Until you understand the symbolism of the different beasts in John's apocalyptic vision, end-time prophecy will remain largely confusing. As a result, you could be blindsided by major events in the future. That's why it's important to carefully study prophetic symbolism today, before the prophesied events come to pass.
The following was transcribed from the audio of Alexander's 5/3/2018 interview with Tony Koretz on A Minute to Midnite. Many thanks go to Phillipa C. of Australia for doing the transcribing!
TK Bible prophecy is confusing at times and it is really interesting to get the different perspectives.
AL It is difficult. Some of it is simpler than other parts of it, but certainly it’s something that requires a lot of study, requires a lot of discussion, and it’s great that we can be part of the same family and the same kingdom, and we can have peace with one another while disagreeing on some of these matters. And then over time I think the Spirit guides us each in the things He wants us to zero in on and the ways He wants us to adjust our view of things. I fully believe that the Lord will guide us each to the place we need to be as long as we are diligent to study His Word.
TK The main thing is to be diligent and keeping our eyes open because, whatever way you look at it, it certainly appears that Bible prophecy is unfolding rather rapidly as events change so quickly in the world. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle when you see all the pieces being put into place. We haven’t got all of the pieces in place yet, but there are some real ‘ah-ha’ moments.
AL Yeah, and so much is happening in the news just recently that it’s hard to keep up with it all. I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing biblical prophecy unfold from day to day, but we are seeing a lot of things being set in place. The stage is being set in a lot of ways, so that’s pretty exciting to watch.
TK I agree with that, and the news does change rapidly. There seems to be so many new developments almost hour by hour on some days, and it’s hard to keep up. But yet we know that God is in control of end times events and where we are heading, and that’s the most comforting thing. It’s not like some out of control train wreck, that no one’s got the steering.
AL Right. Thank God we know basically where this stuff is going. I mean, I don’t know how people who don’t take the Bible seriously can deal with the calamity that occurs; you know, all the unknowns of the world. Just living here is a scary, scary venture if you don’t know how it’s all going to turn out. And of course we know the real end of the story is that those who trust in the Lord will be resurrected—we are going to get eternal life and there is going to be eternal peace no matter what’s going on here, we have that to look forward to—but in the meantime it’s nice to know basically what’s going to happen. We have a sequence of events that we can generally hold to even if there are disagreements over the details, and in that we know that God has it all planned already. It’s all taken care of; He is not surprised by any of it. He’s written the story already, and there’s great peace in that, even joy, to know that we can glorify God by showing people that He’s already talked about this, He’s outside of all this stuff, and how great that He is to let us know ahead-of-time what’s going to happen.
TK I really don’t understand or know how people who don’t have God actually do cope. I don’t know, I don’t think I could do it. I wouldn’t want to do it, for a start. But the ultimate thing is, as you say, we know the end of the story. And we know that our salvation, if we trust in the Lord, is safe and secure, and it doesn’t matter what happens in the world. No one can take that away.
AL Exactly, exactly.
[At this juncture, the speakers spend a moment chatting about coughs, colds, and seasons.]
TK Where are we going to take this today Alex?
AL I thought we could talk about the different beasts in prophecy, because this is an area where I continually see people struggling. There’s a lot of confusion. It’s a difficult area of eschatology to dive into, so this discussion is going to require everyone to really put their thinking caps on... or else run away and come back later when you’re ready for it, because this is going to get pretty complicated. But I think if you just take it, you know, one step at a time, which is what I’m hoping to do—just give you one little bite at a time—then by the end of it you’re going to understand what these beasts are. And it will clear up a lot about the Book of Revelation in particular because the narrative switches back and forth between different beasts, sometimes without even telling you, which makes it very complicated (but we all know eschatology can be really cryptic, so that’s not a surprise). But it is hard to follow, so hopefully this is going to help people to get it.
TK Sounds good, so take it away. Where do we begin?
AL I think we should begin with the fact that beasts, prophetically speaking, represent men or collections of men who are spiritual brutes. There’s a lot of symbolism we will be covering today. I’ll tell you each time there’s a symbol that we need to interpret. Usually the Bible—I would say always, really—the Bible interprets itself, so we just need to figure out what the scriptures have to say about these things, even though there might not be in though we are looking at one particular passage it might not be right there but somewhere else in scripture, sometimes well hidden, but somewhere you are going to find an explanation for that symbol.
When it comes to beasts, I think we find that explanation in… well, as we go we’ll kind of see it play out instead of me trying to explain it right off the bat, but I’ll just prep you by saying that the beasts represent people who are spiritually opposed to God. They’re wild; they’re set against the Lord instead of being docile towards Him, and they’re unwilling to being subservient to the Most High. So beasts can be a person or can be a whole collection of people. We’re going to see beast kingdoms and beast kings. It’s kind of funny that in the Book of Daniel we see one of the kings of a beast kingdom, whose name was Nebuchadnezzar, actually get turned into a beast, quite literally, for several years, because he simply wouldn’t humble himself. He was continually prideful even after God showed him some miraculous things through the Jewish people, he still... he would acknowledge YHVH the Most High, but he would also still acknowledge all of the other gods and worship them as well, and so finally the time came when God said, “I’m going to knock you down about twelve pegs, and you’re going to be a literal beast in the field eating grass for several years.” So that was an interesting way of making what was figurative, literal.
Let’s start out with Rev. 13:1. We are read this: “Then I stood on the sand of the sea (this is John seeing this vision). I saw a beast coming up out of sea having ten horns and seven heads. On his horns were ten crowns and on his heads were blasphemous names. (v.2) The beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority.” In that passage we see a beast that is characterised as a few different beasts put together. Does that make you think of anything, Tony?
TK Well, various different kingdoms that we see arising today, but the identity of some of them is a little bit of a mystery I think, well to me, anyway.
AL It is. It’s an area of some conjecture, but what’s interesting—and you’re right—is that they’re kingdoms, and these kingdoms are actually mentioned before. If we go back to Daniel 7, we find these very same animals are being used to represent three different kingdoms. So the one John saw was just one beast, but it had the characteristics of these other three beasts, so we would call it a chimera, a mixture. But in Daniel’s vision there are four different beasts and they rise from a churning sea. Now the Rev. 13 beast is an amalgamation of these four beasts, and we’re going to find out soon what the seven heads of John’s beast represent, but in this vision with Daniel, only one of the beasts has multiple heads. So let me turn back to Dan. 7 and we will read that together. So he says: (v.2) “ I saw in a vision by night and behold the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles wings then as I looked it’s wings were plucked off and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man and a mind of a man was given to it. And behold another beast a second one like a bear. It was raised up on one side it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth and it was told 'Arise devour much flesh!' After this I looked and behold another like a leopard with four wings of a bird on its back and the beast had four heads and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions and behold a fourth beast terrifying, dreadful and exceedingly strong; it had great iron teeth. And it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet; it was different from all the beasts that were before it and it had ten horns. I considered the horns and behold there came up among them another horn a little one before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots; and behold in this horn were the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things.” He goes on to describe this horn in [such] a way that we understand this is the end-times ruler, the last king of all the empires of man (and we would call him the Antichrist). And he is the one who will butt heads with the Ancient of Days, the Lord Himself, and the Messiah will come down and destroy him. But that’s all we need for right now.
So we see the kingdoms represented by different types of animals, and the number of heads, if you add them up, sums to seven. So there’s four heads of the leopard beast, and each of the other ones has [a single] head, so together that’s seven heads. Which is not exactly the same seven heads that we’re going to find in Revelation, but it’s just interesting that the number [seven] pops up over and over. It’s an important number. The first thing to realize is that these beasts come up out of a churning sea, or a great sea that has been stirred up by the winds of heaven. What does that mean? The angel who was speaking to John in Rev. 17 provided the key to understanding the symbolism of the sea, and you will find the same symbolism in other books as well. Recently I have been teaching the Book of 2 Baruch, which is a rediscovered scripture—what I would call scripture—that was almost lost to time, but it has come back to us, and it’s an amazing scripture. In there we also find the same symbolism of a sea in a dream that was given to Baruch. Now here’s the explanation of it in Rev. 17, v. 15: “And the angel said to me, The waters that you saw where the prostitute is seated are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages.” So the waters of the sea represent all of these peoples and nations. Now the word there, if we were to use it, the Hebrew word would be Goyim, the Nations, meaning those other than Israel, which is made clear later on, that this is not including God’s people. This is only the Gentile people, the ones that are opposed, which is why the woman we call Mystery Babylon, Babylon the great, is sitting on these people—because she is ruling over these nations, these Goyim. She’s not ruling over God’s kingdom, because the Messiah is the One who rules over us.
The ancient peoples, including the authors of the Bible, equated the sea with chaos. You can go back to ancient writings from a lot of different cultures and you’ll find that they always considered the sea [to be] Chaos, and it was usually represented by a sea serpent, which is what the Bible would call Leviathan. In any case, chaos is just always connected with the sea because the sea lacks structure. It's constantly moving and changing. It doesn’t have any stability. Likewise, the Gentile nations don’t have stability; they’re not at peace [like those who are] in the kingdom of God. They’re constantly in this state of flux, so that’s why that symbol is used. In Daniel’s vision, the sea is not its normal self; the sea is being churned up, it’s raging. So what that tells us is that we’re looking at a time of global calamity where, knowing what the angel told to John—that these waters are people—that means the churning of the waters indicates people who are in calamity, [in] chaos, [and] there’s some sort of a large shift going on, probably worldwide. The sea, as we have said, is figurative, which goes right along with the fact that these beasts are figurative, too. Everything in this vision is an analogy or symbol; it’s not to be taken literally. But then the angel does go on to explain it literally to Daniel.
So if we jump down to Dan. 7:17, we have the angel’s explanation of this, and he says, “These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise in the earth.” They’re four kings. So, what I’m about to say here is theory, I can’t really be dogmatic about it, but I think these kings are angelic principalities. I don’t think that these are earthly kings. I think that they—remember the last time I was on here I mentioned something about the Kosmokraters, these fallen angelic rulers, members of the Divine Council, as Michael Heiser would call it, who have rebelled against God and are in this lawsuit against Him? Well, I think it’s these Kosmokraters. And at the Tower of Babel seventy people groups were created; God divided all the people by giving them new languages, and there were seventy of them, if we go back to the book of Genesis. And in the book of Deuteronomy we are told that God assigned those seventy people groups of the Goyim to the Sons of God, or the B’nai Elohim, which the Greeks call Kosmokraters. So those guys are the little ‘g’ gods of the nations, and they’re ruling over all of the gentiles right now. I think that these four kings represented by beasts are four of those Kosmokraters that get their shot at things in the Last Days. So I think [these] are fallen sons of God that we’re looking at here, but then particular characteristics of the beasts are going to be earthly kings, but we will see that here in a bit.
TK So do those four fallen angels, do they have a certain range, like they sit as a principality over a certain area? Is that how it works, do you think?
AL I think over a people group, I would say, probably not a geographical area.
TK Okay.
AL There’s an interesting passage elsewhere in Daniel [10:13] where it talks about a fallen one who was not permitting one of the holy angels to get through to Daniel. He was called the prince of Persia.
TK That’s what came to my mind as you were talking about it.
AL Exactly. So he was the prince of that people called [Persians]. Later on, in the New Testament, we find Paul talking about the principalities and the powers of the air—this is what he’s referring to. He’s talking about these spiritual rulers who are the bad guys. I mean, in context, when you read that, you realize he’s talking about the Enemy. Together they rule the nations and they are all set against God and His kingdom.
So, even though these beasts are kings of some sort, they also represent kingdoms. At the same time that they’re kings, they’re also kingdoms. Every kingdom has a king and every king has a kingdom. And this is made clear by the angel a few verses later: if we skip down to v. 23 we see the angel say, “As for the fourth beast, it shall be a fourth kingdom on earth which shall be different from all the kingdoms.” So the angel has just told Daniel that these beasts are four kings, but then he goes on in a few verses to say that the fourth of these beasts is a fourth kingdom, and that’s tipping us off to the fact that these are both. It’s either-or. King and kingdom are interchangeable in Scripture. That’s really critical to understand when we are trying to interpret Revelation 13. So let’s go back to that.
TK Just before you do, I noticed that [in Dan. 7:23], that “fourth beast shall devour the whole earth,” so it’s not just a small kingdom.
AL Right, right. This is the one who takes over everything. In Rev. 13:3 we read this: “One of the heads looked like it had been wounded fatally. His fatal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled at the beast. (v. 4) They worshiped the dragon because he gave his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” So in these two verses we see a subtle shift happen from talking about a nation to talking about a king, because we were introduced to this seven-headed beast that comes up out of the sea (like Daniels’s beast), but in this case he is being worshiped as—evidently—an individual. Nobody worships a kingdom.
TK Nah.
AL I’ve never seen anybody worship a kingdom. You worship kings sometimes, because kings claim to have divine right to rule, or at least they almost always did in the past, so you could definitely worship a divine king, or you could worship the power behind the king, but you wouldn’t worship his kingdom. So the heads are individual earthly kings of this great empire. We’re going to learn more about in a little bit, but I just wanted to set that up right now.
The head that was healed—it says one of the heads was healed, and he was previously dead because his wound was fatal—this king or this head was totally destroyed (it was a fatal wound), and yet he lives. That’s an important distinction to make because we need to realize that a head of this symbolic beast was slain, not necessarily that the person was slain by a head wound. Okay? There’s a lot of people get that mixed up.
TK I agree. I’m glad you clarified that, because you see some people looking for someone to be assassinated and then come back to life. Some people say it will be a false miracle or whatever, but I don’t think that’s actually what it’s talking about.
AL Let’s come back to that in a little bit because there’s another verse that has to do with that. Actually, let’s just jump down to it right now. Rev. 13:12, it talks about this other beast we will get to in a minute, but he causes the inhabitants of the world to worship this first beast “whose mortal wound was healed” (v. 12). This person who is being worshiped did have a mortal wound, he did die. And then, again—let me see if I can find it—there it is. Verse twelve says he had a mortal wound that was healed, and then v. 14 kind of reiterates that, but it gives us an additional piece of information because it says that he was wounded by the sword and yet lived. One of the heads is slain by a sword, but this can’ be talking about a person because nobody has multiple heads. This is not a king with polycephaly. This is a king among other kings, and one of this group of kings is killed and then comes back. This is why people are worshiping him.
The individual beast that we have shifted to here in ch. 13—we started with the beast empire, which we know because in Daniel it explains [that] it’s four different kingdoms, and they are all merged together somehow—and then, as we are talking about this beast empire, the narrative shifts to talking about an individual beast, who we call the Antichrist. And this beast doesn’t come up out of the sea, he comes up from the Abyss. That’s an important distinction to make as well because the beast empire is said to come from the sea. Both in Daniel and in Revelation it comes up out of the sea. But the individual beast who is going to be the ruler who is worshiped, this beast is from the Abyss.
So, end-times Babel is this empire that has taken over the other kingdoms: the leopard kingdom, the lion with the wings, and the bear kingdom are all subsumed under this end-times kingdom, which you might call the New World Order, but is more accurately called Babel (the end-times Babel). It will also be Rome, but we’ll get back around to that later. Rome is an incarnation of Babel, and Rome never really died. And we’re looking at a time here very shortly when Rome will grow again in power, and it will be that fourth kingdom that Daniel saw that ends up consuming [the others]—because it says in Daniel [that] it trampled down the rest of them. it took over the other beast kingdoms and incorporated them. Assimilated, we should say. [Actually, assimilated is not the right word. I was looking for subjected.]
The Abyss is different from the sea [as a symbol in prophecy] because the Abyss is not a figurative thing. It’s actually a real geographical feature of the world, and we know that from studying the rest of Scripture. The Abyss, also called the bottomless pit, is a part of Sheol, it’s a part of the Underworld. Whoever this is that is being represented as the beast who gets worshiped, he comes from the Underworld, from Sheol, which is where the disembodied souls of the dead go to rest. So this is very intriguing, and anybody who doesn’t get worked up, so excited,about figuring this out is not really paying attention, because it’s quite the mystery. Okay, let’s go to Rev. 11:7 really quickly because it mentions this guy. It’s talking about the two witnesses who testify in Jerusalem for three-and-a-half years, and it says, “When they have finished their testimony, the beast that arises from the Abyss will make war on them and conquer them and kill them.” Are you familiar with this? Do you know what this is talking about?
TK Yeah, Abaddon [Rev. 9:11] or—I’m looking at it right here. I’m interested to know what your thoughts on it will be, because everyone has a slightly different view on it. Personally, I start to wonder and tie it in with the whole alien deception and all that as well. Anyway, that‘s my thoughts without going too far into them.
AL I do think that the whole ancient aliens phenomenon does have something to do with how it all unfolds at the end. I would agree with that. But in this chapter, I think most theologians are agreed, and I’m on board with them, that this character is the Antichrist, and it’s he who will kill the two witnesses. Lots of other people will try, [but] they won’t succeed—the witnesses will be able to kill them with fire whenever they’re attacked. Finally, after three-and-a-half years, the Antichrist himself will attack them, and they will either not defend themselves or for some reason will no longer have their powers. I’m assuming [they will] realize that the time has come, and like Yeshua, they are going to lay themselves down as martyrs. But he is able to kill them, and he hangs them up for everyone to see, and then they’re resurrected after three days. And then [at] that point, if you correlate it with what we see in the Book of Daniel about the last seven years, or the 70th week of Daniel—hopefully most people have heard of that, the 70th week of Daniel, which a lot of people call the tribulation period (the Bible doesn’t actually call it that, but the 70th week is certainly a term which is there)—and that last seven years, in the middle of it is when these witnesses would be killed, and then the Antichrist will set himself up as God in the Temple. We know the he will desolate the Temple, he will bring an end to the sacrifices, he will break a covenant that he has made with many people, and that’s the point at which he [will claim] to be God himself and [desire] to be worshipped in the place of God. He will accomplish (at least in an earthly sense) what Isaiah 14 talks about, of the king of Babel wanting to ascend the hill of God and set himself up in the place of God.
TK Which, to me, I struggle to see how any earthly person, normal earthly person would be worshipped in this day and age, which is why I wonder about if he’s a fallen angel, angelic (sort of) slash alien deception. [I wonder] whether this person will not be fully human, be more than just a human.
AL I think there’s a very good argument to be made that when it talks about the seed of Satan in the first chapters of Genesis (what is it, Gen. 3?) right after the curse, when God says the seed of the woman will be the one to redeem, it’s also said that the seed of the Serpent—the Nachash, who I would equate with Satan, whether that was him or not, he was in his kingdom, right? he was one of the fallen ones—would have his head crushed by the righteous seed. And I would say there is good reason to believe that there is something physical about that, where the DNA, or whatever code angels have, is somehow mixed with a man to create this hybrid. Just like we had hybrids in the pre-flood world--
TK Yep, yep, that’s kinda where I’m coming from, too. So I’m glad to know that you’re on that page as well, cool.
AL Yeah, I think there’s a lot of room to conjecture about how that could possibly happen, but it’s a good possibility.
TK I think that the point that I want to make is, if we do come up with some sort of alien disclosure in all of that, that people aren’t taken aback by it (if that’s the way it goes). Not that it necessarily will, but I do think that’s a possibility and people will be fooled by some sort of a disclosure or a system that says that man was brought to earth or put here and bred here from some far-off planet, and all of that kind of stuff. Basically because evolution is falling apart as an argument, so they’ll have a different one. How it plays out I’m not exactly sure, but if that is the way it is to come about, I could see a lot of people falling for it if they weren’t aware that this is a distinct possibility, as a fallen angel kind of masterminded scheme.
AL Absolutely. Well, I don’t know if the argument will be that these entities will be extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial, but either way, I think they’re going to tell us that there is a battle going on between two different species of these ascended beings, these higher beings from somewhere. That really fits right in with what the occult has been teaching forever, which is that the angel that was in the Garden tempting Adam and Eve to take of the tree was really a good guy. He was probably the leader of this faction of immortals that wanted to help Adam and Eve to ascend, to become enlightened. The Gnostic religion in its different forms has always taught that YHVH of the Bible is actually the bad guy. He [YHVH] wants to oppress, He wants to keep us under His rule and not let us become greater than we are; whereas His enemy, Lucifer, the Light-bearer, he wants to bring us illumination and help us to evolve into gods. “You will be as gods.” That’s what he said in the Garden. I think that’s exactly what he’s going to say in the end times, too, but just with a twist of: these gods throughout history are actually this really advanced species that is either from a different plane of existence or a different planet.
TK It’s interesting that that’s the way the transhumanists are going as well, and seeking to become like God, too, which is a whole other thing and I don’t want to derail us.
AL Yeah, we could go off on that for a while. Okay, back to talking about this man from the Abyss. So the guy in Rev. 11:7 who kills the Two Witnesses—it says he rises from the Abyss, or he has risen from it, before [the time when] he comes and takes out the Two Witnesses. That’s very important because we are talking about the same person as we found in Rev. 13, who is going to be worshiped by the whole world. Then, in Rev. 17:8 we read (the angel is talking to John): “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the Abyss and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast.” There’s that word again. They’re going to marvel at this guy because [he] was, and is not, and is to come. So the angel is explaining to John why it is that the whole world marvels after this person who is a beast ruler. [The angel] says it’s because he was (he existed at one point in the past), he is not (that’s talking about John’s present day, not our present day, because this was him speaking to the apostle at that time, so about 90 AD), then he is to come [in John’s future]. So currently, in John’s time, he did not exist, but he did before and he will again. That is kind of the crux of my whole book, Leviathan’s Ruse—or it’s one of the big things in there—is understanding this verse and understanding why this character is someone who comes back. The Antichrist is not someone who comes on the scene for the first time at the end of time; he is someone who has been here before as one of these great rulers, one of the seven heads, and he will return. But I will get into that a little deeper in just a minute.
Again, this ties back into Rev. 13:3-4, where it talks about this man being worshiped. And we need to realize [that] this is why he’s worshipped. It’s important to me that everybody understands that Revelation is not chronological. Now I know a lot of people are going to get thrown for a loop by that because there have been so many teachers that have said it is chronological, and I would say most Dispensationalist prophecy buffs would teach you, “Yes, this is mostly linear with maybe one little section that is parenthetical, but basically it’s chronological.” Actually, no, it’s not. It’s in sections that are organized thematically, and then within those thematic sections it is chronological. But they are giving us a view of events of the end—different stretches of time leading up to the end and focusing on particular things in each one of those segments. It’s too much to tell people everything that’s going on when you’re trying to teach things topically. So you take one stretch of time and you focus on one particular line of action. Then you step back and you start on another point of time where it makes the most sense to start, and you focus on another line of action. And that’s what’s happening in the Book of Revelation. And this is really great evidence that we just looked at, because that’s what is happening [there]. In chapter 17, which is toward the end of Revelation, we’re finding the angel saying that this beast is yet to come in the sequence of events involving the whore of Babylon and the ten kings of Babylon (or Babel). So he is not yet on the scene in the way the angel is describing this to John, and yet the same person who comes up from the Abyss—which is the same language which we find in Rev. 17: 8, yet if we go back to Rev. 11, that guy from the Abyss—is already there, already in a position of power, and he kills the Two Witnesses. So again, it’s by theme. It’s introducing this character to us earlier in the book but then it’s giving us more information about him from a different [chronological] standpoint later in Revelation. Maybe sometime we can talk more about all the different things in Revelation that tell us it’s not chronological, and we can kind of break it apart and see where all the different chunks are.
Moving on: (Speaking of Babel again) The beast empire of Rev. 13:1 has reversed what happened at Babel. The fall of Babel split apart mankind so that [it] could not cooperate anymore. The efforts of all the people were frustrated because the different languages prevented them from communicating. So they spread out and filled the whole earth, which is what God had asked them to do in the first place. Since then there have been attempts to try and undo that. Kingdoms have spread out and tried to take all the other major civilizations in the world and combine them all into one kingdom. The first one to do that was a man named Ashur (or Assur), who I think was Nimrod. I spend some time in my book talking about why I believe that. This character, if you go back to Gen. 10:9-10, you see that he founded [correction: ruled] Babel, and Uruk, and some of those first cities down in the plains of Shinar, in southern Mesopotamia. Then he went up to Assyria, the land that is named after him, because he was Ashur or Assur, and he made that nation, and he founded a bunch of cities in what is now Assyria.
This guy—if we look in Ezekiel 31—there is a whole chapter about him. It’s a parable because he’s talked about as a tree, a great tree. The Lord tells Ezekiel [that] this king was the greatest king of the whole world, [the greatest] that will ever be. He was the tallest; he had his branches out over the entire world. Everything else was underneath his canopy. It’s a fascinating chapter that people don’t study very often, but it really contains a lot of important information. Actually, that whole sequence of chapters from Ezek. 28-31 is just rife with prophetic information. In any case, Assur, this great ruler, he already tried very hard to reverse Babel, but he wasn’t allowed to do that. God ordered that he was to be killed, and guess what? He was slain by the sword. Ezekiel 31 makes it clear that it was a sword that killed this king. And he was the greatest king of the world, which goes against what secular historians will tell you. They don’t understand that in the early world after the fall of Babel, there was a man who went around conglomerating all the different people who were trying to spread out, bringing them under one kingdom. Now, obviously, there was only so much he could do, because people spoke different languages, and as they were continuing to spread out I can imagine it was very difficult to try and bring all of that under one umbrella; but he succeeded to an amazing degree according to ch. 31. This guy is the same one that we’re seeing [come up] from the Abyss in Revelation, who has done what he was originally trying to do: he has [in large part] reversed Babel. Because that’s what the chimera of Rev. 13 is showing us. One kingdom has taken over all of the other kingdoms [and is] now ruling over [nearly] the whole world—what we would call the New World Order—it’s taken over [almost] everything. All the different civilizations under one umbrella.
We have these technologies now that allow us to translate between languages very well, and that’s getting better and better every day, so we really are reversing the effects of Babel. That’s incredibly dangerous, of course, because we know what happened the first time.
We’ve seen two beasts, so far: we saw the beast empire that came up out of the sea, and we saw the beast ruler who came up out of the Abyss. The third and last beast to look at is the false prophet. He comes from the earth, not from the sea. So Rev. 13:11 says, “Then I saw another beast rising up out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon. (v. 12) It exercises all authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed.” This beast is another one, but it doesn’t come out of the same place—it’s out of the earth. We know that the sea are the Gentile peoples, so the earth has to be what remains, it has to be God’s people (the kingdom of Israel). A lot of people have a lot of ideas about the false prophet that he’s going to be the Pope or he’s going to be some kind of Muslim leader, or something like, that but from the symbolism we’re given here that’s not true. This guy will actually be an Israelite, and most likely, in my opinion, he will be a Jewish religious leader. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s my best guess because he seems to be acting in the role of a religious leader. Certainly he’s called a prophet. That is a fascinating thing to realize, is that, one of the—and we can go back and connect this to a lot of Old Testament prophecies that talk about how the Israelites will enter into a covenant with this person who they think is their messiah and he’s going to turn on them, and it actually connects that with Death. It says that there’s a covenant [they will make] with Death and Sheol [Isa. 28:14-18]. You have to wonder, what is that talking about? How can the Jews at the end of the age be making a covenant with Sheol? But when you connect it to what’s said in Revelation it makes perfect sense, because this ruler has come up out of the Abyss, and the Abyss is in Sheol. They literally have made a covenant with this [dead] man who has come from Sheol.
TK He can’t be just a literal man can it, it’s got to be something more because when somebody dies and they go to either heaven, or hell, or Sheol, or whatever you want to call it, they don’t normally come back out. God just doesn’t go, “Ah, well, I’ll let this fellow come back to earth again.” So it’s got to be a principality it’s got to be a spirit being that’s bigger than just a man.
AL I don’t think so. I think it’s a man, and part of the reason I think that is because many of the ancient people, the occult leaders, the [Mystery] priesthoods of the ancient people believed that they would be able to bring back this man, eventually. In Egypt his name was Osiris. Now that’s the Greek rendering of it, but the name in Egyptian was Asar, just like it was in Mesopotamia. Assur—it’s the same guy.
TK Was it actually just a person, though, or was it a principality, perhaps, that inhabited a body? Or are we talking about some DNA that’s resurrected, or what? Or is God just going to go, “We’ll let this one particular chap arise out of Sheol, although we keep everyone else locked in there.” What are your thoughts?
AL That’s a good question. Two things: I think that the DNA has been preserved and I think they thought they were going to be able to bring him back with genetic engineering, if we haven’t already. We have the technology now. We can actually do it. I have an article I quote in my book that talks about being able to bring back a dead man because they have his semen on a hand cloth, a handkerchief. So the technology is there.
TK But the spirit of that person can’t come back because the spirit is--
AL That’s right.
TK So they could resurrect somebody from the DNA and resurrect a body, but then what is the spirit that will inhabit that body?
AL I think there are two possibilities. One is some kind of arcane arts, because we know that the Bible tells us that magic and sorcery is possible. The witch of Endor was able to bring up the spirit of—the soul, excuse me—of the prophet Samuel. There are arcane arts that allow people to be brought up at least temporarily in some cases, and we don’t know how that might work together with bringing back the body of someone. The other possibility is just that the Abyss has been opened, because we read in Rev. 20:1 that an angel comes down from heaven with a key to the Abyss and unlocks it. And out of the Abyss comes this ruler named Abaddon, or Apollyon, so somebody is actually released from the Abyss.
Now the Abyss is a separate portion of Sheol. Sheol is broken into different areas: one is called Torment, one is called Paradise, and one is called the Bottomless Pit (or the Abyss). And these things are locked from each other so you can’t go from Paradise to Torment. That’s why, when Yeshua was telling the parable about Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, Abraham looked at the rich man in Torment and he said, We can’t get to you, there’s a gap, there’s a vast chasm between us. Well, that’s the Abyss. Just because you open the Abyss doesn’t necessarily mean souls are going to come up out of Paradise or Torment, but like we were talking about earlier, there maybe something regarding the seed of the Nachash, the seed of the Fallen One, that got mixed with this king. And he may now have an angelic spirit which would go into the Abyss part, not the Torment part, because Torment is [only] for human souls. The Abyss part is where the apostles and the Book of Enoch tell us [that] the fallen angels were locked up. So there’s a little bit of detective work that has to go on, but I think that the general idea is that this person is somehow let out of the Abyss.
TK Yeah, but you’ve just clarified it quite well because it’s not just a normal wicked person that’s gone into Sheol, or hell, or whatever you want to call It. This is some sort of other being.
AL Right, there’s something different about him.
We talked about [how] the false prophet was the third beast. In addition to these three beasts, there’s one other creature in Revelation that we should be aware of, because in Revelation 12 we see a monster with similar characteristics to the beast kingdom. But this is not an earthly beast, it’s a cosmic dragon, and it represents Satan, which we know from Revelation 20, where it says “Satan, the ancient serpent” (v. 2) is the dragon who is going to be thrown [into] and locked up in the Abyss. The dragon is shown prior to that in Revelation 12:3 and is described this way: “Behold, a sign appeared in heaven, a great dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns.” First of all, this is a symbol because it says it’s a sign, not literally a creature. But this sign is of a dragon who has seven heads, ten horns, and ten crowns, and his tail sweeps down a third of the stars, and then he stands before the woman trying to devour [her son] the Messiah when he is born. Well, this is certainly Satan, but a lot of us would think of Satan as being one individual entity. And certainly there is an individual entity at the top of the hierarchy—we know that from Ezekiel 28, and he’s at the top of everything—but there are these Kosmokraters [as well], these other fallen angels who are seraphim, who are also rebelling, who are a part of the Adversary (that’s what ‘Satan’ means, it just means adversary). They are all adversaries of us, and what this symbol is telling us is that it’s made up of these seventy of these [fallen] angels. Which is what we talked about earlier—the Divine Council, that there were seventy that rebelled, seventy nations that were created at Babel—and then again, here in Revelation, we see seventy because seven heads times ten horns [equals] seventy rulers. Then [the dragon] has seven crowns on those heads, and it doesn’t tell us explicitly what that’s about, but I’m pretty sure that those crowns are representing the kings that are the heads of the earthly beast. Behind the beast empire is this angelic group of beings, these powers, these principalities of the air, and the seven crowns they wear would then be linked to the seven heads of that beast empire. That is not explicitly stated, so it’s a little bit of a jump, but I think that’s what it means.
This is a lot of stuff to keep straight, and that’s why people have such difficulty with it; because you have this dragon with seven heads, you have the beast empire with seven heads, then you have a beast king that is part of that empire [and is] one of those heads, and then you have a beast from the earth that is the False Prophet. But hopefully now [it’s] clear that those are different characters. Are you pretty on board with that at this point?
TK Yes, yes. The one thing I always try and bring out ,too, that a lot of people miss, is from Rev. 13:4, where it says “They worshipped the dragon which gave power to the beast, and they worshipped the beast.” But they actually worshipped the dragon, which you’ve just said—and quite rightly so—is Satan. I think that the final religion is going to be a direct worshipping of the dragon, worshipping of Satan; it won’t be some proxy sort of religion. It’s going to be pretty plain.
AL Yeah, they’ll be worshipping the Antichrist but also the power behind him, the Dragon, and they’re going to know that they’re doing that. Now, how is the Dragon going to be presented, I think is the question. I think we touched on that a little bit earlier—that may be part of the alien deception, that people see this as the ruler of this great extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial empire. We’ll just have to wait and see how that all turns out.
TK Exactly, we don’t really know. But I just find it hard to believe it could be somebody worshipping Allah as an Islamic antichrist, which is what a lot of people believe. To me, that doesn’t fit the picture. I think when you look back at Lucifer and his desire for worship, and his pride, he is not going to be happy to be worshipped as a proxy. You’re going to know when you take that mark, when you enter that system, you are going to know exactly who it is you’re worshipping and swearing allegiance to. It’s not just going to be som kind of, Oh well, they were tossed into the lake of fire because they took a mark and they didn’t really understand it. People are going to know exactly what they’re doing, and whether it’s something that changes their DNA, or whatever—I think is a possibility. But there’s a distinction between taking the mark of the beast, and what happens to those people, and the regular people who have died without Christ all the way through history. I think there is a kind of separation in terms of the importance of it. That’s why I don’t think it’ll just be an RFID chip; I think it’s going to be something far more than that. And they’re going to know exactly who it is that they’re worshipping and giving their allegiance to. And yet, whether it is an alien deception—I mean, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but those are kind of my thoughts on that, anyway.
AL Yeah, I’m right on board. I’m afraid the Muslims really have been set up by the fallen ones to be cannon fodder more than anything else. I don’t think we’re going to see Islam rise to be the Mystery Babylon or the end-times empire. We can talk a little bit about why the reborn Rome [not a Muslim coalition] is going to be that fourth beast kingdom, but, based on Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38, and the number of Muslim nations that are going to be attacking Israel [and] getting wiped out in the process, I don’t think they’re going to play a big part after that.
TK I would tend to agree with that.
AL Okay, so, we’ve talked about the beast empire having seven heads, but we haven’t really said what they are other than that they’re kings. Let’s read Revelation 17:8–14 really quickly, or at least part of it, and it will give us more insight. The angel says to John, “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the Abyss and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast because it was, and is not, and is to come. (v. 9) This calls for a mind with wisdom.” Okay, what he’s about to explain, you have to have wisdom to understand. And God made it this way for a reason, so if you want to understand, and you desire—and you don’t have to—but if you desire to understand what’s being said about what’s going to unfold, [then] you must ask God for wisdom. The Bible says he will give it liberally. “The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated. (v. 10) They are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, and the other has not yet come; and when he does come he must remain only a little while. (v. 11) As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth and belongs to the seven, but it goes to destruction. (v. 12) And the ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received royal power, but they are to receive authority as kings for an hour together with the beast. (v. 13) These are of one mind, and they hand over their power and authority to the beast. (v. 14) They will make war on the Lamb...” And it goes on to talk about them making all of these martyrs [out] of the saints. This is confusing because the angel is talking about two beasts simultaneously. He can do this because, remember, kings and their kingdoms are interchangeable. But if you don’t realize that he is switching back and forth, you’re going to get really confused. The seven kings are represented by heads, and those heads are seven rulers throughout history. Those rulers are the ones who have been types of Antichrist.
How do I know they’re not contemporaneous, and they’re [instead] sequential? I know because the angel says [that] some have already lived and died, one is presently ruling at the time of John having this vision, and some are still to come. Probably Emperor Nero was the Antichrist-like caesar over Rome at the time when John was having the vision, and he would be one of the seven kings. But before him came others, probably Pharaoh, Sennacherib... certainly Antiochus Epiphanes, who was a ruler of Greece, because he did exactly what the Antichrist is going to do: he went to the Temple in Jerusalem, defiled it, sacrificed pigs on the altar, and set up the statue of Zeus in the Temple. So that would be an abomination of desolation; he desolated the Temple, and that’s exactly what Antichrist will do, so really we’re seeing a type of Antichrist there. But these seven kings are ones who ruled over different iterations of Babel down through the ages. Out of Babel came Assyria, and Egypt, and Greece, and Phoenicia, and Rome, eventually, and all these really came from the civilization that was created there in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the Age. That’s what these heads are telling us: these are the seven antichrist kings throughout history.
It’s a shift in thinking. Part of the difficulty is that the ten horns on these heads are ruling all at once—these are the kings of that final empire at the end of the Age. They are not spaced out over all of history, and we know that because we can tie it to the ten toes of the statue that Daniel saw, that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about. Those ten toes, Daniel explicitly tells him, are ten kings at the end of the Age. So the ten horns are going to exist later—we haven’t gotten to that point [in history] yet—but the seven heads are spaced out over the whole course of history. According to Daniel, the Antichrist is an eleventh horn who rises among the ten and displaces three of them. So ten minus three leaves seven. So there will be seven horns remaining after the Antichrist displaces three of them. That means he will be the eighth horn; he went from being the eleventh horn to being the eighth horn. And he’s also the eighth head—we go back to Rev. 17:11, as we read before: “As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth but it belongs to the seven.”
No wonder it takes wisdom to understand this, because he’s one of the seven but he’s an eighth. How does that work? The only way it could work is if he came back. He was one of the seven and he came back. He’s not only the eighth head, he’s also the eighth horn. Eight, of course, in Bible numerology is interesting because it’s the first after the cycle of seven. The first day of the week is the eighth day as well as the first day. He who is number one becomes number eight, and that is this ancient king called Ashur/Assur, or Nimrod.
TK Mmmm, very, very interesting, Alexander. If you [could] maybe wrap up with any final thoughts on this, and what you think is the main thing people should take out of this today.
AL I think they need to be aware that, based on what we have just studied here, somebody is coming back, someone who ruled the world before. There is a resurrection [coming], and that shouldn’t surprise us because we know that he is the false messiah, and the false messiah copies—he mimics—everything that the real Messiah has done, or at least a lot of it (we see that throughout many verses). Just as the real Messiah was resurrected, this person will also be resurrected. Now, it’s not the same type of resurrection; it’s not by the power of God, it’s probably by the power of [genetic] engineering and arcane arts, or something like that, but nonetheless he’s going to come back.
The ancient Egyptians said that they preserved his efflux under Giza. They actually believed—by preserving his genetic material—that one day he would come back, which is why they have all these myths about Osiris the mummy rising back up, and they worshipped that every year. Year after year they played it out like one of the appointed times; it was a role playing thing. So they expected him to come back, and they still do—the Occult still believes that. And if we’re not ready for that, we’re going to be very, very confused. A lot of Christians will be taken off guard, and that could be a big part of the Great Deception: “Wait a minute, someone’s been resurrected? The Bible never told us about this. We thought there was only one resurrection, and yet this guy has been brought back as well!” But the Bible does actually tell us about it, and that’s what I’m trying to help people to understand. It tells you what kingdoms are going to come, and it tells you the king that’s going to come, and he was here before so don’t be deceived.
TK That’s really good advice, and I think we’re going to have to come back fairly soon and do another show because there’s so much more that we could discuss. We’ve hardly scratched the surface in terms of what the various kingdoms are, and what roles do America and Russia play, and the Middle East, and all of these things. All of this [goes] back to Daniel, as well.
Alexander, it’s been absolutely awesome having you on today, but let’s schedule to do another show really soon, if that’s okay with you.
AL That would be great, I would love to.
TK Before we go, could you give our listeners your website and the name of your book?
AL Absolutely: It’s www.watchmanalexander.com. There are links to my book, my course, podcast, and blog on the website. Also, please sign up for the newsletter while you’re there. Scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages on the website, and you will see a link to sign up for the newsletter and receive a free eBook. You don’t have to stay on the newsletter, either; you can unsubscribe, if you want to, after getting the book, but I would encourage you to be subscribed so that you’ll know when I release new material. I am currently working on a new book called the Prophecy Cheat Sheet, as well as working on the second volume of Leviathan’s Ruse a little bit. But more than that, my efforts right now are going into creating the first few chapters of a novel based on the research that I did for Leviathan’s Ruse. It will be historical fiction.
AL It is difficult. Some of it is simpler than other parts of it, but certainly it’s something that requires a lot of study, requires a lot of discussion, and it’s great that we can be part of the same family and the same kingdom, and we can have peace with one another while disagreeing on some of these matters. And then over time I think the Spirit guides us each in the things He wants us to zero in on and the ways He wants us to adjust our view of things. I fully believe that the Lord will guide us each to the place we need to be as long as we are diligent to study His Word.
TK The main thing is to be diligent and keeping our eyes open because, whatever way you look at it, it certainly appears that Bible prophecy is unfolding rather rapidly as events change so quickly in the world. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle when you see all the pieces being put into place. We haven’t got all of the pieces in place yet, but there are some real ‘ah-ha’ moments.
AL Yeah, and so much is happening in the news just recently that it’s hard to keep up with it all. I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing biblical prophecy unfold from day to day, but we are seeing a lot of things being set in place. The stage is being set in a lot of ways, so that’s pretty exciting to watch.
TK I agree with that, and the news does change rapidly. There seems to be so many new developments almost hour by hour on some days, and it’s hard to keep up. But yet we know that God is in control of end times events and where we are heading, and that’s the most comforting thing. It’s not like some out of control train wreck, that no one’s got the steering.
AL Right. Thank God we know basically where this stuff is going. I mean, I don’t know how people who don’t take the Bible seriously can deal with the calamity that occurs; you know, all the unknowns of the world. Just living here is a scary, scary venture if you don’t know how it’s all going to turn out. And of course we know the real end of the story is that those who trust in the Lord will be resurrected—we are going to get eternal life and there is going to be eternal peace no matter what’s going on here, we have that to look forward to—but in the meantime it’s nice to know basically what’s going to happen. We have a sequence of events that we can generally hold to even if there are disagreements over the details, and in that we know that God has it all planned already. It’s all taken care of; He is not surprised by any of it. He’s written the story already, and there’s great peace in that, even joy, to know that we can glorify God by showing people that He’s already talked about this, He’s outside of all this stuff, and how great that He is to let us know ahead-of-time what’s going to happen.
TK I really don’t understand or know how people who don’t have God actually do cope. I don’t know, I don’t think I could do it. I wouldn’t want to do it, for a start. But the ultimate thing is, as you say, we know the end of the story. And we know that our salvation, if we trust in the Lord, is safe and secure, and it doesn’t matter what happens in the world. No one can take that away.
AL Exactly, exactly.
[At this juncture, the speakers spend a moment chatting about coughs, colds, and seasons.]
TK Where are we going to take this today Alex?
AL I thought we could talk about the different beasts in prophecy, because this is an area where I continually see people struggling. There’s a lot of confusion. It’s a difficult area of eschatology to dive into, so this discussion is going to require everyone to really put their thinking caps on... or else run away and come back later when you’re ready for it, because this is going to get pretty complicated. But I think if you just take it, you know, one step at a time, which is what I’m hoping to do—just give you one little bite at a time—then by the end of it you’re going to understand what these beasts are. And it will clear up a lot about the Book of Revelation in particular because the narrative switches back and forth between different beasts, sometimes without even telling you, which makes it very complicated (but we all know eschatology can be really cryptic, so that’s not a surprise). But it is hard to follow, so hopefully this is going to help people to get it.
TK Sounds good, so take it away. Where do we begin?
AL I think we should begin with the fact that beasts, prophetically speaking, represent men or collections of men who are spiritual brutes. There’s a lot of symbolism we will be covering today. I’ll tell you each time there’s a symbol that we need to interpret. Usually the Bible—I would say always, really—the Bible interprets itself, so we just need to figure out what the scriptures have to say about these things, even though there might not be in though we are looking at one particular passage it might not be right there but somewhere else in scripture, sometimes well hidden, but somewhere you are going to find an explanation for that symbol.
When it comes to beasts, I think we find that explanation in… well, as we go we’ll kind of see it play out instead of me trying to explain it right off the bat, but I’ll just prep you by saying that the beasts represent people who are spiritually opposed to God. They’re wild; they’re set against the Lord instead of being docile towards Him, and they’re unwilling to being subservient to the Most High. So beasts can be a person or can be a whole collection of people. We’re going to see beast kingdoms and beast kings. It’s kind of funny that in the Book of Daniel we see one of the kings of a beast kingdom, whose name was Nebuchadnezzar, actually get turned into a beast, quite literally, for several years, because he simply wouldn’t humble himself. He was continually prideful even after God showed him some miraculous things through the Jewish people, he still... he would acknowledge YHVH the Most High, but he would also still acknowledge all of the other gods and worship them as well, and so finally the time came when God said, “I’m going to knock you down about twelve pegs, and you’re going to be a literal beast in the field eating grass for several years.” So that was an interesting way of making what was figurative, literal.
Let’s start out with Rev. 13:1. We are read this: “Then I stood on the sand of the sea (this is John seeing this vision). I saw a beast coming up out of sea having ten horns and seven heads. On his horns were ten crowns and on his heads were blasphemous names. (v.2) The beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority.” In that passage we see a beast that is characterised as a few different beasts put together. Does that make you think of anything, Tony?
TK Well, various different kingdoms that we see arising today, but the identity of some of them is a little bit of a mystery I think, well to me, anyway.
AL It is. It’s an area of some conjecture, but what’s interesting—and you’re right—is that they’re kingdoms, and these kingdoms are actually mentioned before. If we go back to Daniel 7, we find these very same animals are being used to represent three different kingdoms. So the one John saw was just one beast, but it had the characteristics of these other three beasts, so we would call it a chimera, a mixture. But in Daniel’s vision there are four different beasts and they rise from a churning sea. Now the Rev. 13 beast is an amalgamation of these four beasts, and we’re going to find out soon what the seven heads of John’s beast represent, but in this vision with Daniel, only one of the beasts has multiple heads. So let me turn back to Dan. 7 and we will read that together. So he says: (v.2) “ I saw in a vision by night and behold the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles wings then as I looked it’s wings were plucked off and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man and a mind of a man was given to it. And behold another beast a second one like a bear. It was raised up on one side it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth and it was told 'Arise devour much flesh!' After this I looked and behold another like a leopard with four wings of a bird on its back and the beast had four heads and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions and behold a fourth beast terrifying, dreadful and exceedingly strong; it had great iron teeth. And it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet; it was different from all the beasts that were before it and it had ten horns. I considered the horns and behold there came up among them another horn a little one before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots; and behold in this horn were the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things.” He goes on to describe this horn in [such] a way that we understand this is the end-times ruler, the last king of all the empires of man (and we would call him the Antichrist). And he is the one who will butt heads with the Ancient of Days, the Lord Himself, and the Messiah will come down and destroy him. But that’s all we need for right now.
So we see the kingdoms represented by different types of animals, and the number of heads, if you add them up, sums to seven. So there’s four heads of the leopard beast, and each of the other ones has [a single] head, so together that’s seven heads. Which is not exactly the same seven heads that we’re going to find in Revelation, but it’s just interesting that the number [seven] pops up over and over. It’s an important number. The first thing to realize is that these beasts come up out of a churning sea, or a great sea that has been stirred up by the winds of heaven. What does that mean? The angel who was speaking to John in Rev. 17 provided the key to understanding the symbolism of the sea, and you will find the same symbolism in other books as well. Recently I have been teaching the Book of 2 Baruch, which is a rediscovered scripture—what I would call scripture—that was almost lost to time, but it has come back to us, and it’s an amazing scripture. In there we also find the same symbolism of a sea in a dream that was given to Baruch. Now here’s the explanation of it in Rev. 17, v. 15: “And the angel said to me, The waters that you saw where the prostitute is seated are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages.” So the waters of the sea represent all of these peoples and nations. Now the word there, if we were to use it, the Hebrew word would be Goyim, the Nations, meaning those other than Israel, which is made clear later on, that this is not including God’s people. This is only the Gentile people, the ones that are opposed, which is why the woman we call Mystery Babylon, Babylon the great, is sitting on these people—because she is ruling over these nations, these Goyim. She’s not ruling over God’s kingdom, because the Messiah is the One who rules over us.
The ancient peoples, including the authors of the Bible, equated the sea with chaos. You can go back to ancient writings from a lot of different cultures and you’ll find that they always considered the sea [to be] Chaos, and it was usually represented by a sea serpent, which is what the Bible would call Leviathan. In any case, chaos is just always connected with the sea because the sea lacks structure. It's constantly moving and changing. It doesn’t have any stability. Likewise, the Gentile nations don’t have stability; they’re not at peace [like those who are] in the kingdom of God. They’re constantly in this state of flux, so that’s why that symbol is used. In Daniel’s vision, the sea is not its normal self; the sea is being churned up, it’s raging. So what that tells us is that we’re looking at a time of global calamity where, knowing what the angel told to John—that these waters are people—that means the churning of the waters indicates people who are in calamity, [in] chaos, [and] there’s some sort of a large shift going on, probably worldwide. The sea, as we have said, is figurative, which goes right along with the fact that these beasts are figurative, too. Everything in this vision is an analogy or symbol; it’s not to be taken literally. But then the angel does go on to explain it literally to Daniel.
So if we jump down to Dan. 7:17, we have the angel’s explanation of this, and he says, “These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise in the earth.” They’re four kings. So, what I’m about to say here is theory, I can’t really be dogmatic about it, but I think these kings are angelic principalities. I don’t think that these are earthly kings. I think that they—remember the last time I was on here I mentioned something about the Kosmokraters, these fallen angelic rulers, members of the Divine Council, as Michael Heiser would call it, who have rebelled against God and are in this lawsuit against Him? Well, I think it’s these Kosmokraters. And at the Tower of Babel seventy people groups were created; God divided all the people by giving them new languages, and there were seventy of them, if we go back to the book of Genesis. And in the book of Deuteronomy we are told that God assigned those seventy people groups of the Goyim to the Sons of God, or the B’nai Elohim, which the Greeks call Kosmokraters. So those guys are the little ‘g’ gods of the nations, and they’re ruling over all of the gentiles right now. I think that these four kings represented by beasts are four of those Kosmokraters that get their shot at things in the Last Days. So I think [these] are fallen sons of God that we’re looking at here, but then particular characteristics of the beasts are going to be earthly kings, but we will see that here in a bit.
TK So do those four fallen angels, do they have a certain range, like they sit as a principality over a certain area? Is that how it works, do you think?
AL I think over a people group, I would say, probably not a geographical area.
TK Okay.
AL There’s an interesting passage elsewhere in Daniel [10:13] where it talks about a fallen one who was not permitting one of the holy angels to get through to Daniel. He was called the prince of Persia.
TK That’s what came to my mind as you were talking about it.
AL Exactly. So he was the prince of that people called [Persians]. Later on, in the New Testament, we find Paul talking about the principalities and the powers of the air—this is what he’s referring to. He’s talking about these spiritual rulers who are the bad guys. I mean, in context, when you read that, you realize he’s talking about the Enemy. Together they rule the nations and they are all set against God and His kingdom.
So, even though these beasts are kings of some sort, they also represent kingdoms. At the same time that they’re kings, they’re also kingdoms. Every kingdom has a king and every king has a kingdom. And this is made clear by the angel a few verses later: if we skip down to v. 23 we see the angel say, “As for the fourth beast, it shall be a fourth kingdom on earth which shall be different from all the kingdoms.” So the angel has just told Daniel that these beasts are four kings, but then he goes on in a few verses to say that the fourth of these beasts is a fourth kingdom, and that’s tipping us off to the fact that these are both. It’s either-or. King and kingdom are interchangeable in Scripture. That’s really critical to understand when we are trying to interpret Revelation 13. So let’s go back to that.
TK Just before you do, I noticed that [in Dan. 7:23], that “fourth beast shall devour the whole earth,” so it’s not just a small kingdom.
AL Right, right. This is the one who takes over everything. In Rev. 13:3 we read this: “One of the heads looked like it had been wounded fatally. His fatal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled at the beast. (v. 4) They worshiped the dragon because he gave his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” So in these two verses we see a subtle shift happen from talking about a nation to talking about a king, because we were introduced to this seven-headed beast that comes up out of the sea (like Daniels’s beast), but in this case he is being worshiped as—evidently—an individual. Nobody worships a kingdom.
TK Nah.
AL I’ve never seen anybody worship a kingdom. You worship kings sometimes, because kings claim to have divine right to rule, or at least they almost always did in the past, so you could definitely worship a divine king, or you could worship the power behind the king, but you wouldn’t worship his kingdom. So the heads are individual earthly kings of this great empire. We’re going to learn more about in a little bit, but I just wanted to set that up right now.
The head that was healed—it says one of the heads was healed, and he was previously dead because his wound was fatal—this king or this head was totally destroyed (it was a fatal wound), and yet he lives. That’s an important distinction to make because we need to realize that a head of this symbolic beast was slain, not necessarily that the person was slain by a head wound. Okay? There’s a lot of people get that mixed up.
TK I agree. I’m glad you clarified that, because you see some people looking for someone to be assassinated and then come back to life. Some people say it will be a false miracle or whatever, but I don’t think that’s actually what it’s talking about.
AL Let’s come back to that in a little bit because there’s another verse that has to do with that. Actually, let’s just jump down to it right now. Rev. 13:12, it talks about this other beast we will get to in a minute, but he causes the inhabitants of the world to worship this first beast “whose mortal wound was healed” (v. 12). This person who is being worshiped did have a mortal wound, he did die. And then, again—let me see if I can find it—there it is. Verse twelve says he had a mortal wound that was healed, and then v. 14 kind of reiterates that, but it gives us an additional piece of information because it says that he was wounded by the sword and yet lived. One of the heads is slain by a sword, but this can’ be talking about a person because nobody has multiple heads. This is not a king with polycephaly. This is a king among other kings, and one of this group of kings is killed and then comes back. This is why people are worshiping him.
The individual beast that we have shifted to here in ch. 13—we started with the beast empire, which we know because in Daniel it explains [that] it’s four different kingdoms, and they are all merged together somehow—and then, as we are talking about this beast empire, the narrative shifts to talking about an individual beast, who we call the Antichrist. And this beast doesn’t come up out of the sea, he comes up from the Abyss. That’s an important distinction to make as well because the beast empire is said to come from the sea. Both in Daniel and in Revelation it comes up out of the sea. But the individual beast who is going to be the ruler who is worshiped, this beast is from the Abyss.
So, end-times Babel is this empire that has taken over the other kingdoms: the leopard kingdom, the lion with the wings, and the bear kingdom are all subsumed under this end-times kingdom, which you might call the New World Order, but is more accurately called Babel (the end-times Babel). It will also be Rome, but we’ll get back around to that later. Rome is an incarnation of Babel, and Rome never really died. And we’re looking at a time here very shortly when Rome will grow again in power, and it will be that fourth kingdom that Daniel saw that ends up consuming [the others]—because it says in Daniel [that] it trampled down the rest of them. it took over the other beast kingdoms and incorporated them. Assimilated, we should say. [Actually, assimilated is not the right word. I was looking for subjected.]
The Abyss is different from the sea [as a symbol in prophecy] because the Abyss is not a figurative thing. It’s actually a real geographical feature of the world, and we know that from studying the rest of Scripture. The Abyss, also called the bottomless pit, is a part of Sheol, it’s a part of the Underworld. Whoever this is that is being represented as the beast who gets worshiped, he comes from the Underworld, from Sheol, which is where the disembodied souls of the dead go to rest. So this is very intriguing, and anybody who doesn’t get worked up, so excited,about figuring this out is not really paying attention, because it’s quite the mystery. Okay, let’s go to Rev. 11:7 really quickly because it mentions this guy. It’s talking about the two witnesses who testify in Jerusalem for three-and-a-half years, and it says, “When they have finished their testimony, the beast that arises from the Abyss will make war on them and conquer them and kill them.” Are you familiar with this? Do you know what this is talking about?
TK Yeah, Abaddon [Rev. 9:11] or—I’m looking at it right here. I’m interested to know what your thoughts on it will be, because everyone has a slightly different view on it. Personally, I start to wonder and tie it in with the whole alien deception and all that as well. Anyway, that‘s my thoughts without going too far into them.
AL I do think that the whole ancient aliens phenomenon does have something to do with how it all unfolds at the end. I would agree with that. But in this chapter, I think most theologians are agreed, and I’m on board with them, that this character is the Antichrist, and it’s he who will kill the two witnesses. Lots of other people will try, [but] they won’t succeed—the witnesses will be able to kill them with fire whenever they’re attacked. Finally, after three-and-a-half years, the Antichrist himself will attack them, and they will either not defend themselves or for some reason will no longer have their powers. I’m assuming [they will] realize that the time has come, and like Yeshua, they are going to lay themselves down as martyrs. But he is able to kill them, and he hangs them up for everyone to see, and then they’re resurrected after three days. And then [at] that point, if you correlate it with what we see in the Book of Daniel about the last seven years, or the 70th week of Daniel—hopefully most people have heard of that, the 70th week of Daniel, which a lot of people call the tribulation period (the Bible doesn’t actually call it that, but the 70th week is certainly a term which is there)—and that last seven years, in the middle of it is when these witnesses would be killed, and then the Antichrist will set himself up as God in the Temple. We know the he will desolate the Temple, he will bring an end to the sacrifices, he will break a covenant that he has made with many people, and that’s the point at which he [will claim] to be God himself and [desire] to be worshipped in the place of God. He will accomplish (at least in an earthly sense) what Isaiah 14 talks about, of the king of Babel wanting to ascend the hill of God and set himself up in the place of God.
TK Which, to me, I struggle to see how any earthly person, normal earthly person would be worshipped in this day and age, which is why I wonder about if he’s a fallen angel, angelic (sort of) slash alien deception. [I wonder] whether this person will not be fully human, be more than just a human.
AL I think there’s a very good argument to be made that when it talks about the seed of Satan in the first chapters of Genesis (what is it, Gen. 3?) right after the curse, when God says the seed of the woman will be the one to redeem, it’s also said that the seed of the Serpent—the Nachash, who I would equate with Satan, whether that was him or not, he was in his kingdom, right? he was one of the fallen ones—would have his head crushed by the righteous seed. And I would say there is good reason to believe that there is something physical about that, where the DNA, or whatever code angels have, is somehow mixed with a man to create this hybrid. Just like we had hybrids in the pre-flood world--
TK Yep, yep, that’s kinda where I’m coming from, too. So I’m glad to know that you’re on that page as well, cool.
AL Yeah, I think there’s a lot of room to conjecture about how that could possibly happen, but it’s a good possibility.
TK I think that the point that I want to make is, if we do come up with some sort of alien disclosure in all of that, that people aren’t taken aback by it (if that’s the way it goes). Not that it necessarily will, but I do think that’s a possibility and people will be fooled by some sort of a disclosure or a system that says that man was brought to earth or put here and bred here from some far-off planet, and all of that kind of stuff. Basically because evolution is falling apart as an argument, so they’ll have a different one. How it plays out I’m not exactly sure, but if that is the way it is to come about, I could see a lot of people falling for it if they weren’t aware that this is a distinct possibility, as a fallen angel kind of masterminded scheme.
AL Absolutely. Well, I don’t know if the argument will be that these entities will be extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial, but either way, I think they’re going to tell us that there is a battle going on between two different species of these ascended beings, these higher beings from somewhere. That really fits right in with what the occult has been teaching forever, which is that the angel that was in the Garden tempting Adam and Eve to take of the tree was really a good guy. He was probably the leader of this faction of immortals that wanted to help Adam and Eve to ascend, to become enlightened. The Gnostic religion in its different forms has always taught that YHVH of the Bible is actually the bad guy. He [YHVH] wants to oppress, He wants to keep us under His rule and not let us become greater than we are; whereas His enemy, Lucifer, the Light-bearer, he wants to bring us illumination and help us to evolve into gods. “You will be as gods.” That’s what he said in the Garden. I think that’s exactly what he’s going to say in the end times, too, but just with a twist of: these gods throughout history are actually this really advanced species that is either from a different plane of existence or a different planet.
TK It’s interesting that that’s the way the transhumanists are going as well, and seeking to become like God, too, which is a whole other thing and I don’t want to derail us.
AL Yeah, we could go off on that for a while. Okay, back to talking about this man from the Abyss. So the guy in Rev. 11:7 who kills the Two Witnesses—it says he rises from the Abyss, or he has risen from it, before [the time when] he comes and takes out the Two Witnesses. That’s very important because we are talking about the same person as we found in Rev. 13, who is going to be worshiped by the whole world. Then, in Rev. 17:8 we read (the angel is talking to John): “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the Abyss and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast.” There’s that word again. They’re going to marvel at this guy because [he] was, and is not, and is to come. So the angel is explaining to John why it is that the whole world marvels after this person who is a beast ruler. [The angel] says it’s because he was (he existed at one point in the past), he is not (that’s talking about John’s present day, not our present day, because this was him speaking to the apostle at that time, so about 90 AD), then he is to come [in John’s future]. So currently, in John’s time, he did not exist, but he did before and he will again. That is kind of the crux of my whole book, Leviathan’s Ruse—or it’s one of the big things in there—is understanding this verse and understanding why this character is someone who comes back. The Antichrist is not someone who comes on the scene for the first time at the end of time; he is someone who has been here before as one of these great rulers, one of the seven heads, and he will return. But I will get into that a little deeper in just a minute.
Again, this ties back into Rev. 13:3-4, where it talks about this man being worshiped. And we need to realize [that] this is why he’s worshipped. It’s important to me that everybody understands that Revelation is not chronological. Now I know a lot of people are going to get thrown for a loop by that because there have been so many teachers that have said it is chronological, and I would say most Dispensationalist prophecy buffs would teach you, “Yes, this is mostly linear with maybe one little section that is parenthetical, but basically it’s chronological.” Actually, no, it’s not. It’s in sections that are organized thematically, and then within those thematic sections it is chronological. But they are giving us a view of events of the end—different stretches of time leading up to the end and focusing on particular things in each one of those segments. It’s too much to tell people everything that’s going on when you’re trying to teach things topically. So you take one stretch of time and you focus on one particular line of action. Then you step back and you start on another point of time where it makes the most sense to start, and you focus on another line of action. And that’s what’s happening in the Book of Revelation. And this is really great evidence that we just looked at, because that’s what is happening [there]. In chapter 17, which is toward the end of Revelation, we’re finding the angel saying that this beast is yet to come in the sequence of events involving the whore of Babylon and the ten kings of Babylon (or Babel). So he is not yet on the scene in the way the angel is describing this to John, and yet the same person who comes up from the Abyss—which is the same language which we find in Rev. 17: 8, yet if we go back to Rev. 11, that guy from the Abyss—is already there, already in a position of power, and he kills the Two Witnesses. So again, it’s by theme. It’s introducing this character to us earlier in the book but then it’s giving us more information about him from a different [chronological] standpoint later in Revelation. Maybe sometime we can talk more about all the different things in Revelation that tell us it’s not chronological, and we can kind of break it apart and see where all the different chunks are.
Moving on: (Speaking of Babel again) The beast empire of Rev. 13:1 has reversed what happened at Babel. The fall of Babel split apart mankind so that [it] could not cooperate anymore. The efforts of all the people were frustrated because the different languages prevented them from communicating. So they spread out and filled the whole earth, which is what God had asked them to do in the first place. Since then there have been attempts to try and undo that. Kingdoms have spread out and tried to take all the other major civilizations in the world and combine them all into one kingdom. The first one to do that was a man named Ashur (or Assur), who I think was Nimrod. I spend some time in my book talking about why I believe that. This character, if you go back to Gen. 10:9-10, you see that he founded [correction: ruled] Babel, and Uruk, and some of those first cities down in the plains of Shinar, in southern Mesopotamia. Then he went up to Assyria, the land that is named after him, because he was Ashur or Assur, and he made that nation, and he founded a bunch of cities in what is now Assyria.
This guy—if we look in Ezekiel 31—there is a whole chapter about him. It’s a parable because he’s talked about as a tree, a great tree. The Lord tells Ezekiel [that] this king was the greatest king of the whole world, [the greatest] that will ever be. He was the tallest; he had his branches out over the entire world. Everything else was underneath his canopy. It’s a fascinating chapter that people don’t study very often, but it really contains a lot of important information. Actually, that whole sequence of chapters from Ezek. 28-31 is just rife with prophetic information. In any case, Assur, this great ruler, he already tried very hard to reverse Babel, but he wasn’t allowed to do that. God ordered that he was to be killed, and guess what? He was slain by the sword. Ezekiel 31 makes it clear that it was a sword that killed this king. And he was the greatest king of the world, which goes against what secular historians will tell you. They don’t understand that in the early world after the fall of Babel, there was a man who went around conglomerating all the different people who were trying to spread out, bringing them under one kingdom. Now, obviously, there was only so much he could do, because people spoke different languages, and as they were continuing to spread out I can imagine it was very difficult to try and bring all of that under one umbrella; but he succeeded to an amazing degree according to ch. 31. This guy is the same one that we’re seeing [come up] from the Abyss in Revelation, who has done what he was originally trying to do: he has [in large part] reversed Babel. Because that’s what the chimera of Rev. 13 is showing us. One kingdom has taken over all of the other kingdoms [and is] now ruling over [nearly] the whole world—what we would call the New World Order—it’s taken over [almost] everything. All the different civilizations under one umbrella.
We have these technologies now that allow us to translate between languages very well, and that’s getting better and better every day, so we really are reversing the effects of Babel. That’s incredibly dangerous, of course, because we know what happened the first time.
We’ve seen two beasts, so far: we saw the beast empire that came up out of the sea, and we saw the beast ruler who came up out of the Abyss. The third and last beast to look at is the false prophet. He comes from the earth, not from the sea. So Rev. 13:11 says, “Then I saw another beast rising up out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon. (v. 12) It exercises all authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed.” This beast is another one, but it doesn’t come out of the same place—it’s out of the earth. We know that the sea are the Gentile peoples, so the earth has to be what remains, it has to be God’s people (the kingdom of Israel). A lot of people have a lot of ideas about the false prophet that he’s going to be the Pope or he’s going to be some kind of Muslim leader, or something like, that but from the symbolism we’re given here that’s not true. This guy will actually be an Israelite, and most likely, in my opinion, he will be a Jewish religious leader. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s my best guess because he seems to be acting in the role of a religious leader. Certainly he’s called a prophet. That is a fascinating thing to realize, is that, one of the—and we can go back and connect this to a lot of Old Testament prophecies that talk about how the Israelites will enter into a covenant with this person who they think is their messiah and he’s going to turn on them, and it actually connects that with Death. It says that there’s a covenant [they will make] with Death and Sheol [Isa. 28:14-18]. You have to wonder, what is that talking about? How can the Jews at the end of the age be making a covenant with Sheol? But when you connect it to what’s said in Revelation it makes perfect sense, because this ruler has come up out of the Abyss, and the Abyss is in Sheol. They literally have made a covenant with this [dead] man who has come from Sheol.
TK He can’t be just a literal man can it, it’s got to be something more because when somebody dies and they go to either heaven, or hell, or Sheol, or whatever you want to call it, they don’t normally come back out. God just doesn’t go, “Ah, well, I’ll let this fellow come back to earth again.” So it’s got to be a principality it’s got to be a spirit being that’s bigger than just a man.
AL I don’t think so. I think it’s a man, and part of the reason I think that is because many of the ancient people, the occult leaders, the [Mystery] priesthoods of the ancient people believed that they would be able to bring back this man, eventually. In Egypt his name was Osiris. Now that’s the Greek rendering of it, but the name in Egyptian was Asar, just like it was in Mesopotamia. Assur—it’s the same guy.
TK Was it actually just a person, though, or was it a principality, perhaps, that inhabited a body? Or are we talking about some DNA that’s resurrected, or what? Or is God just going to go, “We’ll let this one particular chap arise out of Sheol, although we keep everyone else locked in there.” What are your thoughts?
AL That’s a good question. Two things: I think that the DNA has been preserved and I think they thought they were going to be able to bring him back with genetic engineering, if we haven’t already. We have the technology now. We can actually do it. I have an article I quote in my book that talks about being able to bring back a dead man because they have his semen on a hand cloth, a handkerchief. So the technology is there.
TK But the spirit of that person can’t come back because the spirit is--
AL That’s right.
TK So they could resurrect somebody from the DNA and resurrect a body, but then what is the spirit that will inhabit that body?
AL I think there are two possibilities. One is some kind of arcane arts, because we know that the Bible tells us that magic and sorcery is possible. The witch of Endor was able to bring up the spirit of—the soul, excuse me—of the prophet Samuel. There are arcane arts that allow people to be brought up at least temporarily in some cases, and we don’t know how that might work together with bringing back the body of someone. The other possibility is just that the Abyss has been opened, because we read in Rev. 20:1 that an angel comes down from heaven with a key to the Abyss and unlocks it. And out of the Abyss comes this ruler named Abaddon, or Apollyon, so somebody is actually released from the Abyss.
Now the Abyss is a separate portion of Sheol. Sheol is broken into different areas: one is called Torment, one is called Paradise, and one is called the Bottomless Pit (or the Abyss). And these things are locked from each other so you can’t go from Paradise to Torment. That’s why, when Yeshua was telling the parable about Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, Abraham looked at the rich man in Torment and he said, We can’t get to you, there’s a gap, there’s a vast chasm between us. Well, that’s the Abyss. Just because you open the Abyss doesn’t necessarily mean souls are going to come up out of Paradise or Torment, but like we were talking about earlier, there maybe something regarding the seed of the Nachash, the seed of the Fallen One, that got mixed with this king. And he may now have an angelic spirit which would go into the Abyss part, not the Torment part, because Torment is [only] for human souls. The Abyss part is where the apostles and the Book of Enoch tell us [that] the fallen angels were locked up. So there’s a little bit of detective work that has to go on, but I think that the general idea is that this person is somehow let out of the Abyss.
TK Yeah, but you’ve just clarified it quite well because it’s not just a normal wicked person that’s gone into Sheol, or hell, or whatever you want to call It. This is some sort of other being.
AL Right, there’s something different about him.
We talked about [how] the false prophet was the third beast. In addition to these three beasts, there’s one other creature in Revelation that we should be aware of, because in Revelation 12 we see a monster with similar characteristics to the beast kingdom. But this is not an earthly beast, it’s a cosmic dragon, and it represents Satan, which we know from Revelation 20, where it says “Satan, the ancient serpent” (v. 2) is the dragon who is going to be thrown [into] and locked up in the Abyss. The dragon is shown prior to that in Revelation 12:3 and is described this way: “Behold, a sign appeared in heaven, a great dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns.” First of all, this is a symbol because it says it’s a sign, not literally a creature. But this sign is of a dragon who has seven heads, ten horns, and ten crowns, and his tail sweeps down a third of the stars, and then he stands before the woman trying to devour [her son] the Messiah when he is born. Well, this is certainly Satan, but a lot of us would think of Satan as being one individual entity. And certainly there is an individual entity at the top of the hierarchy—we know that from Ezekiel 28, and he’s at the top of everything—but there are these Kosmokraters [as well], these other fallen angels who are seraphim, who are also rebelling, who are a part of the Adversary (that’s what ‘Satan’ means, it just means adversary). They are all adversaries of us, and what this symbol is telling us is that it’s made up of these seventy of these [fallen] angels. Which is what we talked about earlier—the Divine Council, that there were seventy that rebelled, seventy nations that were created at Babel—and then again, here in Revelation, we see seventy because seven heads times ten horns [equals] seventy rulers. Then [the dragon] has seven crowns on those heads, and it doesn’t tell us explicitly what that’s about, but I’m pretty sure that those crowns are representing the kings that are the heads of the earthly beast. Behind the beast empire is this angelic group of beings, these powers, these principalities of the air, and the seven crowns they wear would then be linked to the seven heads of that beast empire. That is not explicitly stated, so it’s a little bit of a jump, but I think that’s what it means.
This is a lot of stuff to keep straight, and that’s why people have such difficulty with it; because you have this dragon with seven heads, you have the beast empire with seven heads, then you have a beast king that is part of that empire [and is] one of those heads, and then you have a beast from the earth that is the False Prophet. But hopefully now [it’s] clear that those are different characters. Are you pretty on board with that at this point?
TK Yes, yes. The one thing I always try and bring out ,too, that a lot of people miss, is from Rev. 13:4, where it says “They worshipped the dragon which gave power to the beast, and they worshipped the beast.” But they actually worshipped the dragon, which you’ve just said—and quite rightly so—is Satan. I think that the final religion is going to be a direct worshipping of the dragon, worshipping of Satan; it won’t be some proxy sort of religion. It’s going to be pretty plain.
AL Yeah, they’ll be worshipping the Antichrist but also the power behind him, the Dragon, and they’re going to know that they’re doing that. Now, how is the Dragon going to be presented, I think is the question. I think we touched on that a little bit earlier—that may be part of the alien deception, that people see this as the ruler of this great extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial empire. We’ll just have to wait and see how that all turns out.
TK Exactly, we don’t really know. But I just find it hard to believe it could be somebody worshipping Allah as an Islamic antichrist, which is what a lot of people believe. To me, that doesn’t fit the picture. I think when you look back at Lucifer and his desire for worship, and his pride, he is not going to be happy to be worshipped as a proxy. You’re going to know when you take that mark, when you enter that system, you are going to know exactly who it is you’re worshipping and swearing allegiance to. It’s not just going to be som kind of, Oh well, they were tossed into the lake of fire because they took a mark and they didn’t really understand it. People are going to know exactly what they’re doing, and whether it’s something that changes their DNA, or whatever—I think is a possibility. But there’s a distinction between taking the mark of the beast, and what happens to those people, and the regular people who have died without Christ all the way through history. I think there is a kind of separation in terms of the importance of it. That’s why I don’t think it’ll just be an RFID chip; I think it’s going to be something far more than that. And they’re going to know exactly who it is that they’re worshipping and giving their allegiance to. And yet, whether it is an alien deception—I mean, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but those are kind of my thoughts on that, anyway.
AL Yeah, I’m right on board. I’m afraid the Muslims really have been set up by the fallen ones to be cannon fodder more than anything else. I don’t think we’re going to see Islam rise to be the Mystery Babylon or the end-times empire. We can talk a little bit about why the reborn Rome [not a Muslim coalition] is going to be that fourth beast kingdom, but, based on Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38, and the number of Muslim nations that are going to be attacking Israel [and] getting wiped out in the process, I don’t think they’re going to play a big part after that.
TK I would tend to agree with that.
AL Okay, so, we’ve talked about the beast empire having seven heads, but we haven’t really said what they are other than that they’re kings. Let’s read Revelation 17:8–14 really quickly, or at least part of it, and it will give us more insight. The angel says to John, “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the Abyss and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast because it was, and is not, and is to come. (v. 9) This calls for a mind with wisdom.” Okay, what he’s about to explain, you have to have wisdom to understand. And God made it this way for a reason, so if you want to understand, and you desire—and you don’t have to—but if you desire to understand what’s being said about what’s going to unfold, [then] you must ask God for wisdom. The Bible says he will give it liberally. “The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated. (v. 10) They are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, and the other has not yet come; and when he does come he must remain only a little while. (v. 11) As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth and belongs to the seven, but it goes to destruction. (v. 12) And the ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received royal power, but they are to receive authority as kings for an hour together with the beast. (v. 13) These are of one mind, and they hand over their power and authority to the beast. (v. 14) They will make war on the Lamb...” And it goes on to talk about them making all of these martyrs [out] of the saints. This is confusing because the angel is talking about two beasts simultaneously. He can do this because, remember, kings and their kingdoms are interchangeable. But if you don’t realize that he is switching back and forth, you’re going to get really confused. The seven kings are represented by heads, and those heads are seven rulers throughout history. Those rulers are the ones who have been types of Antichrist.
How do I know they’re not contemporaneous, and they’re [instead] sequential? I know because the angel says [that] some have already lived and died, one is presently ruling at the time of John having this vision, and some are still to come. Probably Emperor Nero was the Antichrist-like caesar over Rome at the time when John was having the vision, and he would be one of the seven kings. But before him came others, probably Pharaoh, Sennacherib... certainly Antiochus Epiphanes, who was a ruler of Greece, because he did exactly what the Antichrist is going to do: he went to the Temple in Jerusalem, defiled it, sacrificed pigs on the altar, and set up the statue of Zeus in the Temple. So that would be an abomination of desolation; he desolated the Temple, and that’s exactly what Antichrist will do, so really we’re seeing a type of Antichrist there. But these seven kings are ones who ruled over different iterations of Babel down through the ages. Out of Babel came Assyria, and Egypt, and Greece, and Phoenicia, and Rome, eventually, and all these really came from the civilization that was created there in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the Age. That’s what these heads are telling us: these are the seven antichrist kings throughout history.
It’s a shift in thinking. Part of the difficulty is that the ten horns on these heads are ruling all at once—these are the kings of that final empire at the end of the Age. They are not spaced out over all of history, and we know that because we can tie it to the ten toes of the statue that Daniel saw, that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about. Those ten toes, Daniel explicitly tells him, are ten kings at the end of the Age. So the ten horns are going to exist later—we haven’t gotten to that point [in history] yet—but the seven heads are spaced out over the whole course of history. According to Daniel, the Antichrist is an eleventh horn who rises among the ten and displaces three of them. So ten minus three leaves seven. So there will be seven horns remaining after the Antichrist displaces three of them. That means he will be the eighth horn; he went from being the eleventh horn to being the eighth horn. And he’s also the eighth head—we go back to Rev. 17:11, as we read before: “As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth but it belongs to the seven.”
No wonder it takes wisdom to understand this, because he’s one of the seven but he’s an eighth. How does that work? The only way it could work is if he came back. He was one of the seven and he came back. He’s not only the eighth head, he’s also the eighth horn. Eight, of course, in Bible numerology is interesting because it’s the first after the cycle of seven. The first day of the week is the eighth day as well as the first day. He who is number one becomes number eight, and that is this ancient king called Ashur/Assur, or Nimrod.
TK Mmmm, very, very interesting, Alexander. If you [could] maybe wrap up with any final thoughts on this, and what you think is the main thing people should take out of this today.
AL I think they need to be aware that, based on what we have just studied here, somebody is coming back, someone who ruled the world before. There is a resurrection [coming], and that shouldn’t surprise us because we know that he is the false messiah, and the false messiah copies—he mimics—everything that the real Messiah has done, or at least a lot of it (we see that throughout many verses). Just as the real Messiah was resurrected, this person will also be resurrected. Now, it’s not the same type of resurrection; it’s not by the power of God, it’s probably by the power of [genetic] engineering and arcane arts, or something like that, but nonetheless he’s going to come back.
The ancient Egyptians said that they preserved his efflux under Giza. They actually believed—by preserving his genetic material—that one day he would come back, which is why they have all these myths about Osiris the mummy rising back up, and they worshipped that every year. Year after year they played it out like one of the appointed times; it was a role playing thing. So they expected him to come back, and they still do—the Occult still believes that. And if we’re not ready for that, we’re going to be very, very confused. A lot of Christians will be taken off guard, and that could be a big part of the Great Deception: “Wait a minute, someone’s been resurrected? The Bible never told us about this. We thought there was only one resurrection, and yet this guy has been brought back as well!” But the Bible does actually tell us about it, and that’s what I’m trying to help people to understand. It tells you what kingdoms are going to come, and it tells you the king that’s going to come, and he was here before so don’t be deceived.
TK That’s really good advice, and I think we’re going to have to come back fairly soon and do another show because there’s so much more that we could discuss. We’ve hardly scratched the surface in terms of what the various kingdoms are, and what roles do America and Russia play, and the Middle East, and all of these things. All of this [goes] back to Daniel, as well.
Alexander, it’s been absolutely awesome having you on today, but let’s schedule to do another show really soon, if that’s okay with you.
AL That would be great, I would love to.
TK Before we go, could you give our listeners your website and the name of your book?
AL Absolutely: It’s www.watchmanalexander.com. There are links to my book, my course, podcast, and blog on the website. Also, please sign up for the newsletter while you’re there. Scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages on the website, and you will see a link to sign up for the newsletter and receive a free eBook. You don’t have to stay on the newsletter, either; you can unsubscribe, if you want to, after getting the book, but I would encourage you to be subscribed so that you’ll know when I release new material. I am currently working on a new book called the Prophecy Cheat Sheet, as well as working on the second volume of Leviathan’s Ruse a little bit. But more than that, my efforts right now are going into creating the first few chapters of a novel based on the research that I did for Leviathan’s Ruse. It will be historical fiction.
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