Daniel 7 (Con't)

Brian, you want to, let me turn this, make sure I've got this right, you want to open this up in a word of prayer? Alright, let's open our

Bible to Daniel chapter 7 and we will finish at least

Daniel 7 today with Lord Willen. And we will start in verse 19 where he gives the explanation of the final, the fourth kingdom.

He says, Then I desire to know the exact meaning of the fourth beast, which was different from all the others.

It was exceedingly dreadful, with its iron teeth and its claws of bronze, which devoured, crushed, and trampled down the remainder with its feet.

And the meaning of the ten horns that were on its head and the other horn which came up And before which three of them fell, namely that horn which had eyes with a mouth, uttering great boast, which was larger in appearance than its associates.

And I kept looking, and the horn was waging war with the saints, and overpowering them until the Ancient of Days came, and judgment was passed in favor of the saints of the

Highest One. And the time arrived when the saints took possession of the kingdom. Thus he said,

The fourth beast will be a fourth kingdom on the earth, which will be different from all the other kingdoms, and it will devour the whole earth, and it will tread it down and crush it.

As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings will arise, and another will arise after them.

And he will be different from the previous ones, and will subdue three kings, and he will speak out against the

Most High, and wear down the saints of the Highest One. And he will intend to make alterations in times and the law, and they will be given into his hand for a time, times, and a half a time.

But the court will sit for judgment, his dominion will be taken away, it will be annihilated and destroyed forever, and that the sovereignty, the dominion, and the greatness of all the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be given to the people of the saints of the

Highest One. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all the dominions will serve and obey him.

And at this point, the revelation ended. And as for me, Daniel, my thoughts were greatly alarming, my face grew pale, but I kept the matter to myself.

Just before we go any further, why would Daniel's face grow pale and him be alarmed?

Does anybody have any thoughts? He did.

He was encouraged, hey, there's coming another kingdom, we're going to be set free. The captivity, in his mind, he's already understanding that at some point

Babylon's over. At some point, he's already got that revelation. And then he's got, man, these other kingdoms, but wait a minute, things are not going to really get better, they're going to get worse.

And he thinks, like you just said, he thinks about his people and he's greatly alarmed and he gets sick.

He's going to have the same situation happen later on in the book as he thinks about his people, and he basically gets sick because he goes, man, this isn't how it's supposed to be.

Things are supposed to be good. But he also did the same thing when he was telling about being genuine, or if they're righteous or not.

This right here specifically has to deal, remember, nobody else is hearing this.

Nobody else has heard this dream. Nobody else has heard the interpretation. This is basically God, the angel, and Daniel.

This is it. I mean, this is direct revelation from God. He's not had to interpret somebody else's dream, somebody else's vision.

This is God giving this to Daniel. And one, it is to encourage him, okay, it is to encourage him to give this revelation to his people, to continue to persevere, but it's also to give the revelation that they would continue to tell the people of God to turn to those that do not follow

God to turn to God. You understand, that is the same message of the book of Revelation. Compromising church needs to repent, turn to God, turn to Christ, and to take those who are being persecuted to continue to persevere.

Same message, same message. So let's back up, and we're going to specifically deal with, because there's someone introduced in this passage that was brought into earlier in the book,

I mean, earlier in the chapter, in 7, where it talked about a little horn comes up, okay?

This is the first time, so last week we saw the little horn, I mean, the son of man.

This one is going to be a horn.

I will say you'll have the horn, you'll have, let's see, beast, man, lawlessness, a lot of S's in that one, and an antichrist come, these four come out of this passage, and you have four, three schools of thought.

You have the preterite, you have the preterist view, you have the historicist view, you have the idealist view, this is sometimes called the spiritual view, if any of y 'all do your own studying, sometimes this comes up as the spiritual, and then you have the futurist view.

All of these are in this passage, and all of these are connected, so I just want you to know they are connected.

So if you flip over to Revelation 13 real quick, and I'll just start at the beginning and read through verse 6,

Revelation 13 verse 6, and just listen to the similarities. Now, understand that the apocalypse fits within a context,

John's getting this revelation on the Isle of Patmos, and my understanding is, if you want to check and make sure that what

I'm saying to you is correct, if you back up to chapter 10, if you look at, remember, the chapter and verse separations are not inspired.

Men have done that to help us try to understand, but sometimes they're not in the best place. If you look at the end of chapter 10, he says, he talks about getting another revelation, so he's got the major revelation that's coming, the apocalypse, and he says, hey, in verse 10 of 10,

I took, I'm sorry, I took the little book out of the angel's hand and I ate it, and it was, and put it in my mouth, and it was sweet as honey, and as I began to eat it, my stomach was made bitter, and then he said, you must prophesy again, okay, he's getting a prophecy within a prophecy, so now, that sets up chapters 11, 12, and 13, okay, 11, 12, and 13 are a prophecy within the prophecy of Revelation, so it talks about the two witnesses, it talks about, it even goes even to when

Christ was born, and he's basically giving the, how

I understand it, the time between the two advents, so then when you get to chapter 13, listen to what he says, remember what we just read about the little horn and Daniel, he said, and a dragon stood on the sand of the seashore, who will we understand the dragon?

If you want to back up to chapter 12, the dragon is, it clearly says it's Satan, okay,

I mean there's no ifs, ands, or buts, the dragon stood on the sand of the seashore, and then I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns, seven heads, and his horns were ten diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names, and the beast which

I saw was like a leopard, his feet was like those of a bear, and his mouth was like that of a lion, where have we seen those at, already,

Daniel, and what empires were those? It was Babylon was the lion, the bear was the

Medo -Persian, and the leopard was Alexander the Great, what would be the next one that would come?

It would be the Roman Empire, and listen, it has these beast -like qualities of them all, and the dragon gave him his power, and his throne, and great authority, and I saw one of his heads as if it had been slain, and his fatal wound was healed, and the whole earth was amazed and worshipped the beast.

They worshipped the dragon because he had given the authority of the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, who is like the beast?

Who is able to wage war with him? And there was one given to him a mouth that was speaking arrogant words and blasphemies, and authority to act for forty -two months was given to him.

He opened his mouth in blasphemies against God to blaspheme his name, his tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven.

So, forty -two months is, if we say, remember what we said about, here it is,

I did it, I did it, I did it again, it won't come off, I did it,

I did it again, I smashed it on there playing with it, remember this was a time, we said that was a year, correct?

Times, two, we're good, everybody follow me, half the times, add those together, what do you get?

Forty -two months, and if you want to keep going forward, you'll see in that same little section of eleven, of chapter, the end of chapter ten, and the end of chapter thirteen of Revelation, you'll have this number come up.

It's all the same, it's all the same, the numbers are the same, now, how we understand who this person is, and Daniel, is related to Revelation thirteen, okay?

Now go back to Daniel, and we'll start seeing how some people think this is fulfilled, and how

I understand it, and then y 'all can throw rocks at me if you want, so, the preterist view would say the little horn, and that has come up, that's in the fourth kingdom, what's the fourth kingdom?

Just make sure we all understand, what's the fourth kingdom? Rome, so Daniel's looking forward to the

Roman Empire, what are we doing? We're looking back, okay? So this would be preterist,

Latin, preter, okay, meaning in the past, or already done, behind, however you want to say it, it's already done, so the preterist view would say that that little horn had already come.

Some people believe that that little horn was, did you raise your hand, did you raise your hand?

Oh, scratching your face, okay. The little horn is Nero, and I understand that,

I do believe that Nero is the beast that's spoken of in Revelation 13, what did he do from 64 to the time he killed himself in 68

AD? He persecuted the people of God, it wasn't Roman Empire wide though,

I want you to understand that, it wasn't like when Domitian comes along, Domitian just, if there was

Christians anywhere in the Roman Empire, he did the same things that Nero did, burned them, dipped them in pitch, impaled them on poles, and put lions, put them in the lion's arena with skins on them to be eaten by animals, okay?

He did that empire wide, that's not what

Nero did. Nero was the first, Caesar Nero, he was the first to understand that now there was a distinction between the

Jews and Christianity. For a while, his predecessor,

Claudius, did not make the distinction in Rome that Judaism and Christianity were two different things, he thought they were just a sect of one another.

It was Nero that comes along and understood, oh wow, there's a difference, and when he understood that there's a difference, he could get the

Jews to capitulate against the Christians and help persecute them, so you had two major persecutors in early

Christian history, the first one would be what? Who persecuted the Christians first?

Paul as a representative, collectively of who though? The Jews, yeah the

Jews, who killed the first martyr? The Jews did, Sanhedrin took

Stephen out, stoned him, because he testified before them that they were murderers, okay? So you had two major persecutors of the people of God in the beginning, one was the

Jewish people, the Jewish, we could just say the Sanhedrin, because that's where they got the power to do that, the next one would be the

Roman Empire, okay? So the preterists see, first and foremost, the persecutor, the horn could be, this is how some of them see it, the horn could be the

Herod's, and the little horn is the Beast of Revelation, which would have been

Nero, okay? Then you have the historicist view, the historicist view takes a perspective that in history, you see this thing fulfilled over time.

The problem with the historicist, and when we get to Revelation, because these are all views of Revelation as well, I'll get more detail, explain it, we'll probably spend two weeks on these two and then two weeks on this, just so you understand, but this model here depends on this right here.

They take the 1260 days and say it's one day to a year, understand?

So that means their understanding of whatever takes place in Daniel, Daniel chapter seven with the fourth kingdom, and whatever takes place moving forward, takes place in 1260 years, and where do they get that from?

They get the 1260 years as the one day per year that the people, that the nation of Israel was walking around, remember they walked around the wilderness, wandered, why?

For 40 days they went in, the spies went in, and they came back, 10 came back, 10 were bad, two were good, because of that he said

I'm giving you one year per day you were in there and you came back, that's what it is, that's where they get it from, I don't agree with it, but that's how they come to it.

The problem with this view is you run out of time, okay?

This time begins with Pope Gregory, and Bert, you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's around the 6th century,

Pope Gregory comes around, okay, I just want to make sure my dates are, 6th century would be around the 500s, you just take 500

AD, add 1260, that's going to put you somewhere near the French Revolution, what happens?

You run out of history, that's why this has strengths in understanding how it unfolded over time, but you run out of time for it to be a relevant understanding moving forward.

Everybody, have I lost anybody yet, okay, just want to make sure. So, the historicist view sees this as the

Roman Empire, okay, as the Roman Empire fell, it fell in 476, it was sacked in 476

I think AD, once it was sacked you had some factions grow up, then you had the

Holy Roman Empire come up, the historicist view, if you read Matthew Henry, I think it's

Poole, I'm trying to think of some of the others, maybe

Gill, maybe, no, who else would be a historicist in that time? Just about any of your 18th century, sure, okay, that would be an easy way of doing it, any of your 18th century, actually any of your reformers up until the 18th century would have held this position, all of them, read all your commentaries, every one of them holds that position, and that's why they saw the

Pope, it's in the Confessions, you take Westminster Confession of Faith, I think it's chapter 26, paragraph 4, you look at it, it actually explicitly names the

Pope as the Antichrist, the London Baptist Confession, 1689, it explicitly,

I think that's in, I'm sorry, it would have been Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 24, and then the

London Baptist Confession, I'm sorry, is 26, same thing, just so you know, the

London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession of Faith are almost a carbon copy of one another, just to let you know, one's a

Presbyterian document, one is a Baptist document, they're all,

I mean, if you put them side by side, there's very little difference, okay, so they see it as the

Pope over the course of time, but run out of time in the late 1700s with the

French Revolution, the idealist approach sees this little horn raising itself up over time, it's similar to this, except it doesn't have a starting and ending point, y 'all follow me?

This doesn't have a starting and ending point, it goes on until Christ comes, so you can always look through,

I really do, I really do like this, okay, I do like this, because as we look at, when we do get to Revelation, and we look at how the book, how to understand it,

I understand it primarily, speaking of the fall of Jerusalem and the fall of Rome, okay, that's how

I understand it, primarily though, of Jerusalem and the

Jewish culture and all of that, but the idealist approach says, hey, this is going to happen over time, so let's just take, for instance, if the little horn was the beast of Revelation, okay, the little horn, the beast of Revelation, is

Nero, he raises himself up, and that generation, he persecutes the people of God, he kills himself in 68, that's when all the

Jewish wars break out, there's absolute chaos in the whole Roman Empire, Vespasian brings some order to it, him and Titus, when

Titus dies, Nerva comes along, after Nerva, it's

Domitian, Domitian raises himself up, he makes empire -wide persecution, what does it say that this person does, it raises itself up, speaks against the people of God, persecutes the people of God, makes war with the saints, what did

Nero do, what did Nero do, he made war with the saints, what did

Domitian do, made war with the saints, what did every pope from the time of Gregory moving forward with the people of God do, you know that the

Roman Catholic Church has put more people to death until the 19th century than any other people that persecuted

God's people, you know that, that should make your jaw drop, these are people that claim to be followers of Christ, they burned more people at the stake, they drownded more people under the inquisitions and all of that, so from a historicist's perspective, you can see how they thought the pope was the anti -Christ, one, the pope claims to be who,

God himself, and it stands himself, and they do have the understanding of, where it says in the 2

Thessalonians 2 passage, where it says it stands himself up in the temple of God, claiming himself to be

God, they understood that as being in the church, and I do too, okay, it's Paul's, he says temple, he's speaking of the church, not the actual structure, so they understood that, and that is true, you just run out of time, but the idealist perspective says, hey, there's going to be people that raise themselves up over every generation, and you'll be able to look back, and this person will be a type of, or shadow of that little horn, so let's think of, and today, think of, we'll just take in our generation, or in Jack's generation, okay, no, just, who would we have saw as someone that persecuted

God's people in Jack's generation, Soviet Union, yeah, any type of communist, why, because who's the, who, the communist, the communist government movement, who's

God? The state is, and when we get to Revelation, and you see the beast, one comes up out of the sea, and one comes up out of the land, okay, the one that comes up out of the sea is an individual, one that comes up out of the land is the governmental structure, so you have a person that then, like you said, the government, and they want to come together to worship the beast, well, the beast is a governmental empire structure, we know that from what, from what

Daniel has already told us, so through every generation, we could even say in our generation, who do we see out there in the last 20 years that has persecuted

God's people, and we could say that person could be a little horn, the nutbag over there in North Korea, he claims to be

God, rocket man, okay, they do, yes, he claims to be

God, he is an emperor, you have to have his picture up in your home, and if you don't, dude, he's persecuting

Christians, G .G .Ping, okay, China, same thing, there, once again, the communist government, we're the ones that can save you, we're here to help you, we're the best for you,

G .G .Ping, you have to have, hey, the state registered church, Christian church over there, okay, quote, they don't care if you worship

God, but you gotta have a picture of G .G .Ping in there too, you see the compromise, you see the compromise, okay, so we see that this is a good application, okay, of these texts, it's not the meaning of it, but it is the application, and that's how

I understand Revelation too, Revelation is a, it's happened in the past, primarily, all of it's happened in the past, but if we want to look at how we're going to apply that book, man, we can see the persecution of God's people through it, just like Daniel 7, we can see the persecution of God's people, we can see how

God's gonna constantly raise up people that are gonna persecute God's people, and they're going to, they're gonna speak blasphemies against God from every generation until he returns, okay, now, the futurist view, which is probably what most everybody in this room has grown up on, it's normally, there's a few brands of it, but primarily it's understood as dispensational eschatology, meaning everything that we just read, and Daniel chapter 7, 9, 19 on, ain't happened yet, well, what relevance would it have been to God's people if it has not happened, or was not going to happen soon, it was irrelevant, so, if to say that everything moves forward, what they have to do is take the fourth kingdom, which is

Rome, it fell in 476, and Burt, you taught this probably, so just make sure

I'm representing it correctly, they fell in 476, at some point in the future, there will be this revived

Roman empire of 10 ,000 people, of 10 confederate states, is that at least a summary, is that okay, is that it,

I just want to make sure, okay, yeah, of 10 confederate states, okay, yeah, so, and how they come to that conclusion is the 10 horns have to represent 10 nations, okay, well, that didn't work, because there was never 10 nations, there was never 10 even providences, so even if you took, okay, we're going to take the 10 providences, and I guess we can see it here if I can pull that over here, even when they had the 10 providences of, or provinces of the

Roman empire at the time of 70 AD, okay, there really, there still was 12, okay, so if you took

Egypt, and you, y 'all can't see this map, and you followed it all the way around to where modern day Istanbul, old

Constantinople, just before you get to Thrace and Belgium, there was 12 provinces in there, okay, that were ruled by procurators, not 10, but they combined the two to make it work, same thing they did, and I, John MacArthur has done a lot for, for, inerrancy of scripture and all that, but I just,

I went back, it's probably been a couple months ago, I went back, I said I want to know what he, what, because everybody leans on his shoulders that are dispensational,

I said I want to know what he said about Daniel 7, you know, he, he talked about the confederate, all this was going to happen, there was going to be a revived

Roman empire, this isn't, now listen, the last time he posted anything, okay, 1984,

I think I'm going to tell you why I think he, last time he did it, because he made a huge mistake, he preached a sermon, said that the 10 nations were fixing to come together, that week, there was going to be 10, 10 states,

I busted out laughing when it happened, I listened to it, and then what happened two days later after he preached that sermon, 10 didn't, it wasn't 10, it wound up being 12 and threw the whole thing out of whack, he never preached another sermon about that ever again, okay, now listen, he preaches, it's not been recorded, you can go on grace to you and you can look, 1984 was the last time he preached anything about this, that's called newspaper exegesis, you don't, look,

I started getting phone calls and text messages yesterday when Israel started getting missiles launched at them, is this battle of Gog and Magog, what's going to happen, is this the end, is this the battle of Armageddon, no, we don't look at it that way, because we're seeing everything because it's embedded into our culture, our

American culture, that everything is in the future, we think that every time something crazy happens over in the

Middle East, oh my goodness, biblical prophecy is being fulfilled, just like they said, okay, well

I remember one guy saying, it used to be, prophecy today used to come on way radio, and when

I'd be working on Saturdays, it would come on, it was Russia and this and Russia that, and everything was lining up just the way it was, well then they had an election that pushed

Putin out for that time, I don't know if everybody remembers that, pushed him out, and he came back the next week and said, yep, it's still just like God said it was going to be, lining up, wait a minute, the

Soviet Union is falling, you just said that they were, that this was the way it was supposed to be, now there's been this complete flip, and you're saying, yep, it's just like it says in the

Bible, so, think about the futurist view, you can never be wrong, serious, we're making jokes, but all you have to do is go, it ain't happened yet, that's all you got to do, just tweak your times, tweak your dates, we'll keep dying, they'll keep moving the bar, and we don't really know what's going to happen, that's not a good way of understanding those passages, okay, do

I believe that there is a future application to what's being said here?

Yes, that's why I have these up here, the horn points to the beast of revelation, okay, the horn of Daniel 7 points to the beast of revelation, how do we know that?

Because both of them do the same thing, both of them are within the Roman Empire, do we all agree?

Yes? Yeah? Have I lost anybody yet? No? Okay. These are in the

Roman, both of these are in the Roman Empire. In the time that Paul begins to tell

Thessalonica, his first letter was about the day of the Lord, remember? They thought the day of the

Lord had already come, and he's saying, no, no, no, no, don't let those people mislead you, this has not happened, it's not going to happen, and he's writing the second letter saying, hey, it's not going to happen until first you see the apostasy and this man appears, he says, this has to happen first, now, this too could be clearly seen by some in history.

Some people believe, some full preterists believe that the man of lawlessness, full preterists

I say, not partial, full preterists say this was either John Giskella, because he did stand up in the temple of God claiming himself to be

God, made himself sovereign monarch, okay, he did say, he did that, but they say that also could be

Nero, okay, that's not the position that I hold, okay, I believe this is a future man down the road, because Paul says until these things happen, he doesn't say, if you go back and read to 2

Thessalonians 2, he doesn't say like Jesus said, when you see, when

Jesus said, when you see the abomination of desolation, he was speaking to a group of people that, hey, you're going to see this in your life, that's not what

Paul does, Paul says in 2 Thessalonians, these things must take place before the end comes, before the day of the

Lord comes, and one of those is going to be the great apostasy, and this man appears, and whatever's restraining him has to be taken out of the way, now, this here believes that what was restraining the man of lawlessness was the

Roman Empire, because in the Roman Empire, who raised, who came up? The Pope.

The Pope, yeah, that's how they understand it, okay, now, the futurist view says that these two men are the same, okay, that the man of lawlessness and the

Antichrist are the same, do you know the Bible only uses Antichrist three times, none of them's in Daniel, and none of it's in Revelation, it's in John, John's small epistles, and what's connected to Antichrist, now,

I'm not saying that Antichrist does not go out and persecute God's people, so understand what I'm saying, it always has to do with false doctrine, always has to do with false doctrine, now,

I know the Left Behind series and all that, all that nonsense, theological fiction, whatever you want to call it, makes this man, he's going to set himself up to be worshipped as God and all of that,

I don't, I could be wrong, I don't think that that's the idea that John's talking about, it has to be doctrine, if you go back and you read the second epistle and the first John, I think it's 218, 219, somewhere around there, it says many

Antichrists have come into the world, but an Antichrist is coming, okay, the article, definite article, many have come, but then what?

The Antichrist will come, so there is going to be someone that will come along and teach full doctrine contrary to what

Jesus, to Jesus' deity, is it these same men? I don't know, okay,

I'm not, I'm not ready to make that argument today because I got seven minutes, okay, but I do believe there is a connection, the man of lawlessness comes along, he claims himself to be

God, right, that's what Thessalonians says, claims himself to be God, sets himself up in the people of God to be worshipped, so by default we would say he opposes

Christ, right, so we can make this connection, not sure if it's the same person yet, okay, we'll get that next year when we get the revelation, so these are connected because they have same qualities, do you remember early on I said you have what's called a prophetic trajectory or motif that when we see these things there is a pattern being set that there's going to, once I said through the idealist way of applying this text, there is going to be someone in every generation that's going to raise itself up to persecute the people of God, it's going to want to be worshipped, it's going to be that way, okay, the reason why

I've taught it this way, because this hasn't been verse by verse like we did the last chapter, is because if we don't understand the model that's been set up for this little horn,

I don't think you're really going to get the grasp of what happens in the next chapter, this man appears again, but he doesn't appear in the fourth kingdom, he appears in the third, okay, so you see there's a pattern, it's going to be one that every generation, every generation is going to set itself up to be worshipped and it's going to persecute the people of God, okay, any questions, comments, outbursts of anger, letters to the editor, riots or demonstrations?

John also says there's a constant spirit of antichrist, it just keeps going, yeah, and because it was always attacking

Jesus' deity, I mean look at, we'll just take the spirit of antichrist, if we're going to talk about the spirit of antichrist,

Mormons, are they a spirit of antichrist? Okay, hey man, they ain't got horns on their head, they ain't walking around wanting to drag the people of God off and quarter them, cut their heads off like Isis, they're not doing that, but what are they teaching?

They're teaching that Jesus was a sinner, do y 'all know that? That's what Mormonism teaches, you can look at their doctrine, on their graph,

Jesus was a sinner, just like you, he climbed up the ladder of grace, problem with that is grace ain't a ladder, if you're climbing up something, you're working for it, grace is not grace if you have to earn it,

Jesus then earned his deity, that's not me making this up, you can go right to Mormon, to Latter -day

Saints and that's exactly what it teaches from their website, okay, they teach you something about God, that he was a man, he was a sure

Moroni and all that nonsense, correct, you can be a God yourself, that's why they believe in polygamy, because the man has to populate his own planet, it's a perversion, it's all that, great, think about Jehovah's Witness, what do they teach about God, I mean about Christ?

He created being, that's right, is Jesus a created being? No, he's the creator of all things, it was by him and through him were all things created and nothing that was created, wasn't created,

I mean was created by him, that's it, that's not what they believe, they don't believe that Jesus is

God, they don't believe in Trinitarian theology, they believe in Unitarian theology, okay, what about Islam, what do they teach about Christ?

Prophet, I will say this though, and you might remember this when we were in London, most

Muslims, when you ask them, why is

Jesus dead? Either they don't give you an answer or they don't know, you know

Jesus, even under Islamic teaching, Jesus didn't die,

Jesus didn't die, Jesus is alive today, if you were to ask them, is Jesus a sinner? You know what they would tell you?

No, Jesus is not a sinner, he lived a perfect life, okay, but is

Jesus God? No, that's why they hate Christianity because they, because God would, and no, this is under their understanding of Allah, God in no way, shape, form, or fashion needs help from any man, he can do it on his own, he doesn't need him, doesn't need any agent, okay, well

I would agree with that to a certain degree, does God need anything? No, but God chose to send the second person of the

Trinity into the world to redeem sinners, okay, and then once Jesus accomplished that, he ascended on high, he then sent forth the spirit of the same substance to go out and to, and to regenerate and to seal us until the day of redemption, they don't, that's not how they understand it, therefore they are an

Antichrist, they teach against the doctrine that Jesus is God, you want to see what any type of of Antichrist teaching is in any other religion, what do they believe about Jesus?

And it's, it's the spirit of Antichrist, now there's one that we don't know what all that doctrine is going to look like at the end of the age when this happens,

I do believe there will be a, a, a person that will, there will be someone, you said something?

Yeah, no, I agree with you, I think, I think it'd be easy for us if we were persecuted,

I'm just pointing to the historicist here, if we were persecuted to the level that, you know, brothers in Christ were in, that wrote

Westminster in the 1691, oh sure, it'd be easy for us to see that the pope had been the longest pope's, you know, pope's exceptional, but it had been the longest running persecutor of the church consistently for hundreds of years, it'd be easy for you to see

Man of Laws as Antichrist in the pope. Oh, no doubt, yeah, no doubt, if you read the

Reformers, you, because you know what, we can look in history and go, we understand what they were going through, we can see how they came to that conclusion, yeah,

I would say he is, I would even say today, he is a, a

Antichrist, he is, there's no doubt, I would tell Francis to his face, you don't believe in the atoning work of Christ, you know why, because you continually represent the bloody sacrifice in the mass, you know that's what that, that's what it is,

I do a lot of work for the Catholic church, every time I get an opportunity to talk to one of them dudes with backwards college, I go, hey man, right here in your, take their catechism, open it up, what does that say, it says represent the bloody sacrifice, that means

Jesus Christ's sacrifice was not sufficient, well it means represent, that's not what it says, it says represent, that's why the mass has to be done day in and day out, because Christ's atoning sacrifice is not sufficient, okay, so A, Antichrist, they had him in the confessions,

B, and I understand why, because that office claimed to be God, persecuted everyone else after it, that opposed itself, and we got to go, the, the

Catholic church until probably,

I think I said it earlier, up in, I think it was the end of the, or the beginning of the 19th century, was the greatest persecutor, but now they're not, because we have all these political governments that keep that from happening, you got to remember under the

Holy Roman Empire, the Pope was more powerful than the emperor,

I mean you had bishops that had more authority than the emperor at times, because of the authority of the church, and you had what's called the

Sackle State, and when our, when they came, when the pilgrims came to the

United States before our, we were founded, there was a, there was a great disagreement on state church, you know, all the reformers, the magisterial reformers,

Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zwingli, all those men, Melanchthon, all those, okay, all those reformers, great things they did for, for Christianity, still believed in a state church.

When our, our predecessors came here, our forefathers in the faith came here, they were going to set up a

Presbyterian state here, and the Baptists said no, no, where do you think the letter of the separation between the church and state come from?

Do y 'all know that's where that came from? That was not something that was put in the Constitution, it was the separation,

Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists, the people in Danbury, Connecticut, the

Baptist church, saying we will not have a state church, we will separate the state from the church, and just to let you know, and we'll pray, get out of here, that the

Presbyterians, when we first came here, persecuted the Baptist people. So for our post -millennial brothers who think a theocracy is going to be good, okay, they think theonomy is the way to go, well, you know, they were willing to drown us for baptizing, for not baptizing infants.

You see those issues that lie? Anyway, Mike, will you pray us out so we can go?

So Lord, we do thank you that you've given us this time together, we thank you for brother Mike, we pray

Lord that as we go into this next portion of worship, we pray that it would be pleasing to you, we pray that you would bless our time together, we pray that Christ would be high and lift it up, so it's in his name we pray and ask all these things.