The woman was utterly wicked! She had organized all the demonic lies of the pre-flood world into a religious system that could deceive the entire planet into worshipping her as the “Queen of Heaven”. Her name was Semiramis and along with her husband Nimrod, she prepared to oversee a global religious government that would rule the earth and grant Satan all the desires of His evil heart.
But then… God intervened. He destroyed Babel and scattered its inhabitants throughout the world creating the nations and changing languages which greatly disrupted communication abilities. He isolated vast portions of the world with enormous natural barriers such as oceans and mountain ranges which the nations would take thousands of years to overcome . ..But the woman was not finished. The influence of Semiramis lived on in the false religions celebrated by humanity throughout the world in every area where the people had been scattered and the culmination of these blasphemies is about to come to fruition in the most hellish spiritual movement of all time. Mystery Babylon.. The Mother of Harlots!
….Circa 620 BC in the land of Judah
“So do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them; do not plead with me, for I will not listen to you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes to offer to the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my anger.” -Jer 7:16-18
Jeremiah the prophet is fit to be tied. He continues to warn the Jewish nation that remains in Judah (the northern 10 tribes had already fallen to Assyria decades earlier) that God is fed up with their false religious harlotry and will soon bring down judgment on the southern kingdom. Still, the people insist on worshipping the false gods of the nations they displaced hundreds of years prior including making offerings to the “Queen of Heaven”. God had allowed Israel to overthrow the wicked inhabitants of Canaan and claim the land for themselves because of promises He had made to the patriarchs most specifically Abraham. Through Moses, God led Israel out of Egypt and gave them the promised land with a covenant so they would always rule over this territory if they continued to worship and follow Him. But after King Solomon turned away from the Lord and built temples and shrines to the gods of his many wives, God divided the nation into two parts and now the judgment is about to come upon the southern kingdom as it had the northern one much to Jeremiah’s frustration.
“Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present—a large assembly—and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, “We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord! We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our ancestors, our kings, and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine.”
The women added, “When we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, did not our husbands know that we were making cakes impressed with her image and pouring out drink offerings to her?”
Then Jeremiah said to all the people, both men and women, who were answering him, “Did not the Lord remember and call to mind the incense burned in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem by you and your ancestors, your kings and your officials and the people of the land? When the Lord could no longer endure your wicked actions and the detestable things you did, your land became a curse and a desolate waste without inhabitants, as it is today. Because you have burned incense and have sinned against the Lord and have not obeyed him or followed his law or his decrees or his stipulations, this disaster has come upon you, as you now see.” -Jer 44:15-23
Although Jeremiah continues to warn the people and prophesy of their impending doom if they continue to perform the wicked practices honoring Semiramis and her pantheon of false gods, their response is both hostile and rebellious toward the God of their fathers which seals their fate as future casualties of the Babylonian invasion and the takeover by Nebuchadnezzar beginning in 605 BC. The land will become desolate just as Jeremiah warns and the people will be taken in judgment because of their desire to worship in the ways of ancient Babel.
EGYPT
….905 years earlier on the Nile River
Pharaoh is worried. His slaves, the Hebrews, are growing more and more numerous and there is now word that a savior or deliverer has been promised to them by their God and soon that deliverer may be born to them and raise an army to overthrow their Egyptian stranglehold on the twelve Israeli tribes. After consulting with his priests and inquiring to Isis and Osiris (the Egyptian version of the false gods Semiramis and Nimrod) Pharaoh hatches a plan to greatly reduce a potential Israeli army by killing all the male babies born to Abraham’s decedents.
The killing starts immediately with all male babies being drowned in the Nile River as soon as the midwife sees the baby is male. One child however is spared and his survival providentially paves the way for Israel to escape the clutches of Egypt 80 years later and begin their voyage to the promised land given to Abraham by God over 400 years earlier. That surviving baby is named Moses and He will be empowered by God to withstand all the evil forces that those honoring the “Queen of Heaven” can throw at him.
ASSYRIA
…722 BC in the City of Nineveh
The leaders of Assyria are ecstatic. Led by Shalmaneser V they have just overtaken Samaria and the northern ten tribes of Israel have been taken captive. What once seemed impossible for the people who worship the goddess Asherah has now become reality and the celebration begins. It was once a foolish endeavor to try to overthrow the powerful Israeli army when Almighty God was leading the Jewish nation and Assyria had been dealt numerous blows to both their manpower and their pride when they had tried in the past.
This time however was different as God was now against Israel for their false worship having endured years of watching the Israeli kings lead the nation in false worship of those gods honored by the “Queen of Heaven “ in ancient Babel. Now He has seen enough of Israel prostituting itself and Assyria is given His direct order to ransack the land of His people and take them away as captives!
Assyria eagerly obliges and the once prosperous Israeli people are reduced to peasants with no homeland and no place to lay their head.
BABYLON
…605 BC on the streets of Jerusalem
Jeremiah’s prophesies have all begun to play out and Jerusalem and the southern kingdom are becoming a ruinous heap. There will be 20 more years of exiles and deportations coming in periodic waves but although the name on the destroyer’s tomb will one day read “Nebuchadnezzar”, the real culprit of this tragedy is “The Queen of Heaven” who honored Satan and influenced the Jews to abandon their God and embrace her evil and seductive ways.
The practices of their forefathers who languished in Egypt centuries earlier had helped perpetrate this. So did the foreign wives that King Solomon insisted on having even though their false religious beliefs conflicted with his own and those of his father David. There was also influence from all the surrounding nations who honored Asherah, Dagon, Baal, and other false deities. But wherever and however these abominations worked their way into Israel and led to their compromise of beliefs, now the deeds were done and God has brought in Babylon to inflict their punishment for their unfaithfulness to Him.
All Jeremiah can do at this point is weep!
MEDES/PERSIANS
…473 BC. The city of Susa in Persia ( Iran )
The Persian King Xerxes had just honored his trusted advisor Haman and elevated him above all the noblemen in the court. The other royal officials have gone so far as to bow down to Haman to pay him honor and respect and he is absolutely giddy in basking in the limelight of his great celebrity status. His pride is on full display and the day would be perfect except for one pesky continual annoyance. The annoyance’s name is Mordecai and he is a Jew.
Haman was an Agagite who greatly revered the Amalekite king Agag whom Samuel the Jewish Judge had hacked to pieces centuries before. The Amalekites worshipped Baal the fertility god who was another of the false deities included in the plethora of demonic idols passed down from Ancient Babel.
Unbeknownst to Haman, Mordecai is Queen Esther’s cousin, and also unknown to most of the royal house in that kingdom, Esther is also a Jew. That night, in a vengeful stupor, because Mordecai refused to bow to him, Haman devises a plan to trick the king into ordering a decree that all the Jews in Persia are to be exterminated on a future date and thus, Mordecai will be eliminated. But King Xerxes doesn’t realize this edict will also cost him his beautiful young Queen.
When Mordecai and Queen Esther finally reveal the evil nature of Haman’s plot to King Xerxes at a banquet, the truth comes out and Xerxes sentences Haman to death and enforces an alternate plan that allows the condemned Jews to escape annihilation.
Still, even though they avoided slaughter, the fact remains that no matter where the Jews are exiled to in these foreign lands, there is always a governmental entity that strives to eliminate them permanently fulfilling a curse God gave to Moses to warn the Jewish nation of the price they would pay for turning away from His Fatherly love and compromising themselves with idols:
“Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known. Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.” - Ex 28:64-67
GREECE
…December 167 BC in Jerusalem
The Jews are now back in their land and the Southern Kingdom of Judah has been somewhat restored from their Babylonian exile but they still are nowhere near a sovereign entity. The kingdom of Greece under Alexander the Great had usurped the Medes as the greatest world power (over two hundred years earlier) and now one of the great generals to come from a wing of that Grecian Empire (governing Syria) is about to perform a vile abomination in the Temple of God as an act of contempt against the Jews and their Heavenly Father.
The general’s name is Antiochus Epiphanes and he is determined to humiliate the Jews and their God and show the people that he alone rules their region completely and unequivocally! In less than twenty years the Grecian juggernaut will officially come to an end at the hands of Rome in the battle of Corinth but on this day, Antiochus fears no one and believes himself to be the all-powerful deity that rules the Middle East.
He enters the temple of God and begins spraying pig’s blood all over the altar. He erects an idol of Zeus and demands the priests eat pig flesh. He even passed edicts that the Jewish people must only worship Zeus (The king of gods) rather than their true God. He slaughters those who oppose his edicts and his evil acts incite the Maccabean revolt that lasts from 167-160 BC.
Although the Jews would endure the assaults and ultimately win the day, it would be marked as one of the most brutal periods and blasphemous assaults on God and His people in the history of the Jewish nation. Antiochus’ worship of Zeus, who was yet another of the mythological deities who evolved from Babel’s demon-possessed Cauldron of religious lies, led him to perform these horrific deeds to the delight of his true master, Lucifer!
But… the worst was yet to come!
ROME
April 14, 70 AD….the Temple in Jerusalem
Roman general Titus, the son of Emperor Vespasian, is in the process of leveling Jerusalem. The Great Temple of Herod is on fire and the Roman legions seem to be out of control ignoring orders and destroying everything with abandon and utter contempt for their Jewish adversaries. The orders to quench the fires are disobeyed and in fact, so much wood is thrown into the growing inferno, it escalates the burning to such a degree that it causes the gold of the temple to melt and sink into the cracks of the giant stones that serve as it’s foundation. In an attempt to dig out the melted gold the Romans will dismantle every rock in the structure fulfilling the words of Christ uttered nearly 40 years earlier:
“And Jesus said unto them, “See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down ...” -Matthew 24:2
Jewish historian Josephus estimates that nearly 1.1 million Jews are killed in the siege and those that survive will be carried away to foreign lands leaving the southern kingdom utterly desolate as it would stay for two millennia. The Romans were willing to tolerate a wide array of deities as long as it wasn’t the exclusive God of the nation of Israel. They fully embraced the Babylonian way of deifying their Emperor and worshipping an abundance of demons masquerading themselves as gods. But alas…Jews and those of the newly formed Christian Church were not welcomed into the party.
… The Isle of Patmos …90 AD
Somewhere on the isolated island known as Patmos in the Aegean Sea, the last of Christ’s twelve disciples sits alone, deposed for preaching the Gospel of Jesus to a Roman culture opposed to his missionary message. His fellow disciples have one-by-one, been killed over the last half century for their testimony but when the Roman Emperor Domitian attempted to boil John to death in hot oil, the attempt failed and John survived the execution. Uncertain about what to do with him, the Romans exiled him to the island and now he waits out his days wondering if God still has any assignments left for this remaining “Son of Thunder!”
As he sits … a glorious vision appears before him and he falls to the ground in complete awe! He sees the glorified Lord Jesus Christ who tells him all the things that will happen throughout the Church age and then how the history of man’s government will culminate in the final seven years of Daniel’s 490-year prophesy known as “ The Great Tribulation!” He warns John of the Antichrist’s final kingdom (The Beast) which will be greatly influenced by a harlot religion known as “Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots”.
The merger of this final political system and the religious system will seek to do what all previous kingdoms had failed to do. Bring total global worship and submission to Satan and eliminate Israel’s existence once and for all. Destroying Israel would nullify God’s promise to bring Abraham’s nation the one thousand-year kingdom ruled by her Messiah Jesus who would be God in the flesh sitting on David’s throne.
As He explains in detail the characteristics of the coming Beast system and the Harlot, the Lord pieces together everything we have seen unfolding since Babel’s destruction…and what it’s leading to!
THE GOVERNMENT FROM THE PIT
“Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery:
Babylon the great
the mother of prostitutes
and of the abominations of the earth.
I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.
When I saw her, I was greatly astonished. Then the angel said to me: “Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast she rides, which has seven heads and ten horns. The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because it once was, now is not, and yet will come.
“This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while. The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.” -Rev 17:3-11
The Lord calls the woman riding the beast “Mystery Babylon" because her sorceries can be traced back to Semiramis in ancient Babel. She has polluted the whole world with her false regions and whether it’s the worship of Baal, Asherah, Isis, Zeus, Hinduism, or Allah, it all comes from the same source and that source is demonic.
Her influence (Queen of Heaven) has been felt in all kingdoms of antiquity and one common denominator has tied together the great world kingdoms of the past like no other; Their vile hatred of the Jews and their God!
When the Lord describes the Beast kingdom He starts by describing the progression of global kingdoms leading up to it this way: “Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while. “ What does this all mean? Well… we have traced back to post-Babel, the great kingdoms that have ruled over God’s people since Abraham’s call. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, the Medo-Persian Empire, and Greece had all come and gone by the time the Lord appeared to John. That’s the fallen five. Then He says, “One is” and that would be the Roman Empire that was ruling at the time of John’s visitation. And … there is still one yet to come. That would be the Beast kingdom. It has to be an iteration of the Roman kingdom because Daniel only spoke of 4 great kingdoms to come before the Lord’s kingdom so Rome must be resurrected at the end to be the model from which will come the final global kingdom. And we know the Antichrist will come from that Roman area which dominated the first-century world. (See Daniel 9:27)
The Lord then goes into deeper detail. “ The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction.” From this, we can ascertain that the Beast kingdom will not originate in this world but will be one that comes up from Hell. Who might this be? I believe that when Satan rebelled against God he didn’t just do it as a solo effort and then recruit allies after the fact to join him. We know that 1/3 of the angels rebelled with him and it is logical that the ringleaders of this rebellion were the satanic government the devil formed to help him rule Heaven if his coup was successful. Of course, God was never to be overthrown and he sentenced the fallen angels to eternal damnation but the wicked government will be loosed for a season to possess the final Beast system and deceive the whole earth.
So, five had fallen …
1-Egypt
2-Assyria
3-Babylon
4-Mede-Persia
5-Greece
And one is…
6-Rome
And one is to come…(after Diaspora)
7-Final iteration of Rome (that is the regional model for the global kingdom of the Beast where the Antichrist comes from)
And then this ….
“The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.”
This means the Beast who once was (A satanic government of fallen heavenly angels) but was banished to the Abyss by the time Jesus addressed John, will come up from the Abyss and indwell the 7th kingdom (revised Roman regional model) to be an 8th kingdom (Satanic global kingdom of Antichrist ).
So coming up from The Abyss and going to its destruction is…
8-The Beast system
We must remember that the prophets didn’t see the Church Age gentile kingdoms in the same way they saw the Old Testament Gentile kingdoms because Israel was entering the Diaspora and the Church is not an earthly kingdom. No kingdom would be able to overcome the Church (although many tried to use and corrupt her) because she is a Spiritual kingdom in the process of being built internally in the hearts of men (not externally). Israel on the other hand is an earthly kingdom and the prophets were concerned about those gentile kingdoms and their impact on the survival of the Jewish nation. Once the Jews were taken in exile and the nation leveled, we are given no further glimpse of the history of gentile kingdoms other than the long legs of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue that showed the ages-long impact of the Roman Empire through time culminating in a final version of Rome, and then ...the Beast kingdom.
This silence of mentioning gentile powers during the church age is why the Bible gives no details about the British Empire, Hitler’s Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. It is also why the United States (the greatest power in world history) and the two world wars they participated in and won, are also unmentioned. In fact, there is not even much mention of the nation of Israel (post re-birth) other than the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 until we get to the Tribulation period. Why? Because the Tribulation starts after the Rapture removes the Church from the earth and once that happens, the world will be as vastly different from the pre-Rapture world as the post-flood world was from the one before Noah entered the Ark. The demonic realm will be set free to wreak unchecked havoc and ensuring the survival of Israel will once again be front and center on God’s ages-old to-do list.
TEN KINGS
“The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast.” -Rev 17:12-13
The Lord then goes on to describe the ten kings that will rise with the Antichrist who likely will be the heads of the ten regions (Roman region being one of the ten ) and how those ten will pledge their allegiance to the Antichrist as he takes his kingdom global. Daniel described it this way:
“After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast—terrifying, and frightening, and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns.
“While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that spoke boastfully.” -Daniel 7-8
Ten kings will Pave the way for the Antichrist to seize control of the entire world and they will do it with assistance from the Harlot.
UNHOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
It is impossible to separate the political Beast from the religious Beast. As we have seen throughout history, the demonic hatred of Israel and the True God of Heaven has been present in all those kingdoms who tried to overpower and control God’s people in the past. That’s because Satan’s goal is to usurp God and gain the worship of the world and he attempts this through false religion. When Rome integrated Christianity into its kingdom it didn’t so much do it to promote the Gospel as much as it did to control the masses and pollute the church with the “ Queen of Heaven’s” doctrines. They have promoted pagan ideas into the Church including the adoration and worship of Mary as a Christian version of the “Queen of Heaven “. The prayers to the various saints and the elevation of the pope to a holy intermediary position are all anti-Biblical practices that are repulsive to our Heavenly Father but fit perfectly in with Babylonian religious rituals Satan initiated through Babel’s wicked queen. They did it in Babel to pollute the post-flood cleansed world and they did it in Rome to pollute the Church.
When the Antichrist-led Beast system rides onto the scene and teams with the Harlot religious system it will be an unholy alliance of politics (total government control of the masses) and religion (demonic spiritual deception and Satan worship) that will bring the planet to its knees and threaten the physical and eternal survival of every human in earth.
“Babylon The Great” (political Beast system) and “Mystery Babylon Mother of Harlots” (Religious system) will be the final rebellious union of all that was desired governmentally by Nimrod back in Babel and all that his evil wife Semiramis longed to fulfill spiritually. It will be the ultimate glorification of man and Satan but it will be a resounding failure because as Psalm 127:1 tells us “Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.”
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HARLOT
“The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire. -Rev 17:16
Once the rapture occurs, all the religious guidance that will be left to fill the vacuum will be the false religious systems of the world likely to be united by the remainder of the Catholic system (there will certainly be some catholic believers taken in the rapture) that will head up a new global order of worship. She will bring together elements of the hollowed-out Protestant denominations, new age believers, eastern religions, Islam, Wiccan, earth worshippers, Green movement environmentalists, and the rest to re-invent the pantheon of Semiramis’ idolatrous adorations to Satan. It will work hand-in-hand with the Antichrist’s Beast system to govern and galvanize the planet and will mostly go unchallenged except for the opposition from the two Witnesses of Revelation 11 …. And the true Gospel of Christ that God will reveal to 144,000 Jewish evangelists who will go about preaching judgment and salvation in Christ’s name and oppose all that the Beast system requires (including the refusal of taking the mark of the beast). Like all those fallen kingdoms of antiquity, the Harlot will despise Israel and the true God and will do all she can to deceive those who dwell on the earth into committing full support to the Antichrist.
The blasphemous Harlot organization will even be so powerful in corrupting the world with earth worship that it will prompt our God to send Angels down, flying through the air to remind people who made the earth they are worshipping :
“Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.” -Rev 14:7
The Harlot will be so bloodthirsty she will even spearhead the implementation of the “Mark of the Beast” through the False Prophet who will pledge the Harlot’s allegiance to the Antichrist and require the world to worship him or be killed. But …once the mechanisms are in place for all the world to worship the new king, the political beast will turn on the blasphemous queen.
The ten kings who handed their power over to the Antichrist will force the destruction of the global consolidation of religions because Satan will no longer need a deceptive system to fool the people. He will have his throne at the top of the world and the entire planet will know they have to worship the Devil or lose their life. He will be present among them and will have a way to track them and require their reverence. If they refuse, he will know. And if he knows … he will kill!
THE NAZI FORESHADOWING
One hundred years ago this Spring, Adolph Hitler published his book “Mein Kampf “ in which he laid out his political philosophy and his hatred for the Jewish race. Less than a decade later he had risen to full power over the German nation and was implementing his plan to bring about his “Third Reich”, hoping to take over Europe, then the world, and exterminate the Jewish population. While he was ultimately not successful, he did bring much disaster upon the world and he killed over 6 million Jews in the worst Holocaust of Jewish history. All those evil things Pharaoh wanted to do to the Hebrew slaves and Haman wanted to do to the Jews in Persia and Antiochus wanted to do in Jerusalem, Hitler accomplished in part, during World War 2.
Hitler’s occult beliefs and those of his warped accomplices, long ago imagined in the fertile mind of Semiramis, helped bring his plan to fruition and put the goals of Babel within his imaginative reach. But it was not to be. God instead used his antisemitism and dictatorial destruction to birth the nation of Israel in 1948 and set in motion the end time events we see beginning to clack together, bone by bone, in Ezekiel 37.
Now Israel is in her land, the EU has brought the Old Roman Empire back to a united forefront, and the world Is about ready for the Ten Kings to emerge. Once they do, the Antichrist and Harlot will be hot on their trail.
CONCLUSION
Just as we cannot read every newspaper headline and assume it is the final fulfillment of some prophecy written long ago, likewise we cannot simply look at the totality of prophetic Scripture through the lens of our American worldview. Could the global headquarters of the Beast system one day reside in some place like New York City? Perhaps. Could America contribute in a large way to fulfilling the final pieces of the prophetic puzzle? Certainly. But we must remember that God views the world through its interaction with His two institutions of grace. Israel and the Church. One has been in survival mode for most of the last four thousand years and has taken a bashing from the nations (but not from America) and the other institution of grace has been God’s beacon to this lost planet for two thousand years (the Church) and America was founded on the Principles of Christianity.
The United States is relatively new to the world’s scene and has mostly been a friend of both the Jews and the Church for all of its existence. While America has been blessed greatly and has abused the blessings of our Charitable God shamefully, still God has used her to spread the Gospel and to be the midwife for the rebirth of the State of Israel and also play the role of her big brother. Will God’s kindness toward America cease on the other side of the rapture? Quite possibly. Nevertheless, there are Biblical passages that explain who is who in the texts of our Holy Book and whenever possible we should let Scripture interpret Scripture when trying to figure out the identity of prophetic symbols.
We know with great certainty who the “Five Fallen” kings were in Revelation by the detailed descriptions given throughout scripture of those nations that came against Israel. We know the nation which was in power at the time of Jesus’ Revelation to John and that was Rome. So when Jesus said “One Is” we know He meant Rome was the 6th. We know Daniel was concerned about His people Israel when He prayed and that the revelations given to him were always in connection with how the prophecies affected the Jews.
The kingdoms that would come against Israel ended with Rome and it was indeed Rome that destroyed Israel. But then Daniel saw the final terrible 10-horned global beast and the rise of Antichrist and He also saw that the Antichrist would come from the people who would destroy Jerusalem In 70 AD. The Romans were the culprit then and revived Rome will produce the Antichrist in the near future according to this logic. Therefore the 7th beast would have to be the final version of Rome that gives way to the ten-king confederacy of Antichrist’s Beast system.
The harlot is not just a false religious system but the “Mother” of them. If she is the Mother then all the false religious systems of the world had to have originated from her. That reveals to us that Babel, which started all the post-flood idolatry, has to be the original source and just like we see great flood legends throughout all of the world's diverse cultures (because they spread out from Babel), we also see the same religious lies spread throughout the world from tribe to tribe because of the influence of Babel.
And finally, the corrupt system of pagan worship was introduced by Rome into the Church after Constantine embraced Christianity and made it the primary religion of the empire. But Rome didn’t vanquish all the other belief systems when they embraced the Cross. They simply prostituted the Church with the merging of the other belief systems into the Christian faith. Semiramis even has her witchy fingers in the business of those who call themselves believers in Christ and proclaim the blood of the lamb. So when the Bible says in verse 17:6 “She is drunk with the blood of the saints”, He is not simply talking about the Tribulation Saints but the saints throughout the ages who were killed because of the lies that false religions used to convince rulers to kill God’s people for speaking God’s truth …Including those religious leaders that killed Jesus.
And what about the city that will burn in Revelation 18? Well, Jesus says in verse 17: 18,
“The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.” That great city which ruled the world at the time Jesus spoke was Rome (known as The City of Seven Hills) which now houses the Vatican. Jesus also says “The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits.”
I believe the ten kings will burn Rome and destroy it when the Antichrist has all the world in his trap and we see the city and the Harlot system burn to the ground to the dismay of many who got rich with her luxuries.
The Queen of Heaven and her offspring will be no more! And Satan will stand at the world’s pinnacle demanding all the worship he feels he deserves. As he does, He will look up … and see this!
“I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war.
His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.
Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.
On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”
-Rev 19:11-16