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Revelation, A Prophecy Come To Pass

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Posted by Richard Ruquist on January 14, 2001 18:39:12 UTC



My opinion of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian bible, is that they have all come to pass. I would like to outline the evidence that leads me to that conclusion. Mind you it is not a proof. For example to arrive at my view you have to take the most global interpretation of the prophecies possible. Other interpretations would lead to other conclusions, like the Messiah is yet to come, at least for the second time.

In determining that a prophecy has come to pass, we must first look for a detail, or details of the prophecy that already have happened, and better yet has only happened once, and is very unlikely to happen again.

The most explicit such detail of the Book of Revelation is the statement that the threat from the east has 100,000,000 militiamen. That has only happened once in all human history, and it was true of communist China under Mao. It is no longer true, and it is not likely to be true in the future, because we face either peace or destruction- an existential choice that eliminates the need for that many under arms.

From this fact, if true, of the prophecy, we can reasonably assume that the threat from the east is the communist bloc.

The next most likely detail of prophecy is the world’s worst depression. The world depression of the1930s is clearly the worse ever by far. The question is then, could it happen again. Well as long as we maintain world peace, then it is unlikely because we now know how to manage economies, e.g., the Greenspan effect. It’s not Greenspan himself, but rather we know how to turn down or turn up an economy, at least in the US. And for the time being the world economy follows the US economy.

Of course, if we have a devastating world war, a war that would devastate the world, I should say, then obviously we would have the worse depression, famine, and the worse everything else predicted in Revelation. So an inherent assumption in this analysis, for that’s what it is, is that we maintain peace. In his wisdom, the prophet of Revelation had to be correct in the global sense whether or not we eventually destroyed ourselves. So prophecy does not mean that we can rest. Things could still go awry.

But let’s assume that we are able to maintain world peace. Then Armageddon has to have already happened. I think that Armageddon was the entire 20th century, plus or minus one Jewish generation, (which is 50 years- the Jubilee) around the reformation of Israel. Then besides the 100 million militiamen, and the world’s worse depression and the world’s worse famine, and the death of nearly 100 million people in the cause of communism, all of which will never happen again if peace is maintained, we have to correlate some other rather explicit prophecies in the Book of Revelation.

Two rather explicit prophecies are the False Prophet and the Anti-Christ. I nominate Hitler to be the False Prophet as prophesied the rule of the Third Reich for a thousand years, consistent with the prophecy in Revelation of a 100 years of peace after Armageddon. Also he was more anti-Semitic than anti-Christian. Stalin was clearly anti-Christian and anti-religion in general. He personally had 36 million of essentially his own people put to death, outperforming Hitler (6 million) in this regard.

One other fairly explicit prophecy is that a woman that is surrounded by water would be destroyed from the sky. For a long time I thought that this had to be New York City because of the statue of liberty. But now I believe that it means Japan, a nation surrounded by water that was destroyed by both firestorm bombs and atomic bombs. If peace reigns, it is unlikely that another city will ever be destroyed by nuclear weapons, at least from the sky. So fire raining down on Gog and Magog must be Germany and Japan, both victims of firestorms.

Even the overall battle plan of WWII is in Revelations. The threat from the north sweeps into North Africa where it is counterattacked by the revived Holy Roman Empire, which I take to be the Axis versus the Allies (sans Italy). The Allies (the US, Britain, France Canada, Australia, etc. for you young ones) are clearly the revived Holy Roman Empire.

The threat from the north is defeated, and next on a global scale we have the confrontation of the threat from the west confronting the threat from the east across the Euphrates River. The threat from the east with 100 million militiamen, as discussed above, is clearly communism. It is interesting to me that the US and its allies went from being Holy to being a threat. Power corrupts.

I take the Euphrates River to be the oceans of the world. And east and west have turned the entire world into a battlefield with the advent of ICBMs that can deliver hydrogen bombs, which are thousands of times more destructive than the atomic bomb, to anyplace in the world.

The end of Revelation is very optimistic. The east and west face each other across the Euphrates River, the river dries up, they confront each other and a third world war is only averted by the intervention of our lord, resulting in a thousand years of peace.

So even if you buy all the above, which is an analysis where each step has a probably of being true less than one, there remains an open question. Who is the lord? We can point to explicit people who qualify to be the False Prophet and the Anti-Christ, with a fairly high probability, but no one stands out who could likely be the Lord-or as commonly assumed, to be the Messiah.

Well, perhaps that common assumption is a mistake. The Lord of Revelation does not have to be the Messiah. Even in Jewish tradition, it is said that the Messiah will not come until the world has completely straightened itself out. And we have a ways to go.

Assuming that Armageddon is past, and the lord has come at the moment of east-west confrontation with nuclear weapons, just when did that happen? Here I admit to being influenced by the new movie “Thirteen Days”. The nuclear crisis was the Cuban Missile crisis. Both military camps in the east and in the west were anxious for a military confrontation, according to memos and tapes now available in the Kennedy Library. So that movie makes a very important political statement. Bombers want to drop bombs. Armies want to fight. That’s what they are trained to do and that how they are taught to solve problems. It takes diplomacy on the part of civilian leaders to keep the military establishment in check.

But the movie erred in one important respect. What actually happened is that Jack Kennedy was the only member of the inner circle of power who was reluctant to strike against the Cuban missiles. Even Bobby Kennedy was in favor of a strike. As we now know Jack engineered a secret deal with Khrushchev, a trade of our missiles in Turkey for his in Cuba that averted the crisis. So one man, at least in the US, is responsible for averting nuclear war. Since Kennedy is the first US president who was Catholic, that adds a little flesh to a satisfaction of that prophesy.

If all this is true. [And I would give it at least a C as a thesis. It’s has a probability of at least 70% of being true.] Then it tells us something about how god works. God works through us, and gets the right man, or woman, in the right place at the right time, to make things come out right. The right man often pays a price. In this case assassination, More often, martyrdom.

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