Lesson 23

National Health by Religious Unity – 12:1-12

 

Jesus said the first and great commandment was “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind,” or “with all thy heart and with all thy soul.”  As we have seen the book of Deuteronomy is an exposition by the man who wrote those words.  The book of Deuteronomy is a careful exposition of what Moses meant when he designed the constitution of a nation.  The details in Deuteronomy we are discovering have tremendous bearing, both on the individual spiritual life as found in chapters 5-11, which deal with how to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.”  In the Hebrew the word “heart” represents “mind.”  The Hebrew language has no word for “mind,” therefore it means mind and it does not mean emotions, it means mind.  It means you think; it means you interact with doctrine. Therefore loving the Lord with all your heart means you know doctrine from God’s Word and you respond in your innermost being to this doctrine.  We have dealt with many topics that have to do with this. 

 

Tonight we are shifting and we move into the second part of the book, chapters 12-26.  We have arbitrarily labeled this as “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul” because if you study the word nephesh in the Hebrew you will find that the Jewish word did not mean the narrow sense theologians use nephesh or soul, it meant the details of life.  “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy soul,” you could substitute “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all of your life,” with all the things that make up your life.  We have outlined the details of life.  First of all, if you are a believer you have fellowship with other believers, you have your personal relationship with loved ones and your family, there’s sex, there’s job, there’s money, relaxation, health, government and there are your friends and neighbors. 

 

Tonight we are going to deal with government, and we are going to deal with Moses exposition of the believer’s interaction with government.  This is one of many expositions that we will encounter of one after another of details of life.  But don’t lose the context; always keep in mind that all of this flows out of spirituality.  All of this depends on the individual believers personally confessing their sins and walking by faith.  This means that we claim God’s promises, “casting all your care on Him for He cares for you.”  “Commit thy way unto Him, trust also in Him and he shall bring it to pass.”  It means that you claim these promises habitually in your life.  This is the sign of spirituality.  These details take on zero meaning unless a believer is filled with the Spirit and walking in the Lord’s will.  So don’t take these as a legalistic moral code. That is not what they were intended to be for but they do furnish you with content and concrete direction as to what God’s will is in various areas of your life. 

 

Now we come to the first section of this.  What you have in your bulletin is a basic outline of this part of the book.  This put in there so you can understand the division so you won’t lose the forest for the trees.  There will be the tendency, since we will take many months to go through these details, we are going to have to go through many areas of the Bible to find out and understand what some of these details mean so don’t lose the forest for the trees as we go through here.

 

Let’s look at the overall outline from chapters 12-26.  We can divide this section of Scripture into four parts.  The first part deals with national unity, chapters 12 through half of chapter 16.  This is the nation Israel, not the Gentile nations.  All these principles apply to a theocracy as I will show you as we go through.  However, many of them do apply in some modified way to our country and we are going to find some very interesting principles to look upon world history and to judge the contemporary scene, and to judge the contemporary society in which we live.  From chapters 12 through half of chapter 16 Moses is stressing national unity, unity in the nation of Israel. 

 

The second section, the last half of chapter 16 to the end of chapter 21, Moses is stressing national righteousness.  In this section he will give you the outline of governmental officers.  He will give you the job and role of the priest, the job and the role of the prophet, he will describe the king and the limitations of power to prevent the centralization of power in the form of a strong federal government totalitarian system. This was always a tendency, it has always been a tendency in history and you will see the checks put against this in Scripture in that section.

 

The third section, chapters 22-25 deal with national freedom.  This will be based on God’s specified individual rights.  You hear of civil rights.  You find in chapters 22-25 a divine outline of true civil rights.  They are explained in detail in those chapters.

 

Chapter 26 deals with a very strange thing, the only thing I can make an analogy with in our society would be things like the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and a few other things, saluting the flag, etc.  In chapter 26 from the citizen allegiance, here you have the patriotic expressions of the citizens of Israel, how they express their patriotism, so it promises to be a very detailed study and one which is very pertinent, because I for one have never heard this area of the Word of God expounded before, yet it’s all there and very pertinent to our condition today.

 

We’re going to begin with this first section which will stress unity, the unity of the nation.  Notice this comes before righteousness, before freedom and before a spirited response on the part of the citizens.  Why?  Because you can’t have a nation without unity; you can’t have a nation going in 360 different degrees, you have to have a group of people all going in basically the same direction and so obviously is a prerequisite, then you have righteousness, then you have freedom, in that order.  You cannot have freedom unless first you have a standard of righteousness, and you cannot have a standard of righteousness unless you have a unity on which that is based.  This is a very perceptive outline of the structure of any nation, be it Israel or the United States.

 

We’ll start with chapter 12 and tonight will be largely introduction because this first section that deals with unity, that goes through 16:17, was in itself divided up into certain sections.  This is an outline of the first section of Deuteronomy, again so we don’t lose the forest for the trees.  In this section we have it broken down by chapters.  In chapter 12 you have the emphasis on unity by an authorized worship center of the nation.  So the big word to remember here is that you have one worship center, and the religion, you have a national religion with a national temple.  Therefore you have the emphasis in chapter 12 on unified worship.  The whole theme in these chapters is going to be unity so Moses begins in chapter 12 by saying we have to have a national religion and it must be unified and it must have a central place of authority.  So here you have your authorized worship center.

 

In chapter 13 he shifts the topic over to a very interesting thing and that is you must have only one body of doctrine.  For those of you who don’t like Bible doctrine, please notice, chapter 13 is dedicated to you because this tells you that there is only one legitimate body of doctrine and God does not honor any departure from that body of doctrine.  So chapter 13 is unity by doctrine.  You’ve always heard that doctrine divides and yet isn’t it strange that in Deut. 13 that is the basis for unity, one set of beliefs.

 

The third section which starts in chapter 14 and runs through chapter 15 and here we have unity expressed in religious practices. These are various details of how you eat, what you do, how you cut this ox up, what you do with him, etc.  These are all religious practices and there has to be a unified pattern.  So Moses gives this unified pattern in chapters 14-15.

 

Finally in chapter 16 he concludes with an emphasis on national holidays or national celebrations. Therefore, there will be throughout the entire country, from north to south, east to west, certain national holidays in which all males, head of homes and families, must participate.  The women do not have to and the children do not have to but all men must participate in these religious national ceremonies. 

 

As you can see, the theme for this first section of this part of Deuteronomy is unity; unity expressed in a multitude of ways.  Tonight we’re going to start with this section and I want to preface the whole section by a few introductory remarks, and then we may get into the first few verses of chapter 12.  When we start in looking at chapter 12 we see immediately in verse 1 that we finally got to the statutes and judgments.  You’ve seen this phrase, “these are the statutes and judgments,” and then I say whoops, Moses isn’t going to give you statutes and judgments, we’ve gone into mental attitude and all the rest of it.  Finally we’re getting there and in chapter 12 you have a list of statutes. 

 

Why must there be this kind of unity?  Why?  When Moses starts to analyze the life of the nation he has to dwell first on unity.  There is a reason for this.  To find this reason turn to the first United Nations building in Genesis 11.  In Gen. 11 you have one of the most significant events in ancient history for at this time all of the nations of the world spoke the same language.  I know that naturalistic historians think this is a fairy tale but let me tell you something, as one who has studied linguistics there is no linguistic expert in the world who ever has explained the origin of the human languages.  There is no linguistic expert who has ever offered a theory for why the fact is that you can have communicating beings speaking different languages and yet they are still basically of the same IQ and basically the same species.  Why do you have subdivisions and a fractured communication system?  Why do you have diverse cultures and races?  Why are these things true in the world and there is no explanation apart from the Biblical explanation of what happened here in Gen. 11.  So this is very significant because here in Gen. 11 we read:

 

Verse 1, “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar,” that’s near where the Biblical Babylon is, that will come up again tonight so remember where this is occurring, “and they dwelt there.  [3] And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.  And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. [4] And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. [5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. [6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they have begun to do: and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they have imagined to do. [7] Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. [8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from there upon the face of all the earth: and they ceased building the city.”

 

What’s the point?  The point here is that you had a movement in world history to world govern­ment.  Why did you have a movement and a tendency toward world government?  For one reason—violation of the will of God.   God’s command to Noah was disperse, propagate and disperse, and what is it they wanted to do?  They wanted to hold back and we know from extra-Biblical sources, such as Josephus, for whatever he’s worth, and often times he’s worth much in tracing this down, we have extra-Biblical traditions and these extra-Biblical traditions add light to this narrative for they say one reason why they wanted to build a tower to reach to heaven is because they knew that God judges by a flood and they figured that if they had a tower tall enough that they could escape the judgment of God.  So the very structure of the building says we defy You to judge us, we are going to take out an insurance policy against divine intervention in history and therefore we will express this by building this building.  And we will make us a name; a name simply is a reputation or a characteristic.  So you have a tendency toward world government here, an entire movement toward world government.  Why? Because these people basically were united spiritually, they wanted one-world religion; they wanted one-world set of beliefs for they realized that the human race would go off in various geographical locations and they were afraid of this. 

 

They had seen God judge.  Don’t forget, the generation that built the tower of Babel, the flood was very, very prominent in their minds.  If you’ve studied mythology you can see how this comes out in all their mythology, they’re afraid of the water, they’re afraid of the sea, they are afraid of these things, that God will judge.  So the judgment of the flood is very close to their thinking.  So they start this movement toward world government because they recognize something, that man in order to live in society in an efficient way should have one speech, one government, one religion. 

 

Now what happens, verse 7, God goes down and He confounds the language and He fractures the human race by language.  This is one way He fractured them.  By culture, which is transmitted through languages and by race, although there is no explicit mention of race we find it in Noah’s family, for example, where he had two white children and we have various other kinds of races showing up in the genealogies of Genesis 10-11.  And here’s where you have the divergence of races after the flood. 

 

Why has God done this?  People saw if we could only have world unity today our problems would be solved.  God was not being arbitrary when He divided the human race up; He had a good reason.  If you’ve studied naval design you understand this.  Remember the Titanic, a great ship that the naval architecturists had developed the concept of holds in a ship, water-tight holds so that if you got a leak in this place, just that hold would fill up with water and the ship wouldn’t sink.  So you have this ship divided into holds, and the holds supposedly were to prevent the ship from sinking, had it got a hole in the hull.  The Titanic steamed out of England, moved west across the Atlantic, and then collided with an iceberg that ripped horizontally all the hulls and the Titanic went down, one of the greatest catastrophes at sea that the human race has seen.  This struck fear in many hearts and man realize that they had to attain greater ways of designing ships so this wouldn’t happen, and since then they’ve gone to the horizontal hold that runs the length of the ship.   The holds were a way of keeping the ship afloat when some of them were bad.

It’s the same concept in the human race.  God has divided the human race up into various cultures. We have the northern European culture, the Oriental culture, the African culture. These cultural boundaries can be looked upon as holds in a ship so that if one of these cultures goes apostate the pollution is confined.  Therefore you can have one culture go very bad in history and God can take the next culture come along and conquer it because one of the promises God gave Noah was that I will not judge again, and the next judgment that God brings into history is a final cataclysmic judgment upon the entire planet which will involve members of the human race, the Second Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

Now put yourself in God’s position.  If you have made a promise that you’re not going to judge the world and you’ve got to allow human history to go on, but you know men’s hearts are sinful, you know from the behavior of the antediluvian civilization that men naturally go into apostasy, how are you going to keep the human race surviving by postponing the judgment?  You can’t allow judgment to come in, yet you’ve got to punish sin; yet you can’t allow the sin to just spill out and take in the whole human race because that would necessitate you judging.  For example, if 500 years after the flood if He didn’t do this, suppose the whole world became apostate, what would God have to do?  Then you would have to start the Second Advent right there to cut it off and destroy it, but God can’t do that because He’s already prophetically promised He is going to let history roll on for a certain length of time.  Therefore He’s got to have some way in which He can allow history to go on without bringing the Second Advent of catastrophic judgment upon the human race. 

 

How is He going to do it?  One of the greatest designs He thought of was dividing the human race up like this into culture, so that if one culture goes apostate, the apostasy is isolated in that culture.  When we get into Genesis you’ll see one of the great rules, the three great races, the Japhetic, the Semitic and the Hamitic races as they go across the face of the earth.  This explains the great mystery why it is that in the North American continent we had some of the greatest civilizations that ever lived.   For example, we have the Aztec civilization, you go into the Andes and you find great temples showing tremendous ability at engineering, and all of these great civilizations that we had on the North and South American continents before the white man came to this hemis­phere.  But why was the white man able to drive out these cultures?  It was part of the design of God for these cultures had become permeated with paganism, had become heathenistic, had rejected God to the point where the entire culture became polluted.  This is not saying the white man was superior, this is not saying that the white man was right; it is only saying that in the wisdom of God in history the white man was used to destroy the Indian cultures of the Western hemisphere because these cultures had become apostate. They had become pantheistic; they had become immersed in religions very similar to the Canaanites. 

 

Therefore throughout world history God play off, you might say, one culture against another one, the balance of power concept, you have one culture go down, another culture comes up.  This culture judges another culture, etc.  You see this go on and on, the interplay of power, you see it if you go back into the 18th and 19th century when the greatest missionary activity ever in the history of the Church was conducted by the British Empire, and the slogan was that the sun never sets on the British Empire.  God used the British Empire.  I am not saying that everything the British Empire did was right; I am simply saying that in the wisdom of God the British Empire was used to colonize and bring missionary activity into many frontiers of the world. 

For example, British missionaries like Hudson Taylor went into China; William Carey went into Southeast Asia, what is now Burma and eastern India.  You have England bringing the gospel into India, into the Middle East, into Africa and you have the great British Empire responsible for a lot of evangelistic activity.  But England became apostate, liberalism took over and today where is the British Empire.  By and large it has been replaced by United States power as the result of World War I and World War II.  Therefore you see even here how God plays off one culture against another.  One culture, the English culture, was great at one time.  For example, we can go back to the year in which our country was founded, in 1776, and on the European continent there was apostasy all over the continent.  There was a group called the Illuminati, people dedicated to Satan, who worshiped Lucifer and they were spreading communism all around the continent of Europe. 

 

However, in England about 1789 when the French Revolution began, our country was just becoming stabilized, but what no one ever notices is that the French Revolution was by and large stimulated by the left-wing radicals and the communists of their day, known as the Illuminati.  They were known to you in history as the Jacobin club, Robespierre and the rest of them, these men were all left-wing, pro-communist, they all were atheists.  They were for the avowed annihilation of Christians.  At one time three to four thousand believers were led into a square and they mercifully cut them down with artillery simply because they were Christians.  And they erected great shrines in France to worship the goddess of Liberty and they were persecuting the Church, etc.  So there in 1789 you had the French culture go down to disaster and yet right across the English Channel you had another culture.  Something happened in England that saved England. 

 

In that crisis hour England too could have gone down but there was a difference between England and France in that day for a man by the name of John Wesley…. By the way, the Wesley children had one of the greatest mothers in the history of the Church, for Wesley’s mother had something like 23 children, and if you can control a family of 23 that is a sign of wisdom, many of them died through infant diseases, etc. and yet she produced some of the greatest saints of the time.  Her husband was an active believer and she largely through the ministry to her children brought up John Wesley, and she brought up another man, Charles Wesley, who wrote many of the hymns in the hymnals.  These two brothers, together with a man by the name of George Whitfield turned the tide of the country, for these three men went and preached.

 

John Wesley went into the coal mines of England and preached; he was a member of the Anglican Church, the Church of England.  And he went down into the coal mines and preached the gospel and the religious authorities of his day said you can’t go down into the coal mines, it’s undignified for a member of the clergy.  So John Wesley said that’s too bad, God has called me to preach the gospel, I intend to go into the coal mines, those people need the gospel, and I am going to see that they get it.  So the religious people said well then we’re going to cause you some trouble.  John Wesley said go right ahead, so they made static for John Wesley all during his ministry and finally he separated into the movement which you know as Methodism.  That is the beginning of Methodism. Why is it known as Methodism? Because of the methodology Wesley used to train his converts.  John Wesley preached and preached and preached; he traveled something like 55,000 miles on horseback, all during that time, tired, as he was riding from one site to another site, he translated the Bible from the Greek into English. 

When he spoke in a coal mine there were no amplifying systems; his voice along with the voice of Whitfield was so powerful that people say that lived in the time that they could speak to 10,000 people at once and could be heard. These men were fantastic men of God and this is what saved England in the eleventh hour of judgment for in response to their preaching that nation came back to God.  There were many, many conversions in England and that led a back to the Bible movement and it was that that provided the stability in that eleventh hour that saved England from the disaster that France suffered.  As you read history, France has never recovered from this disaster.

 

The nearest person who brought France back was Napoleon and everybody thought he was a mad man and later on he became a mad man but he was the best thing France ever had because Napoleon tried to kill off the atheists.  At one time they opposed him in the downtown streets of Paris and Napoleon said so, they’re going to riot, so he brought in his battalion of artillery and he lined them up pointing guns into the mob and he said all right, come forward.  So they came forward and he said fire and all of a sudden there wasn’t any mob.  It’s a strange thing that Napoleon never had any trouble with riots after that.  This is the way Napoleon maintained law and order in France.  This brought back France part way, but he couldn’t do it all the way.  Do you know why?  Because he didn’t reach the spiritual grasp of the nation.  He was able to do it by force, imposing law and order by military force but that is not a final solution; that will not permanently solve the problem.  You will only have enduring stability when you have a back to the Bible movement. 

 

This is the salvation of England and this is one of the great historical examples of the principles of Genesis 11, that God has divided the human race into many cultures.  This is the explanation of why it takes Wycliffe so many years and heartaches to communicate in different cultures.  They are basically trying to break through the barriers that God has put up but those barriers do more good than they do harm.  Therefore, even with Wycliffe, with all their help they have to realize that the barrier is there for a reason.

 

Let’s look, since this is Gen. 11 and we have discovered why you have different nations, let’s look at the principle of Israel. We come down in history to one nation called Israel.  Israel was God’s select nation which we call a theocracy. We call it a theocracy because Israel was the only authorized nation to have a direct covenantal relationship with God.  For example, the United States is not God’s chosen nation.  England is not God’s chosen nation.  No Gentile nation is part of God’s chosen people in the sense Israel was.  Israel operated from 1400 BC on down to 586 BC before she went into captivity as a living, vibrant theocracy.  What do we mean by theocracy?  We mean that God personally ruled in the nation’s affairs.  Now Israel during these years was the theocracy in which God ruled by direct means. For example, if the nation was prosperous God modified the physical climate.  If the nation was spiritually in tune with Him, God would insure military victory.  And if the nation would disobey the ruler, then God would bring physical catastrophes upon the nation, God would bring military disasters upon the nation. 

 

Now we have a second time in history besides Israel when you have a theocracy established and this is the Millennium.  You have Israel; Israel goes down into captivity in 586 BC.  She comes back but when she comes back she’s always under a Gentile power, that’s the book of Daniel. The times of the Gentiles has begun, Jesus says, and they will continue until He returns.  So you have the cross of Jesus Christ, you have the Church Age, the Church is removed at the rapture and you have the Tribulation in which Satan in his last triumph tries to establish world government before the Second Advent of Christ.  Jesus Christ comes and sets up 1,000 of world government, and here, if you turn to Zech. 14 you’ll read about an authorized world government, a government that will be authorized by Jesus Christ personally.  Remember this comes after the Second Advent of Christ, not before. 

 

In Zech. 14 Jesus Christ finally returns, verse 4, “And His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in its midst toward the east and toward the west,” the exact Mount that the Lord Jesus Christ ascended from will be the exact site in which He will return to earth.  In verse 9 it says, “And the LORD shall be king over all the earth; in that day there shall be one LORD, and His name one.”   There will be one-world religion; there will be one-world culture.  It’s slightly modified, there will still be nations as we understand the Biblical prophecy, so there is some division and yet there is a basic unity and the unity is one-world religion. This is the basis for the stability of the Millennium; one-world religion.  But who sets it up?  Not man, God does, and it is future.

 

In verses 16-20 you see how this works.  “And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year,” these are all believers now, because when Jesus Christ returns He removes all unbelievers.  He judges and therefore the only people to enter the Millennium are born again believers.  However, these are mothers and fathers and sooner or later they have children; these children will grow up as unbelievers and therefore you begin to have the problem of unbelief even in the Millennium.  But in verse 16 we deal with this, “And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles” which is a feast that will be on a worldwide scale at that time.   But do you see that these nations go up, they go up to worship the Lamb, Jesus Christ is personally present, He is the world dictator.

 

In verse 17 it says, “And it shall be that whoever will not come up of al the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, even upon them shall there be no rain. [18] And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain, there shall be the plagaue, with which the LORD will smite the nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.”  In other words, the world government will be a theocracy in which once again the link between physical creation and God’s divine government is reestablished, so that if you have national disobedience, God disciplines by direct physical application of power.  That is the sign of a theocracy.  This is why the Tribulation which precedes the Second Advent is linked to the Church, not Israel, because there again you have God disciplining by physical means. 

 

In this Millennium where you have this perfect world government you have the second of the two authorized theocracies in history.  At this point in history we live between the cross of Christ and His Second Advent, there is no authorized theocracy. Therefore what do we do?  It’s not really a question of what we are doing, it’s a question of what Satan is doing and Satan has always tried to corrupt society and to gather as many people into the corruption is possible.  How do you suppose Satan is going to do it?  He is going to use the same principle that God is going to use.  The principle holds whether God uses it one hand or Satan on the other, that is, that there must be a structural unity grounded on religion.  Therefore Satan’s attempt throughout history has always been to set up state religions, to try and bring and unify the entire nation under one religion which he can dominate.  We have this attempted national religion, such as Canaanitism, Baalism, etc.

 

We have also had in our own time the deification of national leaders. For example, we had Caesar in the Roman Empire and in our own time we have had Hitler in Germany, where you can read actual pages, the song “Jesus loves me, this I know” where “the fuehrer loves me, this I know because the Nazi’s tell me so,” this is written where they took over the entire hymnology of the church and dedicated it to the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler.  This was an attempt to worship and set up a national religion. Why?  Because Hitler, as an intelligent thinking man, knew the one way he could get the Germans united would be behind a national German religion and that is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the rest of the so-called heroes had their problems in the 1903’s in Germany, because these men saw, as German Lutherans, the problem that Hitler was taking over the German Lutheran Church and was going to use it for his means. Why? Because Satan always wants a religion to ground his attempts to take over men. 

 

Today we see this with Lenin in Russia, with Mao Tse-tung in China, the thoughts of Mao, best reading on the college campus so we have the deification of leaders.  Today these are but mild forerunners of what is going to happen and to see what Satan’s greatest attempt at world religion will be, turn to Revelation 17.  We are going through these Scriptures to show the tremendous power of religion behind world history and to show you that in order to bring about an ordered society and a peaceful society you have to have spiritual union. God knows it; Satan knows it.  Both are trying to do this.  You have God doing it in Israel, you have God doing it in the Millennium, but now you have Satan trying to maneuver.

 

Watch how Satan, in one last cataclysmic attempt in the Tribulation…. Someday there’s going to be a rapture in which every living believer in the Church is removed leaving an unbelieving world; that unbelieving world will have many believers in it very rapidly because of the rapture and a few other events that occur and during this time which is seven plus years God is going to many judgments upon the earth.  But along with that Satan, since the Church has been removed, the temple of the Holy Spirit has been removed, Satan will try his last desperate attempt to defeat God and his plan, and the last desperate attempt is to unify the world in one great ecumenical religion pictured in Rev. 17.  “And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven vials, and talked with me, suing unto me, Come here; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sits upon many waters.”  Who is this that sits on many waters?  Why is she called a whore?  Because this indicates an unnatural union, a union between church and state, and that is going to be one of the great signs of world ecumenical religion an unnatural union of church and state, religion and politics.  “The great whore” in Scripture, if you trace the term you will always find it depicting apostasy in a particular way, i.e. a union of church in state.   You find it with Jezebel in the Old Testament, the queen who came in as a Canaanitess and brought her gods into Israel and almost succeeded in destroying the monarchy of the nation. 

 

It says she “sits upon many waters.”  People say they can’t understand the book of Revelation.  Do you know why they can’t understand the book of Revelation?  Because it takes time to study.  If you take a few moments you’ll see what many waters are, look at verse 15 because it tells you what the waters are.  John had the same question, he thinks like we do, you’re standing here and  you’re seeing a serial movie and an angel is standing by I think I’d ask him what’s going on too.  John did, the angel was just showing him an audio visual presentation of the prophecy and John said hey, explain that.  So he asked the angel what is it, verse 15, “And he said unto me, The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are people, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.”  So this great whore of ecumenical religion is sitting on these.  Therefore this means that not only is it an ecumenical religion but it is a worldwide ecumenical religion.  She sits on many, and she sits on them means she controls them. So you have the major nations of the world controlled by one ecumenical religion. 

 

Rev. 17:2, “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.”  We will see why in a moment because what the kings are doing with ecumenical religion, mentioned here as wine, wine would be a sign of partying, of enjoyment, etc. it’s a mutual agreement.  The kings want union but they know something, we can’t get union unless we first have religious union, so what we will do is make a deal.  You, speaking to the whore or the ecumenical religious organization, you get rid of all of these sects, get rid of everything and make one religion for us  and that will give us the power base we need to take over the world.  So that is what the king is getting from this apostate religious organization.  But she in turn is getting money because the nations agree to pay her for money for doing this.  Therefore there is a two-pronged exchange; the nations get the power, the religious organization gets the money and religious organizations always love to get money. 

 

Therefore you have this person, clothed and decked out in many clothes, that’s what verse 4 says, “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and bedecked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” This woman is elegantly dressed; she is rich with a power given to her by the nations.

 

Now we come to verse 5 and here we begin to understand a little more about this coming world religion.  “And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” Who is this?  First notice the name “mystery,” that tells you something.  The ecumenical religion of the Tribulation has not yet come into existence.  We suspect, and conservative scholars expect how it will come into existence is through a union between the World Council of Churches and Rome.  Why do we say this?  Never in history have Protestants and Catholics been able to get together but just this week the Catholic Church dumped one of the obstacles to Protestant thinking and that is the saints, Rome threw out saints by the dozens.  [Blank spot]

 

There’s one thing that they want to get and that is union and they can’t get it as long as they hold different doctrines than Protestantism.  Protestantism has been dominated by liberalism from 1850 onward largely.  Romanism has been dominated by liberalism since Pope John the 23rd, he was a liberal.  Catholicism is slowly crumbling by the same forces that crumbled Protestantism a century ago.  This we predict will come together in union and be the source of the great one-world religion along with many other organizations of course.  However, it has not yet occurred.  This is why the Scriptures refer to this lady as “Mystery.”  Mystery is something that has not yet been revealed.   You cannot equate this one-world religion yet with the World Council of Churches, you cannot equate it yet with Romanism.  It has not yet come unto the scene. 

 

Her nickname is “Babylon the great,” by the way, names in Scripture always depict nature.  For example, when Jesus is called as Handel’s Messiah quotes Isaiah 9, “Ye shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Father of eternity,” these are names that describe the character of our Lord Jesus Christ.  So these names here in verse 5 depict the character of this one great world religion.  “Babylon the great,” this tells you the location and this is most significant because it is this location, Babel, where the World Council originally met in Genesis 11.  Here is where you had your one-world government centuries and centuries, millennia ago.  This is the site of the destruction of the destruction of the nations and the beginning of diversity.  This is where man tried to form his one-world religion and in the end times it comes back that this woman is at least tied, if not located, at Babylon.  She is at least tied.  I say this for several reasons.  If you study on your own I recommend the book by Hyslop, The Two Babylons, and he shows you in this book how Babylon in history has permeated out through the cultures of the world and influenced religion. 

 

For example, in Jer. 7:18, one of the great prophets of the Old Testament you see the first great manifestation of Babylonian religion.  From Babylon we get something that recurs again and again in world religion.  If you’ve studied world religion you will recognize the mother-child cult.  And it is Babylon where the mother-child cult originates, where a woman is elevated and her son, and this has permeated all of the apostate religious systems from Babylon on.  In Jeremiah 7 we have the people, “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger.”  “The queen of heaven” here is the queen that was worshiped in Babylon and came westward to infiltrate the Israelite religion. 

 

This queen, known in several mythologies as Venus, the goddess of love, it is known to the Latin’s that way, it is known to the Assyrians or the Ugaritic people as Ashtoreth, Greeks call her Aphrodite, the people in Ephesus called her Diana.  It is a woman that appears again and again and she’s the symbol of apostasy.  She always has a name, the goddess of love and she always has a child.  Therefore this goddess of love who is supposedly a perpetual virgin always has a child.  That shows you one of the contra­dictions and yet it is always there.  And in Jeremiah 7 you have the people, as Dr. Pentecost was fond of saying at seminary, making hot cross buns originally, and here you have them making hot cross buns out to the queen of heaven and it was an apostasy which Jeremiah opposed.

 

Now turn back to Revelation and you’ll see what happened between the time of Jeremiah and the time of Revelation, for in Rev. 2 this lady and her cult have moved westward; she moves period­ically and the center of her religion seems to move with her.  In Rev. 2:13, John addresses the Pergamos Church, and he makes an interesting statement when he says to Pergamos, “I know thy works, and where thou dwells, even where Satan’s seat is;” why does he isolate that one church, he’s addressed seven churches, why call Pergamos the place where Satan sits?  Because we know from church history at Pergamos was the center of the mother-child cult.  It had moved westward after the destruction of the Persian Empire, moved into what is now Turkey and this is where John is writing, and at Pergamos this religion is centered.  After John dies guess where it moves?  It moves west to a city called Rome and we have it known as Mary and the virgin. That is not a Biblical doctrine. We believe in the virgin birth but the elevation of Mary and the child Jesus is nothing more than the continuation of the Babylonian mother-child cult and it ends up in Romanism because Romanism has incorporated the very heart of this religion.  It is this religion that evidently comes to fruition in Rev. 17 with the great one-world religion. 

 

The mother-child cult will occur in this woman, Babylon the great; “the mother of harlots and abominations” means she epitomizes them all.  Verse 6, notice the sweetness and light; ecumenicalism always says we love everyone, let’s all get together, but what do I read in verse 6, “And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great wonder.”  This is the sweetness and light crowd as they really operate.  The sweetness and light crowd will put a knife in your back on them if you turn your back on them.  Never do that.  Verse 6 is how they operate, they kill believers, always. World religion is always against God’s will.

 

Verse 8, “The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life,” very briefly what happens is this ecumenical religion is a tool of somebody else.  Satan uses the ecumenical religion to destroy all other religions, then when this is done somebody else, called the beast, comes onto the scene.  The beast is a ruler, evidently coming out of Western Europe who is able to unite the Western European nations in what is known as the Revived Roman Empire among students of prophecy.  And this Revived Roman Empire will be controlled by this one-world dictator called “the beast” in Scripture.  The beast has gotten power by the whore or the great harlot which is the religious system but once he gets power he destroys her.  Which is again always what happens; the politician will establish his religion to get power and when he gets in power he will destroy it because the very force that caused him to be powerful could cause somebody else to be powerful.  So you can see the reasoning, he destroys any chance anyone else has and the beast kills him.

 

So the beast makes war upon this woman and verse 16 describes it.  “And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.”  Here the world government under the beast destroys the harlot.  Jeanne Dixon in her book, The Gift of Prophecy, prophecies of this man. She doesn’t call him the beast, but listen to her fourth vision which she had on Feb. 2, 1962, “she saw a great vision in which simultaneously people of every race, religion and color, kneeling and lifting their arms in wonderful adoration surrounding him; they were as one.” 

 

And her interpretation of this vision was that a child was born somewhere in the Middle East shortly after 7:00 a.m. Feb. 5, 1962 who “will revolutionize the world; before the close of the century he will bring together mankind into one all embracing faith.  This will be the foundation of a new Christianity with every sect and creed united power.  Mankind will begin to feel the great force of this man in the early 1980s.”  Jean Dixon is not consciously prophesying of the beast, but when I compare her prophecy and the prophecy of the Scripture they are identical.  Who was it that gave Jean Dixon these prophesies?  He woke one morning and in her bed she saw a serpent and she looked into the serpent’s eyes and saw wisdom.  What is a serpent the symbol of in Scripture?  It is a symbol of Satan.    

 

We have a tendency in our own day to look forward to the fact that world peace must come after you have a world religion; the two have to go together.  You cannot have a world government, world peace, without first having a world religion.  So today you have a tendency to establish the harlot. What would be the preliminary outline of a world religion that would be acceptable today?  I suggest we already have it available; it is already being talked about in academic circles, it is something known as humanism.  It is grounded on four points. 

 

First it is based on the evolutionary doctrine, a doctrine which will permeate all thinking.  Second, it is triggered by World War II because after World War II, particularly with the discovery of nuclear energy and the fear of all-out nuclear holocaust, men first began to see the seriousness of a world government.  Now the cry is that we must have peace, even if we have to compromise principles we must have peace.  This is acting as the catalyst to bring this cry for one-world religion together.  Thirdly the goal of this is the satiation of human fulfillment or what they call the cycle social evolution of man.  The highest goal of this is the total satisfaction of Man, not men; be careful of this, Man with a capital “M”.  That’s the distinction; humanism is not humanitarian, don’t confuse the words.  Humanitarian is when you love and individual, you care and the person is dear to you and you do good works for that individual but humanism could care less about the individual, humanism cares about Man, Mankind, the entire race, and does not think in terms of individuals, it thinks of the overall.  The last thing is that it has a pseudo Millennium.  It is looking forward to a time of world government and world religion which they can usher in. 

 

I will now quote, for those of you who are skeptics and think I am making this up, from one of the great exponents of this doctrine, Julian Huxley in his essays of a humanist.  These are quotes taken from it but as I read through this listen carefully and compare it with what you know of Scripture and listen and compare it with what we’ve gone through tonight.  Julian Huxley writes: (quote) “the present uneasy age of disillusionment after two great wars has witnessed a widespread break­down of traditional beliefs.”  How true that is.  Huxley is right; there has been a traditional breakdown of beliefs.  “If the situation is not to lead to chaos, or despair or escapism, man must reunify his life within the framework of a satisfactory ideal system.  This new idea system I shall call humanism.  It must be organized around the facts and ideas of evolution.  It will have nothing to do with absolutes.  It will have nothing to do with absolute truth, absolute morality, absolute perfect, absolute authority.  Man’s destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of this planet.  The evolutionary outlook must be global.”

 

“To have any success in fulfilling his destiny as the control or agent of future evolution on earth, man must become one single inter-thinking group with one general framework of ideas; otherwise his mental energies will be dissipated in ideological conflict.  In every field we must aim to transcend nationalism and the first step toward this is to think globally.  Finally, the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely the [can’t understand word] of the new religion which we can be sure will rise to serve the needs of the coming era.  Religion of some sort is necessary.  One of the main things needed by the world today is a new single religious system to replace the multiplicity of conflicting and incompatible religious systems that are now competing for the spirit of man.  We must learn what it means, and we must disseminate humanistic ideas, finely injecting them whenever possible into practical affairs as a guiding framework for policy in action.

 

So for some of you who think that I a little radical when I can say that I can see humanism right here in the schools of Lubbock, just listen to the words of Julian Huxley. And it is not just Julian Huxley; if it was just Julian Huxley we’d have nothing but hot air to deal with because that’s all Julian Huxley is but the danger is that this is spreading all over the world.  James Warburg lets you know that the doctrine of humanism expounded by Huxley has come into this family and is now leading it in its decisions.  Listen to what James Warburg writes, this is an important man, not because he himself is important, but he shows you how the ideas of humanism and the need for this one-world religion have permeated into the leading families of the world. 

 

Warburg writes in one of his 21 books that he has written since 1922, “We are living in what appears to be a major turning point in world history.  The age of sovereign nation states living perpetually on the brink of armed conflict is drawing to a close in what should be the dawn of a new era in supra national world organization.  We no longer have to torture ourselves over the age-old question of choosing between what is right and what is expedient.  The only remaining expedient is the brotherhood of man.”  This is what is dominating; these are the powerful men behind the governments of the world and this is how they think.

 

Warburg concludes “we have reached the ultimate threshold” and then he has the gall to cite the Millennial vision, “we have reached the ultimate threshold of which the Hebrew prophets Micah and Isaiah spoke when they foresaw in Isaiah 2:2-4, “And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow into it. [4] He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” 

 

These men say we shall bring in the Millennium. What has happened is they have taken the doctrine of God’s holy Word, the Millennium, a prophecy of what God is going to do to bring salvation to the world and have taken that, torn it out of the pages of Scripture and said we will bring in the Millennium, we don’t need the Second Advent of Christ to do it, we will do it, and we will base it on a religion of man known as humanism.  For those of you who think that I am being radical in suggesting that there should not be world peace, turn to Matt. 24:6.  This may tempt you, you may say this is a worthy ideal, to have world peace, and I agree with you, men all over the world are crying for world peace but are we to have it man’s way or are we to have it God’s way, that is the issue; not the issue are you for peace or against peace.  The issue is are you for peace on God’s terms or are you for peace on man’s terms.  I tell you, if you are for peace on man’s terms you will get pieces, not peace. 

 

In Matt. 24:6 Jesus makes one of most ardent prophecies, He says until I come, “ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. [7] For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. [8] All these are the beginning of sorrow.”   Now is Jesus Christ wrong or is He right?  Are you going to buy the line of a pacifist?  If you are a thinking citizen you will recognize from this prophecy that we are going to have wars and wars and wars, and there’s only one thing that you can do to protect yourself.  There’s one thing that we can do as a nation to protect ourselves and that is have a strong military; make it number one priority over everything else, including domestic problems.  The absolute necessity today is to have an absolutely strong military; this is the way to guarantee peace and freedom for the world. 

 

We have shown a brief introduction to Deut. 12, we could go on and on in world history to show you this principle but just remember, a major point is that you have to unify belief in order to have world unity and Moses recognized it when he wrote the constitution of the nation Israel and there­fore from chapters 12-16 he is going to set up one and only one religion.  There will be no religious freedom in Israel; there can be no religious freedom in Israel and there won’t be.  This you must understand.  It seems unreasonable until you realize that Moses wanted one unified strong healthy nation.  The only way you can get this is through one religion, authorized by God.  Today, by application, we cannot attain this unity.  It is silly for us to expect the United States to be fully unified.  We can’t because God has not authorized, even Christianity, to be a state religion.  The only way we can live in peace and honor today is to live together with multiplicity of religions and don’t let one come to the forefront as they are trying in our country, to make humanism the forefront and teach your children evolution and all the rest of it in the public schools.  That is the movement, that is the tendency, and I point this out because you, as thinking Christians and parents, you have to understand this.  There are going to be times at PTA and times at school where it’s only going to be your voice because you are the only people that have the discernment of the Word of God to see the issue.  If you don’t see the issue, no one else will.