An Emergency Exposition of Revelation 11

[Puritan_Jay]

I have written a free 300K+ word e-book (PDF) entitled An Emergency Exposition of Revelation 11, subtitled as Apocalyptic Events in the 21st Century, starting in the present third decade (Interpreted using Reformation & 17th Century English Puritan Principles).

It is largely an update on the interpretations of John Gill (in the 1700s) and Thomas Goodwin (in the 1600s), and accordingly uses the Reformation’s historicist eschatological model and stands as a necessary eleventh hour antidote to the ruinous, and very grievous, misconceptions Christians today possess concerning the Antichrist, the supposed Rapture, an imminent Second Advent, etc.

The book’s core theses are:

• We are, as of 2024, on the eve of the killing of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, and that slaying will be, as Thomas Goodwin described it, a civic gagging of the Lord’s faithful ministries in the West at the hands of the scarlet coloured beast from the bottomless pit of Rev 17, which is the same beast as in Rev 11.
  
  
• The scarlet coloured beast represents the third, final, and most depraved phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast system; the first of those three phases was the Great Red Dragon of Rev 12 (Pagan Roman Empire), the second was the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 (European civilisation with an apostate Christian veneer), and the third "that was, is not and yet is" being the West as a bloc under final-phase Marxist (aka Globalist) control.
  
  
• We are at the close of the Sardian church era, contrary to the view of many that we are somehow in a Laodicean state (despite there having been no Philadelphian era behind us).
  
  
• The coming silencing of the Lord’s public witness in the West will be part of a twofold chastening on Sardis for failing or refusing to adhere to, and look back at, the “morning star” early step towards the Kingdom’s golden age that was the Reformation. In particular, the charge from Christ in Rev 3 is lack of watchfulness; Sardis has forsaken the Reformation gains in the form of worship (despising the Regulative Principle), in its eschatology (embracing Futurism), in its lack of filial love among the brethren (paying lip service to it or fixating on legalism at its expense), among other issues.
  
  
• The other element of the chastening will come in the form of the great difficulty Christians will experience in trying to conduct commerce, travel, receive healthcare, etc., caused by their just refusal to express state-backed views on the woke agenda, which will become enshrined in a social credit system around late 2025 onwards.
  
  
• The social credit system will be the superlative system of the Mark, which saw historical prototypes in Popish efforts at excluding believers in the past from commerce, for which reason the Mark and the Image of the Beast are introduced under the Beast from the Sea’s tenure in Rev 13.
  
  
• The Mark is, contrary to futurist interpretations, not an implanted microchip or quantum tattoo, but rather is something the ungodly inflict upon themselves at the urging of the False Prophet (“the beast from the earth” of Rev 13), and, being organically tied to the Image of the Beast, consists of any expression of allegiance to that Image and compliance with its evil demands.
  
  
• The False Prophet is an umbrella term for all who informally advance the narrative of the Beast system in any of its latter two phases (i.e. nominally Christian western civilisation and secular, atheistic, tyrannical, final-phase Marxist conditions); accordingly, it consists of apostate clergy, godless educators, experts, authors, scientists, musicians, actors, sports stars, and anyone else used to synthesise “organic” movements that the beast system can then “react to” through the formulation of evil laws.
  
  
• The Image of the Beast is thus a product of the work of the False Prophet in stirring up the masses to create new objects of worship, as it were, and in the final, to-be-short-lived scarlet phase of the beast system, those demanding, angry, threatening objects of worship consisting of all the sacred cows of the Left: LGBT, Critical Race Theory, feminism, and perhaps also the neo-Paganism that is climate-hysteria-driven enviro-kult.
  
  
• The number of the beast is a linguistic hieroglyph for nothing less than a class of man, styled in Rev 13 as “a man”, that is, a caste, whom I refer to as “the hidden man”, or the Lateinos, and is none other than the hyper rich elites of the West who exercise real power behind the facade of democracy. This corrects the Reformers’ and English Puritans’ mistake in bundling the entirety of the Beast system from Rev 13 onwards into the singularity of the Papacy; rather, the evil beasts of Daniel and Revelation are oligarch-owned ungodly blocs or empires, as distinct from the Papacy, which is but the Little Horn, the definitive Antichrist.
  
  
• The chastening on Sardis will endure for a literal 3.5 years commencing at an indeterminate date in 2025, hence this is an emergency exposition; however, it must be acknowledged that warnings such as this will, prophetically, be ignored by the vast majority of believers until Christ repeats His message to Sardis in Revelation 16:15, on the eve of Armageddon, at which point Sardis will repent en masse in readiness for transitioning into Philadelphia.
  
  
• 2025 is the operative year for the slaying of the Two Witnesses as it falls 1,260 years after AD 765, when the Little Horn that is the Papacy reached its apotheosis as the Antichrist, in that the Donation of Pepin from AD 754-756 finally came into meaningful being with the defeat of the recalcitrant Lombards, facilitating the first realisation of the Pope’s claims of temporal supremacy in addition to his ecclesiastical claims of supremacy.
  
  
• As with Gill and others, I take the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16 to commence during the 3.5 years in which the Lord’s public witness lies silent in the West, and that those plagues are directed at the ungodly of the world, styled as “the earth” in the West and “the sea” in the East, and culminating between mid 2028 and mid 2029 with a last minute heeding of Christ’s command to Sardis and an end to the slain condition of the Two Witnesses.
  
  
• The restoration of the Two Witnesses I take to consist of the reaction of the Lord’s faithful few public ministries to the Jewish Epiphany on the eve of the Armageddon event, which is contemporaneous with Joel 3’s prophecy and which opens with the events of Ezekiel 38-39.
  
  
• Further, I take the restoration to occur specifically in the US rather than in my country (the UK), contrary to the views of the old writers, who predicted it would be Britain or even France.
  
  
• The ascent to “heaven” of the resurrected Two Witnesses in Rev 11:11 I take, as did Gill et al, to be the elevation to a place within government of the Lord’s faithful public ministries, triggering a “great earthquake” that will, in fact, be a political earthquake severing the US from the rest of the West and leading to a three-way split among the other western nations, just as global war with the East begins.
  
  
• During this political earthquake, all those behind the beast system in the US will be promptly arrested and publicly executed as the seven thousand slain in Rev 11:13.
  
  
• This will mark the saints of the most High beginning to take the Kingdom, in accordance with Daniel 7:18,22 and will entail the wholesale destruction of all western political power as it dashes in pieces of the feet and toes of iron and clay of Daniel 2’s image, and grows until it eventually fills the whole earth, a process I interpret from Daniel 12 to be completed at the end of the present century.
  
  
• I concur with Gill, and thereby stand against some / most modern Reformed notions, in affirming that the golden age of the Kingdom is not one and the same as the Millennium, but rather precedes it and constitutes “the brightness of His coming”.
  
  
• I further concur with Gill in asserting that the golden age, which he calls “Christ’s spiritual reign”, is one and the same as the Philadelphian church state, but unlike Gill, I assert that the Jews shall return to the Messianic fold right at the start of the Philadelphian age, rather than later within its early decades.

Aside from those core points, the book also expounds Revelation 1-10 and resolves some issues the old writers were unable to, due to their position on the prophetic timelines:

• The hour, day, month, year symbol of Revelation 9:15.
  
  
• The content of the seven thunderings of Revelation 10, that John was forbidden to write, and an explanation for why they were to be hidden, and their relevance to the present time in which we live (hint: their obscuration marks God's displeasure with the church transcendent's widespread abandonment of historicism from the mid 1800s until now).
  
  
• The exact meaning of each of the 7 last plagues of Rev 16, with projected (speculated) timings.
  
  
• The exact year in which the Papacy and its Romish Antichurch are removed from this world (interpretation rather than speculated timing).
  
  
• The proper identification and projected timing of the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39, its relation to Revelation 16, its spiritually transformative aftermath, and the great destruction it heralds for the ungodly in both the East and the West during the “great hail” of Rev 16, which is the same as the “fire” of Ezekiel 39:6.

If you are interested in seeing this book, please get in touch with me and I can send you a link to the PDF. I would ideally like to add an Appendix on Matthew 24 (having for now outsourced that to John Gill's commentary!), but apart from that, I consider the book to be largely complete. I know that, at over 300K words, it’s something of a “weighty tome”, but deep subjects require extensive exposition and observation. One of the gross sins of Sardis is its failure to study, to be watchful...

I must point out, though, that from Rev 3:1-5 it is plain that almost nobody will heed warnings such as this on time for the coming chastening. I therefore regard the book as being something that might gather dust until the appointed time of Sardis’ awakening in 2028/29, when believers will have been totally disenfranchised with all the dead-ends of futurism and finally receptive to materials such as the theses of my book, and all just as the world will be standing on the precipice of the terrible war that all our leaders in the West are now openly predicting is coming in the next few years.

 

[Douggg]

The proper identification and projected timing of the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39, its relation to Revelation 16, its spiritually transformative aftermath, and the great destruction it heralds for the ungodly in both the East and the West during the “great hail” of Rev 16, which is the same as the “fire” of Ezekiel 39:6.

Gog/Magog, latter days, latter years. Ezekiel 38:8. Ezekiel 38:16.

The 7 year 70th week is in Ezekiel 39.

Gog/Magog event, Gog's armies destroyed, verses 1-6.

followed by 7 years, verses 9-10

followed by Armageddon, verses 17-20

Jesus returned to this earth, His Second Coming, verses 21-29

ALL OF THE END TIMES EVENTS TIME FRAMES IN THE BIBLE FIT WITHIN THAT 7 YEARS FOLLOWING THE GOG/MAGOG EVENT.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

Jesus is not coming back any time soon, and certainly not right after the Gog-Magog war (which is the opening act of , or trigger for, Armageddon).

We are still in the Sardis church era, albeit right at its end, when the terrible chastening of Rev 3v3 comes for forsaking the Reformation's advances which are those things that Sardis originally "received and heard", and it starts next year (2025) when the last of the Lord's faithful public ministries will be silenced by "hate speech" laws in every western country. On top of that, Christians will be greatly restricted in commerce, travel, healthcare, etc., due to their non-compliance with the social credit system based around bowing down to the Image.

None of this is going to be fixed until 3.5 years after the Lord's public witness is silenced in the West and Christ repeats His Rev 3v3 message to Sardis in Rev 16v15, right on the eve of Armageddon. Only at that point, as the sixth of the 7 last plagues is about to transform into the 7th, will the church transcendent as a whole become fully disillusioned with futurism and other bad eschatologies and look back again at the Reformation, triggering what Thomas Goodwin writing in the 1600s predicted would be the glorious "Second Reformation", marking the start of the golden age of Daniel 2v44, which will be the Philadelphian church era, or Christ's spiritual reign as some of the old writers called it.

The sad thing is, unbelief of this doctrine is prophetically hardwired into the present day so I expect very, very few people to heed this interpretation right now.

 

[Douggg]

Jesus is not coming back any time soon, and certainly not right after the Gog-Magog war (which is the opening act of , or trigger for, Armageddon).

I would not say right after the Gog/Magog event - but 7 years after. Ezekiel 39:21-29 is Jesus Himself speaking in the text having returned to this earth, His Second Coming.

 

[Douggg]

Jesus is not coming back any time soon, and certainly not right after the Gog-Magog war (which is the opening act of , or trigger for, Armageddon).

We are still in the Sardis church era, albeit right at its end, when the terrible chastening of Rev 3v3 comes for forsaking the Reformation's advances which are those things that Sardis originally "received and heard", and it starts next year (2025) when the last of the Lord's faithful public ministries will be silenced by "hate speech" laws in every western country. On top of that, Christians will be greatly restricted in commerce, travel, healthcare, etc., due to their non-compliance with the social credit system based around bowing down to the Image.

None of this is going to be fixed until 3.5 years after the Lord's public witness is silenced in the West and Christ repeats His Rev 3v3 message to Sardis in Rev 16v15, right on the eve of Armageddon. Only at that point, as the sixth of the 7 last plagues is about to transform into the 7th, will the church transcendent as a whole become fully disillusioned with futurism and other bad eschatologies and look back again at the Reformation, triggering what Thomas Goodwin writing in the 1600s predicted would be the glorious "Second Reformation", marking the start of the golden age of Daniel 2v44, which will be the Philadelphian church era, or Christ's spiritual reign as some of the old writers called it.

The sad thing is, unbelief of this doctrine is prophetically hardwired into the present day so I expect very, very few people to heed this interpretation right now.

The two witnesses being killed does not happen until 1260 days into the 7 year 70th week.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I have written a free 300K+ word e-book (PDF) entitled An Emergency Exposition of Revelation 11, subtitled as Apocalyptic Events in the 21st Century, starting in the present third decade (Interpreted using Reformation & 17th Century English Puritan Principles).

It is largely an update on the interpretations of John Gill (in the 1700s) and Thomas Goodwin (in the 1600s), and accordingly uses the Reformation’s historicist eschatological model and stands as a necessary eleventh hour antidote to the ruinous, and very grievous, misconceptions Christians today possess concerning the Antichrist, the supposed Rapture, an imminent Second Advent, etc.

The book’s core theses are:

• We are, as of 2024, on the eve of the killing of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, and that slaying will be, as Thomas Goodwin described it, a civic gagging of the Lord’s faithful ministries in the West at the hands of the scarlet coloured beast from the bottomless pit of Rev 17, which is the same beast as in Rev 11.
  
  
• The scarlet coloured beast represents the third, final, and most depraved phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast system; the first of those three phases was the Great Red Dragon of Rev 12 (Pagan Roman Empire), the second was the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 (European civilisation with an apostate Christian veneer), and the third "that was, is not and yet is" being the West as a bloc under final-phase Marxist (aka Globalist) control.
  
  
• We are at the close of the Sardian church era, contrary to the view of many that we are somehow in a Laodicean state (despite there having been no Philadelphian era behind us).
  
  
• The coming silencing of the Lord’s public witness in the West will be part of a twofold chastening on Sardis for failing or refusing to adhere to, and look back at, the “morning star” early step towards the Kingdom’s golden age that was the Reformation. In particular, the charge from Christ in Rev 3 is lack of watchfulness; Sardis has forsaken the Reformation gains in the form of worship (despising the Regulative Principle), in its eschatology (embracing Futurism), in its lack of filial love among the brethren (paying lip service to it or fixating on legalism at its expense), among other issues.
  
  
• The other element of the chastening will come in the form of the great difficulty Christians will experience in trying to conduct commerce, travel, receive healthcare, etc., caused by their just refusal to express state-backed views on the woke agenda, which will become enshrined in a social credit system around late 2025 onwards.
  
  
• The social credit system will be the superlative system of the Mark, which saw historical prototypes in Popish efforts at excluding believers in the past from commerce, for which reason the Mark and the Image of the Beast are introduced under the Beast from the Sea’s tenure in Rev 13.
  
  
• The Mark is, contrary to futurist interpretations, not an implanted microchip or quantum tattoo, but rather is something the ungodly inflict upon themselves at the urging of the False Prophet (“the beast from the earth” of Rev 13), and, being organically tied to the Image of the Beast, consists of any expression of allegiance to that Image and compliance with its evil demands.
  
  
• The False Prophet is an umbrella term for all who informally advance the narrative of the Beast system in any of its latter two phases (i.e. nominally Christian western civilisation and secular, atheistic, tyrannical, final-phase Marxist conditions); accordingly, it consists of apostate clergy, godless educators, experts, authors, scientists, musicians, actors, sports stars, and anyone else used to synthesise “organic” movements that the beast system can then “react to” through the formulation of evil laws.
  
  
• The Image of the Beast is thus a product of the work of the False Prophet in stirring up the masses to create new objects of worship, as it were, and in the final, to-be-short-lived scarlet phase of the beast system, those demanding, angry, threatening objects of worship consisting of all the sacred cows of the Left: LGBT, Critical Race Theory, feminism, and perhaps also the neo-Paganism that is climate-hysteria-driven enviro-kult.
  
  
• The number of the beast is a linguistic hieroglyph for nothing less than a class of man, styled in Rev 13 as “a man”, that is, a caste, whom I refer to as “the hidden man”, or the Lateinos, and is none other than the hyper rich elites of the West who exercise real power behind the facade of democracy. This corrects the Reformers’ and English Puritans’ mistake in bundling the entirety of the Beast system from Rev 13 onwards into the singularity of the Papacy; rather, the evil beasts of Daniel and Revelation are oligarch-owned ungodly blocs or empires, as distinct from the Papacy, which is but the Little Horn, the definitive Antichrist.
  
  
• The chastening on Sardis will endure for a literal 3.5 years commencing at an indeterminate date in 2025, hence this is an emergency exposition; however, it must be acknowledged that warnings such as this will, prophetically, be ignored by the vast majority of believers until Christ repeats His message to Sardis in Revelation 16:15, on the eve of Armageddon, at which point Sardis will repent en masse in readiness for transitioning into Philadelphia.
  
  
• 2025 is the operative year for the slaying of the Two Witnesses as it falls 1,260 years after AD 765, when the Little Horn that is the Papacy reached its apotheosis as the Antichrist, in that the Donation of Pepin from AD 754-756 finally came into meaningful being with the defeat of the recalcitrant Lombards, facilitating the first realisation of the Pope’s claims of temporal supremacy in addition to his ecclesiastical claims of supremacy.
  
  
• As with Gill and others, I take the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16 to commence during the 3.5 years in which the Lord’s public witness lies silent in the West, and that those plagues are directed at the ungodly of the world, styled as “the earth” in the West and “the sea” in the East, and culminating between mid 2028 and mid 2029 with a last minute heeding of Christ’s command to Sardis and an end to the slain condition of the Two Witnesses.
  
  
• The restoration of the Two Witnesses I take to consist of the reaction of the Lord’s faithful few public ministries to the Jewish Epiphany on the eve of the Armageddon event, which is contemporaneous with Joel 3’s prophecy and which opens with the events of Ezekiel 38-39.
  
  
• Further, I take the restoration to occur specifically in the US rather than in my country (the UK), contrary to the views of the old writers, who predicted it would be Britain or even France.
  
  
• The ascent to “heaven” of the resurrected Two Witnesses in Rev 11:11 I take, as did Gill et al, to be the elevation to a place within government of the Lord’s faithful public ministries, triggering a “great earthquake” that will, in fact, be a political earthquake severing the US from the rest of the West and leading to a three-way split among the other western nations, just as global war with the East begins.
  
  
• During this political earthquake, all those behind the beast system in the US will be promptly arrested and publicly executed as the seven thousand slain in Rev 11:13.
  
  
• This will mark the saints of the most High beginning to take the Kingdom, in accordance with Daniel 7:18,22 and will entail the wholesale destruction of all western political power as it dashes in pieces of the feet and toes of iron and clay of Daniel 2’s image, and grows until it eventually fills the whole earth, a process I interpret from Daniel 12 to be completed at the end of the present century.
  
  
• I concur with Gill, and thereby stand against some / most modern Reformed notions, in affirming that the golden age of the Kingdom is not one and the same as the Millennium, but rather precedes it and constitutes “the brightness of His coming”.
  
  
• I further concur with Gill in asserting that the golden age, which he calls “Christ’s spiritual reign”, is one and the same as the Philadelphian church state, but unlike Gill, I assert that the Jews shall return to the Messianic fold right at the start of the Philadelphian age, rather than later within its early decades.

Aside from those core points, the book also expounds Revelation 1-10 and resolves some issues the old writers were unable to, due to their position on the prophetic timelines:

• The hour, day, month, year symbol of Revelation 9:15.
  
  
• The content of the seven thunderings of Revelation 10, that John was forbidden to write, and an explanation for why they were to be hidden, and their relevance to the present time in which we live (hint: their obscuration marks God's displeasure with the church transcendent's widespread abandonment of historicism from the mid 1800s until now).
  
  
• The exact meaning of each of the 7 last plagues of Rev 16, with projected (speculated) timings.
  
  
• The exact year in which the Papacy and its Romish Antichurch are removed from this world (interpretation rather than speculated timing).
  
  
• The proper identification and projected timing of the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39, its relation to Revelation 16, its spiritually transformative aftermath, and the great destruction it heralds for the ungodly in both the East and the West during the “great hail” of Rev 16, which is the same as the “fire” of Ezekiel 39:6.

If you are interested in seeing this book, please get in touch with me and I can send you a link to the PDF. I would ideally like to add an Appendix on Matthew 24 (having for now outsourced that to John Gill's commentary!), but apart from that, I consider the book to be largely complete. I know that, at over 300K words, it’s something of a “weighty tome”, but deep subjects require extensive exposition and observation. One of the gross sins of Sardis is its failure to study, to be watchful...

I must point out, though, that from Rev 3:1-5 it is plain that almost nobody will heed warnings such as this on time for the coming chastening. I therefore regard the book as being something that might gather dust until the appointed time of Sardis’ awakening in 2028/29, when believers will have been totally disenfranchised with all the dead-ends of futurism and finally receptive to materials such as the theses of my book, and all just as the world will be standing on the precipice of the terrible war that all our leaders in the West are now openly predicting is coming in the next few years.

And how do you know that 2025 is a definitive year? By what metric?

 

[Ivan Hlavanda]

The two witnesses are Moses and Elijah.

Both Moses and Elijah were there at the Mount of transfiguration to testify that Jesus is God. The Jews today will not hear you testify of Jesus from New Testament as they only know the Law (Moses) and Prophets (Elijah).

Both Moses and Elijah were mentioned in the last chapter of OT, Malachi 4
4 “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. 6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

Lastly, let's look at the miracles the two witnesses do in revelation 11. 6 They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.

Who in OT shut the sky for 3 and a half years and it did not rain? Elijah.
Who turned the water into blood in Exodus? Moses. Everyone who did miracles in OT did different miracles that we can assosciate them with. The 2 witnesses do the miracles of Moses and Elijah.

Moses and Elijah will be the two witnesses who testify of Jesus during the first half of the 7 year tribulation, which has not yet started. Then they will be killed by the antichrist (and everyone will cheer and celebrate) but God will raise them up after 3 and half days.

 

[Maria Billingsley]

I have written a free 300K+ word e-book (PDF) entitled An Emergency Exposition of Revelation 11, subtitled as Apocalyptic Events in the 21st Century, starting in the present third decade (Interpreted using Reformation & 17th Century English Puritan Principles).

It is largely an update on the interpretations of John Gill (in the 1700s) and Thomas Goodwin (in the 1600s), and accordingly uses the Reformation’s historicist eschatological model and stands as a necessary eleventh hour antidote to the ruinous, and very grievous, misconceptions Christians today possess concerning the Antichrist, the supposed Rapture, an imminent Second Advent, etc.

The book’s core theses are:

• We are, as of 2024, on the eve of the killing of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, and that slaying will be, as Thomas Goodwin described it, a civic gagging of the Lord’s faithful ministries in the West at the hands of the scarlet coloured beast from the bottomless pit of Rev 17, which is the same beast as in Rev 11.
  
  
• The scarlet coloured beast represents the third, final, and most depraved phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast system; the first of those three phases was the Great Red Dragon of Rev 12 (Pagan Roman Empire), the second was the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 (European civilisation with an apostate Christian veneer), and the third "that was, is not and yet is" being the West as a bloc under final-phase Marxist (aka Globalist) control.
  
  
• We are at the close of the Sardian church era, contrary to the view of many that we are somehow in a Laodicean state (despite there having been no Philadelphian era behind us).
  
  
• The coming silencing of the Lord’s public witness in the West will be part of a twofold chastening on Sardis for failing or refusing to adhere to, and look back at, the “morning star” early step towards the Kingdom’s golden age that was the Reformation. In particular, the charge from Christ in Rev 3 is lack of watchfulness; Sardis has forsaken the Reformation gains in the form of worship (despising the Regulative Principle), in its eschatology (embracing Futurism), in its lack of filial love among the brethren (paying lip service to it or fixating on legalism at its expense), among other issues.
  
  
• The other element of the chastening will come in the form of the great difficulty Christians will experience in trying to conduct commerce, travel, receive healthcare, etc., caused by their just refusal to express state-backed views on the woke agenda, which will become enshrined in a social credit system around late 2025 onwards.
  
  
• The social credit system will be the superlative system of the Mark, which saw historical prototypes in Popish efforts at excluding believers in the past from commerce, for which reason the Mark and the Image of the Beast are introduced under the Beast from the Sea’s tenure in Rev 13.
  
  
• The Mark is, contrary to futurist interpretations, not an implanted microchip or quantum tattoo, but rather is something the ungodly inflict upon themselves at the urging of the False Prophet (“the beast from the earth” of Rev 13), and, being organically tied to the Image of the Beast, consists of any expression of allegiance to that Image and compliance with its evil demands.
  
  
• The False Prophet is an umbrella term for all who informally advance the narrative of the Beast system in any of its latter two phases (i.e. nominally Christian western civilisation and secular, atheistic, tyrannical, final-phase Marxist conditions); accordingly, it consists of apostate clergy, godless educators, experts, authors, scientists, musicians, actors, sports stars, and anyone else used to synthesise “organic” movements that the beast system can then “react to” through the formulation of evil laws.
  
  
• The Image of the Beast is thus a product of the work of the False Prophet in stirring up the masses to create new objects of worship, as it were, and in the final, to-be-short-lived scarlet phase of the beast system, those demanding, angry, threatening objects of worship consisting of all the sacred cows of the Left: LGBT, Critical Race Theory, feminism, and perhaps also the neo-Paganism that is climate-hysteria-driven enviro-kult.
  
  
• The number of the beast is a linguistic hieroglyph for nothing less than a class of man, styled in Rev 13 as “a man”, that is, a caste, whom I refer to as “the hidden man”, or the Lateinos, and is none other than the hyper rich elites of the West who exercise real power behind the facade of democracy. This corrects the Reformers’ and English Puritans’ mistake in bundling the entirety of the Beast system from Rev 13 onwards into the singularity of the Papacy; rather, the evil beasts of Daniel and Revelation are oligarch-owned ungodly blocs or empires, as distinct from the Papacy, which is but the Little Horn, the definitive Antichrist.
  
  
• The chastening on Sardis will endure for a literal 3.5 years commencing at an indeterminate date in 2025, hence this is an emergency exposition; however, it must be acknowledged that warnings such as this will, prophetically, be ignored by the vast majority of believers until Christ repeats His message to Sardis in Revelation 16:15, on the eve of Armageddon, at which point Sardis will repent en masse in readiness for transitioning into Philadelphia.
  
  
• 2025 is the operative year for the slaying of the Two Witnesses as it falls 1,260 years after AD 765, when the Little Horn that is the Papacy reached its apotheosis as the Antichrist, in that the Donation of Pepin from AD 754-756 finally came into meaningful being with the defeat of the recalcitrant Lombards, facilitating the first realisation of the Pope’s claims of temporal supremacy in addition to his ecclesiastical claims of supremacy.
  
  
• As with Gill and others, I take the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16 to commence during the 3.5 years in which the Lord’s public witness lies silent in the West, and that those plagues are directed at the ungodly of the world, styled as “the earth” in the West and “the sea” in the East, and culminating between mid 2028 and mid 2029 with a last minute heeding of Christ’s command to Sardis and an end to the slain condition of the Two Witnesses.
  
  
• The restoration of the Two Witnesses I take to consist of the reaction of the Lord’s faithful few public ministries to the Jewish Epiphany on the eve of the Armageddon event, which is contemporaneous with Joel 3’s prophecy and which opens with the events of Ezekiel 38-39.
  
  
• Further, I take the restoration to occur specifically in the US rather than in my country (the UK), contrary to the views of the old writers, who predicted it would be Britain or even France.
  
  
• The ascent to “heaven” of the resurrected Two Witnesses in Rev 11:11 I take, as did Gill et al, to be the elevation to a place within government of the Lord’s faithful public ministries, triggering a “great earthquake” that will, in fact, be a political earthquake severing the US from the rest of the West and leading to a three-way split among the other western nations, just as global war with the East begins.
  
  
• During this political earthquake, all those behind the beast system in the US will be promptly arrested and publicly executed as the seven thousand slain in Rev 11:13.
  
  
• This will mark the saints of the most High beginning to take the Kingdom, in accordance with Daniel 7:18,22 and will entail the wholesale destruction of all western political power as it dashes in pieces of the feet and toes of iron and clay of Daniel 2’s image, and grows until it eventually fills the whole earth, a process I interpret from Daniel 12 to be completed at the end of the present century.
  
  
• I concur with Gill, and thereby stand against some / most modern Reformed notions, in affirming that the golden age of the Kingdom is not one and the same as the Millennium, but rather precedes it and constitutes “the brightness of His coming”.
  
  
• I further concur with Gill in asserting that the golden age, which he calls “Christ’s spiritual reign”, is one and the same as the Philadelphian church state, but unlike Gill, I assert that the Jews shall return to the Messianic fold right at the start of the Philadelphian age, rather than later within its early decades.

Aside from those core points, the book also expounds Revelation 1-10 and resolves some issues the old writers were unable to, due to their position on the prophetic timelines:

• The hour, day, month, year symbol of Revelation 9:15.
  
  
• The content of the seven thunderings of Revelation 10, that John was forbidden to write, and an explanation for why they were to be hidden, and their relevance to the present time in which we live (hint: their obscuration marks God's displeasure with the church transcendent's widespread abandonment of historicism from the mid 1800s until now).
  
  
• The exact meaning of each of the 7 last plagues of Rev 16, with projected (speculated) timings.
  
  
• The exact year in which the Papacy and its Romish Antichurch are removed from this world (interpretation rather than speculated timing).
  
  
• The proper identification and projected timing of the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39, its relation to Revelation 16, its spiritually transformative aftermath, and the great destruction it heralds for the ungodly in both the East and the West during the “great hail” of Rev 16, which is the same as the “fire” of Ezekiel 39:6.

If you are interested in seeing this book, please get in touch with me and I can send you a link to the PDF. I would ideally like to add an Appendix on Matthew 24 (having for now outsourced that to John Gill's commentary!), but apart from that, I consider the book to be largely complete. I know that, at over 300K words, it’s something of a “weighty tome”, but deep subjects require extensive exposition and observation. One of the gross sins of Sardis is its failure to study, to be watchful...

I must point out, though, that from Rev 3:1-5 it is plain that almost nobody will heed warnings such as this on time for the coming chastening. I therefore regard the book as being something that might gather dust until the appointed time of Sardis’ awakening in 2028/29, when believers will have been totally disenfranchised with all the dead-ends of futurism and finally receptive to materials such as the theses of my book, and all just as the world will be standing on the precipice of the terrible war that all our leaders in the West are now openly predicting is coming in the next few years.

With all due resoect, Futurism has consistently proven to be wrong which is why it must be continually updated, like you have done here. Why? Because it continually fails to "come to pass". Consider the alternative.
Thank you for sharing.
Be blessed.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

Maria, you didn't read or understand my post. I am opposed to futurism, I utterly abhor it. My position is historicist.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

To the others, the whole reason I have written this exposition is to go back to Reformation principles in unlocking prophecy, not to revisit the dead-ends you are subscribed to. But you will almost certainly not look into this before the appointed time.

The Two Witnesses is a metaphor for the Lord's public witness in the Great City, which is the West in its final years (i.e. now). If you think it is Moses and Elijah roaming about the literal Jerusalem, I can only pity you for the darkness you are in. It probably really is going to take the rigours of the 3.5 year ban on the Lord's public witness in the West to finally snap you out of it.

 

[Maria Billingsley]

Maria, you didn't read or understand my post. I am opposed to futurism, I utterly abhor it. My position is historicist.

Ok but maybe point that out first. The post doesn't clearly state that you refute Futurism outright. You mentioned a "Sardis Awakening in 2028/ 29", yet another futuristic date?
Be blessed.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

And how do you know that 2025 is a definitive year? By what metric?

2025 is 1,260 years after AD 765, which was the year when the Donation of Pepin finally came into meaningful force, the Lombards having resisted the attempts at Papal rule in the intervening years after the Donation was initially made. This represented the Little Horn of Daniel 7 having 3 kingdoms plucked up before it and meant that, for the first time, the Man of Sin in Rome not only exercised ecclesiastical power, but direct temporal power also, meaning it was the point at which the Antichrist reached its apotheosis. From that moment onwards, the Woman (the church transcendent) has abode (to varying degrees) in the spiritual wilderness, including even during the dim glow of the morning star of Rev 2 that was the Reformation, and thus it shall remain until the present Sardian age ends.

Since 2021 I have been trying - in vain - to waken Christians up to the coming gagging through hate speech laws in every single western country. None of those laws existed in 2021, but I knew from this interpretive model they were coming, and now most of them are at advanced stages. Those planned for Canada and Ireland are the most terrifying so far and will essentially amount to a death sentence for all faithful ministries speaking against LGBT, etc.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

Ok but maybe point that out first. The post doesn't clearly state that you refute Futurism outright. You mentioned a "Sardis Awakening in 2028/ 29", yet another futuristic date?
Be blessed.

Maria, I *did* say it up front, in my opening comments.

 

[Maria Billingsley]

To the others, the whole reason I have written this exposition is to go back to Reformation principles in unlocking prophecy, not to revisit the dead-ends you are subscribed to. But you will almost certainly not look into this before the appointed time.

The Two Witnesses is a metaphor for the Lord's public witness in the Great City, which is the West in its final years (i.e. now). If you think it is Moses and Elijah roaming about the literal Jerusalem, I can only pity you for the darkness you are in. It probably really is going to take the rigours of the 3.5 year ban on the Lord's public witness in the West to finally snap you out of it.

May I comment respectfully? I can't help but point out language you are using to get your point across. For instance " unlocking prophecy " , " appointed time", public witness " , " great city which is the West in its final years" and "3.5 year ban on the Lord's public witnesses ", etc. These are all key phrases in Dispensational Futurism or even another angle on the matter. I'm Just pointing this out to you because its still the same thing wrapped up in a different package. Maybe I should read your free pdf to get clarity but so far it's sounding more like biblical eisegesis.
Be blessed.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

Maria, I am using the same terminology the old writers used, such as John Gill, Alexander Hislop and others who lived and wrote long before Dispensationalism was a thing. The issue we have today is that Christians have forsaken the writings and insights of the Reformers and 17th Century English Puritans. This is why terrible chastening begins next year and it will hit most believers like a freight train.

If Dispensationalism has appropriated some of the old historicist nomenclature, that's not really historicism's problem. We could say the Romish Antichurch as done the same by referring to itself as a "church", or for calling its members "Christian". I know you are trying to call me out for being disingenuous or something, but really, you didn't read my post properly and I don't want to quibble over pedantic semantics. I have offered my synopsis for anyone who wants to look at it, but I do so knowing that almost none can receive this at the present time. Judgment falls on Sardis, "like a thief", next year and nothing any of us can attempt will prevent that. Therefore, this is chiefly for a witness at this stage (for the few that will even look at it) and hopefully play some part in the remedy to come later this decade, when the church transcendent finally awakens.

 

[Jerryhuerta]

I have written a free 300K+ word e-book (PDF) entitled An Emergency Exposition of Revelation 11, subtitled as Apocalyptic Events in the 21st Century, starting in the present third decade (Interpreted using Reformation & 17th Century English Puritan Principles).

It is largely an update on the interpretations of John Gill (in the 1700s) and Thomas Goodwin (in the 1600s), and accordingly uses the Reformation’s historicist eschatological model and stands as a necessary eleventh hour antidote to the ruinous, and very grievous, misconceptions Christians today possess concerning the Antichrist, the supposed Rapture, an imminent Second Advent, etc.

The book’s core theses are:

• We are, as of 2024, on the eve of the killing of the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, and that slaying will be, as Thomas Goodwin described it, a civic gagging of the Lord’s faithful ministries in the West at the hands of the scarlet coloured beast from the bottomless pit of Rev 17, which is the same beast as in Rev 11.
  
  
• The scarlet coloured beast represents the third, final, and most depraved phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast system; the first of those three phases was the Great Red Dragon of Rev 12 (Pagan Roman Empire), the second was the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 (European civilisation with an apostate Christian veneer), and the third "that was, is not and yet is" being the West as a bloc under final-phase Marxist (aka Globalist) control.
  
  
• We are at the close of the Sardian church era, contrary to the view of many that we are somehow in a Laodicean state (despite there having been no Philadelphian era behind us).
  
  
• The coming silencing of the Lord’s public witness in the West will be part of a twofold chastening on Sardis for failing or refusing to adhere to, and look back at, the “morning star” early step towards the Kingdom’s golden age that was the Reformation. In particular, the charge from Christ in Rev 3 is lack of watchfulness; Sardis has forsaken the Reformation gains in the form of worship (despising the Regulative Principle), in its eschatology (embracing Futurism), in its lack of filial love among the brethren (paying lip service to it or fixating on legalism at its expense), among other issues.
  
  
• The other element of the chastening will come in the form of the great difficulty Christians will experience in trying to conduct commerce, travel, receive healthcare, etc., caused by their just refusal to express state-backed views on the woke agenda, which will become enshrined in a social credit system around late 2025 onwards.
  
  
• The social credit system will be the superlative system of the Mark, which saw historical prototypes in Popish efforts at excluding believers in the past from commerce, for which reason the Mark and the Image of the Beast are introduced under the Beast from the Sea’s tenure in Rev 13.
  
  
• The Mark is, contrary to futurist interpretations, not an implanted microchip or quantum tattoo, but rather is something the ungodly inflict upon themselves at the urging of the False Prophet (“the beast from the earth” of Rev 13), and, being organically tied to the Image of the Beast, consists of any expression of allegiance to that Image and compliance with its evil demands.
  
  
• The False Prophet is an umbrella term for all who informally advance the narrative of the Beast system in any of its latter two phases (i.e. nominally Christian western civilisation and secular, atheistic, tyrannical, final-phase Marxist conditions); accordingly, it consists of apostate clergy, godless educators, experts, authors, scientists, musicians, actors, sports stars, and anyone else used to synthesise “organic” movements that the beast system can then “react to” through the formulation of evil laws.
  
  
• The Image of the Beast is thus a product of the work of the False Prophet in stirring up the masses to create new objects of worship, as it were, and in the final, to-be-short-lived scarlet phase of the beast system, those demanding, angry, threatening objects of worship consisting of all the sacred cows of the Left: LGBT, Critical Race Theory, feminism, and perhaps also the neo-Paganism that is climate-hysteria-driven enviro-kult.
  
  
• The number of the beast is a linguistic hieroglyph for nothing less than a class of man, styled in Rev 13 as “a man”, that is, a caste, whom I refer to as “the hidden man”, or the Lateinos, and is none other than the hyper rich elites of the West who exercise real power behind the facade of democracy. This corrects the Reformers’ and English Puritans’ mistake in bundling the entirety of the Beast system from Rev 13 onwards into the singularity of the Papacy; rather, the evil beasts of Daniel and Revelation are oligarch-owned ungodly blocs or empires, as distinct from the Papacy, which is but the Little Horn, the definitive Antichrist.
  
  
• The chastening on Sardis will endure for a literal 3.5 years commencing at an indeterminate date in 2025, hence this is an emergency exposition; however, it must be acknowledged that warnings such as this will, prophetically, be ignored by the vast majority of believers until Christ repeats His message to Sardis in Revelation 16:15, on the eve of Armageddon, at which point Sardis will repent en masse in readiness for transitioning into Philadelphia.
  
  
• 2025 is the operative year for the slaying of the Two Witnesses as it falls 1,260 years after AD 765, when the Little Horn that is the Papacy reached its apotheosis as the Antichrist, in that the Donation of Pepin from AD 754-756 finally came into meaningful being with the defeat of the recalcitrant Lombards, facilitating the first realisation of the Pope’s claims of temporal supremacy in addition to his ecclesiastical claims of supremacy.
  
  
• As with Gill and others, I take the Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16 to commence during the 3.5 years in which the Lord’s public witness lies silent in the West, and that those plagues are directed at the ungodly of the world, styled as “the earth” in the West and “the sea” in the East, and culminating between mid 2028 and mid 2029 with a last minute heeding of Christ’s command to Sardis and an end to the slain condition of the Two Witnesses.
  
  
• The restoration of the Two Witnesses I take to consist of the reaction of the Lord’s faithful few public ministries to the Jewish Epiphany on the eve of the Armageddon event, which is contemporaneous with Joel 3’s prophecy and which opens with the events of Ezekiel 38-39.
  
  
• Further, I take the restoration to occur specifically in the US rather than in my country (the UK), contrary to the views of the old writers, who predicted it would be Britain or even France.
  
  
• The ascent to “heaven” of the resurrected Two Witnesses in Rev 11:11 I take, as did Gill et al, to be the elevation to a place within government of the Lord’s faithful public ministries, triggering a “great earthquake” that will, in fact, be a political earthquake severing the US from the rest of the West and leading to a three-way split among the other western nations, just as global war with the East begins.
  
  
• During this political earthquake, all those behind the beast system in the US will be promptly arrested and publicly executed as the seven thousand slain in Rev 11:13.
  
  
• This will mark the saints of the most High beginning to take the Kingdom, in accordance with Daniel 7:18,22 and will entail the wholesale destruction of all western political power as it dashes in pieces of the feet and toes of iron and clay of Daniel 2’s image, and grows until it eventually fills the whole earth, a process I interpret from Daniel 12 to be completed at the end of the present century.
  
  
• I concur with Gill, and thereby stand against some / most modern Reformed notions, in affirming that the golden age of the Kingdom is not one and the same as the Millennium, but rather precedes it and constitutes “the brightness of His coming”.
  
  
• I further concur with Gill in asserting that the golden age, which he calls “Christ’s spiritual reign”, is one and the same as the Philadelphian church state, but unlike Gill, I assert that the Jews shall return to the Messianic fold right at the start of the Philadelphian age, rather than later within its early decades.

Aside from those core points, the book also expounds Revelation 1-10 and resolves some issues the old writers were unable to, due to their position on the prophetic timelines:

• The hour, day, month, year symbol of Revelation 9:15.
  
  
• The content of the seven thunderings of Revelation 10, that John was forbidden to write, and an explanation for why they were to be hidden, and their relevance to the present time in which we live (hint: their obscuration marks God's displeasure with the church transcendent's widespread abandonment of historicism from the mid 1800s until now).
  
  
• The exact meaning of each of the 7 last plagues of Rev 16, with projected (speculated) timings.
  
  
• The exact year in which the Papacy and its Romish Antichurch are removed from this world (interpretation rather than speculated timing).
  
  
• The proper identification and projected timing of the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39, its relation to Revelation 16, its spiritually transformative aftermath, and the great destruction it heralds for the ungodly in both the East and the West during the “great hail” of Rev 16, which is the same as the “fire” of Ezekiel 39:6.

If you are interested in seeing this book, please get in touch with me and I can send you a link to the PDF. I would ideally like to add an Appendix on Matthew 24 (having for now outsourced that to John Gill's commentary!), but apart from that, I consider the book to be largely complete. I know that, at over 300K words, it’s something of a “weighty tome”, but deep subjects require extensive exposition and observation. One of the gross sins of Sardis is its failure to study, to be watchful...

I must point out, though, that from Rev 3:1-5 it is plain that almost nobody will heed warnings such as this on time for the coming chastening. I therefore regard the book as being something that might gather dust until the appointed time of Sardis’ awakening in 2028/29, when believers will have been totally disenfranchised with all the dead-ends of futurism and finally receptive to materials such as the theses of my book, and all just as the world will be standing on the precipice of the terrible war that all our leaders in the West are now openly predicting is coming in the next few years.

Prophecy is best understood after it's been fulfilled. What my work affirms is the historicist’s view through the most recent accounts in history that expose the Protestant’s part in secularizing society, which wounded the papacy and enriched the merchants of the earth, exposing apostate or liberal Protestantism as Babylon in Revelation and the four horsemen in Revelation as riding forth in modern times,

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendour. With a mighty voice he shouted: “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil [Greek: unclean] spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.” (Revelation 18:1-3 NIV)​

No argument stands against the evidence we live in the time of the rich merchants, as they have tremendous influence in the world today. But under the papacy, the merchants were suppressed; they were near the bottom of society, and it wasn’t till the time the Protestants held intercourse with the princes and kings of the earth that the power of the papacy was broken and the merchants given the ability to rise in society to have the influence they have today. We can look to the Old Testament for clues in identifying Babylon in Revelation,

“Among my people are wicked men who lie in wait like men who snare birds and like those who set traps to catch men. Like cages full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; they have become rich and powerful and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it, they do not defend the rights of the poor. Should I not punish them for this?” declares the LORD. “Should I not avenge myself on such a nation as this? (Jeremiah 5:26-29 NIV)​

God calls his people a “cage of unclean birds” for their desire to become rich, which is the condemnation on the Church in Laodicea,

“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation… You say, `I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. (Revelation 14, 17 NIV)​

Undoubtedly, we live in the time of the rich merchants and the spirit of the church in Laodicea. History affirms historicism, which has lost ground to futurism and preterism in recent times, will regain dominance to expose futurism and preterism and be proven the only way to interpret prophecy.

 

[Puritan_Jay]

I think you're on the right track, but we live in Sardis, not Laodicea. There has been no Philadelphian era yet in which the Kingdom of Daniel 2:44 is to grow to fill every nation, and note that it does so at the expense of the ungodly governments, meaning, believers will ascend to power in first one nation, then another and another. This is the meaning of the Two Witnesses being called up to "heaven" in Rev 11v11 and it will be contemporaneous with the Jewish epiphany, in which Israel becomes Messianic, just as it is abandoned by all its western allies. The Jewish conversion will be "life from the dead" to the Lord's slain public witness in the West; this will happen before the present decade is out, as my ebook explains.

All of this would be well understood had the church transcendent paid better attention to the Reformers and Puritan writers on these matters, but after William Miller's "Great Disappointment" in the 1840s, eschatology nosedived and interest in the great commentaries of the start of the Sardis era mostly vanished. We have to look back at that which Sardis "received and heard" according Rev 3v3. This is the crisis point we are at, and for not heeding that warning, Sardis will be visited "like a thief" in chastening which, as the old writers predicted, will be the last persecution of the church, but a very painful and sharp one. I hope as many in Sardis as possible will keep their garments white and also look to get prepared before this thing hits, because it is going to be biblical. Literally.

 

[Maria Billingsley]

Maria, I am using the same terminology the old writers used, such as John Gill, Alexander Hislop and others who lived and wrote long before Dispensationalism was a thing. The issue we have today is that Christians have forsaken the writings and insights of the Reformers and 17th Century English Puritans. This is why terrible chastening begins next year and it will hit most believers like a freight train.

If Dispensationalism has appropriated some of the old historicist nomenclature, that's not really historicism's problem. We could say the Romish Antichurch as done the same by referring to itself as a "church", or for calling its members "Christian". I know you are trying to call me out for being disingenuous or something, but really, you didn't read my post properly and I don't want to quibble over pedantic semantics. I have offered my synopsis for anyone who wants to look at it, but I do so knowing that almost none can receive this at the present time. Judgment falls on Sardis, "like a thief", next year and nothing any of us can attempt will prevent that. Therefore, this is chiefly for a witness at this stage (for the few that will even look at it) and hopefully play some part in the remedy to come later this decade, when the church transcendent finally awakens.

What do you suppose this chastening will be next year? In other words, what will happen? Shall I take this as a "prophetic word" given to the church by 17th century Theologians guaranteed to pass ? Or shall we wait and test all things before believing.
Thanks for engaging!

 

[Jerryhuerta]

I think you're on the right track, but we live in Sardis, not Laodicea. There has been no Philadelphian era yet in which the Kingdom of Daniel 2:44 is to grow to fill every nation, and note that it does so at the expense of the ungodly governments, meaning, believers will ascend to power in first one nation, then another and another. This is the meaning of the Two Witnesses being called up to "heaven" in Rev 11v11 and it will be contemporaneous with the Jewish epiphany, in which Israel becomes Messianic, just as it is abandoned by all its western allies. The Jewish conversion will be "life from the dead" to the Lord's slain public witness in the West; this will happen before the present decade is out, as my ebook explains.

All of this would be well understood had the church transcendent paid better attention to the Reformers and Puritan writers on these matters, but after William Miller's "Great Disappointment" in the 1840s, eschatology nosedived and interest in the great commentaries of the start of the Sardis era mostly vanished. We have to look back at that which Sardis "received and heard" according Rev 3v3. This is the crisis point we are at, and for not heeding that warning, Sardis will be visited "like a thief" in chastening which, as the old writers predicted, will be the last persecution of the church, but a very painful and sharp one. I hope as many in Sardis as possible will keep their garments white and also look to get prepared before this thing hits, because it is going to be biblical. Literally.

Apparently, you’re coming from a postmillennial form of historicism with your notion that the fifth kingdom is the rock cut out without hands. The rock strikes the period of the feet, not the iron legs (Daniel 2:34, 44). Daniel 7 affirms that the little horn is a beast that comes out of the Roman empire, the legs, and contends with Christ at his return, making it the fifth kingdom. At the same time, Revelation reveals two more kingdoms, the beast from the earth and the image, before the scarlet beast rises from the abyss to kill the two witnesses. That's seven, nay eight kings (Revelation 17:9-11).

The fifth kingdom is the papacy. The rise of Protestantism wounded it, and history affirms that it had the merchants subdued while it held power over the Western world. As I said, no argument prevails against this truth. We live in a time of rich merchants, and Protestantism promoted our secular society to the kings and princes of the earth, which enriched the merchants. It was Protestantism that held intercourse with the kings of the earth, and “the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”

Furthermore, the influence of the Protestants also led to the merchandise of religion, which historians of our day affirm. I have documented this in my work. You might want to read Odo W. Middelmann's The Market-Driven Church. I cite several contemporary authors in my work who substantiate that we live in the Laodicean era. The Philadelphian era can be affirmed as the end of the 2300 days/years in 1844, which is no coincidence when the merchants made their greatest strides in laissez-faire.

And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. (Daniel 8:14)​

​

For our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:29).​

My work scares and upsets most "Christians."

 

[Ivan Hlavanda]

The Two Witnesses is a metaphor for the Lord's public witness in the Great City, which is the West in its final years (i.e. now). If you think it is Moses and Elijah roaming about the literal Jerusalem, I can only pity you for the darkness you are in. It probably really is going to take the rigours of the 3.5 year ban on the Lord's public witness in the West to finally snap you out of it.

What evidence do you have that this is a metaphor? Scripture needs to be taken literarly, unless stated otherwise or the literature points to it.

We take the book of genesis as literal history. Why should the book of revelation be different?

You say the great city is the West. Revelation 11 8 and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified.

The Lord was crucified in Jerusalem. Jerusalem being called Sodom and Egypt is nothing new, read Ezekiel.

If you read about the witnesses in revelation literarly, the text will make sense, if we look at things spiritually, it falls apart.

Revelation 11 4 These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth.
This is similar to text in Zechariah 4 3 And there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left....the two olive trees here are Joshua the priest and Zerubbabel.
So if they are 2 literal people in Zechariah, why would they be a metaphor in revelation 11?

Rev 11 5 And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm....is fire coming from the mouth of witnesses today that it consumes people? No.

6 They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.....what witnesses have that power today?


9 For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, 10 and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth. 11 But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them. 12 Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them.....so when did this happen? Or are you going to allergorize this also? Maybe Jonah wasnt in whale's belly for 3 days, Jesus in tomb for 3 days....see what happens when you allergorize eveything? It becomes total nonsence. If you read these things as they shoud be, you will know that there will be 2 witnesses in Jerusalem testifying about Jesus for 3 and half years, and they will have authority and power from God to do miracles, and when the antichrist kills them, people will rejoice, but God will raise them after 3 and a half days.

I can only pity you for the darkness you are in

Are you sure you are the one that is not in darkness? Nevertheles, we all will stand before God and give our account.