We're good, okay. So we've been studying through Revelation. We're finally coming to the end of what is called the time of Jacob's trouble or the tribulation, the seven year period. And the Lord's kind of pulling back and he's looking at the judgment that he's bringing down. on the planet because at this point Satan now has his government worldwide in place in chapter 18 and his religion in place worldwide in chapter 17. And last week we, you know, went through part one. And we saw that, verse one, when one of the angels came to talk to John, he said, come hither, I will show thee the judgment of the great whore, the great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit to the wilderness, and I saw a woman. sitting on a scarlet-colored beast. And she was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her head, her forehead, was a name written, Mystery Babylon the Great. the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered. with great admiration. Now, I gotta tell you, you know, we've all probably at one point in our life, those of us who are Christians, have forayed into the book of Revelation. We've probably read this chapter and looked at it. And, you know, we're struck by that fifth verse where all those words are capitalized, mystery, all caps. Babylon the great all caps the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth all caps I mean 13 words all capital 65 letters all capital which is 5 times 13 I mean just the rebellion of Satan's government, but I'm looking at it, and I always was puzzled and then I Got the thinking The this is the way we are it's not our fault. We're parochial we tend to look from our vantage point And so I wondered, what if we went back to John's vantage point? Because we're looking in the year 2000 or backwards, but he's looking in the year 90 A.D. forward. Now, you remember John, the one who's writing this book of Revelation? We learn about him in many of the Gospels, but in particular he was allowed to write a Gospel, the Gospel of John, and in chapter 1 he's talking about how Jesus is calling all his disciples, and we saw early on that this man shows up named John the Baptist, and he's out there preaching to people and he's baptizing people in the wilderness and and everybody there's a whole stir in Jerusalem about this guy and John the Baptist has these two disciples with him one of whom is this young writer John back in the day when he was young now he's an old man on the Isle of Patmos getting the book of Revelation, but you go back to when he was young and he was maybe 18 19 years old and one day he's standing there with his mentor the one teaching him John the Baptist and John the Baptist looks at Jesus and says behold the Lamb of God and young John You know turns and follows Jesus and meets Jesus and starts and he says, we found the Messiah, the Christ. I mean, this is it. This is the one we've been waiting for. And he begins to serve and follow and walk with Jesus as a young man, about 18 years old. All right. So he's a young man. He's a young Jewish man. He doesn't know anything about the New Testament. There was no New Testament at that time. He had grown up with the Jewish scriptures, from Genesis all the way through to the final book scroll that they had, 2 Chronicles, and he had all those readings. And he's reading through there, and the reality is, to those Jews, none of them, the word mystery is not found once in their Bible. The word mystery is not in the Old Testament a single time. Prophecy is in the Old Testament, mystery is not given there. Mystery is a New Testament word. Now go with me to Ephesians chapter three. I wanna try and see this from his standpoint. Do you wanna walk with me through this and see if it makes sense? Okay, so later on, okay, so this young man, John, he follows Jesus. He sees Jesus crucified. He sees Jesus resurrected. He's called by Jesus, not just as a disciple, but as one of the 12 apostles. He's given the command by Jesus, go ye into all the world, preach the gospel. You'll receive power from the Holy Ghost. He waits in the upper room with Peter. The Holy Ghost comes. He gets power. They go to the temple. You read in Acts chapter two, three, he's preaching at the temple. They're doing work at the temple. And everything he's doing is based on what's in the Old Testament. And not too long afterwards, we read an Acts about a man named Paul that's called by Jesus. And Paul is called, and Jesus, Ephesians chapter three. Verse one, for this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for you Gentiles, if you've heard of the dispensation of the grace of God, which is given me to you, word, how that by revelation he, that would be Jesus Christ of verse one, made known unto me the mystery The mystery, as I wrote to you in a few words, whereby when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men. And now it's revealed unto his holy apostles and his prophets by the Spirit. And so the mystery is introduced, and the mystery is that there's gonna be, Jesus Christ is going to have a bride. Go to chapter five of Ephesians. Chapter 5, verse 25. Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church, and he gave himself for it, the church, that he might sanctify and cleanse it, the church, with the washing of the water by the word, that he might present it, the church, to himself, a glorious church, Not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing that it should be holy and without blemish verse 32 This is a great mystery. I speak concerning Christ and the church. That's his bride Now the concept of the Messiah having a bride nobody knew about this it was a mystery and and it's given to Paul now now John is learning through Paul and He couldn't learn this through Isaiah. It's not in Isaiah. He couldn't learn this through Moses. It's not in Moses. It's not in any of the books. This is a new mystery given to Paul to explain. And so he's going, oh, wow. The Messiah has a bride. Now, back to where we are. Go back to where we are in Revelation 17. That's a new thing. Okay, interesting. Now, John is being given this revelation here about the second coming of Christ. And in this revelation, he learns about this coming antichrist in the 13th chapter, this beast that's gonna rise up, and the dragon's gonna give power to this beast, and he's gonna be able to deceive people, and he's gonna speak blasphemy and open his mouth against God. Young John says, well, I've seen the Christ, and now you're describing to me the Antichrist. And he says, let me give you a mystery in verse five. The Antichrist has a bride too. because he wants to copy Jesus. See, the devil's a counterfeiter. The devil counterfeits what God does. The devil doesn't create, he counterfeits. And everything, I was listening a while back, I wish I had written, I actually wrote the notes, I lost them. It was about 20 years ago. There was a producer in Hollywood that got saved. and he had produced a lot of movies and television shows, and he was doing an interview on a Christian network, and he was saying, you know, I'm reading my Bible now, and I was learning as a producer, there's only so many plots. I can't remember if he said there were seven or 12 different plots. You know, there's the damsel in distress. There's the guy that falls and gets redeemed. He's talking about all these plots, and he said every single one of them's from the Bible. Everything we've ever made is from the Bible. We didn't know it. Well, of course. God's a creator, the devil's a counterfeiter. He just takes these things and he runs with them. That's what he does. And John is learning, oh my goodness, he's got a bride. The Antichrist has a bride. Now going back, as this is being opened up to him, You know, when you first get saved and you look at the Bible, you see, I never saw that before. All of a sudden, something's new to me. I guess the best example would be a Jew. If you get a Jew that's saved, and he's been doing the Passover meal his whole life, and he's been reading portions of the Old Testament, and then all of a sudden he gets saved, it's like, wow, this thing opens up. I never noticed it before. And John is having opened up to him, this is the revelation we're looking at from your standpoint, the finish of everything, all the way back to the beginning to see how the devil has been planning his bride too from the beginning. That mystery, it's Babylon the Great. He names it as a city. Now, you say the bride is a city. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. I mean, later on, what we're going to see is that they're going to say, I want to show you, go to chapter 21, I just want to show you. Chapter 21 of Revelation. Chapter 21, verse 9. And this is when the new heavens and the earth, and there came to me, that would be John, one of the seven angels. And he talked with me, and he said, come hither. I will show thee the bride, the lamb's wife. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and a high mountain. And he showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. I mean, you mean that's Jesus' bride is a city? And now here he's using metaphorical language. It's not the bride that's the city, it's the inhabitants of the city. It's the believers in the city. That's his bride, but they're all collected into one place, and I can have all the bride together in one place, in one time, in this city. It's not the city, that would be the jewelry wrapped around the city, because there's all the gemstones, but it's the people inside of it. back to where we are in Revelation, and Babylon has inside of it all of the unbelievers, and the blasphemers, and those who are abominable inside of it that hate God, and this is the Antichrist's pride. Now, as we saw, going back in Genesis chapter 11, because he wants to get the full picture, so I want to take some time to go over this with you. Sometimes the big picture helps me. Going back in there, there was this man Nimrod in chapter 10 that in chapter 11 found, 11 verse 2, he found a plain in the land of Shinar. I don't like the ups and downs of life. I don't like the hills and the valleys. I don't like the highs and the lows. I just want to rest. get a lounge chair, get a radio, get a margarita, and just I'm gonna lay out here and dwell there and let us do this. We're gonna make, verse four, a city and a tower that may reach to heaven. We're gonna make a name for ourselves. And this was Satan, right here, implanting not only an idea of government, but the tower is the religion, like the steeple, that may reach to heaven. The promise of religion is If you die today, would you know for sure if you're going to heaven? Well, I hope so. I think so. That's what the average person will tell you. I may get there if I do everything right according to the religion I go to. And it's a hope so, maybe. And what Satan did right here at the Tower of Babel is he implanted the virus. of a spiritual doctrine that would be the source of every false religion in this present evil world. When they all went out with their languages, they took that concept of that tower in a different language here and a different language there, and they spread it everywhere. Babel was built by Nimrod, who's a type of the Antichrist, and right here begins this Babylonian cult. this clandestine system claiming to have divine secrets. And to become a member at that thing, you had to, if you were going to be initiated into it, would you like to join the Babylonian cult? Well, you have to make a confession to our priest. The Babylonian priest, you make a confession to him. And now that you've made a confession, you can be admitted into the order. And once you're admitted into the order, you're no longer just an Egyptian, or an Assyrian, or whatever nation you are. Now you're a member of the mystical brotherhood of the Babylonian cult. Okay, let's say you joined, you took all the catechism classes, and you made, what's the first thing they did first? Your confession, and then your communion, and then your confirmation. You're no longer an American, now you're a member of the Roman Catholic, you're no longer a Paraguayan, you're a member of the Roman Catholic Church. You've joined the mystical brotherhood. Now at the top of this brotherhood was a high priest called the Pontiff. The pontiff. And this, Satan began to send around the world. Now, the first place he did it was at Babel. He kept Babel was not far from the Euphrates River, and when, go to Daniel chapter 2, and we'll watch how it's coming down through the centuries, and Satan is going to keep his seat, Satan's seat on the planet. I want to be like the Most High. I would like my throne in heaven, but I'll start right here with my seat on planet Earth, and maybe one day I'll get to ascend up there. And so he's got his seat here, Daniel chapter two. So we saw it beginning at the Tower of Babel, which is about, I'm not so good with the dates. It's about 2,200 BC. Okay, and now when we're in Daniel, we're looking at about 700 BC, and we know what happens in Daniel chapter one, Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem, he takes the people, he says, bring me the brightest, the youngest children who have no blemish, the well-favored, skillful ones in knowledge, bring them that they can study, end of verse four in chapter one, the tongue of the Chaldeans. Chapter 2, verse 10, the Chaldeans answered the king and said to the king, there's not a man on earth that can show thee the king's matters. Because we study things like magicians and astrologers, Chaldeans, I mean the mystical brotherhood that was right there in Babylon. It continued under the Chaldean priests. And it stayed there, and when Babylon fell, it stayed there while the Persians were there. But finally, I did some research, when the Persian Empire fell in 334 BC under the attack of Alexander the Great, and you remember the empires, there was Babylon, Persia, and then Greece, and Greece came in and swept with the Blitzkrieg, and they took over, and in 334, And it fell. Then what happened is Satan said, as the earthly empires now are moving from the east in Babylon to the west, and they're heading in a westerly direction, I'm going to move my seat there. And the Babylonian, Chaldean priests moved from Persia to Greece, and Satan's seat followed, and it was moved to a city of Alexander's one of the greatest generals he had was the general Lysimachus. You can go back and check this out, but I've done the research for you. Lysimachus. And Lysimachus, when Alexander died, took over that region and his city was Pergamos. And he set up his power in Pergamos. He enriched the city with 9,000 talents of gold. They built beautiful buildings. He built a huge altar of Zeus, which was one of the wonders of the ancient world. And right there, that Babylonian religion continued with the mythology and the gods. And when Lysimachus died, a man named Atollus became the king of Pergamos and the pontiff. of the Babylonian order right there. It was about 310 B.C. or right around then. And that continued until a man named Atalas III in 133 B.C. Go back to Revelation real quickly, chapter two. Revelation two. Chapter, verse 12, Jesus tells John. And to the angel of the church in Pergamos, when the Persian Empire fell, the priests came here, Lysimachus, this was his city. He had all the protection of the Greece armies, and he set up the Zeus temple right there. Pergamos, write these things, saith he, that has the sharp sword with two edges. I know thy works, where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is. And there's the head of the Babylonian religion right there in Pergamos. Now, I just want to tell you this. John didn't know this stuff. He didn't live in the day with cell phones and instant news. They didn't have newspapers. They didn't even have the Pony Express back then. I mean, these Jewish men grew up, and they walked not far from where their house was, and this is, he's getting all this stuff revealed to him that he doesn't know. Now, what happened is, Atalas III, when he died, he bequeathed the headship of the Babylonian priesthood to move from Pergamos to Rome, again, Satan being wise, Greece is now being taken over by Rome. The Caesars are becoming powerful. We want to stay where the governmental power is. We're building a city and a tower. We want to stay close. And so the Etruscans carried the Babylonian religion with the Babylonian books and all the rights to Rome, and they set up the pontiff at Rome as the head of the mystery, mystical brotherhood and priesthood. And in 63 BC, they asked Julius Caesar to be the supreme pontiff of their Babylonian order, figuring we'll have the protection of the empire with us, and it occurred. And the first Roman Empire was now a Babylonian pontiff, making Rome the official successor of Babylon. And the emperors of Rome continued to exercise the office of the supreme pontiff until 376 AD. And there was a new young emperor named Gratian. And he was in his teens, 17 or 18. And he said, I don't want to be that priest. Now, nearby there was a monastery of Babylonian priests on Mount Carmel, and they elected a man named Damasus, one of their newly ordained Roman Catholic bishops, and said, he'll be the pontiff. And the emperor said, I don't care, let him be. And in 378, the head of the Babylonian order became the ruler of the Roman Catholic Church that had just been established about 60 years earlier by Constantine. and Pontiff Demasius began openly to bring the Babylonian rites into the Roman churches that were called Catholic, supposedly Christian, but they weren't. Within three years, the worship of the goddess Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven, that we saw in Jeremiah 44, was now transferred to the Virgin Mary. And Easter and Lent were decreed official observances. The Babylonian prayer beads were now called rosaries, and new Roman prayers were made on them to Mary. They were made on them in vain repetitions. Remember, Jesus said, you not vain repetitions in Matthew chapter six, verse seven. The Babylonian sign of the cross was now used in the services in the Catholic churches. This came from the mystical tau of the Chaldeans and Egyptians. It was practiced by them in their worship services. The tau is the first letter of Tammuz. Do you remember in Ezekiel 8, the abomination that God said? It was an abomination that the women were weeping and making prayers to Tammuz. Tammuz was the son of Nimrod. Okay, going all the way back to Babylon. And now that's in the ceremonies. They're doing this, the Babylonian mysteries are coming forth and being called Roman Catholic and called Christian. The next thing they did was the Babylonian had Vestal Virgins that were involved in Like what harlots do, sleeping with powerful men to draw them in to association with the Babylonian priesthood and make them initiates. Now it's going on and they call them nuns. And so the Babylonian Vestal Virgins were now transformed into nuns. And the Papal Roman Catholic Church now shrouded herself in the Babylonian mysteries and now they're called Christian. But they're not Christian, they're Catholic. The Roman Catholic, that's the history going on right here. The mystery, all the mysteries, the mystery of baptismal regeneration, the sprinkling of water would save a soul, was brought in. The mystery of something called transubstantiation. Where are my other notes? I want to read this to you. Satan's religion. They had, as we saw, goddess worship from the Jewish Encyclopedia. It was Ishtar, now it's Mary. They had lots of lesser gods, thousands of lesser gods. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists hundreds of patron saints that you pray to instead of gods. Now they're saints, Saint Christopher, whatever, whatever. They had ceremonies in Babylon called the partaking ceremonies. The partaking ceremonies was you could partake of the God at the Tower of Babel, and now it's spread here into Pergamos and now to Rome. What happened was the priest of Baal would take a cake, he would consecrate it, and it would be changed into the flesh of the God you were praying to. And that's what you ate from. The ceremony is described in Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, entitled, Eating the God. It's confirmed in Will Durant's Story of Civilization, page 749. As a matter of fact, curiously, the word cannibal comes from that. Cana is priest. Baal is the priest of Baal, cannibal to eat. It's to eat the God. That's where it comes from. And the Council of Trent and the Roman Catholic Church declared transubstantiation a dogma of the faith. The Eucharistic prayer of the priest changes the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ. That's part of the things that they do. And all this is coming in, but it's not Christian? It's not Bible, Old or New Testament. It's Catholic. None of these practices came from either testament. They all came from Babylonian tradition. Go to Mark chapter 7. Now John doesn't know, this is all ahead of, John doesn't know this. There's no Roman Catholic Church at this time. This is all prophecy to him. We look back at it, but he didn't see any of this coming. Jesus is trying to warn him, this is what's going to come. Mark chapter seven. And we'll pick it up in verse Now, what happened here was the Pharisees, who are people that Jesus described as hypocrites. I don't know how much you know about the Pharisees. Do you want me to give a little history, some understanding? Okay. All right, let me try and give a little, I didn't put this in my notes, but I'll try and give some history. Okay, when you get to the New Testament, all of a sudden you see these groups called the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and a third, another group called the Herodians, that's only mentioned three times, but every time they're mentioned, they're mentioned in the same verse with the Pharisees. Who are these guys, where do they come from? All right. The scribes were legitimately an Old Testament office given to the Levite priests, and they were to scribe the Word of God. And when a prophet would speak, like I showed you in the book of Jeremiah, if you don't remember, I'll just read it for you briefly. It's in Jeremiah, chapter 36, where God called Jeremiah. And he said to him, and it came to pass, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, he said, take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I, the Lord, have spoken to you, okay? And so Jeremiah said, he called a man named Beruk, the son of Neriah, and Jeremiah spoke the words, and Beruk wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord. This is the scribe. and God would allow prophets to have like a secretary, a scribe, and God would speak through them, and as he was speaking, then this guy would write it down. And the scribe's job was to write the first copy of the word of God when God spoke it, and then he was given permission to make another copy for another synagogue, and make another copy for a synagogue. And you can go and you can read stories about the Masorite scribes and how careful they were in the work that they did because they believed they were handling God's Word and they trembled at the Word of the Lord. They never changed anything. So the scribes were a legitimate office. But who are these Pharisees and Sadducees? You can't find them in the Old Testament. And you can't find the Herodians in the Old Testament. Well, it turns out that what had begun to happen is God had told them in the book of Leviticus and in the book of Exodus, you can only use Levites to approach unto me. The other 11 tribes need a mediator of the Levites. He was setting up a type for them, that you're going to need a priesthood, and one day I'm going to have the greatest priesthood, which is Jesus Christ. And so the Levites had permission, but you'll see that when Jeroboam took over, he began to choose other tribes to make priests, which God never accepted. But it became traditional, and these Pharisees are those guys from other tribes that wanted to be priests, although they weren't Levites, and in God's eyes, they couldn't legitimately be a priest, but they're the Pharisees. Now, of the Pharisees, the Sadducees were the same thing. What was the difference between them? Well, the book of the Acts of the Apostles speaks of them as a sect, S-E-C-T. The first time the word is ever found, go to Acts chapter 5. I'm doing extra teaching for you. Is this okay or no? At this rate, we'll never get out of Revelation. Acts chapter 5, the men were preaching, Peter and James and John were preaching, and verse 17, and then the high priest rose up, and all they which were with him, which is the sect of the Sadducees, and they were filled with indignation, and they put their hands on the apostles and put them in prison. Which, what else? I mean, religious people hate. But there is the sect of the Sadducees. Now go to the 15th chapter of Acts. and verse five, and there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees, which believed, saying it was needful to circumcise them and to command them to keep the law of Moses. So we see two different sects. S-E-C-T-S, not S-E-X, okay. Now sect is from the Latin word to divide. And what's happening here, and it's to divide based on beliefs or tenets or principles. And here we have groups of God, Jews, who have different principles and different tenets. Now God doesn't want that. God wants the unity of the faith based on his word. Yes, sir. Okay, yes, and so if he wants, I'll show you where that one is. Go to Acts chapter 22. I'll show you the difference in their beliefs. But the main thing I want to show you is God doesn't want division of beliefs within his church. He wants the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, and we all speak the same thing according to the Word of God. There aren't supposed to be sects. There aren't supposed to be cults. There aren't supposed to be denominations. But I guess there's no new thing under the sun. Back in Jesus' time, there were sects. Today, there's denominations. Acts chapter 22, Paul in verse six was speaking, and he perceived that this crowd, one part was Sadducees, the other part was Pharisees. So he cried out in the council. He said, men and brethren, I am a Pharisee. I was born the son of a Pharisee. and of the hope and resurrection of the dead, I'm called in question." Meaning, I believe in the resurrection. I mean, that's what I believe in. Now, he knew that the Sadducees didn't, and when he said so, there was a dissension between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the multitude was divided, for the Sadducees say, there is no resurrection, there is no angel, there is no spirit. But the Pharisees believe in the resurrection, spirits, and angels. Okay, now I'm going to take you back again. So the Pharisees show up. These are people who weren't supposed to be priests, but they wanted to be priests, and they tended to believe the things that were in the Word of God, but their error, we were back in Mark 7, I wanted to show you, is they add to the Word of God. Did I say Mark 7? Yeah. And the Pharisees came with certain of the scribes that worked for them, and they saw what Jesus was doing, and when they saw some of Jesus' disciples eating bread with defiled, that's to say, unwashed hands, they found fault. because the Pharisees and all the Jews that are attached to them accept to wash their hands off and eat not. And I even think they use some of that disinfectant we use during COVID, holding the tradition of the elders. And the Pharisees, verse 5, and the scribes said to Jesus, you know, why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders? And what they had done is their scribes had written traditions. And if you go back and you study the Jewish history, you'll find out that they have not only the Bible, they have something called the Talmud. And the Talmud is the writing of the Jewish traditions. It's kind of like the interpretation of the Bible and additional things added to the Bible. For example, I'll give you an example. They were told, God said, remember to keep the Sabbath, keep it holy. And six days you labor, but you don't labor on the Sabbath. And the Pharisees said, well, walking is labor. I mean, it takes exercise to walk. Yeah, but they gotta walk to synagogue. So I said, okay, I'll tell you what. They're allowed to walk so many furlongs to the synagogue, and anything beyond that is breaking the Sabbath. And they just make these things up as they went. And then somebody said, well, wait a second, wait a second. If you say I can only walk two furlongs to get there, do you mean from the front door of my house or do you mean from my gate? And then they, well, some said, well, from the front door, from the gate, and they'd argue about that. And they would write these traditions. You can read the Talmud. It gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. It's way bigger than the Bible. All these things added. So the Pharisees tended to add to the Word of God. The Sadducees we saw tended to subtract from the Word of God. God says there's angels in the Bible. We don't believe in angels. God says you have a spirit. We don't believe people have a spirit. God says there's going to be a resurrection. We don't believe in a resurrection. You can't have a resurrection. So the Sadducees subtract from the Word of God. The Pharisees add to the Word of God. The Pharisees, they really fancied themselves the keepers of the Word of God. Now notice how Jesus responded to them in Mark chapter 7, because they got all these traditions. Jesus answered and said, Wow, well hath Isaiah prophesied, of you hypocrites, as it's written, this people honoreth me, that's God the Father, with their lips, but their heart is far from me, because in vain they worship me, teaching the doctrines, for doctrines the commandments of men. Verse 13, you make the word of God of none effect through your traditions which you have delivered. And so Pharisees add to the word of God. Think of the word P, plus. Bible plus. The Bible plus something. They're adding something to the Bible. Sadducees, S, subtract from the Word of God. Okay? Now, the Pharisees, because they thought that they were religious, they actually believed in separation of church and state. So the Pharisees didn't have much problem with the Roman government. They felt, our job is taking care of the temple. Let the Romans take care of the government. The Sadducees had subtracted from the word of God. They didn't, because the Pharisees, look, I'll be resurrected one day. But the Sadducees, I'm not going to get resurrected one day. This is all I have is right here, right now. And if I don't have the power that Herod has, or Pilate has, what good is it to me? And they were always trying to take over the government. The Sadducees were the ones that caused all the civil disorder, not the Pharisees. They weren't disobedient civilly. And the Pharisees had a group of them that said, look, You know, we don't want to fight the government, but maybe we should influence it. And so, they had a little group come out of them called Herodians that actually lived with Herod to try and influence him in a positive manner toward the Bible, and more importantly, toward their traditions, so they could get along. And by the way, Herod didn't mind when they talked traditions, he minded when they talked Bible. Bible convicts, traditions don't. You can talk to someone about, did you get baptized? Do you go to the confessional? They won't get too mad about that. But if you start talking about you must be born again, has your soul been cleansed of the stains of sin? They're gonna get real mad. So you just talk tradition with people. So the Herodians were that. So now do you understand the setup? Just so you got the setup with that thing? All right, so. This thing was all a mystery in John's day. I mean, he didn't see this thing. The papal church had not yet been born. It wasn't going to be born until the fourth century. It hadn't developed. Now, what was working in John's day that he learned of, go to 2 Thessalonians 2. Because John was learning the mysteries from Paul. And Paul was writing the mysteries as God gave them to him. And so John, yes, he read the Old Testament. John, yes, he read the Gospels, but he read the writings of Paul to learn the mysteries that God was revealing to those that wanted to go further in their learning. 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 and verse 7, for the mystery of iniquity doth already work. And in John's time, he was seeing the iniquity. I mean, he saw it in the fact that he was thrown in prison on Patmos Island just for preaching the gospel. Do you remember chapter 1 of Revelation? Why he was in jail? Go back to Revelation chapter 1. I know it's a long time ago, but Revelation 1, verse 9. I, John, I'm your companion. I'm your brother. I'm a companion in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. I'm in the isle of Patmos. Why? For the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus. They threw me in here for street preaching. That's why he got thrown in prison. Okay, back to where we are. So what we're seeing is historically, this was all a mystery in John's day, but he knew the mystery of iniquity was at work. And he's learning there's a day coming where the mystery of iniquity is gonna become real by the Antichrist and his bride in Babylon. Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, the first seed of disobedience and the virus of the mystical brotherhood started way back there at the Tower of Babel, swept through the years, was picked up by the Roman Catholic Church. Today, we can see clearly through the rearview mirror of history, the great whore is the papal church. There's no if, ands, or buts about it today. Roman Catholicism is today's great whore. She won't be the final whore. She will merge in to the final whore along with all the Protestant denominations and all the cults and all the other religions when Satan finally gets it and brings it right back to Babel. And Babylon the Great will be the mother of all the abominations of the earth. But right now as we stand today, it's the Roman church. Go back to where we are in the 17th chapter. Look at the verse four. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet. Now we know purple is royalty and scarlet, decked with gold and stones, precious stones and pearls. Five of the papal vestments are scarlet and purple. The other vestment is one covered with expensive pearls. The papal mitre that he wears on the head is adorned with gold and precious stones. It's worth an estimated $80,000, just the headpiece alone. He says more. He says, you thinking more? Maybe, yeah, maybe my stuff is old. So what we're seeing here is Satan's great religion, the great whore, today it is, no question, it's the Roman Catholic Church. It's going to then merge along with all the other ones. When we disappear, they're all going to go in to that great mother whore. Transubstantiation, for example. Do you know how many letters are in that word? 18. 6 plus 6 plus 6. Let me see. I'll do this up there for you. Let me get a pen here. That's the teaching that you change the little white wafer. Have you ever gone to a Catholic Mass? Okay, they take a little white wafer, he stands up there, he says a whole bunch of words, and supposedly what happens is at his command, Jesus comes down out of heaven and enters into it. And then you, no I'm not kidding, this is what they teach you. That's a doctrine of the faith. They'll kill you if you don't, that's why they killed people. During Fox's Book of Martyrs, they killed people who wouldn't believe that. They would ask born-again Christians, do you believe that? No, I don't, and they'd kill them. And you come to the priest, and you kneel before the priest, and he looks at you and he says, the body of Christ. And you're supposed to say amen and stick your tongue out, and then he puts it on your tongue. In other words, amen, I believe this is the body of Christ. Okay, that's transubstantiation. 18 letters. 6 plus 6 plus 6. The Pope has a title on his mitre. It says, uh, Vicarius, and he uses the Roman lettering, so the U is like a V there. Vicarius. Philae, I gotta spell it right, E-double-I-D-A. Vicarious means the vicar. That means, the V-S means of. Philae is the son of, and Dei is God. And he means, I sit here as the person, as the son of God. In his place, I am now Jesus on earth. Now it's curious, do you know anything about Gematria? Roman Gematria? You probably know a little bit about it. The letter M is equal to a thousand. The letter D is equal to 500. The letter C equals 100. The letter L equals 50. X equals 10. V equals 5. And I equals 1. In the old days, you'd see movies that would say, like, that's an LX, and you'd have to figure out what year the movie was made. Now they do it. Okay, so watch this. This is a 5. That's a 1. 5 plus 1. The C is 100. That's a 1. And that's another 5. This is a 1. The L is a 50. 50 plus 1 and 1 plus 1. The D is 500 plus 1. Let's see, that's 500 and 1. This is 53, and this is 110, 12. One, 12. Let's see, 112 plus 53 plus 501, two plus three plus one, six, six, six. There it is. Okay. I have those notes. Teresa, you can copy the notes, give them to you. Yes, Roman Catholicism, today's great whore. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that the Roman Catholic Church rests on three pillars, just like Social Security rests on three pillars. It's neither social nor secure. Well, neither is this church. The three pillars supposedly are, number one, the scriptures, number two, apostolic tradition, Jesus said you're hypocrites for your tradition. More importantly, number three, the living magisterium. What's the living magisterium? That's the Pope alive today, plus the College of Cardinals. So, Let's say the Bible says one thing, but our tradition trumps that. But let's say I want to change a tradition, like eating meat on Fridays. The Living Magisterium can change a tradition any time. So at the top is a man, beneath that is the tradition, and on the bottom of the barrel, something that's never used is the Bible. If any of you were Catholics, how much Bible was given you as a Catholic? Yeah. Amen. Now I'm just about out of time. This chapter's going to take about two more hours to teach. Do you want to continue? Okay. Okay. So that'll be tonight's study. We've gone long enough. Some of the notes are available for you and I'm continuing to type out. I got about four pages of notes here, but I want to continue because I have more to give you. We're going to look at the seven hills. We're going to look at the seven mountains. We're going to look at the kings that have fallen and the ones that are coming. And it's just a bit of a study. But the main thing is this was a mystery to John. And now we can look back and clearly see it's the Roman Catholic church. Amen and amen. That's a Bible. Yes. Vicarious Philly D? Just go online, ask. It's on the mitre that he wears. Yeah. And that's the seat that he sits on. He is the Son of God on the earth. That's what is taught. You're better not to learn their doctrine. It'll really corrupt you, will hurt you. I mean, it's best not ... I think of it like this. The Bible says if a man think himself to be something when he is nothing, okay? Nothing is a zero, okay? What God wants to do is get you from a zero on the plus side of the ledger and bring you up. By the way, I forgot to tell you this too. Modern Pharisees, modern Sadducees. Remember, Pharisees, P, plus, add to the Word of God, that's Popes. Popes, add to the Word of God. Sadducees, subtract, scholars, all the modern Bibles, all the modern Hebrew and Greek scholars, subtract from the Bible. Like I showed you, the Muslim that came up to that man, Jesus is a liar. He lied to his brothers, John chapter 7. He said he wasn't going to the feast. They subtract the word yet, and it makes Jesus a liar. In the King James Bible, the word is there. The NIV has 64,000 missing words. Scholars subtract from the word of God. Okay, so the modern Sadducees are the scholars. The modern Pharisees are the popes and the priests. The modern Herodians are probably the conservatives that want to fix the government. You're not going to fix it. Okay? Even if you are traditional, you're not going to change anything. We need to get scribes back to the Word of God and just stick with the Word of God. So, yeah, but you'd have to go look, you can see that thing. But what I was trying to say is, you start out as a zero, and God wants to get you in this direction. The problem with religion is it digs you in a hole. You're not a zero, you're a minus, the deeper you get in, the more you get initiated into it, minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five, you're so far in a hole, God's gotta get you all the way back here to get you to zero. Religious people are the toughest people to talk to. I used to encourage people, don't go to church. Oh, I'm not religious like you, Dr. Caesar. You know, they would say this at the Catholic hospital. I don't go to church anymore. I'd say, good, don't go. Don't. Stay out of it. The further away you get from the thing, the better off you are. The more you'll get back to zero, it wouldn't be easier to save you. Amen and amen. Yes, in the back. There is one strange, bizarre Bible that adds, it's called the Amplified Version. It just throws a whole bunch of words at you and just makes the whole thing nonsense. I mean, it's just nonsense. But most, all the Bibles, yes, they subtract. All of their Bibles, all of their Greek editions that they've rewritten are subtracted. I'm not asking you to study manuscript evidence. Don't waste your time, but if you want to, I can give you all kinds of authors you can study. Yes.