Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Rise of the Antichrists

Graeme Carlé

• Publisher: Emmaus Road Publishing
• eBook ISBN: 9780473453695
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

The Lost Keys of Revelation?

It is often thought today that the keys to understanding theBook of Revelation have been lost and are irretrievable butthey’re not. They were just buried under centuries of rubblecreated by the Gentile church’s foolish attempts to distanceitself from its Jewish foundations. If, like any archaeologist, wedig carefully we can rediscover them.

In Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, we found one key tounderstanding Revelation chapter 12 is the metaphorical“time, times and half a time” and we unlocked the last 4, 000years of Jewish history.

This book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, unlocks Revelationchapter 13 and the last 2, 000 years of the Christian era, withstartling results. Not only can we now understand the forcesshaping history and the deaths of some 270 million in 20thCentury genocides but we can also project the future of Israeland the Middle East.

1

The First Beast
‘Out of the Sea’

And he [the dragon] stood on the sand of the seashore. And I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names (Revelation 13:1)

Having been cast down from heaven to ‘the earth and the sea’ (Revelation 12:12), the dragon stands on the seashore as the first beast emerges from the sea on to the earth. As we saw in our earlier study, the Greek word for beast (therion) is a generic term for dangerous wild animals, being used another thirty six times in Revelation. For example, in Revelation 6:8, people are being killed by ‘wild beasts’. This was the time of the Colosseum and the Roman circuses, which routinely featured criminals and Christians facing damnatio ad bestias (i.e. execution by wild animals).

Obviously no ordinary wild animal, this fierce, deadly, and blaspheming enemy of God and His people must first be understood as it was in the first century by the original hearers of John’s message. Only when we have that established can we respond properly today.

Why does it come up out of the sea? ‘The sea’ is the Mediterranean, which in those days was usually called the Great Sea, in comparison to the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. Later in his vision, when John sees a horrible woman sitting on ‘many waters’, “the waters” are interpreted by an angel as meaning “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” (Revelation 17:15). The first beast, then, arises from ‘all the nations’ i.e. the Gentiles, as will be confirmed next.

Like the dragon (Revelation 12:3), this beast has seven heads and ten horns but is a composite of other animals:

And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority (Revelation 13:2)

‘Like a Leopard…, a Bear… And a Lion’

As bizarre as this beast may seem to us, first century Jewish Christians would have readily understood this image because these three animals had featured, in reverse order, six hundred and fifty years earlier in a then very well-known vision of Daniel’s. The reverse order is because Daniel saw them in about 550 B.C.⁶ as affecting Israel’s future whereas John was looking back from about 100 A.D. at Israel’s past.

Daniel had a dream about the coming of four wild animals that would precede the coming of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah:

I was looking in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts were coming up from the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion… a second one, resembling a bear… another one like a leopard (Daniel 7:2-6)

Note the first three are ‘like a lion.., a bear.., and a leopard’ and also come up from ‘the great sea’, the Mediterranean. They appear one after another and are each given ‘dominion’ (Daniel 7:6 & 12). The fourth beast which follows them is not like any particular animal but Daniel goes on:

After this… a fourth beast, frightening and terrifying, and very strong. And it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the rest with its feet. And it was different from all the beasts before it and it had ten horns (Daniel 7:7)

After this beast, Messiah appears:

I kept looking in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a Son of Man was coming and He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him.

And to Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations and men of every language might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away; and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed (Daniel 7:13-14)

Remember, it was Jesus’ quoting of this prophecy that caused the high priest and the Sanhedrin to sentence Him to death for blasphemy. The high priest had asked Him if He was the Messiah and He replied:

“… I tell you, hereafter you will see THE SON OF MAN SITTING

AT THE RIGHT HAND OF POWER and COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN”.

Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has blasphemed! What further need do we have of witnesses? Behold, you have now heard the blasphemy; what do you think?” They answered, “He deserves death!”

(Matthew 26:64-66, capitals in NASB to show Old Testament quotations)

Daniel is then given the interpretation of the beasts:

17. “These great beasts, which are four in number, are four kings who will arise from the earth.

18. “But the saints of the Highest One will receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, for all ages to come” (Daniel 7:17-18)

The beasts then are ‘four kings’ (v. 17), and as we saw in Book 1,⁷ in Jewish thinking ‘king’ can denote not only a single individual but also a kingdom and a dynasty of kings or emperors.⁸ These ‘four kings’ are earthly and temporal and they are to be superseded by the heavenly and eternal Kingdom and ‘the saints’ (v. 18), i.e. God’s people, will ‘receive’ and ‘possess’ it forever.

Daniel also carefully notes that even though the first three beasts, the ones like a lion, a bear and a leopard, lose ‘their dominion’, they are going to reappear at a later time:

As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but an extension of life was granted to them for an appointed period of time (Daniel 7:12)

As we will see, this ‘extension of life... for an appointed period of time’ is the time of Revelation chapter 13, comprises “the times of the Gentiles”, and is therefore the last 2,000 years.⁹

Identifying Daniel’s Four Beasts

These ‘four kings’ are not specifically identified in Daniel 7, but they did not need to be because they already had been, some fifty years earlier. In 604 B.C.,¹⁰ both the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel had had identical dreams about these same four kingdoms and the Messianic kingdom. It was then that Daniel was given the divine interpretation and reason for the dreams:

“O king, while on your bed your thoughts turned to what would take place in the future, and He who reveals mysteries has made known to you what will take place” (Daniel 2:29)

So, like the rest of us, Nebuchadnezzar was wondering about the future and Daniel got to tell him. He began by explaining the four kingdoms for Nebuchadnezzar, the first being his own Babylonian Empire:

“You are the head of gold. And after you there will arise another kingdom [the Medo-Persians]… then another third kingdom [the Greeks] which will rule over all the earth. Then there will be a fourth kingdom [the Romans]…” (Daniel 2:38-40)

Accordingly, in Daniel 7’s parallel vision: the first beast, the lion, is the Babylonian Empire; the second, the bear, is the Medo-Persian; the third, the leopard, is the Greek and the fourth beast is the Roman Empire.

We will confirm their identities soon because they are very like stepping stones in a swamp where many have wandered off and sunk in confusion. We have to establish each step as rock solid before we seek the next. For example, The New Oxford Annotated Bible identifies the four beasts as Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece.¹¹ Its scholars have decided that the Book of Daniel is not supernatural or predictive so that ‘the history recorded in these visions suggest that they were composed sometime before 164 B.C.’ i.e. in the time of the Greeks. Their decision therefore rules out Rome as the fourth beast since it was not then significant and also locks these scholars into two more critical errors.

Firstly, they are using modern Gentile thinking to count the empires, overlooking the Jewish understanding recorded throughout Daniel that the Medes and the Persians comprised one empire, not two (Daniel 5:28, 6:8, 6:12, 6:15). For example, in a vision dated about 551-552 B.C.,¹² Daniel sees the Medo-Persian Empire as another animal, this time as a ram with two horns, being overcome by a goat. An angel interprets for him:

“The ram which you saw with the two horns represents the kings of Media and Persia. The shaggy goat represents the kingdom of Greece” (Daniel 8:20-21)

In Daniel 7 then, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Thanks
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The First Beast ‘Out of the Sea’
• 2. The Seventh Head John’s Future Empire
• 3. The Meaning of ‘Ten’ Literal or Metaphorical?
• 4. ‘His Fatal Wound’ Miracle or Metaphor?
• 5. ‘To Make War with the Saints and to Overcome Them’
• 6. The Eleventh Horn Subduing Three
• 7. The Second Beast ‘Out of the Earth’
• 8. ‘To Worship the First Beast’ What is Worship?
• 9. 20th Century Emperor Worship Repeating History
• 10. The Bitter Fruit The Beasts’ Killing Fields
• 11. Religious Empires Non-Christian and Christian
• 12. Muhammad as Emperor Ruling from Beyond the Grave
• 13. ‘Satan’s Century’ Summary of 20th Century Emperor Worship
• 14. Totalitarianism The Secular Perspective
• 15. John’s Metaphors The Two Beasts
• 16. ‘Antichrist is Coming’ Ready or Not
• 17. “The Abomination of Desolation” Recognising the Pattern
• 18. Reviewing and Interpreting Revelation 13: 1-15
• 19. The Hidden Kingdom What Has God Been Doing?
• 20. Islam The Slouching Beast?
• 21. Conclusions
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Five “Abominations of Desolation”
• Bibliography
• Index