March 13, 2003 ©Homer Kizer
Printable File
Commentary — From the Margins
"Can This Marriage Be Saved"
Time magazine's February 24, 2003 article by Michael Elliot, titled the above, begins, "It was, so far as anyone could remember, unprecedented." Indeed, what we are seeing is unprecedented: we're seeing spiritual warfare manifest in our realm. What is occurring has been prophesied for two and a half millennia, but those prophecies were sealed and secret until the time of the end, that generic identification of age-concluding events which includes seven years of tribulation greater than humanity has never known.
The prophet Amos wrote, "Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets" (3:7); but the office of prophet has fallen on hard times, with no new prophecies having been recorded since the reigns of the Caesars. The Book of Revelation concludes with language suggesting that there will be no additional revelation; yet both Peter and Paul cite Joel's prophecy about sons and daughters prophesying.
If the visions of Daniel are sealed until the time of the end, their unsealing will cause these visions to be read differently than they previously were—if they are not read differently, then they were never really sealed and secret until the time of the end. So either linguistic marmalade will be made of Scripture by asserting that the time of the end began in the 1st-Century, or a person's intellectual honesty will require the person admits that God uses human language in somewhat the same way humanity does. That said, the time of the end didn't begin two millennia ago, or two centuries ago, or even two decades ago. The time of the end is a period of turmoil, of wars, of ecological catastrophes, of human survival becoming questionable. It begins with the escalation of these attributes, not with twelve years of unprecedented worldwide prosperity. Thus, the visions of Daniel could not be understood when the Universal Church adopted amillennialism, or when early Protestant scholars determined that Rome was the fourth empire of the image Nebuchadnezzar saw, or when a pre-tribulation rapture of the Church was found. They are only understandable now if we have entered that age-ending period of history identified by the generic expression, the time of the end.
My argument is that humanity has entered the period known as the time of the end; that sometime shortly post September 11, 2001, war broke out in the spiritual realm; that the spiritual sar of the kingdom of Persia attacked the spiritual king of Greece; that what we are witnessing and are about to witness is the physical manifestations of the spiritual he-goat of Daniel's eighth chapter vision trampling the Persian ram, both the he-goat and the ram representing fallen angels that resisted the angel of God sent to Daniel with the vision recorded in chapters ten through twelve. My argument goes on to claim that the visions of Daniel are no longer sealed, that more of Revelation can be better understood because of Daniel's visions being unsealed, that I was drafted just as if I received a please-report-to letter from Selective Service to explicate these prophecies.
The test of a genuine prophet was that what he said came to pass. Today, that same test can (and should) be applied to those who explicate prophecy: teachers and experts need to rightly discern what God has revealed to the prophets, since He does nothing without having first made what will happen known. If the Church, then, applies the same getting it right standard to prophecy experts as was applied to prophets, we can soon determine whether those experts that find Rome, the Roman Church, or the Holy Roman Empire in the prophecies of Daniel or Revelation are genuine. My contention is that Rome and the Roman Empire are not mentioned directly anywhere in prophecy, and only tangentially mentioned in prophecies about spiritual Israel. Thus, prior to the overturning of one world order and the establishment of another, one in which the Roman Church will be eclipsed by the spectacular ascendancy of an American religion that holds the error of Bishop Arius, a religion that will leverage food into discipleship, I will figuratively lead with my chin—I will state for the record that the existing world order will shortly (in somewhat the length of time it took Alexander the Great to conquer the known world) be overturned and replaced by one that has the values of ancient Greece; that the United States will play a leading roll in the toppling of the existing world order; that American hegemony will be established through the Middle East, and probably worldwide through the institution of democratic ideals; that shortly after this hegemony is established, it will be broken; that from the breaking of this American hegemony will rise two ten-nation coalitions, one Islamic, one "Christian," but both holding variant forms of the error of Bishop Arius. Further, I will state for the record that more than half of the world's population will profess to be "Christian" prior to when American hegemony is broken, but that Christ, Himself, will turn His hands against two-thirds of these self-identified Christians halfway through seven years of tribulation, that the remaining third—more than a billion people—will prove to be genuine.
Because my claims are, as one prophecy expert said, "Radically controversial," I will not hedge what I write in vagaries: the man of perdition is not the true antiChrist, but the antiChrist's forerunner. Satan, when cast from heaven, will come as the antiChrist. It will be Satan who requires newly liberated humanity to accept his slave mark, which is the mark of the beast (Chi xi stigma or the tattoo of Xx, not 666). Humanity will either accept spiritual slavery, or will live completely by faith for three and a half years. And the Church has been set up by that old dragon who deceives the entire world to accept the antiChrist as the true messiah, for the Church will be able to identify the man of perdition as an antichrist because of him holding the error of Bishop Arius, the logic which will allow this person to believe that he really is god. But enough for now: attend a prophecy seminar when one is scheduled near you, and hear exactly how insidious Satan's plan of deception really is.
The secular marriage of nations known as the United Nations cannot be held together as presently constituted. All of its members, including the United States, have been empowered by the spiritual sar of the spiritual kingdom of Persia/Babylon; so there is considerable hesitancy to damage this marriage. However, secular nations front for spiritual powers, the consistent claim of the Bible. The spiritual king of Greece is presently flying out of the west to trample the spiritual sar of the kingdom of Persia/Babylon; real war is being waged in the spiritual realm that humanity can neither enter to make observations nor measurements. President Bush will, more reluctantly than he should, use the secular power of the United States to establish here on earth what will be established in the spiritual realm by the king of Greece. The time of the Gentiles will conclude with Christ smashing the two ten-nation coalitions that will arise when the great horn or first horn of the spiritual king of Greece is broken. Endtime prophecies are about spiritual powers, not physical, which is why world events will blindside so many experts, who remain unaware of the physical/spiritual shadowing of prophetic events, even to the spiritual liberation of Israel from Egypt.
* * *