Revelation for the Head and the Heart

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Norman McNulty

Michael Hasel

What is the Sea-Beast Doing Today?

This leads very nicely and very quickly and easily into my topic, which focuses on Revelation 13.

The last presentation focused primarily on Revelation 12, and he touched at the end on my topic, which is Revelation 13, which is great.

I will elaborate a little bit more on some of the slides that he showed here at the end.

So I guess the question is, why would an archaeologist and religion professor be interested in the sea beast of Revelation when I'm a historian?" And the answer to that question is, because prophecy and history are inextricably bound together.

And they're the 2 elements, I believe today, that are, as we have seen already in our presentations today, that are increasingly under attack in the Christian world and have been completely rewritten in major ways.

And we see that happening in biblical history, and we see that happening in prophecy as well.

We've seen a wonderful presentation a few moments ago on how that has happened with the 1260 days.

I'll be there next month, in fact, again.

And 1 of the things that I enjoy going to is the Western Wall.

And when I visit the Western Wall, particularly on Sabbath, particularly on this day, there are many, many Jews that worship in this place.

The Western Wall is the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

It's the place where Herod rebuilt the Temple Mount and had the Temple built on top, and here hundreds of Jews, sometimes many, many Jews are crowded there to worship.

It's the closest they can come to where the temple once stood, where the sanctuary once stood, and yet it is at 1 point in 1 idea invigorating to see this, to see the fervency with which Jews today worship on the Sabbath, and yet it's also a sad thing to see because in some ways Judaism is facing a stone wall that it cannot get past.

It is worshiping there week after week, Sabbath after Sabbath.

That wall has been standing there for over 2, 000 years.

It was standing there when Jesus, the Savior, was in this place, walking past this same wall, and yet because of their rejection of Christ, they are still awaiting this Messiah.

And my question today is, what is it, how is it for us as Adventists?

Is it possible that after 160 years of this movement that we too are losing our fervency and our focus on looking at what God has planned for this movement to spread His message to the world.

Ellen White in Selected Messages writes, all that God has in prophetic history, those are those 2 elements together, in prophetic history specified to be fulfilled in the past has been, and all that is yet to come in its order will be." Wasn't that wonderful to see how God in the French Revolution and in the events that we just saw a moment ago how God in His order fulfilled prophecy back in the end of the 1260 days.

Daniel, God's prophet, stands in his place.

In the Revelation, the Lion of the tribe of Judah has opened to the students of prophecy, the book of Daniel.

And thus Daniel is standing in his place.

He bears his testimony, that which the Lord revealed to him in vision of the great and solemn events which we must know as we stand on the very threshold of their fulfillment.

Now if she can write this over a hundred years ago, do you think it is even closer to its fulfillment today?

In history and prophecy, The Word of God portrays the long-continued conflict between truth and error.

Old controversies will be revived, and new theories will be continually arising.

But God's people, who in their belief and fulfillment of prophecy have acted a part in the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels' messages, they know where they stand.

They have an experience that is more precious than fine gold, and they are to stand firm as a rock, holding the beginning of their confidence steadfast unto what?

We are living in the end time, and we must be steadfast in the message that God has given us.

I don't want to be up here without the Word of God.

So, we have that message made more clear.

Now, as we saw in a few slides a few moments ago, we saw several events that have taken place, and I just want to begin with this, and we're going to go into it a little bit more in depth.

How many of you remember this event in 2005?

I was living on the island of Cyprus with my family on a Greek Orthodox, in a Greek Orthodox country, and every single channel in that country had this live event as the funeral of Pope John Paul II was taking place.

2000000000 people, it is estimated, watched this worldwide.

USA Today says, never have so many world leaders come together for the funeral of a religious leader.

Never has such a funeral drawn the interest of so many.

It was a choreographed public relations masterpiece.

Pope John Paul II's funeral brought together what at that time was the single largest gathering in history of heads of state outside the United Nations, surpassing the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965.

4 kings, 5 queens, and at least 70 presidents and prime ministers and more than 14 leaders of other religions attended.

By the way, the countries that you see in purple here are the countries that sent their heads of state to that funeral.

You can just imagine that that's quite a bit of the world's population.

Even ecumenical patriarch, the head of all the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, and there's 14 Eastern Orthodox churches.

Bartholomew, Patriarch Bartholomew I, was in the honorary first seat in the sector that was reserved for delegations from churches, not in full communion with the Holy See.

This was the first time an ecumenical patriarch attended a papal funeral since the Great Schism in 1054.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, then Rowan Williams, was also present at the papal funeral, the first time since the Church of England broke with the Catholic Church in the 16th century, the first time an Archbishop of Canterbury attended a Catholic papal funeral.

And of course, this image shocked anyone in the Adventist church who knew a little bit about the heritage of our American history.

3, 1 current, 2 former presidents of the United States kneeling before the Catholic Pope's casket.

This is a quote that was referred to briefly yesterday.

The mingling of church craft and state craft is represented by the iron and the clay.

The union is weakening all the power of the churches.

This investing the church with the power of the state will bring evil results.

Men have almost passed the point of God's forbearance.

They have invested their strength in politics and have united with the papacy.

Revelation 13, which is my subject for today, verses 1 through 4.

I'm going to read the first part of this.

Then I stood on the sand of the sea and I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having 7 heads and 10 horns.

On his horns, 10 crowns, and on his heads, a blasphemous name.

Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion.

The dragon, Satan, gave him his power, his throne, and great authority." If we go back to the prophecy of Daniel chapter 2, where as you saw the feet and the toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided so that the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile.

By the way, the iron in the feet is a continuation of the iron in the legs.

And that continues on through, through the division that you see there.

Now, the text in Daniel doesn't specifically refer to 10 toes, does it?

And I'm not going to ask for everybody to lift up their feet to me today and show me how many toes they have.

My dad did that once in a workers' meeting somewhere in the world, and somebody actually took his foot off, shoe off, and showed him that he had 6 toes on 1 of his feet.

But we all know that that is an exception, not the rule, right?

McNulty, in your medical practice, you don't see that very often.

Let's look at the other elements that we, in Daniel 7, 24, the fourth beast, which is again representing what?

The papist, I'm sorry, Rome and then so forth on down has 10 horns.

In Revelation 17, the beast with 7 heads and 10 horns, and Revelation 13, our verse, beast with 7 heads and 10 horns.

Domstig has already described to us, The view of Protestantism since its beginnings was to identify this beast with 7 heads and 10 horns in Revelation 13 as the papacy.

Martin Luther, the papal empire and the imperial papacy he describes as the 2 beasts.

The papacy, he declares, brings the secular sword under its control.

Other Reformers he went on, of course, to describe in quite some words, and Dr.

Dennis Pettibone, our church historian here at Southern Adventist University, has written a wonderful article on this some years ago published in the Journal of the Adventist Theological Society that in fact the idea that the Pope was Antichrist did not begin of course with Luther, it began already much earlier with Jan Hus and others, but it continued to be the case with major Reformers all the way through its history.

In fact, it came over to the New World as well and continued to be a major focal point here.

Back to Menu

What is the Sea-Beast Doing Today?

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Sound Doctrine