Godmindbody Part 3, Chapter 10: Revelation, Part 2
- robrensor1066
- Oct 1
- 47 min read
Updated: Oct 2
Godmindbody: The Bible, Prophecy, Miracles and TMS Healing Explained
By Robert Ensor
Copyright © 2025 Robert Ensor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted.First Published September 2025.
All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible, which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist – merely a concerned layperson (!) – and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious and get proper care.
The full title is available free from this website. Or you can buy it from amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQ6MNZ2N For part 1, see the link: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-a-book-about-tms-and-christianity-part-1
For the entire book see the pdf below:
Revelation Part 2 John saw seven angels with seven bowls. The book states that with the bowl judgements, God’s wrath is finished (Rev 15:1). This ties the bowls to wrath, which usually means the wrath of Lord Jesus when he reappears to defeat the Antichrist and save the remnant. The bowl judgements, then, come around the time of the Parousia, shortly after the last trumpet, but quite a long time after the sixth trumpet judgement, which explains why Jesus’ return is often described as being unexpected.
Then those who overcame the beast, his image and the number of his name were singing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb while stood on a sea of glass with harps of God (Revelation 15:2–3). This combination of Moses and Jesus could be a foretaste of the millennial dispensation, that involves modified temple sacrifice (symbolised by Moses) blended with Christianity (the Lamb). The similarity of ‘the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb’ to the ‘new song’ in chapter 14 hints that these two songs are in some sense identical. Moses is likely mentioned because he is one of the two witnesses who preached in Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Song of Moses is found in Deuteronomy 32, and consists of God speaking through Moses of the ‘day of calamity’ (Deuteronomy 32:35), when he will claim vengeance on his enemies and ‘make atonement for his land and his people’ (Deuteronomy 32:43). The Song of Moses thus also anticipates the Day of the Lord, the Second Coming, which is imminent at this point in the narrative of Revelation. Those who are singing the song are the deceased elect, since they are Jewish (represented by Moses) Christians (symbolised by the Lamb) and only the elect could learn the aforementioned new song. Because they have harps of God, and stand on a sea of glass, they are clearly in heaven, awaiting the first resurrection.
Then the ‘temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened.’ (Revelation 15:5). The earthly temple was always patterned on the heavenly temple.
In Revelation 16:2, the first angel emptied the first bowl on the earth, and it became a harmful ‘sore on the people who had the mark of the beast and who worshipped his image.’ Ergo, taking the mark is not the refuge from suffering that it will seem to be. These open sores were foreshadowed by the boils afflicting the Egyptians during the ten plagues of Egypt (Exodus 9) and the pestilence that Josephus described during the Siege of Jerusalem.[i]
The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea and every living thing in the sea died (Revelation 16:3). The third used his bowl to poison the rivers and springs of water, and ‘they became blood’ (Revelation 16:4). Again, this could be what Isaiah (19:6) predicted would happen to the water sources in eschatological Egypt, suggesting that this judgement at least may be localised rather than worldwide. Further evidence that this judgement will affect Egypt comes from the typological first plague in Exodus, which turned the Nile to blood (Exodus 7:20). The fourth angel went around scorching people with great fire (Revelation 16:8), corresponding to Paul’s statement that Jesus would return with his mighty angels in flaming fire (2 Thessalonians 1:7–8), with the angels there being the angels with the bowls. The fifth angel darkened the kingdom of the beast (Revelation 16:10), which evokes the darkness that came over Egypt for three days (Exodus 10:22). It is the darkening of the sun, moon and stars associated with the coming of the Son of Man, prophesied by Jesus himself on the Mount of Olives (Matthew 24) and the prophets. This is literally a thick cloud that envelops the earth or the region of the beast’s kingdom. The sixth angel targeted the Euphrates and its waters dried up (Revelation 16:12). Frogs came out of the mouth of the beast and the False Prophet (Revelation 16:13). These were demons that gathered the kings of the earth together for the war ‘of that great day of God the Almighty’ (Revelation 16:14). If they’re being gathered together for the Day of the Lord around the time of the bowl judgements, the third and last series of divine judgements in Revelation, then the Day of the Lord is at or very near the end of the tribulation. This gathering of the armies of the nations was foretold by Joel (3).
‘“Behold, I come like a thief. Blessed is he who watches, and keeps his clothes, so that he doesn’t walk naked, and they see his shame.”’ (Revelation 16:15). The one who comes like a thief in the night is Jesus. In 16:15, John was paraphrasing Jesus’ earlier Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24:43), which exhorted believers to watch and remain alert for the coming of the Son of Man at the time of the end. This stage in the timeline, then, is when Christians must heighten their vigilance for the coming of Jesus, because the end is nigh. As per the Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22) and 1 Corinthians 5:4, keeping one’s clothes means maintaining the spirit of salvation. Being naked is the state of not being clothed in spirit and the immortal body it leads to.
The seventh angel poured out his bowl, causing a ‘great earthquake such as has not happened since there were men on the earth.’ (Revelation 16:18). ‘The great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.’ (Revelation 16:19). This is reminiscent of Isaiah’s prophecy of the earth being broken, torn apart and shaken violently, in an earthquake of unparalleled magnitude (Isaiah 24:19). The ‘great city’ is most likely Babylon the Great, which will literally be Babylon on the Euphrates, since that is the only named city referred to as great in the text (Revelation 17:5). That would explain the other references to the Euphrates and the beast’s kingdom being darkened in Revelation (9:14–16; 16:10).
Another candidate is Jerusalem, given previous references to the Holy City, Jerusalem’s history of earthquakes, the fact most Bible prophecies are concerned with Jerusalem, and other allusions later in Revelation. Preterists have also pointed out that during the Roman siege, the Jews of Jerusalem were fragmented into three main warring factions; the war against the Romans was exacerbated by a simultaneous Judean civil war.[ii] In Revelation, however, the force of the earthquake sounds sufficient to physically split a city into three.
‘Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found’ (Revelation 16:20), suggests that the islands are submerged in a great flood caused by the massive earthquake. Let’s not forget that Daniel (9:26) foretold that ‘its end will be with a flood’. God promised after the deluge in Genesis that he would never again destroy the earth and cut of all life with a flood (Genesis 9:11); he never promised not to destroy a large portion of the life on earth with a flood. In any case, humanity failed to keep their end of the Noachin covenant, potentially rendering it null and void. Babylon has always been liable to flooding, sitting as it does on the Euphrates River, with the Tigris and the Persian Gulf nearby.
Massive hailstones weighing ‘a talent’ each also came down on people, who cursed God for the severity of the plague (Revelation 16:21). The historical precursor of this prophecy came when the Romans catapulted Jerusalem with stones that Josephus recorded as weighing a ‘talent’[iii]; another exact correspondence between Revelation and the events of 66-70 AD that cannot simply be dismissed out of hand but ought not to blind us to the future.
Then an angel came to John, promising to show him the judgement of the ‘great prostitute who sits on many waters’ (Revelation 17:1). He carried John away to the wilderness, where he saw a ‘woman sitting on a scarlet-coloured beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns.’ (Revelation 17:3). This verse refers back to the beast with seven heads and ten horns of Revelation 12, and the ten horned fourth beast of Daniel (7). ‘On her forehead a name was written, “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF THE PROSTITUTES AND THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” I saw a woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.’ (Revelation 17:5–6). This woman in the wilderness is framed as the polar opposite of the woman clothed in the sun (Israel), who was also pictured in the wilderness. In the Bible, Israel is the repentant bride of Christ and Babylon is the mistress of the Antichrist. Israel and Babylon, therefore, are distinguished in the text. Note also that Babylon is geographically situated in a wilderness, that is, a desert.
In the tradition of Daniel, the angel explained to John that the beast he saw, ‘was and is not; and is about to come up out of the abyss and to go into destruction.’ (Revelation 17:8). The beast is in the primary sense, a man, and the abyss is the underworld, Sheol. A man who was, is not, and is about to come out of the underworld and go into destruction, is therefore the reincarnation of a man. The Antichrist is the reincarnation of Antiochus IV and Nero, which certainly explains Revelation 17:8 and why Antiochus and the future tyrant are both pictured as little horns (Daniel 7;8): they’re the same soul, in different bodies. Indeed, in Daniel (11:29;30), the ‘return’ of the Antichrist is prophesied several times. Moreover, Paul wrote that the son of perdition would pretend to be God in the temple (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4), and Antiochus is the only person who has ever done anything like that before. The reincarnation of the beast also explains why Nero’s name adds up to 666 in Hebrew gematria, the ‘Romanness’ of Daniel’s fourth beast, his final kingdom and the ‘seven mountains’ of the beast’s heads (Revelation 17:9), in addition to all the legends and prophecies about Nero’s return, which were pretty widespread in ancient Rome. For example, in his interpretation of Revelation, the ancient Christian poet Commodian believed Nero would be raised up from Hell to impersonate Christ.[iv] According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, astrologers predicted that, when he fell from power, Nero would rule in the east. Some even believed he would rise up in Jerusalem, which the Antichrist is forecasted to do.[v] In the apocryphal Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, ‘Isaiah’ prophesies that a fallen angel would return to earth in the form of Nero and pretend to be Christ. In the Sibylline Oracles, Nero is depicted as the Antichrist, returning after his disappearance and falsely declaring himself to be God’s equal. He comes as a champion of the East to overthrow tyrants and be defeated in battle against the West.[vi] Antiochus and Nero were similarly insane, megalomaniacal characters who claimed divine status while acting like beasts. I think Hitler was another incarnation of Nero; both Hitler and Nero saw themselves as great artists and actors, both were melodramatic, and both attacked the Jewish people and despised Christianity. When Hitler issued the order to destroy Germany’s infrastructure in 1945, he called it the Nero Decree. Could there be a more fitting candidate for the Antichrist, than a soul who was Antiochus, Nero and Hitler? The name of Nero’s final eschatological incarnation will also add up to 666, one way or another.
The seven heads of the beast are interpreted by the angel as seven mountains on which the woman sits (Revelation 17:9), and also seven kings, of which five have fallen, the one is, and the other has yet to come (Revelation 17:10). ‘The beast that was, and is not, and shall be, is himself also an eighth and is of the seven; and he goes to destruction. The ten horns that you saw are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour.’ (Revelation 17:11–12). Again, these were the ten kings or horns of Daniel’s fourth ‘iron’ beast – Rome – who came to be dominated by one little horn after a conflict that saw three horns uprooted. As in Daniel 7, these kings ‘give their power and authority to the beast.’ (Revelation 17:13).
The ten horns and the beast hate the prostitute, make her desolate, strip her naked, eat her flesh and burn her (Revelation 17:16). ‘The woman who you saw is the great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.’ (Revelation 17:18). This means that the Antichrist and his ten subordinate kings will together sack Babylon, therein identified as his capital, which will also get the sharp end of the bowl judgements. This sack will probably come before the massive earthquake that affects Babylon because after such a catastrophe most of the valuables in the city would be damaged, and there wouldn’t be much left to sack. Why would the Antichrist sack his own capital? For supplies and funds, to keep his war machine going, out of desperation. This was what Isaiah meant when he alluded to the Antichrist betraying his own people (Isaiah 14:20). It would be typical of Nero, who is rumoured to have set Rome ablaze, and Hitler, who wrecked Berlin through strategic ineptitude and sheer bloody-mindedness, to destroy his own capital.
Afterwards, he will rally his armies at Armageddon and return to Jerusalem in anger. Indeed, he – it is unclear who – gathered them together for battle at ‘“Harmagedon”’ (Revelation 16:16). Harmagedon is Megiddo, northern Israel, which is merely a rallying point, rather than the site of an actual battle with Christ; that will subsequently take place at Jerusalem (Zechariah 14).
In chapter 18, verse 2, another angel cried out that Babylon the Great has fallen and become ‘a habitation of demons’ and unclean and hated birds. This is a reference to Isaiah’s eschatological Babylon, also prophesied to become a desolate abode of demons and wild animals (Isaiah 13), and partially fulfilled with the historical abandonment of Babylon in the ancient world. We have already established that Isaiah’s Babylon was the literal Babylon on the Euphrates that is today a ruin.
The angels implore people to ‘“Come out of her’ (Babylon), ‘that you don’t receive her plagues.’ (Revelation 18:4–5). She is haughty and said to herself, ‘‘I sit a queen, and am no widow, and will in no way see mourning.’’ (Revelation 18:7). This is an allusion back to Isaiah 47:8, in which Babylon, the ‘daughter of the Chaldeans’, says, ‘‘I am, and there is no one else beside me. I won’t sit as a widow’. The point here is to establish that John and Isaiah were writing about the same Babylon; and we know that Isaiah’s Babylon was Babylon (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). Babylon is described as burning and being made desolate in ‘one day’ (Revelation 18:8) and in ‘an hour’ (Revelation 18:17). The seafarers and merchants mourn her, because of the loss of their trade (Revelation 18:19).
‘Babylon’ is commonly interpreted as being Rome, a hub of international maritime commerce and the city of seven hills (allegedly corresponding to the seven heads of the beast) that was ‘revived’ following the collapse of the western empire, and the Year of Four Emperors. Indeed, Saint Malachy foretold that during the reign of the 112th and ‘last’ Pope, ‘Rome, the seat of the Vatican, will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’[vii] Now, there have been 266 Popes so far, which calls Malachy’s prophecies into question, but there are other End Times prophecies from Christian mystics about there being no Pope in Rome for a while, and the Pope going into exile.[viii] For example, as part of the Fátima messages, Sister Lucia had an apocalyptic vision of what she believed to be the Pope, bishops and priests being executed by soldiers on the top of a mountain.[ix] While these prophecies are not generally accorded the same pedigree as Scripture, they are nonetheless noteworthy. According to tradition, Saints Paul and Peter were martyred in Rome,[x] along with many others who were killed in the coliseum, making the ‘blood of the saints’ part applicable to that city. Peter himself used ‘Babylon’ as a codeword for Rome, presumably due to the city’s decadence (1 Peter 5:13).
Then there are those who see ‘Babylon the great’ as Jerusalem, identified by Jeremiah as a once ‘great’ widow (Lamentations 1:1). The case for Babylon as Jerusalem is actually pretty good, considering that Jerusalem is not called Babylon. Preterists believe that the judgement of Jerusalem by means of its destruction by the Romans in AD 70, was the destruction of Babylon the Great and established Christ’s heavenly kingdom.[xi] In reality, the Kingdom of Heaven in heaven was accessible to followers of Jesus from at latest the Pentecost (AD 33), and the earthly Kingdom of God has yet to be established. When justifying the Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah said that Judah ‘had a harlot’s forehead’ (Jeremiah 3:3), which is echoed by the inscription on the whore of Babylon’s forehead: ‘BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES’. Jerusalem, like Revelation’s Babylon, was the location for the martyrdom of many saints, sits on seven hills and numerous springs (or ‘many waters’), has been conquered, ‘made desolate’ and burned by the nations represented by the composite beast. The Romans did not kill any Old Testament prophets (if only for want of opportunity), a crime that Jesus charged Jerusalem with, before saying to the inhabitants of the city: ‘therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Baraciah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar.’ (Matthew 23:34). Saint Stephen, shortly before he was martyred by Jerusalemites, blamed Jerusalem for killing Jesus, the Messiah (Acts 7:52). Jerusalem has been at the centre of most Bible prophecy since the days of Isaiah, who also foretold a siege of the ‘city of David’, and it is the only city other than Babylon that is directly referenced in Revelation. It has also been resurrected and rebuilt several times throughout history and is called a ‘prostitute’ and a disloyal bride who will be stripped naked in the Old Testament books of Ezekiel (23:3;23:6) and Jeremiah (3:1). God spoke of Jerusalem’s disloyalty through his prophet Ezekiel because the inhabitants of the city at that time (6th century BC) had been worshipping idols again, including some Babylonian idols. Ezekiel foretold that God’s punishment for the city’s idolatry was to be captivity at the hands of Babylon, and King Nebuchadnezzar II duly conquered the city, deported many Jews, and left it desolate.
The prostitute sitting on the beast who then strips her naked is taken by Preterists as a symbol of Judea’s dependence on and cooperation with the Roman authorities, especially in the killing of Jesus, and the Romans’ subsequent destruction of the Holy City.[xii] Before the Jewish Revolt, Judea was a client kingdom of the Roman Empire.[xiii] King Herod the Great was a major collaborator with the empire and a close friend of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius.[xiv]
There can be no doubt that Jerusalem is prophesied to suffer greatly in the End Times, enduring at least two earthquakes and being conquered and tyrannised by the beast. There can also be no question that the events of AD 70 were a model for eschatological tribulations. It is quite likely, given the worldwide effects of the seal, trumpet and bowl judgements, that Rome too will be affected, along with many other cities that are not named as candidates for ‘Babylon’. Indeed, ‘the cities of the nations’ (Revelation 16:19) are prophesied to be devastated by the massive earthquake resulting from the bowl judgements.
Ultimately, however, Babylon is Babylon. The preponderance of scriptural evidence backs up this assertion. There are too many descriptions of a future Babylon being destroyed in Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel, featuring geographical, linguistic and cultural indicators pertaining to the city in Mesopotamia.
But Babylon does not sit on seven hills like Rome or Jerusalem. So how are the seven heads of the beast ‘seven mountains’, if Babylon the Great is the desolate Babylon in present-day Iraq, and that Babylon is not built on hills? Well, the mountains aren’t literal mountains. Etemananki, the ziggurat of ancient Babylon, believed by some to be the biblical Tower of Babel built by King Nimrod (Genesis 11), had seven architectural levels or stages and was so large it was called a ‘mountain’. It is currently reduced to ruins and foundations but will be rebuilt in some form by the Antichrist in homage to Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar II, his precursors. Such a project sounds insane, but the Antichrist is going to be insane, and Saddam Hussein already tried something similar when he reconstructed parts of Babylon, envisaging himself as a modern day Nebuchadnezzar II, in another instance of the typology.[xv] There may be seven of these towers in the future Babylon, or the beast’s ‘seven mountains’ could be the seven stages of the rebuilt Etemenanki. The Tower of Babel is, after all, the symbol of human hubris and defiance of God. The recovery of one of the beast’s heads from a fatal wound and the whole earth marvelling at the healing of the beast’s fatal wound (Revelation 13:2–3) are allusions to the future reconstruction of Etemananki and to the spectacular, rapid revival of Babylon from a site of archaeological ruins, to the capital of a multinational empire.
The seven kings, five who have come, one who is and the other who had yet to come at the time of composition, have been interpreted by Preterists as the first seven Roman emperors – Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero (supposedly the sixth one who is or was at time of writing) and Galba – a view that is rendered null and void by the consensus dating of John’s exile to Patmos in the ‘90s AD, and my dating of circa 80 AD, because Nero died in 68 AD. Moreover, neither Vitellius nor Otho, who followed Galba as number 8 in that series, were hardly significant enough figures to be the Antichrist. Classical dispensationalists have interpreted the seven kings as representative of seven world empires: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, and the beast’s empire.[xvi] Daniel established the precedent for beasts representing kingdoms. But Daniel never included Egypt in his list. If we’re including empires not in Daniel’s book, then why not pick the British Empire, the Mongol Empire, or Sumeria?
In reality, the seven kings are all conquerors who have in some way desecrated the temple, or are prophesied to do so. The candidates include: Pharaoh Sheshonq I or ‘Shishak’ who circa 925 BC took away the treasures of the temple (2 Chronicles 12:9); the leader of the ancient Philistines who sacked Jerusalem in league with the Arabs and Ethiopians (2 Chronicles 21:16–17); King Ahaz of Judah who desecrated the temple by cutting the vessels in pieces, closing its doors (2 Chronicles 28:24), and taking away the covered area and royal entrance (2 Kings 16:18); King Manasseh, who built altars to pagan idols in the temple (2 Chronicles 33:15); his successor King Amon, whose son Josiah removed male cult prostitutes from the temple (2 Kings 23:7); another evil King of Judah named Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:35–24:7); King Hezekiah ‘cut off the gold from the doors of Yahweh’s temple…and gave it to the king of Assyria’ in payment of tribute, though he was overall a pretty good king who did so under duress (2 Kings 18:15); Nebuchadnezzar II burned the temple down; Antiochus IV, who obviously desecrated the temple in numerous ways; the Parthian prince Pacorus, whose troops looted the Holy City; the Roman magnate Crassus desecrated the Holy of Holies by looting a beam of solid gold;[xvii] the Roman general Pompey the Great entered the temple and thereby desecrated it, though he stole nothing;[xviii] and finally we have Herod the Great and Mark Antony, since it was Antony’s army, seeking to install Herod as puppet King of Judea, that sacked the city and ‘burst into’ the temple in 37 BC.[xix] Part of the temple was also damaged during that siege, which may be considered a desecration. Logically, five of the above must be five of the seven kings who were in the past as of 80 AD. Nebuchadnezzar II, Antiochus IV, Manasseh, Amon and Ahaz were all definitely kings who desecrated the temple, whereas Pompey, Antony and Crassus were Roman statesmen, not kings or emperors. Shishak took all the treasures of the temple away, but it is unclear whether he personally desecrated the temple like Antiochus, or whether the Judeans took from their own temple treasury to pay tribute to him. The sixth – who must have been alive at the time John wrote the Revelation – was Titus, who sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD.[xx] At the time of the sack, he was the emperor’s son, effectively a ‘prince’, but he later briefly became emperor, thus qualifying him as a ‘king’. The seventh of the seven kings was Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem (1100–1118), after his brother Godfrey led the crusader forces who seized Jerusalem in 1099.
How could Baldwin desecrate the temple, when the temple no longer existed after 70 AD? Well, nine Knights Templar set up their headquarters in the al-Aqsa mosque in 1118 AD and are rumoured to have conducted archaeological digs on the Temple Mount searching for the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, its treasures, the Holy Grail, scrolls about Jesus, the skull of John The Baptist (allegedly part of templar rituals) and/or the Ark of the Covenant, depending on the version. Nine men is not nearly enough to fulfil the Templars’ stated mission of protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land, but it is enough to do some digging in a specific location. As King of Jerusalem during these excavations, Baldwin shared the Temple Mount with the Templars and must have been shown the temple ruins the knights had found. The Book of Revelation thus corroborates the idea, dismissed by academics as a legend, that the Knights Templar found some remains from at least one of the old temples on the Temple Mount, and thereby desecrated it. The eighth king is the future beast, who is forecasted by Daniel and Jesus to desecrate the Temple Mount in an ‘abomination of desolation’. He is of the seven not only because all seven were desolators of the temple like him, and so he belongs to the same category, but also because he was Antiochus, one of the seven kings.
Revelation 19 begins with the angels rejoicing over the destruction of ‘Babylon’, because she killed God’s servants (Revelation 19:2). Then the voice of a mighty multitude proclaims, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the almighty, reigns!’ (Revelation 19:6). The multitude announced: ‘the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready”’ (Revelation 19:7). The fine linen of the bride is the deeds of the saints (Revelation 19:8). The bride, therefore, is Israel and the Church, assimilated into one entity via the blood of Christ and the conversion of the remnant. The marriage represents the foundation of the millennial kingdom, ruled by Jesus. The angel said to John: ‘Blessed is he who is invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.’ (Revelation 19:9). Those invited to the wedding supper of Jesus, are those allowed to enter the kingdom and the Promised Land, which will be a beacon of security and peace amidst a world reeling from an onslaught of catastrophes, particularly the massive earthquake and its after-effects.
John then fell down before one of the messengers to worship him. ‘He’ said ‘I am a fellow bondservant with you and with your brothers who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God’ (Revelation 19:10). The Christian mystic Edgar Cayce believed that this ‘he’ was the soul of Peter, and that by giving John a message, Peter was keeping the promise he made to appear to John when the two men were in prison together.[xxi] In Acts 10, Cornelius fell down at Peter’s feet and worshipped him. Peter’s response was essentially the same as the response to John: ‘“Stand up! I myself am also a man.”’ (Acts 10:26).
Then John saw the heavens opened and ‘behold, a white horse and he who is sat on it is called Faithful and True. In righteousness he judges and makes war.’ (Revelation 19:11). ‘He is clothed in a garment sprinkled with blood.’ (Revelation 19:13). This is a reference to the figure Isaiah saw coming from Edom, his garments sprinkled with the ‘lifeblood’ of the peoples (Isaiah 63:3). His name is ‘“the Word of God”’ (Revelation 19:13). This is Jesus, the Logos, who is identified as the saviour in Isaiah 63:3. By this point he has already relieved the remnant at Edom; that’s why his garment is bloody. The ‘armies which are in heaven’ followed him on white horses (Revelation 19:14). These are angels and the raptured elect, who will accompany Jesus into battle against the Antichrist, though he fought alone at Edom.
‘Out of his mouth proceeds a sharp, double-edged sword that with it he should strike the nations. He will rule them with an iron rod. He treads the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of God, the almighty.’ (Revelation 19:15). The figure from Edom in Isaiah 63:2 has red clothing, as if he has been treading in a wine vat. This treading of the winepress during the Campaign of Armageddon and the Battle for Jerusalem is one meaning of the ‘wrath of God’, and once again it is used here in connection with Jesus fighting when he reappears.
This is the Second Coming. Not the esoteric coming of Christ within the souls of his flock following their personal struggles (also alluded to in Revelation), but the literal arrival of God on earth, so that the prophecy made upon Christ’s ascension to heaven – ‘Jesus…will come back in the same way as you saw him going into the sky’ (Acts 1:11) – shall be fulfilled.
‘I saw the beast, the kings of the earth, and their armies gathered together to make war on he who sat on the horse and against his army.’ (Revelation 19:19). This is the battle for Jerusalem described in Zechariah 14, for though the Antichrist initially gathered his armies at Armageddon, Jerusalem is where they meet God in Zechariah. The outcome is predictable.
‘The beast was taken and with him the false prophet who worked the signs in his sight…These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. The rest were killed with the sword of him who sat on the horse, the sword that came out of his mouth.’ (Revelation 19:20). Make no mistake, Revelation 19 clearly tells of an actual war. There is, and shall be, plenty of spiritual warfare, but the multiple references to birds eating the flesh of the fallen makes it plain that this war is to have real effects here on earth (Revelation 19:18).
The text operates on the individual and collective, internal and external, future and past, symbolic and literal levels, which may explain some of the confusion. But it is primarily intended to be read literally, that is, as a Futurist premillennialist would read it. The fact that, in the narrative of Revelation, the beast and False Prophet are thrown in the lake of fire prior to the millennium’s beginning, combined with the fact that these events haven’t happened yet, mean that the millennium has to be in the future, effectively ruling out postmillennial and exclusively Preterist eschatological positions.[xxii] This first throne judgement is a kind of divinely administered Nuremberg Trials, to bring a corrupt regime to account for its crimes.
Revelation 19 shouldn’t be misinterpreted as an excuse for inappropriate violence. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5) for good reason. The Antichrist cannot be overthrown until the appointed hour, by anyone other than Jesus. And the millennial kingdom, which many Catholics regard as an idea too dangerous to be taught, is not a dangerous idea if it is understood that only Jesus coming with the clouds and the heavenly host under the specific circumstances described in Scripture will be able to inaugurate it. Regular humans simply cannot establish the millennial kingdom on their own. Nor should Revelation be taken as an excuse to completely isolate oneself from the world. If you want to prepare for the millennium, unite your soul with Christ, help others, spread the gospel and beware of false prophets, who will be known ‘by their fruits’ (Matthew 7:16). Numerous prophets, including John and Isaiah, have written about the righteous being preserved from the worst of the divine judgements during the tribulation. To receive and serve God are the best forms of protection, not always for the present body, but for the soul and the resurrected body. Jesus himself said that the time before the flood was typological of the tribulations and the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24:37). Noah and his family survived that catastrophe because Noah was righteous amidst a world of iniquity (Genesis 6:9). They were physically saved from the Great Flood by the wood of the ark, as Christians will be in the tribulation, physically and spiritually, by the wood of the cross.[xxiii]
It is written in Revelation 20:4 that ‘I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgement was given to them.’ This judgement is identical with the sheep and goats judgement in the Olivet Discourse, and the Jehoshaphat Judgement in Joel 3:2. The fact there will be more than one throne means that there will be more than one judge at this judgement. This is when the twelve apostles will sit in judgement of the 12 tribes of Israel, as Jesus promised them during the Last Supper (Matthew 19:28). It is a first throne judgement, distinguished from the last and final judgement by the term ‘The Last Judgement’, which is referred to later as ‘the great white throne judgement’ (Revelation 20:11–15).
There are different tiers of punishments at the first throne judgement. As previously mentioned, the Antichrist and the False Prophet will be thrown in the lake of fire, their bodies and souls destroyed utterly. But there are those followers of the beast who are to be punished by being ‘killed’ (Revelation 19:21) and Isaiah tells us their souls will go to hell, where ‘after many days they will be visited’ (Isaiah 24:22) – many days here being the thousand years – and thrown in the fire. Some of those who took Jews captive during the persecutions are prophesied to themselves become ‘captives’ (Isaiah 14:2). It seems that others will be punished by simply being excluded from the kingdom (Matthew 8:12; Matthew 25:1–3). Likewise, different tiers of kingdom rewards are prepared for God’s ‘sheep’.
‘I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and the word of God, and such as didn’t worship the beast or his image, and didn’t receive the mark on their forehead and on their hand. They lived and reigned with Christ for one thousand years. The rest of the dead didn’t live until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over these, the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with him for one thousand years.’ (Revelation 20:4–6).
Some have taken this to mean that only tribulation martyrs will rule with Christ, but this is to ignore the ‘and such as didn’t worship the beast’ or receive the mark, meaning that not only the dead in Christ will be raptured to co-rule, but some of the living also, as Saint Paul prophesied in 1 Thessalonians, chapter 4. And it is the 144,000 elect who are to rule with Christ, whether they were martyred or survived. Hence Christ said it is the ‘eklektos’ who will be raptured from the ‘four winds of heaven’ to the Middle East and in Revelation, chapter 14 they stand with him on Mount Zion, the site of his future temple residence, when the war is over.
Some Christians may be wondering how this resurrection concept fits with my belief in reincarnation. Well, the last body a soul incarnated in, is the one that is raised. This makes sense for several reasons, including the fact the most recent corpse is probably the least decomposed of all the bodies a soul has worn. The first resurrection is treated as a separate event from the rapture by some Futurist pre-tribulation dispensationalists, but Paul described the dead as rising to be with Jesus before the living in the rapture (1 Thessalonians 4:15), and if the first resurrection is to be after the rapture, then it would not be the first resurrection, but the second. Because some of the saints were ‘beheaded’ for the word of God by the beast it is absolutely plain that the elect saints will NOT be raptured out of the world before the tribulation, or halfway through it, since the beast who will kill them will be in power for at least approximately the second half of that tribulation, which will be roughly the last half of Daniel’s 70th week. Even most of the apostles were not spared martyrdom, so what makes pre-tribulation dispensationalists think they are worthy of being spared tribulation?
There has not yet been a mass simultaneous resurrection of thousands of people, which again means that the millennium, that follows the first resurrection, lies in the future.[xxiv] The bottom line here is that John, like Jesus in his Olivet Discourse, located the rapture after the Great Tribulation or suffering, the abomination and the persecution.
Now I will address competing eschatological beliefs regarding the resurrection. Some Idealists see the first resurrection as a spiritual resurrection, not a literal physical one, and that the martyrs will reign from heaven with Christ.[xxv] But a resurrection is by definition both physical and spiritual, since it involves the spirit returning to the dead body to reanimate it, and again, some of those who partake in this first resurrection are described as having been ‘beheaded’: they are definitely literally dead before being resurrected. The Greek word ezesan John used in 20:5 is derived from the verb zao (live), which refers to bodily resurrection in the New Testament,[xxvi] zao is equated with anastasis in 20:5,[xxvii] and anastasis means physical resurrection.[xxviii] Some of the older corpses, especially those that were burned, will have to be regenerated by God. Indeed, the severed heads of the ‘beheaded’ must be reunited with the rest of their corpses to be raised, but ‘with God all things are possible’ (Matthew 19:26), and the resurrection of every person in a body, no matter how decayed, is foretold in Scripture (John 5:28–29; Acts 24:15). Given 1 Thessalonians 4, the gathering from the four winds of heaven and the many bird of prey metaphors in Scripture, this resurrection precedes the bodily ascent of the elect into the sky to be with Christ, and their descent with him to rule.
What else are the saints to rule, if not the earth? The 24 elders have been made priests and kings who will rule with Christ ‘on earth’ (Revelation 5:10). In the narrative of Revelation, the ‘thousand year’ reign of Christ and his resurrected saints occurs following the tribulation and the Second Coming. Daniel (2:35) wrote that God’s kingdom is to be set up on the ‘earth’. The fact that these tribulation martyrs have to be resurrected in order to live and reign, means that their reign must be on earth, the only world in which resurrection is necessary for the dead to live. The Father, Christ and the saints already reign in heaven, with power to intervene in earthly affairs, and have done so for more than a thousand years. The Word of God has always ruled creation with the Father. Why bother giving specific durations in years – as was also the case with the weeks in Daniel 9 – for the coming and rule of the Messiah, unless that rule will be on earth? If it is from heaven, which is beyond the material universe, and therefore our conception of spacetime, then there would be no or little point forecasting specific dates and periods of government.
Postmillennialists believe that the thousand years means the rule of Jesus from heaven during the present church age…which, no matter how rose-tinted your glasses are, hardly fits the idyllic presentation of God’s kingdom throughout Scripture. In the current era, people don’t live hundreds of years, wolves don’t lie down with lambs except to eat them, far from beating their swords into ploughshares, militaries are still trained and armed for fighting and killing, God is not physically in the temple to bloodlessly arbitrate disputes between nations, serpents are dangerous, the world is not full of the knowledge of God, and the devil is not fettered. Indeed, Saint Peter compared the devil to a lion roaming for prey during the present age (1 Peter 5:8). Our current era is not the millennium. We are in the last days, the time of decadence before the tribulation.
Idealists tend to reject the idea of a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, because no other book of the Bible gives that duration. This is a simple denial of what the Word of God actually states, in addition to being factually inaccurate. As we have seen, the millennium reign on earth is implicit throughout numerous prophetic books of the Bible, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. It is also present in Jesus’ parable of the darnel weeds of the field. Christ himself explained that parable in the following terms: ‘the Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling and those who do iniquity, and will cast them in the furnace of fire…Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.’ (Matthew 13:41–43). The Son of Man’s angels taking sinners out of his kingdom to be burned, before the righteous are glorified in the Kingdom of their Father, can only mean that Jesus’ kingdom will be followed by the Last Judgement – in which sinners will be weeded out – and a subsequent, final Kingdom of God: the New Jerusalem. The parabolic timeline matches the narrative chronology of Revelation. God can intervene and change whatever he likes in his creation, and through human editing and organisation he set the canon of Scripture, and included Revelation within that as the last book, for good reason. There would be little point in the Revelation if it did not add some hitherto undisclosed knowledge concerning the last days. Daniel’s prophecies built on Ezekiel’s and Jeremiah’s, and they added to the visions of Isaiah, who expanded on Moses’ prophecies. God reveals more and more of his mysteries over time, in successive dispensations of his plan; this is an ongoing process that has not yet concluded. Indeed, human history is to a large extent the history of unfolding knowledge, a journey from the darkness of ignorance to the light of truth – with plenty of stumbling and backward steps in between. The material circumstances faced by people in any era are determined primarily by the state of their knowledge, since the mind shapes matter.
Earlier in the text, I touched on the parable of the vineyard workers. Now is the place to expand upon that analysis. The first labourers in the vineyard receiving the same pay as the last ones hired, after the latecomers get their wages, and the saying, ‘many who are first will be last and the last will be first’, are about the 144,000 elect, who return to the fold in the latter days, yet are given to rule with Christ as glorified immortal priest-kings before many Christians who were saved decades and centuries earlier. These earlier Christians must await the second resurrection to receive their full wage, which is to say, their immortal bodies. Jesus concluded the parable with ‘many are called, but few are chosen.’ (Matthew 24:14). The word chosen is translated from the Greek eklektoi: the elect, plural.[xxix] This saying has a twofold meaning: firstly, that many hear the gospel, but few actually commit to living the way; and secondly, that many – the ‘great multitude’ in heaven awaiting the second resurrection – are called in that they are saved, but the much smaller number of 144,000 are eklektoi. Needless to say, inheriting an immortal physical body, and having miraculous powers, will make authority much easier to bear and wield for the elect. Jesus has already declared that he will eat the Passover meal after his return (Luke 22:15–16), so eating and drinking will still be possible, but like sleeping, they will not be necessary for the glorified in the millennium. Hence those who drink living water ‘will never thirst again’ (John 4:14) and those who eat the bread of life won’t go hungry (John 6:35). The fact that all those who receive their wage of eternal life are workers, who work for their master, should underline the importance of works in salvation…
Why are the last saved, the first ones to be raised? Well, an impending rapture is an incentive that will help motivate the elect to endure the widespread tribulation catastrophes and the Antichrist, the worst enemy of true Christians to ever walk the earth. The elect’s participation in the first resurrection and the rapture is also a consolation, and a reward for carrying out an important mission, upon which the fate of the world depends. Another reason is practical; the last Christians will be more familiar with conditions on the devastated earth at that time and the nature and languages of the non-elect survivors, having lived with them just prior to the Parousia and endured what they have suffered.
This interpretation of the parable of the vineyard workers enables us to understand that not all of those who partake in the second resurrection will be consigned to the lake of fire. On the contrary, the Christian ‘multitude’ in heaven who were not alive during the last days will be exempt from the lake of fire, as will those who were alive in the millennium, learned from the elect during that time, and were not tempted to participate in the final uprising of Satan at the end of the thousand years.
Indeed, John implies the existence of a group of survivors who were intelligent and pious enough not to receive the mark of the beast or worship the beast, but failed to be saved and/or glorified prior to the millennium. These individuals and their descendants are to be ruled and taught by the elect. Think about it. If there were only the 144,000 elect on earth for the millennium, what would be the point of resurrecting them and having them co-rule an earthly Kingdom of God? Why not just let them live eternally in the New Jerusalem, clothed in their new glorified bodies? Indeed, John wrote that the elect will be ‘priests of God and of Christ’ (Revelation 20:6). A priest has a flock. A ruler presupposes the ruled. The idea of post-tribulation survivors governed by an elect priesthood was foretold by the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. Souls will thus fall into three categories during the thousand years: the saints, their subjects or students, and those who are already damned, and languish in Hades to await their final destruction in the lake of fire, because they received the mark and worshipped the beast. The number of those who will be saved during the reign of heaven on earth will be greater than the number of the elect who are saved before the Second Coming, due to the restraining of the deceiver, the removal of the worst offenders beforehand and the human tendency to automatically believe and obey authority, whether that authority be bad or good. The best argument for the physical millennium, other than the fact it is explicitly mentioned in Scripture, is that it is a logical necessity in order to save as many souls as possible; there are obviously a lot of people who, through sin, conformity or want of wisdom, were and are unable to find salvation in a harsh, iniquitous world, but could do so under more favourable conditions. Therefore, because God is good and merciful, he has promised a millennium where Jesus and the saints will rule and teach the earth directly. Many basically good people who lived in the church age, but weren’t saved, will be reincarnated in the millennium, to have a last chance at salvation. The physical presence of the glorified King Jesus, and his power, will be obvious to everyone in the kingdom. Everyone will not only believe in God, they will know that God exists. There will be no more debate, no agnosticism, and no atheism. It will be a time when the authorities will not only be just and truthful, but living examples of the rewards of the way that they teach. Seeing the elect rise from and descend to earth will underline to the non-elect survivors that these are not ordinary human beings. These are children of God, to be heeded. Indeed, after all they have suffered, the survivors will be terrified of the elect, though they will come to give relief and instruction. Unfortunately, it seems that not all of the students will pass their final test, although they have been allotted a thousand years to prepare for it.
Indeed, it is written that the ‘devil’ will be ‘bound’ for a ‘thousand years’, ‘that he should deceive the nations no more until the thousand years were finished’, after which ‘he must be freed for a short time’ (Revelation 20:3). This binding of Satan is a mental binding of the deceiver archetype, the inner tempter and accuser. The fact the deceiver is bound, not destroyed, during the thousand years, means that the deceiver’s influence over the minds (and therefore the bodies) of humanity – the glorified elect are a different kettle of fish – will be vastly reduced, but as subsequent events make plain, that influence is not altogether non-existent…
Idealists and Postmillennialists believe the devil has been bound ever since Jesus’ ministry, and is therefore still bound today, even in our incredibly troubled world. God and Jesus are far more powerful than Satan – the devil is only tolerated temporarily because he still serves a purpose – and can dismiss him and his demons on request, but that’s not the same thing as the deceiver being shackled as a default state for all humanity. In our materialistic age, Satan is doing better than ever. This notion can be easily corroborated by simply looking around, at the news, other people, or at your own thoughts and feelings; the monologue of fear, desire and anger that dominates the inner and outer worlds of most people. ‘The devil’s greatest trick was persuading the world he doesn’t exist’,[xxx] so do not be deceived. Even when he incarnates in the beast from the sea, he will lie about his true nature, and blasphemously call himself God.
But with the deceiver fettered, and Jesus in direct control, everything will change. The work of reconstruction will commence. People will live significantly longer, happier lives (Isaiah 65:20). Nature will flourish. Miracles will be fairly common occurrences. Godmindbody healing, as practiced by Jesus, will become widespread. The esoteric truths of Christ will be taught in the schools. ‘Many will be last who are first, and first who are last.’ (Matthew 19:30).
The millennial regime’s form of government will be a theocratic monarchy, like the early United Kingdom of Israel, except the infallible Son of God himself will be King of Kings, with authority delegated to the elect as priest-kings. The Bible says nothing about elections after the Second Coming, although some form of democracy may be possible in certain outlying protectorates, the core metropole of the millennial kingdom itself will obviously be a kingdom that rules all kingdoms ‘under the whole sky’. Given the physical immortality of Jesus and the elect, offices may be held until the end of the thousand years, or even persist into the new world, if it be our Lord’s will. Because Jesus’ decision making is perfect, he has conquered all human frailties, the elect will be glorified beyond the reach of sin and death, and by that point the deceiver will be mentally restrained inside of everyone, there will be no possibility for the abuse of power typically associated with autocracy in the millennial kingdom. (Until the real Messiah comes constitutional democracy, though highly flawed, represents the best possible form of government, not so much for its efficiency, but for its checks and balances against tyranny, the worst type of government).
The prophet Zephaniah (3:9) hinted that God will reverse the confusion of the tongues that occurred during the Tower of Babel episode, and give humanity a new language: ‘For then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that they may all call on Yahweh’s name, to serve him shoulder to shoulder.’ The ESV has it: ‘I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech’.[xxxi] So many misunderstandings and even disagreements can result from people lacking a common language. A universal mother tongue will significantly increase international cohesion.
In the millennial kingdom, the Church will be universalised. There will be no more room for doctrinal differences with the Son of God physically in Jerusalem to arbitrate and set the record straight. Hence we have Catholic prophecies about a great pope who will restore the true faith as part of a universal Church,[xxxii] but this Church will not be Roman Catholic or any other particular denomination, it will simply be Christian, clearly and transparently teaching the true testimony of Jesus, which differs significantly (but not completely) from virtually every current church. The fat of unnecessary or incorrect dogma will be trimmed and the meat of truth preserved. Books will be added to the Bible, as they were after the first coming of Jesus. The Church and the religious leaders will of course be subordinate to King Jesus, as head of the Church; there is no wall between church and state in a theocracy, but a division of labour makes sense. That is, although some of the elect will focus more on rebuilding civilization and governing than on preaching the true religion, politics, the economy, healthcare and the law will all be framed and implemented in obedience to Christ’s will, in conformance with his commandments and with the eternal state in view. Ezekiel makes it plain that the religion will be centred on the new temple on Mount Zion, with resumed animal sacrifices (Ezekiel 40–48) and God living in the temple as a divine presence in human form. Zadok’s descendants will serve as high ranking priests due to their ancestor’s fidelity to God in the past (Ezekiel 44), and the descendants of the disloyal Levites will also serve in the temple. Rome will doubtless remain an important spiritual hub, perhaps under the aegis of the prophesied ‘great Pope’. The truth is the truth and all else will fall by the wayside; hypocrisy and the tendency to over-emphasise ceremonies without understanding or appreciating their true spiritual meaning will be diminished, although we know from the Bible that at least Passover, temple sacrifices and the Feast of Booths will be reinstated in the millennium. It is probable therefore that the full calendar of Jewish feast days will be observed, in addition to some Christian holidays, with new meanings gained from events surrounding the Parousia. The priorities of the New Church will be to explain the truths of the gospel, plain and simple, to heal the sick, help the flock in other practical ways and organise ceremonies, festivals and holy days that remind people of God, his deeds, and the coming judgement. A good priest is one who helps you to become your own priest, so that you no longer need a priest. That is the goal of the new elect priesthood, as it is the objective of the millennium in general: to prepare the flock for the new earth, to make children of God of all to whom it is given, through the salvific power of the Word of God. But because the deceiver was not completely destroyed, some traces of sin will remain.
During his last hurrah, the unbound Satan will ‘deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the Earth, Gog and Magog’ (Revelation 20:8) and use them to besiege ‘the camp of the saints and the beloved city.’ (Revelation 20:9). This is the Gog of Magog conflict foretold in Ezekiel 38. Again, ‘the camp of the saints’ is a reference to the rule of at least some of the saints on earth. The last hour defection will come from the ranks of the remaining unsaved, and from outside the Promised Land metropole, the kingdom itself. The beloved city is Jerusalem. Satan will target Jerusalem precisely because the Holy City will be the capital of God’s kingdom, the seat of power;[xxxiii] he will be aiming to win in one fell swoop, which of course cannot happen, because his enemy, God, controls the outcomes. The devil will tempt Gog and his allies to attack Jerusalem, in what will be a last iteration of the Sennacherib pattern, because the Holy City will be without walls, undefended by conventional military means after the swords were turned into ploughshares. This will be a catastrophic miscalculation, since millennial Jerusalem will be defended by God, who will use fire to defeat Gog’s forces (Revelation 20:9). The devil will be defeated and cast into ‘the lake of fire.’ (Revelation 20:10). Then the dead are resurrected and judged before the ‘white throne’ (Revelation 20:11) according to ‘their works.’ (Revelation 20:12).[xxxiv] This is the Last Judgement. The dead who did not participate in the first resurrection, will take part in this second resurrection. This group will include many of the early saints and good Christians from bygone eras, but these will pass the judgement, and will at last come into their immortal bodies like the elect did before them.
The dragon was cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10). ‘Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. If anyone was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire.’ (Revelation 20:14–15). In other words, the devil, his servants and the souls of those who do not pass judgement, who were not saved by the end of the millenium, and therefore awaited judgement in Hades, and not in heaven, are to be annihilated. The first death is the death of the body; the second death is the destruction of the souls and resurrected bodies of the damned, because they favoured perishable things over the imperishable. The mark of the beast is the outer token of their choice, borne of fear and greed. The fact death and Hades will no longer exist after they are thrown in the lake of fire, and thereby annihilated, demonstrates that the lake of fire is not the conventional Christian idea of hell, in which sinners continue in torment or discontent for eternity, but a place of utter destruction, where after a (probably short) period of being burned alive, sinners simply cease to be.
Why do sinners need to be resurrected to receive their punishment? Well, being destroyed is not quite the same without a body; nor is living forever. The body makes the reward better and the penalty worse. The sinful are destroyed by God, not only as a punishment for disobedience, but because the final paradise would be impossible with them in it. Their continued survival would, if that were possible, mar eternity for the chosen. It may also risk another fall, and by that point, after many thousands of years witnessing the meat grinder of human history, God will be finished with death, suffering, and sin.
The old earth and heaven then make way for a ‘new heaven and a new earth’, (Revelation 21:1) in which ‘death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more.’ (Revelation 21:4–5). The chosen are to live forever with God in the ‘New Jerusalem’, which comes ‘down out of heaven’ (Revelation 21:1) to a new, transfigured, spiritualised Earth. Although heaven and earth will indeed ‘pass away,’ (Matthew 24:35), God and his children are forever, as David prophesied: ‘My God…Of old, you laid the foundations of the earth. The heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will endure. Yes, all of them will wear out like a garment. You will change them like a cloak, and they will be changed. But you are the same. Your years will have no end. The children of your servants will continue. Their offspring will be established before you.’ (Psalm 102:24–28). The new heaven and new earth may mean that the present planet earth is sublimated into a new earth, or the current earth simply ceases to be, and the new earth is in a different place altogether. Because God gave Abraham and his ‘offspring’ (Jesus) ‘the land where you are traveling, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession’ (Genesis 17:8), which is clearly a place on our earth, I believe that this world will be transformed into the new earth as Jesus’ body was transformed into a glorified one. Note that it is only after the Last Judgement that death and suffering are finished. Previously, in the millennium, death still existed, though its power was considerably weakened, and it could not touch the glorified rulers. Some contend that the new earth will still see death, but John could not have been plainer when he wrote, ‘death will be no more’ after death itself was thrown into the lake of fire...
There will be no temple in the New Jerusalem, because God and the Lamb will be the temple (Revelation 21:22), and they will dwell with their people (Revelation 21:3). There will be no night and no sun in the New Jerusalem; God is the light (Revelation 21:23). ‘The kings of the earth bring the glory and honor of the nations into it.’ (Revelation 21:24). The kings of the earth, plural, at that time will be the saints, whose thousand-year tuition will result in many Gentiles passing the Last Judgement and entering the New Jerusalem. There will be a river of the water of life proceeding from the throne of God, and the tree of life on either side of the river, whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:1–2). ‘There will be no curse any more.’ (Revelation 22:3). The servants of God will continue to ‘serve him’ in the new world (Revelation 22:3). The nature of this service is mysterious, but it indicates that the saved won’t be idle in God’s kingdom, but will continue to glorify God in their work.
‘For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God’s angels in heaven.’ (Matthew 22:30). This means that there won’t be sex, marriage and reproduction in the new earth, because people’s bodies will be different. While one reason that mortals breed is to live on through their children, the elect and the saved, being immortal children of God, are their own posterity, and some of them will be able to live with their resurrected children, if those children were saved. Childbirth has to cease at a certain point, because if children were born in the New Jerusalem, they wouldn’t have passed judgement, and may not be fit for the eternal state.
The extreme size and height of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:16–18), far from being metaphorical of salvation or the Church, as some suppose, is actually indicative of the fact that the new earth is made of a very different and more elastic substance than the present earth. God can do anything he wants. The shape of the New Jerusalem, with its high walls, is essentially a massive cube. ‘The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb’ (Revelation 21:14). The city had twelve gates, each one named after a tribe of Israel (Revelation 21:12); the conjunction of the two twelves represents the combination of Israel and the Church in the New Jerusalem. The foundations of the city’s wall were covered in jewels: jasper, emerald, beryl, chalcedony, jasper, sardius, chrysolite, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth and amethyst (Revelation 21:20). The bejewelled walls were anticipated by the 12 kinds of jewels set in the high priest’s breastplate (Exodus 39:10)[xxxv] that were ‘according to the names of the children of Israel, twelve’ (Exodus 39:14). Furthermore, the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the tabernacle, was also cubic (Exodus 26), prefiguring the New Jerusalem.[xxxvi] The lack of a ‘sea’ (Revelation 21:1) is a literal topographical description of the new earth. Symbolically, it may be an indication that there will be no more unconscious, since the sea represents the unconscious. The soul of humanity will no longer be divided between good and evil, conscious and unconscious after the destruction of the deceiver; the divided mind will be made whole, as the division between spirit and flesh will be closed up.
Like the elect in the millennium, everyone in the New Jerusalem will have no need of food, sleep and water, though the leaves of the trees of life will have healing effects (Revelation 22:2), this healing is to be emotional in nature, since the bodies of all will be incorruptible.
The New Jerusalem descending from heaven to a new world is the sacred marriage of spirit and matter on a cosmic scale and indeed, there are references to ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19:19). Jesus spoke of the tribulations as ‘birth pains’ (Matthew 24:8), but what exactly is being born during the End Times? The marriage not only represents the union of God and Israel/the Church, but the Spirit of God is also the ‘bridegroom’, the earth or physical body is the bride, and the child is the new glorified body and the new glorified earth that are born out of the union of opposites. In the same way that you entered the current earth in a material body, one enters the new earth and its kingdom with a new body made of a corresponding substance. The ‘curse’ was placed upon humanity by God after Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and it led to mortality, suffering, toil, and separation from God, Eden and the tree of life (Genesis 3). The New Jerusalem represents a closing of the gap between heaven and earth that was created by Adam and Eve’s original sin, hence ‘There will be no curse any more’ (Revelation 22:3). Eat enough of the tree of knowledge and you return to the ‘tree of life’, which John saw in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:2). The tree of life and the water of life are symbols of eternal life, though they also literally exist in the New Jerusalem. Like the alchemical ouroboros, the Bible ends where it began: with humans as immortal companions of God in paradise. But in the New Jerusalem, there will be no desire to disobey, because the consequences of error will have been well and truly learned. The New Jerusalem is what all of this – life, suffering, everything – is for. It is the end God had in view all along, from the very beginning of creation. The crowning glory of his work. Revelation has a reputation for being doom and gloom but the overall message, and certainly the concluding message, is one of good news, hence the word ‘gospel’ originates from the Greek euangelion, meaning good news.[xxxvii] A few years of hardship, when set against an eternity of deathless glory and joy, is a small price to pay. It is important to understand the reward, because that is your motivation to endure the darkness of the age.
The New Jerusalem will be a radical shift. Currently, when bodies die, souls go to heaven or Hell depending on whether they were saved or not during their time on earth. Hell is not necessarily tortuous, but it is a place apart from God, for souls that chose to remain separate from him, and that distance from the almighty comes with a degree of discontent, that varies depending on choices made in the previous incarnation. Two unsaved souls may experience Hades quite differently, depending on their deeds while on earth. Indeed, it is a place where sins are punished, though not the only place; souls typically reincarnate from the underworld, so that more lessons can be learned on earth. To go to heaven, on the other hand, is to be in the presence of God and other loved ones who are there, freed from the constraints of the suffering body. That is where the ‘great multitude’ of dead Christians are now, in soul form, awaiting their resurrection. But Jesus made it plain that heaven and Hell are temporary conditions. Hades, after all, will be thrown in the fire; there is no need for an afterlife, in a world where nobody dies. Read the next chapter: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-part-3-chapter-11-summary-and-discussion
[i] Josephus Flavius. The Jewish Wars.
[ii] Pate CM. Zondervan. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[iii] Josephus Flavius. The Jewish Wars.
[iv] Nero as the Antichrist, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html
[v] Suetonius. Twelve Caesars.
[vi] Nero as the Antichrist, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html
[vii] Prophecy of the Saints. https://catholicmystics.blogspot.com/p/prophetic-warnings-phrophetic-warning.html
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima. The credibility of the Fàtima visions was increased by a miracle at the site of the visions in 1917, which was so widely witnessed that it was officially acknowledged as such by the Catholic Church. Moreover, the visions predicted that the First World War would end soon, that there would be a Second World War, the rise of Russian-led communism, and other confirmed historical events.
[x] Bible & Archaeology. 2022. University of Iowa. FAQ: How did Peter and Paul die? Link: https://bam.sites.uiowa.edu/faq/peter-and-paul-martyrdoms
[xi] Gentry K. Zondervan. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2012. Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Travel Obscurer. August 9, 2024. The Real Babylon (and Saddam’s Babylon) – Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi v the Iraqi Dictator. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V7Gav4HUh4
[xvi] Thomas, R. Zondervan. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[xvii] Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2012. Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Titus reigned as emperor from 79 to September 13, 81 AD. In conjunction with the cryptic reference to Titus still being alive in Revelation, by a process of elimination we can therefore date John’s composition of Revelation in exile on Patmos to the reign of Emperor Titus, 79 – September 81 AD. But Domitian was said by Tertullian to have sentenced John to exile and several church fathers believed that John wrote the Revelation during his reign, which was from 81 AD until 96 AD. So far as we know, Titus did not persecute Christians; Domitian definitely did. How to reconcile the two accounts? Well, Domitian was called Caesar before acceding to the position of emperor, and he was consul under his brother Titus in 80 AD (Suetonius, Twelve Caesars). Consuls did not have the power of capital punishment over Roman citizens, but John was not a Roman citizen. It would not have been impossible for Domitian to exile people before becoming emperor. And it is unlikely that his later persecution of Christians simply came out of the blue with no warning signs during his consulships and term as Caesar, a position of great authority. Therefore, I date the composition of the Revelation to around 80 AD; a time when Domitian wielded power as Caesar and consul, but his brother Titus remained alive as emperor. Domitian’s initiative in this exile, his title of Caesar, John’s exile for the duration of his later emperorship, and the intervening decades, may have led to confusion among the church fathers about who was emperor at the time John was sentenced.
[xxi] Van Auken, John. 2015. Edgar Cayce’s Amazing Interpretation of the Revelation.
[xxii] Thomas, R. Zondervan. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[xxiii] Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho.
[xxiv] Thomas, R. Zondervan. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[xxv] Ibid.
[xxviii] Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic. And: https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/anastasis
[xxx] Charles Baudelaire.
[xxxii] Prophecy of the Saints, https://catholicmystics.blogspot.com/p/prophetic-warnings-phrophetic-warning.html
[xxxiii] Thomas, R. Pate, CM (ed), Hastra, S, Thomas, R. Gentry, K. 2010. Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic.
[xxxiv] Further scriptural evidence that works are an important factor in salvation and God’s judgement.
[xxxv] The breastplate jewels were mostly but not exactly the same as those found in the New Jerusalem’s wall.
[xxxvi] Saint Irenaeus. Against Heresies.