Anti-Christ and the Beast

jmdewey60
reply to post by sk0rpi0n

 

You will notice that the first beast is also the same as the beast that the whore sits upon.

The First Beast is the one who comes up out of the sea.
The one who the Great Whore rides on is the Scarlet Beast, not the same one as the First Beast.

Both the first beast and the beast the whore sits on have ten horns and seven heads. This leads me to believe that they are the same entity.

reply to post by sk0rpi0n

Both the first beast and the beast the whore sits on have ten horns and seven heads.

Well, there is that.
I think that there is two different things going on.
In Rev. 11, something is happening.
In Rev. 17, it is static, where an angel is describing the identity of the whore and the beast she is sitting on,
who are pointed out as representing specific individual people.
The coming of the beast in 11 is the direct result of exercising of the Dragon's (who is this great all-encompassing foe of humanity) power, making use of a preexisting primordial entity (the beast) who had been subdued at the time of creation.

reply to post by SuperLuminous1

Wow, this is a really old thread, but as it's bumped now, I'll go ahead and answer you.

I used to believe the same stuff as you, its technical name is called “futurism”, and its one of three schools of prophecy. Over the years I found there were discrepancies with futurism, and so I started digging to find out where these interpretations came from.

This is history, you can look this up anywhere and find it out.

Around the 1500's you had the Protestant Reformation going on, and Martin Luther splitting from the Catholic Church. Luther was running around publishing articles stating that the “Pope was the Antichrist” (or “Little Horn”). As the Station of the Pontifex Maximus (the Pope) does in fact match the description given in Daniel regarding the “Little Horn”, and for the first time a publicly readable “Luther Bible” was available to the masses who had been suppressed by the Catholic Church, this was getting legs in a big way.

So the Catholic response to this was to hold the Council of Trent. This council did a number of things, but one of them was to organize the Protestant Counter-Reformation. Part of their tactics to counter Luther’s accusation that the Pope was the Antichrist, was to come up with competing theories that showed that he could not possibly be so. They tasked the Jesuit Order with writing these theories.

The one you believe, and are telling me about is called “Jesuit Futurism”, and was released by Jesuit Theologian Francisco Ribera, who took the last week of Daniels 70 weeks, and moved it to the “end times”, where an antichrist would rise to power, make peace, and rebuild the temple...

Francisco Ribera
Apocalypse commentary
In order to remove the papacy of the Catholic Church from consideration as the Antichrist (as an act of countering the Protestant Reformation), Ribera began writing a lengthy (500 page) commentary in 1585 on the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) titled In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarij, proposing that the first few chapters of the Apocalypse apply to ancient pagan Rome, and the rest he limited to a yet future period of 3½ literal years, immediately prior to the second coming. During that time, the Roman Catholic Church would have fallen away from the pope into apostasy because of the Reformation cry stating that "the papacy is the seat of the true and real Antichrist." (Martin Luther, Aug. 18, 1520). Then, he proposed, the Antichrist, a single individual, would:

Persecute and blaspheme the saints of God.
Rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
Abolish the Christian religion.
Deny Jesus Christ.
Be received by the Jews.
Pretend to be God.
Kill the two witnesses of God.
Conquer the world.

To accomplish this, Ribera proposed that the 1260 days and 42 months and 3½ times of prophecy were not 1260 years as based on the year-day principle (Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6), but a literal 3½ years, hence preventing the arrival of the deduction of (i) the 1260 years to be related to the Dark Ages (according to the Historicism (Christianity) interpretation of eschatology from 538 A.D. when the papal power was fully established in Rome until its political blow in 1798 A.D., when Louis-Alexandre Berthier the general of Napoleon captured pope Pius VI as prisoner to Valence, France) and (ii) the Antichrist to be related to papacy.

This school was rejected by the Catholic Church, in lieu of Jesuit Theologian Luis De Alcazar's Preterism, which is closer to the Historicism taught by the protestant reformers.

So Futurism (what you have listed above), was even rejected by the people who wrote it...

This theory of Futurism was picked up by writers such as 'Hal Lindsey', in his book 'The Late Great Planet Earth', and it started to become popular again. Since many pastors were not trained in Prophecy, and since many independent churches (such as many baptist churches) had no formal training for their pastors, they learned the WRONG interpretation of scripture. Then to make matters worse, as Futurism teaches a “rebuilt” Israel, and Temple, there are certain interest groups who have a vested interest in pushing futurism on the Christian masses.

sk0rpi0n
Both the first beast and the beast the whore sits on have ten horns and seven heads. This leads me to believe that they are the same entity.

Yes, you are correct.
The same way that the Gospels are written about the same event from different perspectives, so is Revelation. That perspective may change in location, time, or reference (eg... political vs religious).

The beast with the seven heads in both instances refers to Rome, the “City of the Seven Hills”:

“This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits.”

Rome has been called the “City of the Seven Hills” since forever, going back before John wrote his Revelation.

The symbol of the Vatican is one of the “Vates” holding a “Cup of Prophecy”, this person can be seen in coins minted in that period as well as the paintings and sculptures of the Vatican.

Vates
In pagan Rome the vates resided on the Vatican Hill, the Hill of the Vatii. The Vatican Hill takes it name from the Latin word Vaticanus, a vaticiniis ferendis, in allusion to the oracles, or Vaticinia, which were anciently delivered on the Vatican Hill.

The First beast is a compilation of the Beast from Daniel. This is due to Rome ingesting all the previous culture of the preceding beasts (scientific, theological, religious, etc). It also has the same 7 heads. One head becomes wounded, this was when the Pope was taken from political power in the 1790's, at the end of the 42 month reign. 1776, is when the second beast was to “come from the land”, which also happened around the same time. The US came from an empty land, as a small Christian country (a lamb), and becomes the last true world superpower, controlling the worlds monetary system. We also were the first to “call fire from the heavens” by being the first to build atomic weapons. The US became a country in 1776, a few years before the wounding of Rome. Rome continues to live, though minus its old power, making it “the beast that was, and is not, yet is”.

John Wesley writing his notes on Revelation in 1760 wrote:

”Another . . . beast .... But he is not yet come, though he cannot be far off; for he is to appear at the end of the forty-two months of the first beast. And he had two horns like a lamb–a mild, innocent appearance."–P.427