|||
Turn (or Click) in your Bibles to the book of Revelation, chapter 14. We are blogging through a series of lectures concerning what the Bible teaches about Mystery Babylon and the Stone Kingdom. This is lecture #10, and the title of it is The 4th Empire—Pagan Rome.
At this point in our series it has occurred to me that I need to explain something to our online ministry audience.
In the spring of 2010, Stone Kingdom Ministries began broadcasting my lectures on shortwave radio. The coverage maps showed that we could reach almost the entire North American continent with the good news of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, His Stone Kingdom, which is soon to emerge in its fulness here on planet earth. After ten years on radio, we decided to drop shortwave radio and devote much more emphasis on getting my materials online.
For those of you who enjoy Podcasts, Stone Kingdom is working on a full digital transformation. Part of that will include Podcast format. Stay tuned, more on this to come when we are ready.
I believe it is now God’s time that Christians have their eyes opened to many things previously hidden. Mystery Babylon concerns all of us, ladies, and gentlemen, because we are still and have been living under the rule of a global empire for a century and longer.
Most people do not recognize it. That is because the Bible prophesied that modern Babylon would be a mystery. The fact that we are enslaved to this global empire would be a fact hidden from the masses for a long time. The enslavement is now being shown openly. (E.g., mandatory masks, shelter in place, keep six feet distance from everyone, etc.)
“Mystery Babylon” does not refer to that ancient city in Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq. That ancient city crumbled into dust centuries ago. It is referring to the ideas, methods and means of man’s government which were established in ancient Babylon, but which have continued in existence secretly all down through 25 centuries until now!
That we are now living under the rule of a secret empire has been hidden from our understanding for God’s purposes. But now is the time for this mystery, this hidden globe-encompassing empire called Mystery Babylon the Great, to be made known. Why now? Well, follow along as we read…
Revelation 14:6 And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
7 Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
8 And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
By studying the Scriptures and comparing them with history and current events, some students of the Bible (including this student) have concluded that the secret empire of Mystery Babylon is now in the process of falling. The signs are everywhere. The fall of Babylon is beginning to bring a certain level of discomfort to many people, both in their checkbooks and in their need for answers.
We believe we have some of those answers. Not of ourselves, of course, but the answers which God has placed in His Word for just such a time as this. Therefore, it behooves us to know how God has had all of this planned out, so that we will not fear as the collapse affects us in very real ways in our day-to-day lives.
You will recall last time, how I interrupted my plan of studies to peek at what is going on right now vis a vis Mystery Babylon’s economic leg. That was our two lectures called 100 Years of the Fed. …referring to the Federal Reserve System, of course.
Ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls, who is the present chairman of the Federal Reserve System? When I wrote this, it was “Gentle Ben” (as I call him) Bernanke. He was replaced in 2018 by Jerome Hayden “Jay” Powell who is the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve. He was nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the United States Senate. Although Bernanke was frequently called up to testify on Capitol Hill, would it surprise you to learn that he seldom gave interviews to the news media?
But he made an exception in December 2010. I cannot remember the last time I watched any of those 20/20 types of programs, but as Providence would have it, that Sunday I just happened to turn on the TV just as the CBS program 60 Minutes was beginning, and lo and behold, there was Scott Pelley commencing an interview with Dr. Bernanke.
I watched the entire segment, plus the rest of the show, which featured Lesley Stahl doing a favorable profile of the now 38-year-old founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. But that is another story, and we can chat about that during our fellowship meal after today’s lecture. My bottom line on that is: beware; Big Brother might come in the guise of Big Bird…or a ZuckerBird, if you will (chuckle, grin).
Back to Gentle Ben Bernanke. Do you recall last time how I used the illustration of the movie, Bull Durham? And of former Buckeye football coach Jim Tressel? And I showed you how the coaches use formulaic, boilerplate language when dealing with the sports writers? Such as, “I’m just glad to be part of the team, Erin. We’ve got a great bunch of guys all working together…” and blah, blah, blah.
Then, can you imagine how I chuckled as I watched Ben Bernanke?
It was a slick piece of propaganda, but I trust my listeners/readers would have been able to recognize the b.s. when they heard it. The main clue that it was b.s. was whenever Dr. Ben opened his mouth.
And you will recall also that I told you how they (politicians, bureaucrats, etc.) not only try to obfuscate the issue, but they will often tell bald-faced lies. Well, Bernanke was extremely clever in the way he handled Scott Pelley’s softball questions.
For example, he acknowledged that some critics have said that QE II, i.e., the second round of Quantitative Easing, was nothing more than printing more money… six hundred billion dollars’ worth.
QE II is the recently announced program by the Fed that over the next several months they are going to buy U.S. bonds. Okay, they are going to buy government bonds. Why are they doing that? Well, because China, Japan, Russia, and other countries are getting tired of buying them.
Why? Because they realize they are being played for international suckers by the Fed and the U.S. government! They see very clearly that the purchasing power of the US dollar is being systematically destroyed, so why would they want to hold billions or trillions of US dollars that are constantly losing value.
But if other nations will not buy our debt-financing instruments, such as bonds; then the whole financial house of cards is going to collapse soon unless somebody buys them. So, what this QE II really amounts to is that we taxpayers—through the Fed—are picking up the tab for monetizing our own debt. And historically, that has been one of the last steps, one of the last resorts of a tumbling economy just before that economy collapses.
But Dr. Bernanke assured the public, with the complicity of 60 Minutes, that we at the Fed are not simply printing more money to cover that, but he said he was going to—and I think this is almost a verbatim quote—he was going to “use the Fed’s own resources”—to buy the Treasury bonds.
Well, think about that: what kind of resources does the Fed have? Answer: it has all the money it wants to print, doesn’t it? Or technically, I would agree with Chairman Bernanke that they are not going to simply print another $600 billion. Because technically, the vast majority of our money is not in paper greenbacks anymore—that comprises only about one or two percent of the total money supply.
Most of our so-called money is now in the form of electronic digits of zeroes and ones zipping through cyberspace at the speed of light. You talk about creating something out of thin air! The vast majority of “money” in the United States today is in the form of digital figures on a computer screen.
Anyhow, I thought it was highly significant that Dr. Bernanke would deign to come down from his high place in the grove of the Federal Reserve for the purpose of trying to reassure us peasants that all is well, when it fact, the economic situation is on fire and sitting on the edge of an abyss to boot.
For him to make such a rare appearance on “the peoples’ television” tells me that I did not see his lip quivering during every answer he gave just because he was afraid of Scott Pelley’s softball questions. No, rather, I think he has lots of reasons to fear and it all has to do with the ephemeral nature of money which can very easily disappear into the thin air out of which it was created. Well, I will have much, much more to say about the current money and economic system in lectures to come.
Now, referring back to lecture seven of this series, we showed you how the Higher Critics and some notable scholars such as Dr. James Strong have erred in their teaching concerning which historical empires are to be identified with the four kingdom-empires prophesied by Daniel as he interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel, chapter 2.
Remember how Dr. Strong and others taught that the four empires were: #1, ancient Babylon; #2, the Medes; #3, the Persians; and #4, the Greeks? They totally ignore the Roman Empire.
Since we are dealing with biblical prophecy, I felt it was also important to teach you, if only briefly, about the three primary schools of eschatological interpretation. Just as quick review:
those who believe and teach that God’s time clock stopped for about 2,000 years and that when the secret rapture occurs, it will kick in again, and then a whole ton of prophecies will be fulfilled in a very short (7 or 3 ½ years) period of time in the future—those of that school are called Futurists.
Those who teach that almost all prophecy was fulfilled by 70 A.D. are called Preterists (sometimes spelled Praeterists). And,
Those who teach, as the Reformers did, that God’s time clock did not stop, but that Daniel and Revelation have been progressively being fulfilled all during the centuries We are called Progressivists or historicists or progressive historicists, all synonymous terms. (Not to be confused with the political, so-called “progressives,” who are actually collectivist regressivists.)
Let us turn now to Daniel, chapter 2. My lecture # 7 was entitled: Daniel Unsealed: The Fourth Kingdom-Empire. In that lecture, we also demonstrated how students of Bible prophecy can very easily conclude that simply because verses follow one another, that they must necessarily happen at, or near in time to each other.
Yet we provided you with two astounding examples which prove otherwise. The second example, if you recall, was Daniel 2, verses 32 and 33—and if you want to just glance at them quickly to refresh your memory, you will remember that these two verses encompass a span of about two thousand years!
Then, at the end of that lecture I told you that we would come back to Daniel, chapter 7, verses 7 & 8, and I would show you how these two verses likewise cover a span of time measured in centuries! This is precisely where we will pick up in the next installment, now that I have laid the groundwork for this mini-series.