Commentaries and Podcasts

By Octave 444 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 27: The City of God

Before we commence with Revelation chapter 21 and the City of God, we should pause to speak about the references to the Book of Life. This Book of Life, as we had mentioned briefly in our discussion of The Camp of the Saints, is not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament (in the podcast version I failed to say explicitly, which I later added to the notes). But there certainly does seem to be at least one reference in the Old Testament to the same Book of Life of the Revelation, and that is found in Daniel chapter 12. Other passages may arguably be interpreted as references to the Book of Life, especially if they are taken out of context, so before we discuss the reference in Daniel, these passages we shall discuss briefly.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 26: The Camp of the Saints

After explaining the parable of the tares of the field to His disciples, as it is recorded in Matthew chapter 13, Yahshua Christ then related to them the parable of the net, where it seems that this parable along with those of the treasure hidden in the field and the man seeking the pearl had all been meant to further elucidate the meaning of that parable of the wheat and the tares. In the manner in which Matthew recorded this, these parables were given to the disciples after they requested and received the explanation of the wheat and the tares. So we read, in the closing verses of that chapter, that “47 Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a net having been cast into the sea and it gathers from out of every race, 48 which when it is full, bringing up upon the shore and sitting they gather the good ones into vessels, but the rotten ones they cast out. 49 Thusly it shall be at the consummation of the age, the messengers shall go out and they shall separate the wicked from the midst of the righteous 50 and they shall cast them into the furnace of fire. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth!” Next, after they received the explanation of the wheat and tares and these other parables, we read: “51 ‘Have you understood all these things?’ [and] They say to Him: ‘Yes!’”

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 25: Violence of the Lambs

As it is described in the vision of Revelation chapter 18, at the fall of Babylon the children of Israel, who are the exclusive people of Yahweh God, are called to come out of her and to separate themselves, whereupon they are told to “6 … return to her as she also had rendered, and you double twice the things according to her works. 7 As much as she had magnified herself and lived wantonly, so much you give torment and grief to her!” So it is fully evident that according to the Revelation, the children of Israel shall indeed have a role in executing the vengeance of Yahweh God upon His enemies. As we have already said in relation to this, Paul of Tarsus had also made the same expression to the Corinthians, where he had written to them in his second epistle in chapter 10: “4 For the arms of our warfare are not fleshly, but through Yahweh they are able to destroy strongholds, 5 destroying reasonings and every bulwark raising itself up against the knowledge of Yahweh, and taking captive every thought into the obedience of the Anointed; 6 also being in readiness to avenge all disobedience, whenever you shall have fulfilled your obedience.” Paul of Tarsus wrote that epistle perhaps 40 years before John recorded this Revelation of Yahshua Christ, and must have had his own understanding from the words of the Old Testament prophets, with whom this Revelation certainly agrees, magnifies, and augments.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 24: The Wedding Supper of the Lamb

As we have already explained, in Revelation chapter 12 the apostle John saw a vision of a woman who had twelve stars, by which we should understand that collectively she represents the twelve tribes of the children of Israel, and she was being taken into the wilderness to be nourished for three-and-a-half times, which we had identified as the period of history during which the woman received the Gospel of Christ and then returned to Yahweh her God through Him. But then in another vision in Revelation chapter 17, John is taken back to the wilderness and sees that the woman is now a whore and that she has joined herself to the beast, which is the same beast system that had manifested itself in the various world empires by which she had been held captive during all the time of her punishment. Joining herself to the beast, the woman turned over her kingdom to the beast, as it states in that same chapter. As we also asserted, the woman was once freed from the beast, as it is described in Revelation chapter 13, but has now become a whore by joining herself to it, as she had a better opportunity to keep the Word of God in the Gospel. So for her failure, the whore must be judged, and Revelation chapters 18 and 19 briefly describe aspects of that judgment.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 23: The Fall of Babylon

Presenting our commentary for Revelation chapters 17 and 18, we hope to have adequately explained the reasons for our interpretation, that the visions related in those chapters describe the conditions of the children of Israel as the Whore of Babylon in this last time of Jacob’s trouble, the period which the Old Testament prophets as well as the New Testament apostles have described as one final trial before the ultimate salvation of the children of Israel from their enemies – which is also a promise which has been explicitly repeated in the words of both the prophets and apostles of Christ. Doing that we also hope to have adequately explained that Mystery Babylon is a name representing the secular society’s political, religious and economic system, which is grounded in secular humanism and which is directly opposed to God. The fundamental elements of this system had indeed originated in ancient Babylon, and have been perpetuated by both ancient pagans and by the enemies of Christ until they could be manifested once again under the guise of the so-called Age of Liberty, whereby those same enemies have come to rule over the children of Israel as their kingdom was given over to the beast. This is the fulfillment of the words of Isaac, who promised Jacob that he would rule over his brethren, but who later told his disenfranchised son Esau, as it is recorded in Genesis chapter 28, that he “40 … shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.” As we had asserted, that yoke was broken upon the emancipation of the Jews in the time of Napoleon. As Martin Luther had written in his essay On the Jews and Their Lies (chapter xi), Jews of his own time were boasting that they had come into the control of Germany, and three hundred and thirty years later, in the 1870's, German journalist Wilhelm Marr had written to complain that the Jews had conquered Germany.

 On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 22: The Woman is the Whore

In the early chapters of the prophecy of Jeremiah, namely in chapters 1, 3 and 16, the prophet is told to address the children of Israel, the scattered flock of Yahweh, who were already in the north country (1:13; 3:12, 18; 16:15). Then in Jeremiah chapter 16, in one of those references, there is a promise that Yahweh would send for them many fishers, a prophecy which was fulfilled in the spread of the Gospel of Christ as He had told His apostles, as it is recorded in Matthew chapter 4, “19 … Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” But immediately following that promise in Jeremiah there is another, where the Word of Yahweh says “and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.” Christ had never mentioned the hunters, as it was apparently not yet their time.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 21: The Seven Last Plagues

The most important aspect of Revelation chapter 15, where we had described the sea of fire and glass as representing the fiery trials which the children of Israel would be about to suffer in this world, as the contents and consequences of the seven vials of the last trumpet are revealed, is the fact that the overcomers of this world order would sing the Song of Moses, and that song was also described as the Song of the Lamb, which is Christ Himself. We must interpret that passage to be referring to the Song of Moses found in Deuteronomy chapter 32, a song which is explicitly attributed to Moses, and not to the song of unknown authorship which Moses and the rest of the Israelites are depicted as having sung after their deliverance from the Egyptians at the crossing of the Red Sea. Then there is also a prayer of Moses in the 90th Psalm, but that is a prayer and not a song, in English, Greek and Hebrew. Yet even the prayer relates to the message in the Song, as Moses requested the blessings of God fall upon the children of Israel.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 20: The Song of Moses

In our last presentation, The Harvests of God which discussed Revelation chapter 14, we see that three such harvests were described. But because the King James Version and most other popular Bible translations mistranslate the verb ξηραίνω, which is to be dry or parched, in those editions there only appear to be two harvests. First there is a harvest of firstfruits, which is described as the hundred and forty-four thousand that are apparently already with Christ. The verb used to describe the act of their having been redeemed is in the perfect tense, and where they are described as being virgins and as following Christ the verbs are in the present tense. So it is apparent that this harvest is already completed, which also fits the prophetic context of the earlier descriptions of the hundred and forty-four thousand who were sealed.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 19: The Harvests of God

In our last two presentations in this commentary, Of Beasts and Tyrants and The Papal Beast, we hope to have demonstrated the correlations with Revelation chapter 13 and Daniel chapters 2 and 7, and especially chapter 7, and how the entire prophecy in Revelation chapter 13 encompasses and summarizes the 2,520 years, or seven times, of the punishment of the children of Israel for their sins, in their captivity. The first half of that period is found in relation to the first beast of the chapter, in the forty and two months of verse 5. Forty-two months is a period of roughly 1,260 days, which is three-and-a-half prophetic times, or 1,260 years. The latter half of that period is not dated in the Revelation, but in relation to the little horn of Daniel chapter 7, which we have identified as the emperor Justinian and his establishment of the office of the papacy, we see in verse 25 that “the saints of the most High … shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.” In that we see the second period of three-and-a-half prophetic times, or 1,260 additional years, which is very close to the period during which the popes of Rome had exercised temporal authority over the Byzantine empire, and within a short time, over all of the kings of Europe.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 18: The Papal Beast

In the opening presentation of our commentary on Revelation chapter 13, titled Of Beasts and Tyrants, we saw John describe a great beast which arose out of the sea, and among other attributes it was described as having seven heads and ten horns, and had the characteristics of a leopard, a bear and a lion. Then along with these it also shared many of the attributes with which the four beasts of Daniel chapter 7 were described. Both the beast here and the beast in Daniel had arose out of the sea, which we interpret as being the mass of the world’s people. Therefore, since the four beasts of Daniel’s vision also had ten horns, and had the features of a leopard, a bear and a lion, we should certainly understand that there is a connection between them, that they are prophesying the same phenomenon. This is further affirmed where in Daniel chapter 7 we read that “17 These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth” and further on in the Revelation, in chapter 17, we read: “9 And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. 10 And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.” The woman representing the children of Israel collectively, which is clear in our interpretation of Revelation chapter 12, it becomes quite certain that the beasts and its seven heads represent kings and kingdoms with which the woman was associated throughout history.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 17: Of Beasts and Tyrants

The proof of our Christian faith is manifest in the fact that we can document our beliefs, and in doing so we can also explain them clearly from ancient documents, while at the same time we can measure them against the history of peoples and nations, and in that same study we can also see that those beliefs cohesively explain the circumstances of our world today. But while Moses did not explain everything in the remote past, he laid a foundation for Yahshua Christ, and through Him the inspiration of Moses is also fully revealed. As Paul of Tarsus had explained in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, Moses cannot be understood without Christ. So just as Matthew had attested, Paul must have also believed that Christ had come to reveal things kept secret from the foundation of the world.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 16: The Nature of the Devil and Satan

In our last presentation, discussing the opening portion of Revelation chapter 12, we set forth the proposition that not only does the chapter describe the birth of Christ Himself, as well as other events of the remote past, but it also prophecies of the birth of a nation, or actually, of a kingdom under the dominion of Christ. The declaration was already made towards the end of chapter 11, which we interpret as a prophecy of the Reformation, that “15… The Kingdom of the Society of our Prince and of His Anointed has come, and He shall rule for the eternal ages!” We would cross-reference this passage with Daniel chapters 2 and 7 and the prophecy of a kingdom which belongs to the saints of the Most High. But here once again it is evident that an ongoing process is being described, and not a singular event, since a very similar declaration is made in this chapter, in a verse which we have not yet discussed, where we read “10… Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God has come.” As we had also asserted, the interpretations of this chapter are manifold, and each aspect deserves our full attention.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 15: The Birth of a New World Order

In our last presentation in this commentary, discussing Revelation chapter 11 and The Two Witnesses, we saw in the period of the Reformation two significant events, each which had lasted for three-and-a-half days, or prophetic years in prophecy. These two witnesses represent those men who sought to keep the Word of God, but having seemingly been defeated they appeared to lie dead in the streets for that length of time. However they were revived, they recovered, and they were caught up into heaven, which we interpret to indicate that they would rise up and prevail so that they would assume a position of governance over the people in the place of those who slew them. In the ancient world, the seats of power and authority were esteemed to represent heaven on earth, and the architecture of palaces and temples reflected that belief. The very concept of kingship was said to have descended from heaven, ordained by the gods, and the kings were declared to be the sun on earth, the light of the world, and often they were even considered to be gods themselves. This is a complex subject, and an academic paper which discusses it at great length is titled Heaven On Earth, Temples, Ritual, and Cosmic Symbolism in the Ancient World, from a seminar held at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.