The Rise and Purpose of Islam in Bible Prophecy

An Islamic Invasion is Underway

Today we stand on the cusp of the worst social unrest in the history of every western nation, with dire warnings of near-term civil strife and wholesale bloodshed emanating from the ranks of academia.

The western nations – especially those in Europe – have wilfully enacted a policy of open-door immigration of unvetted young males from backward, lawless, Islamic Third World "car crash" countries.

The blame superficially falls at the feet of the elected politicians in government, all of whom share the same globalist, woke value set, even in Trump's cabinet (yes, Trump waves the rainbow flag too).

But in actuality, this all comes from a singularity: the clique of supranational globalist elites who own and dictate policy to every government and major political party in the West.

This multiheaded hydra is fundamentally Anti-Christian, Satanic, godless, atheistic and materialistic, and is nothing less than the fourth beast system of Daniel 7 in its final, scarlet (hyper socialist) form, as depicted in Revelation 17 – see my article, The Satanic Beasts of Revelation.

The question must arise as to why the beast system wants demographic change, a question that is not too difficult to propose an answer to once we appreciate its actual nature and Satanic aims.

It is not that the elites want to live in a caliphate of shariah law in the West; rather, I believe they are using Islamic immigration to destroy western culture specifically for the purpose of rebuilding it in a new, "re-imagined" fashion.

The Muslim interlopers would thus be unwitting agents of revolution, little wrecking balls, to break down western society into a rubble-strewn detritus of demoralisation, stress, hopelessness, defeatism, humiliation and world weariness, so that when the real objective is thrust upon us, we would be too weak, broken, disenfranchised and disillusioned to mount any meaningful resistance.

The ruling elites, it seems, want us to conclude that the cause is lost and have us resigned to the Chinese style social credit system they seek to impose as part of their Great Reset.

But in so doing, they in turn are unwittingly serving a higher purpose: God's ordained will.

So what is God's purpose in sending the hordes of Islamic locusts upon us?

As ever, we have to look to His Word for clues.

Islam is Only Visible in Bible Prophecy via the Historicist Model

The vast majority of those ostensible Protestants who profess to know Christ today subscribe to an eschatological model called futurism, which looks for a future super politician Antichrist, a rebuilt temple at Jerusalem, a peace treaty in the Middle East brokered by said Antichrist, Christ's imminent return and, in some cases, a rapture of believers to Heaven during a "Great Tribulation" on earth in which the Antichrist brands everyone with an implant or some other kind of discernible mark.

This prophetic model was originally devised by two Jesuit priests for subtle intersection into Protestant teaching as a Counter-Reformational blow against the established Protestant eschatological model of historicism, which had to be dealt with because of its exposure of the Papacy as the man of sin (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4) and of the Antichurch of Rome as Mystery Babylon (Revelation 17:5), both of which teachings placed a bad light on Rome and stood as barriers to its long-avowed goal of reconquering the peoples lost to "the north heresy", as some Romanists of old called Protestantism.

Those Jesuits employed in concocting futurism were called Francisco Ribera (writing in the 1500s) and Manuel de Lacunza (in the 1700s), but their efforts did not really begin to bear fruit until the 1800s when they were picked up and refined by John Nelson Darby, one of the fathers of the extremely heretical Plymouth Brethren sect and later Cyrus Ingerson Scofield who presented the Scofield Reference Bible and championed the horribly heretical dispensationalism of Darby.

So successful were the efforts of the futurist camp that today only a very tiny few professing Protestants still adhere to the Reformational historicist eschatological interpretive framework (and to the Reformational soteriological model that is Calvinism – for an in-depth study into the root of this malaise, see my article Arminianism and the Star That Fell From Heaven.)

Futurism, of course, we of a Reformed school reject for what it is: a Satanic red herring designed to lead inquirers into interpretive dead-ends.

This is seen most abundantly when it comes to the treatment of the key passage in Scripture that foretells the rise and purpose of Islam, i.e., Revelation chapter 9.

For the futurists, Revelation 9 is still ahead, with their experts pontificating about vast legions of demons being released from Hell in the near future to swarm the earth (Revelation 9:1-11) and four powerful demons being released from beneath the river Euphrates to wreak a fresh wave of havoc (Revelation 9:12-21).

But the historicist model enables us to see that Revelation 9 has been fulfilled already, in two distinct phases:

1. The emergence of a new false religion, i.e., Islam, in Revelation 9:1-11, which happened in the early 7th century, with its first wave being directed against the heartlands of the Antichurch of Rome in southern Europe by the instrumentality of the Saracens (Arab Muslim raiders), and,
2. A second more developed Islamic assault, consolidated through its adaptation by a powerful empire, and directed against the eastern fork of the Antichurch (Orthodoxy) in the form of the Ottoman occupation of south eastern Europe that endured for almost four centuries, beginning in the 15th century.

There is, however, a third and final role for Islam in unknowingly executing God's judgments against the West, and that is found in the third and final of the seven last plagues of Revelation 16 (for an overview of these plagues, see my Concise Commentary on Revelation 15 and my article, Apocalypse Now: The Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 16, Starting Around the Close of This Decade).

For now, though, let's consider the original purpose of Islam in Revelation 9.

WAVE #1: The "Destroyer" Appears (Islam Afflicts the Early Antichurch))

"And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." (Revelation 9:1-2)

As I explain in my article, Arminianism and the Star That Fell From Heaven, there are two stars that fall from Heaven in Revelation.

The first one is in Revelation 8:10 and entails a "great star" falling from heaven and polluting "the rivers and fountains of waters", making them "Wormwood" with the outcome that "many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter".

The interpretation of this is that Pelagius, an initially highly esteemed Welsh theologian in the late Roman-era church, i.e., a "star of the ecclsiastical heavens", introduced what was then the highly novel doctrines of "free will", denial of original sin and the attainability of sinless perfection (wicked ideas that would later become enshrined in Wesley's Holiness Movement).

These doctrines would contaminate the rivers and fountains, i.e., the broader suite of doctrines held by the early church, so that many would imbibe these teachings and thereby die (i.e. eternally); that is, they were a very palatable and easy to swallow, Christian-sounding and -looking set of teachings designed specifically to persuade the spiritually awakened – but not born again – to believe that they were genuine heirs of eternal life in Christ when, in fact, they had only become religious and good-living, i.e., "having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof" (2 Timothy 3:5).

The Wormwood doctrine was roundly criticised and rejected by the early church councils, notably opposed by Augustine, but the free will element of it would eventually find a home in the ever-apostatising Antichurch (retained to this day by both its western and eastern forks), while remaining absent from the non-conformist believers in those long centuries before the Reformation.

It would not be until another Jesuit priest, Luis de Molina, in the 1500s and not long after in the same century, an apostate Reformed minister, Jacobus Arminius, came along that Wormwood-Pelagian ideas would be repackaged and become transformed into the new Protestantism we know as Arminianism, and which is now the mainstream and majority "Protestant" soteriology.

(Again, for an in-depth history of this development, see my article Arminianism and the Star that Fell From Heaven).

But while the appearance of Wormwood-Pelagianism was a 5th century issue, another tremendous evil would fall upon the world in the form of a second star that fell from heaven, as described in Revelation 9:1-2.

Unlike Wormwood, this second star did not strike the doctrinal waters, but the earth itself, i.e., the ungodly in the so-called civilised world that was emerging from the ruins of the defunct western Roman empire, and was sent as a judgment upon them.

This second star appeared around the 7th century, and represents another personage – or rather, an office – that had fallen from high esteem within the professing church, namely, the bishopric of Rome, that "anointed cherub" of Ezekiel 28:11-19.¹

Having been apostatising for centuries and calling itself "Papa" (pope) since 366 when Damasus I was the first to assume that title, the office of bishopric of Rome was now plumbing new depths of wickedness as related thus by Gill:

"...the bishops of that city [i.e. Rome] had shone out in great light and purity of doctrine and practice formerly, but now about this time most sadly apostatised; they had been indeed gradually declining for some time, but now they may be said openly to fall from heaven, when Phocas, who murdered his master, the Emperor Mauritius [i.e. Maurice], and took the imperial crown to himself, gave to Pope Boniface the Third the title and power of universal bishop, about the year 606, which he and his successors exercised in a most haughty and tyrannical manner." (John Gill commenting on Revelation 9:1)

So far from holding the keys of Heaven as he claims, this second fallen star held the keys of the bottomless pit (as Revelation 9:1 reveals) and with them he inadvertently opened a proverbial "Pandora's Box", the bottomless pit, from whence sprung the curse upon humanity that is Islam.

Assumed by most to refer to Hell itself, this pit could only be so figuratively, not literally, as Hell is a place of containment and confinement for a certain group of angels that "kept not their first estate" (Jude 1:6) and for deceased unregenerates.

The bottomless pit is, in my view, both (a) an allusion to the hellish destiny of that thing which emerged from it in Revelation 9:2 and (b) a reference to the more obscure, deeper, wilder, uncivilised parts of the barbarian "abyss" or "sea", i.e., regions in this world far removed both geographically and culturally from the civilised world (the "earth" of Revelation), and it is also thus with the other references in Revelation to the bottomless pit (Revelation 11:7 and 17:8).

The thick smoke and vexatious locusts that emerged from the uncivilised, barbarian, heathen, hell-destined world refers to the murderous new creed that was ordained specifically to afflict both apostate Christendom and Christ-hating Judaism, for which dual purpose the demon at its head was given its name in both Greek (for apostate Christianity as Apollyon) and Hebrew (for the Christ-hating Jews as Abaddon), a name that translates as "the Destroyer".

And destroy is what Islam always does!

Every culture, every society, every semblance of law and order, Islam destroys upon contact, and in the most bloodthirsty, merciless fashion, for none of the other heathen religions is so murderous, so rage-filled, so fanatical, so uncompassionate, so unnaturally cruel (even to its own women, children and animals) as the demented creed of Satan that Islam is.

Even the average humble dog, so hated by Muslims and considered "haram", has more humanity and kindness in it than the average Muslim has.

And even though Judaism was an ordained target, the trigger for Islam's emergence was the Papacy, in its new emboldenment as universal bishop, provoking God into permitting Satan to unleash Islam upon south-western Europe after Boniface III's assumption of the title universal bishop and all the tyranny and blasphemy that followed, in Christ's name, against God.

And here we find the beginnings of a symbiosis between Islam and apostate Christianity; the Antichurch's very existence, especially its exaltation and the excesses of its Pope, provoked a Divine warrant for the deployment of Islam as a judgment upon it.

In turn, the Antichurch could portray its victimisation by Islam as an evidence of Rome being Christ's true church, suffering persecution stirred up by Satan.

ISLAMIC WAVE #2: The Four Angels of the Euphrates (Revelation 9:12-21)

The Saracen raids were agonising to southern Europe and very afflictive to the pre-schism Antichurch, but did not hurt the Woman (the non-conformist Christians) self-exiled in the Alpine Piedmont and other quiet areas of the western and central continent.

But the Antichurch itself would, after several centuries of east-west disputes, eventually split during the Great Schism (1054) into two distinct factions, an eastern and a western fork, based in Constantinople and Rome respectively, with both claiming to be the true continuation of the Apostolic church² and accusing the other of being an unlawful impostor.

Yet in most critical respects, Orthodoxy and Romanism remained as one, both retaining the Wormwood-Pelagian doctrine of free will, works-based salvation, the exaltation of tradition, veneration of religious statues and pictures, claims of exclusivity as the one true church, priestly celibacy (that egregious "doctrine of devils" in 1 Timothy 4:1), prayers for the dead, prayers to "saints", etc.

The key differences were in ecclesiology, insofar as Rome claimed universal authority for its Pope, whereas Constantinople maintained an essentially episcopal-synodal system of collegiality, i.e., no supremacy of one region's bishop over the others.

There were some doctrinal issues as well (notably the Filioque), and later they would pick holes in each other's understandings of the trinity, original sin, the Immaculate Conception and other matters, but at the time of the Great Schism, it was chiefly about governance, or perhaps more cynically, about narratives justifying their own regional domination.

The important point here is to understand that Orthodoxy remained essentially Antichristian (because of its adherence to a works-based salvation and other abominable doctrines rooted in paganism and tradition) and thus constituted "another Romanism", hence I term it the eastern fork of the Antichurch.

And God's wrath towards it, as veritable Antichurch, was to be seen in the terrible events of Revelation 9:12-21, concluded under the "sixth trumpet" of the Apocalypse, which introduces the Second Woe, a long period of history that would encompass the Age of Discovery, the Reformation, the Age of Empires, the World Wars, the expansion of Islam, the emergence of atheism, communism and all the abominations of the modern age, and which closes only when the Great Earthquake of Revelation 11:13 (i.e., the great geopolitical reordering foretold in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7) happens, bringing on what will the Third Woe, which shall be vexatious only to the Antichurch and all false religionists.

Therefore, every war, every plague, every famine, every grand catastrophe that has befallen the world since the emergence of Mohammed’s cursed Islam has been a painful stroke, a lash of the whip, on the back of unregenerate humanity, especially here in the West where the Antichurch and its harlot offspring have stolen the name of Christianity and either proactively persecuted or simply marginalised the true church transcendent for many centuries.

Returning to the text, when the sixth trumpet is blown it draws a response from a voice amidst the four horns of the golden altar which is before God the Father; that voice is Christ’s, as Intercessor, decreeing further temporal judgments upon the ungodly for their sin in general and particularly for their treatment of the church transcendent (which I take to also include the murdered little ones as well as aborted unborn infants), persecution of the Lord’s elect being the superlative manifestation of the broader sinfulness of the ungodly, which is also punished under the plagues of this Trumpet.

The sixth angel obeys Christ’s decree, which was to “loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates” (Revelation 9:14); these angels were then released, having been prepared for a prophetic hour, day, month and year, to slay one third part of men, which we come to further below.

Gill takes these angels not to refer to spirits of any kind, but to four human agencies, that is, governments or princes at the head of tribes, restrained from passing west of the Euphrates into the eastern Roman Empire, whose border was the literal Euphrates river, until the time should come when they were to be given free rein to do so, and that accordingly, they represent the next major geopolitical force that should strike at the Antichurch and, in the process, break forth into the Levant and overrun Palestine.

Similar terminology is deployed in Revelation 16:12’s description of the great River Euphrates being dried up to make way for the kings of the east, but that refers to a separate event to come multiple centuries after the former (yet falls under this sixth Trumpet too), and the latter entails a drying up, that is, a total removal of the impediment that the metaphorical Euphrates is, whereas in the former case, here in Revelation 9, the metaphorical Euphrates abides fully hydrated and is presented not as a constraining agency, though the four angels are said to be bound in it (in Revelation 9:14), but merely as their point of origin, or more precisely, it is named as the “Euphrates” to denote its general orientality and marginality with respect to the Byzantine Empire, and therefore the loosing of the four angels is not attributed to any Revelation 16-style drying up of said river, but simply to a fiat of the Lord’s angel who blows the sixth Trumpet.

Moreover, I think the four agencies are not to be considered as literally four in number, but take that number to represent what followed when the geopolitical force they symbolise broke forth upon history.

Specifically, this refers to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, founded by Osman I (whose origins are disputed but generally thought to have come from central Asia) which then spread in all directions from its new hub in what is modern-day western Turkey, but at that time, was a region of the Byzantine Empire, with an erstwhile Orthodox (“Nicene Christian”) populace; under this interpretation, the number four refers pre-eminently to the four points of the compass, as representative of the new empire’s outward expansion into the Balkans, Ukraine, southern Russia, modern-day Iraq, Palestine, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea coasts (both in Arabia and Egypt), and north Africa as far as Algeria.

The angels, therefore, driving this expansion, though stylised as being four in number, refer more prosaically to that which energised and directed the Ottoman Empire’s development, and while that can be attributed to geopolitical and religious (Islamic) ambition on an immediate level, egged on by demonic forces on a higher level, against it one could say that previous generations of Muslim powers had the same goals and evil spirits energising them; so more properly, these “angels” should perhaps be understood as simply being a metaphor for every punitive force or means to be brought upon apostate Christianity (and to Christ-rejecting Judaism) at the hands of the Ottomans.

Now we come to what I consider to be the most difficult part of one of Revelation’s most difficult-to-interpret passages (i.e. this sixth Trumpet), namely:

"And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men." (Revelation 9:15)

This hour-day-month-year construct greatly baffled not just me, but also the old writers and confounded their efforts at decoding it on the basis of prophetic time alone, to the extent that some (i.e. Charles Daubuz, as Gill recounts), consigned it to a metaphor for readiness rather than a computable timespan.

However, Daubuz’ metaphor theory (a) makes the symbolism pointless as all agencies unleashed in Revelation could equally be construed as being primed and ready to go at their appointed time and (b) it would be inconsistent with the symbolic style of Revelation, absent an explicit termination of the principle of prophetic time (which does actually occur later in Revelation).

Consequently, we simply must take this to indeed refer to a specific timespan laid out under the principles of prophetic time.

There then follows the question, does it refer to a timespan allocated to preparing the four angels prior to their release, or does it refer to the period immediately after their release?

I say it refers to neither, but rather it refers to the duration of their destructive work in the wake of their release, where release is defined as the starting point of their afflictive work in history, not the starting point of their organised nationhood.

Addressing these points, let us first consider prophetic time (using the Reformational-Puritan historicist model):

1 prophetic hour = 1/24th of a prophetic year = 15 literal days

1 prophetic day = 1 × 365 day literal year

1 prophetic month = 1 × 30 day “month” = 30 literal years

1 prophetic year = 360 literal years

So, 1 hour + 1 day + 1 month + 1 year of prophetic time = 15 days + 1 year + 30 years + 360 years, all of which add up to 391 years and 15 days.

That presents a timespan pertinent to the Ottoman Empire, and for me is plainly too long to realistically apply to its gestation; rather, as stated above, I submit that it applies to its reign of oppression of the apostates of the East, implying that it had to first appear, then grow to maturity, then become a brutal rod for the back of the eastern fork of the Antichurch.

By most accounts, the Ottoman Empire began in 1299 under the leadership of Osman I in the region of Bithynia in what would cover most of the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey today.

However, it did not grow to become a threat to the eastern Roman Empire until the year 1453 when, under the command of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, it laid siege to Constantinople from the 6th April until the 29th May, thereby bringing an end to the Byzantine era and, some argue, an end to the Dark Ages as well.

Upon its surrender on that fateful day in May 1453, Constantinople was ransacked and its Orthodox “church” buildings destroyed; on top of that were unsanitised³ accounts of violent rapes (of women and, typical of Muslim form, men also), slaughters, enslavement and a host of obscene atrocities⁴ wrought upon tens of thousands of “Christians” by the Turks.

So here we have an approximate start date of the 391 year and 15 day period: some time in spring 1453, in the preparatory days prior to the siege of Constantinople beginning, during which the sense of foreboding and great panic would have been rising to a crescendo among its people as they witnessed or heard rumours of the build-up of Ottoman forces near their city:

"Mehmed then tasked the Hungarian gunsmith Urban with both arming Rumelihisarı and building cannon powerful enough to bring down the walls of Constantinople. By March 1453 Urban’s cannon had been transported from the Ottoman capital of Edirne to the outskirts of Constantinople. In April, having quickly seized Byzantine coastal settlements along the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara, Ottoman regiments in Rumelia and Anatolia assembled outside the Byzantine capital. Their fleet moved from Gallipoli to nearby Diplokionion, and the sultan himself set out to meet his army." (Encyclopaedia Britannica on the Fall of Constantinople).

When the residents of Constantinople saw that super weapon lined up against their city in that terrifying day in March 1453, all hopes and denialism concerning the rumours of an Ottoman assault would have vanished in an instant and a chill dread would have consumed them, thus commencing their great, visceral pain at the hands of the Ottomans, even before a single cannon or musket shot had been fired.

What happened, therefore, 391 years and 15 days afterwards (1 hour + 1 day + 1 month + 1 year of prophetic time), that is, some date in the latter part of March 1844?

The answer is the Edict of Toleration (21st-23rd March 1844), which was a formal promise made by the Ottoman Empire, under pressure from the British Empire and other European states, to cease from brutally treating “Christians”, especially converts from Islam, and to desist from its cruel slave trade.

This date also probably explains why the old writers could not ascertain the timing; they were studying the passage long before the time of its fulfilment and instead of looking for a definite starting point for the Ottoman ascendancy, looked for a time, prior to their own day, when it seemed to be decisively finished as an oppressing force.

Note that under this Ottoman oppression, Orthodoxy had a window to repent lasting a period of 397 years (from its start in 1054) until the Ottoman plague arrived in March 1453, which is only 6 years more (approximately) than the 391 years of said plague, making the duration of that plague of the same order of time as the duration of Orthodoxy’s missed opportunity to get right with Christ.

One might conclude two things from this, namely, (1) that the Lord ordained it to show, on the one hand, a correlative approximate symmetry between His special judgment upon Orthodoxy and the period of its failure to repent and (2), on the other hand, a slight but significant disparity between the two durations so as to make the interpretation of the time outlined (391 years and 15 days) unambiguously applicable to the afflictive period, rather than to the missed opportunity to repent.

Beyond that, in the vision of the sixth Trumpet of Revelation 9, John was given the number of the horsemen – not simply footsoldiers – unleashed by the agency of the loosed angels of the Euphrates, that being 200,000,000 (two hundred million, which I come to below) and that these horsemen had breastplates of fire, jacinth and brimstone, and that the horses themselves had lion-like heads, with fire, smoke and brimstone issuing from their mouths which, along with their tails, were their means of dispensing torment.

Since these heads and tails denote weapons deployed against the eastern fork of the Antichurch, and since the means of oppression used by the Turks against the Greeks at that time was physical violence above all else, and all other torments they brought to bear upon the Greeks were founded on the basis thereof, these weapons refer not to the vile doctrines and demands of Islam, but to the literal instruments and machines of death fielded by the Ottomans; that is, they refer to guns and cannons, borne by horsemen and infantry.

Meanwhile, their breastplates of fire, etc., depict that they are aglow, that is, that their armour is impervious to traditional means of military assault due to the raw firepower at their disposal; their aggression, therefore, is their defence, and it was by the barrel of the gun that the Ottoman Empire dominated and subjugated the old eastern Roman Empire from 1453 until it had its oppressive wings clipped by the above-described Edict of Toleration in 1844.

Returning to their number, i.e., two hundred million, Gill writes (in the mid 1700s):

"The Turks used to bring, and still do bring vast armies into the field: in the year 1396, Bajazet [aka Bayezid I], with three hundred thousand men, fell upon sixty thousand Christians [by which Gill means apostate Christians and is referring to the clash with the Crusaders at the Battle of Nicopolis], killed twenty thousand of them, and lost sixty thousand of his own: against him afterward, in the year 1397, came Tamerlane the Tartar, with four hundred thousand horse, and six hundred thousand foot, and having killed two hundred thousand Turks, took Bajazet prisoner, and carried him about in a cage, in golden chains. In the year 1438, Amurath [Murad II9] entered into Pannonia, with three hundred thousand horsemen: and in the year 1453, Mahomet [he means Mehmed the Conqueror] took Constantinople with the like number; yea, it is said, that the army at the siege of that city consisted of forty myriads, or four hundred thousand men. It is reported, that the great Turk contemptuously sent to the emperor of the Romans a camel, or a dromedary, laden with wheat, with this vow by a message, that he should bring against him as many fighting men as there were grains of wheat therein. And it is related, that when Ladislaus, king of Hungary, went out against Amurath with four and twenty thousand horse, Dracula, governor of Wallachia, advised him not to attack the emperor of the Turks with so small an army, since he went out every day a hunting with more men than such a number"

(John Gill commenting on Revelation 9:16)

I would add to Gill's notes that the 200 million tally could be taken in either of the following ways:

1. 200 million across ca. 4 centuries = 50 million per century = 5 million per decade = 500,000 per year, which is of the order of magnitude of the Ottoman army's size at sundry times, as Gill's notes show.
2. As a symbolic figure rather than a literal quantity, and refers to the insurmountable vastness of their army compared to the forces that could be arrayed against them, it being noteworthy that to this very day, Turkey retains a huge army, the second largest within NATO, with around 700,000 men, a number that only the US Army exceeds within the alliance.

The Apostle John goes on to say that through the agency of these brutal horsemen, one third part of men was to be killed, and again, this may refer to a large minority of apostate Christians within what was the old eastern Roman Empire, rather than an exact figure.

Revelation 9 then concludes with the sad notice that for all of the plagues thus far brought upon the apostate Christian party, none would reform those thus afflicted or draw them to repentance for their murders, sorceries, fornication, or theft, or to seeking Christ alone for salvation, instead - and note this! - of worshipping "devils, idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, wood" (Revelation 9:20), which all who bow to the icons of Orthodoxy and the statues of Romanism tragically do.

All of that means, implicitly, that much worse would follow upon ungodly humanity, the epicentre of which would remain the civilised European states.

The foregoing plagues ensuing from these Trumpets blown in obedience to Christ’s decrees, of course, demonstrate that God does not simply foresee the future, but proactively ordains and regulates it.

World events are therefore scripted, by God, for His own purposes, loathsome though that doctrine is to all who despise the Reformed doctrine of the sovereignty of God.

WAVE #3: The Third of the Seven Last Plagues (Revelation 16:4-7)

"And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments." (Revelation 16:4-7)

The third of the Seven Last Plagues is justified from Heaven itself as a punishment for the ungodly’s murderous acts against the Lord’s children, collectively called "saints (i.e. true believers) and prophets" in Revelation 16:6 and it is this justification that we look at first before considering the actual outworking of this third plague, one that, although a metaphor for something dreadful yet not a literal transformation of waters into blood, recalls the turning of the literal waters of Pharaoh’s Egypt into literal blood (Exodus 7:17).

The above-mentioned murderous acts are not to be understood of occurring during the time of the Seven Last Plagues, or at least, they may only minimally be considered so, because the bulk of the Lord’s people are to remain at liberty during the ca. 2025-2029 slain state of the Lord’s public witness against sin and error (styled in Revelation 11 as the Two Witnesses).

Rather, therefore, I think this is a deferred punishment on the nations of the West alone for their ancestors’ abuse of the Lord’s faithful children; Gill wrote:

"...it is notorious to all, how much of the blood of the saints, of the preachers of the Gospel, of the prophets and witnesses, have been shed in Italy, Savoy, and other places near Rome, as well as in Rome itself (John Gill on Revelation 16:6)

The principle of deferred judgment is entirely biblical (Deuteronomy 5:9) and with numerous precedents, such as the case with the house of Saul for its bloodshed against the Gibeonites (2 Samuel 21:1)⁵ and the Egyptians for their murdering, by drowning in the Nile, of the innocent baby boys at Pharaoh’s command in Exodus 1.

Nevertheless, it is also the case that the hearts of many are now so depraved as to be of the same state and inclination of those apostate zealots of bygone centuries who seized upon the Lord’s people in murderous rage to shed their blood; they would not just civically slay us through wicked laws designed to silence our public witness, but they would also literally murder us if they could, making them as worthy of this third plague as their evil ancestors were.

The last word on the third plague comes from the approving voice of the angel of the altar, acting as representative for the souls of those slain for the Lord’s testimony (Revelation 6:9), who cry out for justice to be done for the martyrdom they experienced; here, at last, a definitive vengeance is executed against the descendents of those who put the martyrs to death in the Inquisition and in the persecutions enacted by the Erastian, apostate Protestant party, against the Lord’s faithful few in Great Britain during the infamous Killing Time of the 1680s.

What, then, will this plague actually consist of?

Because "the rivers and fountains of waters" phrase is not to be understood literally, lest the Lord’s faithful servants should also partake of the third plague, and despite the fact that a strong allusion is made to the waters of the Nile being turned to blood, the phrase is likely rather to be understood of the same class of symbolic rivers and fountain of Joel 3:18 also, that is, doctrinal instruction.

Except that in the case of the third of the Seven Last Plagues, this refers to false religious instruction, the bloodiest of all in consequence being that coming from Islam.

Moreover, as far as I am aware, the most common ancient view of the great utility of rivers and fountains lay, above all else, in their use in watering the earth for agriculture, rather than the underlying perfunctory conveyance of rainwater to the ocean or vessel-borne freight between settlements, so if we posit that the rivers and fountains are emblematic of a means of irrigating and refreshing the land, we can then see that they are a corollary to the spiritual rain that the Lord’s public witness against sin and error gives and withholds during its 1,260 year mission, that spiritual rain being the sound doctrine of the Word of God, which brings us back to the same interpretation the previous paragraph arrived at.

And, to reiterate, these rivers and fountains are bloodied to hurt the ungodly and so the imbibers of those waters are not the godly, but the ungodly, and so it is the ungodly, whose wicked ancestors' spiritual instruction came from one draught of these waters (apostate Christianity), that shall now find in another draught of them (Islam) retributive blood and death.

And, since apostate Christianity will still abide until Babylon’s destruction under the final of the Seven last Plagues, this blood found in these waters does not mean a deathly realisation that their false religion is wrong (as some of the old writers mistakenly thought), but rather, due to the retributive aspect of it, points to literal bloodshed amongst those who subscribe to false religions, as well as those unrepentant descendants of such.

Now the question arises, is this to be worldwide, or just within the West?

I submit it will be almost certainly exclusively confined to the West, because that – especially the Catholic regions of Europe – was the epicentre of persecution against the Lord’s children in the Dark Ages, and, as outlined above, there is the biblical principle of corporate guilt leading to revenge being visited upon the descendents of the Lord’s enemies.

Now, so far from being sustained (as they imagine) by their priests and clerics, the votaries of false religion (and the atheistic descendants of such) will find the teaching from those sources to be a fount of literal violence, aptly executed upon them through the aggression of another false creed, the very one ordained of God back in the era pointed at in Revelation 9.

After a fashion, therefore, those who historically consumed the waters of apostate Christian teaching have imbibed a final violence to be bloodily bequeathed to their posterity, in both Europe and its colonial offshoots; hence these doctrines will (in the case of the still-religious Islamic hordes) directly compel them into acts of bloodshed, and probably receiving in return retributive acts from their largely irreligious or apostate host populations in the West.⁶

Here, then, is not simply the streets running with blood, as it were; no, this is more explicit: it is bloodshed wrought by practitioners of false religion (Islam, primarily or even exclusively) upon the descendents of another set of practitioners of false religion (apostate Christianity), in readiness for which huge, culturally incompatible, and extremely angry, Muslim populations are already pre-installed and still swarming into every western European country, unabated, thanks to the open-borders social engineering policy of the globalist elites who see this influx as a fit way to trample down, destroy, and then "re-imagine" in pursuit of their hell-on-earth dystopia.

And now that they are ensconced in Europe, the Musim locusts are a force of occupation, treated by our governments and the police, as well as the shrill harpies of the Left, as special treasures, with more privileges and protections and rights than the native populations, despite snarling hatred toward us, raping and murdering our young women, threatening us with bloody Jihad, desecrating our war memorials, cursing our flags, and generally behaving like the inhumane monsters their fore-bearers, the Saracens and Ottomans of Revelation 9 were.

And given that we are reviewing one of the Seven Last Plagues here, meaning, one of that suite of superlative temporal judgments to fall upon the nations in this scene of time, the coming Islamic assault will make all "race wars" and sectarian strifes in the West prior to this time pale by comparison; this will take "cultural enrichment" to a whole new level and constitutes another very good reason why the Lord’s children should vacate major urban centres now, while they still may.

Moreover, it has been said that the most reliable predictor for civil war in any nation is where a government turns on its own people and no longer rules for them, but for an agenda, for another demographic (i.e. immigrants), or for another clientele (the elites themselves).

Termed by some as "downgrading", this phenomenon is increasingly being spoken of in conservative academia as a precursor to transformative civil strife in the West.

Timing-wise, I take this plague to follow Plagues #1 & #2, and therefore think it will arrive ca. 2027-2028; but my projected timing is educated speculation, not interpretation, so take it accordingly!

The End of Islam, After Its Purpose Has Been Served

When the Jews convert to Christ worldwide, as promised in Deuteronomy 4:30 and Romans 11:15, among many other passages, Islam will have lost one of its reasons for existing: to afflict Christ-rejecting Jews.

And when that conversion of the Jews triggers great "life from the dead" to the Gentiles, as promised in Romans 11:15, and pure doctrine flowing as waters (Joel 3:18) after the defeat of Gog and the happy, Messianic aftermath (Ezekiel 39's closing verses), all filter through, there will be a swift end to Arminianism and all the atheistic notions that have possessed the western world.

Both forks of the Antichurch will also be exposed for what they always were, and so only truly Philadelphian doctrine will be seen and heard when the word Christianity is spoken of, depriving Islam of its other and perhaps primary reason for existing: to afflict apostate "Christianity".

God will ensure, then, that Islam will be destroyed, presumably by several means including the following:

• Many of its votaries will perish alongside the ungodly urban masses of the West when the "great hail" (the worst war in history) of Revelation 16, timed for the Gog-led but God-defeated assault on Israel, takes place and the Lord sends "a fire on Magog (Russia) and on them that dwell carelessly (without regard for their souls, i.e., atheistically) in the isles (the West)" (Ezekiel 39:6).
• When the "great earthquake" (Revelation 16:18) of that time strikes, i.e., the reordering of world's geopolitical landscape in favour of the Lord's people, who will ascend to temporal power (Revelation 11:13, Daniel 7:22), then they will demolish every remaining mosque and heathen artefacts, eject surviving Muslims from the western lands, and presumably also banning their wicked religion.
• Islam itself will realise that God is with us, i.e., the Gentile believers and our newly Christian brethren of the house of Jacob, and so it will see the failed promise of a caliphate, etc., and know, above all by God's enabling, that this was a creed crafted by Satan and cursed of God.

When the true Philadelphian church age gets underway, and Christ opens every door to His church and Gospel, and the stone cut out without hands grows into a mountain that will fill the whole earth, no place will be found any more for false religion, like Islam and counterfeit Christianity (Romanism, Orthodoxy and, amidst Fundamentalism in the "Protestant" camp, the damnable and damning heresies of Arminianism).

Islam's fate is therefore the same as that of all the other false ways (including atheism); it will be ruthlessly excised from the face of this earth like the pestilential tumour it always was.

Be watchful, then, and know why the Lord has ordained this evil in this world and turn from fellowshipping with the very apostates whom Islam was let loose upon; and pray for any Muslims that you know, that they might too come to knowledge of the one true God and His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Whom alone to lovingly know is life eternal.