Instead it is the collapsing West led by the United States. During Trump's presidency, the expression "deep state" came into vogue. It refers to the immense organization of the administrative branch of the U.S. government and how quasi-official activity within it forms concentrations of power that functionally are outside the purview of official government. Each new President appoints about 8000 people to positions in the administration, listed in a document that has traditionally had a plum-colored cover and is hence called "the Plum Book". The President, as an individual with no more background than a single individual can have, relies on others to make these appointments. They are made by others in positions of political power, and these individuals also have memberships in organizations, usually semi-secret such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission, while others are more secretive such as the high-level Freemasons or the Jesuits, which form another concentration of power. The U.S. government has about 20 covert agencies that operate secretively. Any group of people, whether as an official government agency or a secret society who can keep others from knowing what they are doing, has a great advantage in infiltrating and subverting other groups to their interests. The CIA, NSA, ONI, and other intelligence agencies, civilian or military, also constitute a major part of what is meant by "the deep state".
Consequently, besides the open activities of states in the world there is a substratum of activity that is not known to the general public. This covert level is where much of the power in the world resides that causes events that shape world history. Of the secret groups, one has been around longer than the others and has been able to acquire mastery over them. For centuries, going back to the Crusades plundering the Near East, the Papacy has been acquiring vast wealth which is kept secret. Wealth enables power. Occasionally, some scandal brings some of it to light, such as that of the Vatican Bank-P2 Freemason lodge in the 1980s. As far as I can tell, the Jesuits are the supreme secret society. They control the Freemasons, though the popular impression is given that they are opposed to each other - another Machiavellian ploy. And now for the first time in history, a Jesuit is the Pope and controls the vast wealth of the Vatican. Although it is difficult to investigate the covert substratum of world politics, the Papacy appears to have far more power, wielded away from public attention, than is popularly realized. The beast of the earth as Revelation describes him might very well be the restored papacy under complete control of the Jesuits.
By the way, for those willing to do the two activities involved in truth-seeking, there are only a few actual secrets that cannot be found out with persistent digging. Indeed, the launch codes of nuclear missiles and military satellite frequencies are highly guarded, but much else can be found out through persistent attention to tiny but telltale pieces of information. The Internet has made information mobile and freely accessible, and this reveals what has hitherto been able to be kept secret. For instance, although the UFO-UAP topic is a highly guarded secret within the U.S. government, it is such a large secret that leaks are unavoidable. The JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the shoot-down of Flight 800 from NYC also have much evidence from a multitude of sources that have been uncovered and pieced together, and they overturn the official story (or "narrative"). Evaluating these leaks is the role of the truth-seeker. The same applies to the deep state and its relationship to the beast of the earth.
And the other truth-seeking activity is, once you have dug out the facts constituting the evidence, to think for yourself in putting the facts together to form a plausible explanation.
