The Satanic Beasts of the Book of Revelation

(NOTE: This is largely derived from my verse-by-verse commentaries on Revelation 11,12,13 & 17, which are still being worked up for web deployment.)

Primer

In Revelation there are numerous beasts described, some evil and some good, as follows:

• The four holy beasts of Revelation 4, revisited in Revelation 15.
• The Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12, though not explicitly called a “beast”, is by its form plainly a beast and, like the other two main Satanic beasts of Revelation, is also seven-headed and ten-horned.
• The Beast from the Sea, seven-headed and ten-horned, of Revelation 13.
• The two-horned Beast from the Earth, of Revelation 13, emerging as an adjunct to the Beast from the Sea, looking like a lamb but speaking as a dragon and coercing or compelling the ungodly to create the Image of the Beast, (i.e. of the Beast from the Sea) which is brought to life and demands worship for itself upon pain of death. This two-horned beast is frequently referred to by the Reformed writers, and indeed, Revelation itself, as the False Prophet (Revelation 19:20).
• The Scarlet Coloured Beast from the Bottomless Pit, likewise seven-headed and ten-horned, of Revelation 17, said to be “the beast that was, is not; and yet is”, and which is the same beast as that which kills the Two Witnesses in Revelation 11, as noted by Alexander Hislop in The Red Republic.

As John Gill points out, the four holy beasts refer to quintessential aspects of the faithful pastorate in the New Testament church era and are one and the same as the Cherubim of Ezekiel 1 (see John Gill on Revelation 4:7)

But what exactly does the symbolism of a Satanic "beast" point to?

Given that the Beast of Revelation 13 is generally taken to be either a man (the popular futurist view) or an office / role held by a succession of men (the mainstream historicist view, at least here in the UK), the issue really needs to be settled now that world events appear to be converging on a "singularity", as sensed by many people through observation of the news and societal developments.

This means that entrenched notions about the beast system of Revelation have to be challenged, especially the futurist view that has thrived so much as to have metastasised beyond the field of eschatology into broader, mainstream consciousness; for example, the Twentieth Century’s most notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley, reputedly self-styled himself “the Beast 666”, owning the moniker as a badge of honour (being both a despicable reprobate and senior member of the British intelligence services, devoted to the wicked royal family).

Yet it should be clear that the beasts of Apocalyptic prophecy – whether in Daniel or in Revelation – are emphatically not symbolic of individuals per se, but either of groups of people (as in the sacred beasts of Revelation 4 representing the faithful pastorate)), or in most instances more particularly emblematic of autocratic political empires or blocs, each existing under a common ideological alignment.

That is to say, most of the beasts of Apocalyptic prophecy are hieroglyphs for empires or blocs.

An example from classical times of the beasts-as-empires motif in prophecy is found in the very helpful and instructive case of Daniel 8.

Daniel 8 covers the rise of the Median-Persian empire (styled as a two-horned ram) and its demise in the face of Alexander the Great’s campaigns (the "he-goat"); then the split of the Macedonian-Greek Empire into four parts (Turkey to the north, Greece to the west, Syria to the east and Egypt to the south).

Out of the Syrian part came Antiochus Epiphanes, a “little horn” (Daniel 8:9) that was a prototype of the Daniel 7 "little horn" (the Antichrist of Rome), who expanded towards the east in Persia and to the south in Egypt where he subdued many cities according to Gill, and in between, Palestine itself.

The king of the south refers to Egypt, whereas the king of the north to Syria.

In 166 or 168 BC (depending on the source), this little horn that was Antiochus did all in his power to debase and destroy the worship of God by mixing it with worship of Jupiter in a syncretic fashion, as well as many murders and persecutions, the burning of the Word of God, defilements of the Temple, executions for possessing the Word, etc.

This he was to continue for 2,300 “mornings and evenings” (as the words "days" in Daniel 8:14 should be rendered), that is, literal days, not prophetic years, amounting to 6 years, 3 months and 18 days, which Gill demonstrates was fulfilled in the time of the Maccabees.¹

In fact, the prophecy of Daniel 8 was so unambiguously fulfilled with the rise of Medo-Persia and its subsequent destruction by Alexander the Great, and then with the rise and fall of Antiochus Epiphanes over one of the four parts of the Greek empire (the north, that is, Syrian part), that the enemies of the Lord in times of old tried to claim that the prophecy had been retrospectively fabricated after those events as a kind of hoax to advance the early Christian church; for example, Gill relates how the Neoplatonic philosopher, Porphyry of Tyre, described by Augustine as “the most bitter enemy of the Christians”, had made such a vile claim.

Returning from that brief diversion into Daniel 8, I would further refine the beasts-as-empires interpretive motif by adding that the beasts of Apocalyptic prophecy are umbrella terms for the pre-eminent geopolitical empires in human history since the age of the ascendancy of the first of them described in Daniel’s dream in Daniel 7, which in turn are automatically synonymous with their defining religion-cum-ideology.

However, the Word of God at first glance seems to contradict what I have just said:

“These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth” (Daniel 7:17)

This is one of those rare cases where the word rendered kings in the Hebrew original6 can equally also be rendered kingdoms, and as Gill points out in his commentary on Daniel 7, various ancient translations of this passage (notably the Greek Septuagint) had it as kingdoms.

And this point is rather settled a few verses later by the Word of God itself:

“The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth” (Daniel 7:23)

In turn, the term kingdom is permissibly interchangeable with the term empire², especially in the biblical narratives of empires in antiquity.

The four great beasts of Daniel’s vision described in Daniel 7 are symbolic representations of four empires or geopolitical blocs spanning four consecutive ages of human history, and on the one hand it is said that they “came up from the sea” (verse 3) and on the other that they shall “arise out of the earth” (verse 17); this is not a contradiction, but rather sees two different aspects of their narrative being assigned two differing metaphors.

The sea refers to the seething, unstable, back and forth waves of agitation, foaming strife and conflict of tribe against tribe, nation against nation, as the tumultuous, sin-soaked backdrop from whence these four great empires should emerge.

But superlatively, the sea also denotes the uncivilised, unsettled tribes of the earth before any of them had crystallised into proper, recognisable empires.

This should be taken note of, because, as an Apocalyptic hieroglyph, the sea is very dramatically referenced again in the Word of God as the source of the first beast in Revelation 13.

The earth, meanwhile, at least in Daniel 7:17,is reckoned by Gill to refer to the ungodly, fallen human spirit at the heart of those four successive world empires, which makes them distinct from, and primes us to better appreciate the purity and Christ-owned nature of, the Kingdom of God which is to follow the final of those four empires and which is itself mentioned in Daniel 7.

“But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever” (Daniel 7:18)

In concluding this "primer" for what follows further below, it may be helpful to keep this quick reference in mind:

• Beasts as “kings” or “kingdoms” = the ruling caste of Daniel 7-style empires or power blocs (amalgamations of national power bases) PLUS their religion-ideologies. These castes and the empires they rule are typically synonymous as was, for example, the Nazi leadership and the Third Reich.
• Heads as “mountains” or “kings” = kinds of government / temporal power source in Revelation 17:9.
• Horns as “kings” or “kingdoms” = specific individual governments or other sources of power / influence; and though given the number ten in several instances, these are not to be automatically counted as literally ten in number; rather, ten is an identifier marking them as western secular governments within the wider beast system.

The Encapsulation: Daniel 7's Fourth Beast

The three main Satanic beasts of Revelation bear not just a striking resemblance to each other, albeit with significant differences in some key particulars, but also to the fourth and final beast of Daniel 7 which is ten-horned like the three major Satanic beasts in Revelation.

"After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. And I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things." (Daniel 7:7-8)

This fourth beast of Daniel 7 the one that greatly piqued the interest of Daniel himself (Daniel 7:19) and featured a "little horn" that rose up in the midst of the ten horns; then later, upon said beast's passing, the time for the Lord’s children to possess the Kingdom would begin (Daniel 7:18,22), meaning it would be the final ungodly “kingdom”, that is, power bloc or realm, so to speak, in profane history prior to the emergence of the golden age promised in Daniel 2.

Accordingly, Daniel 7’s fourth and final beast, the ten-horned monstrosity with the "little horn" in the midst, is the same as the feet and toes of iron and clay in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision in Daniel 2 and encompasses all three of the major Satanic beasts of Revelation, which are presented as chronological phases within the continuum summarised in Daniel as the fourth beast.

That is, the emergence of the Great Red Dragon in Revelation 12 is one and the same as the emergence of Daniel 7’s fourth beast; likewise, the replacement of the Great Red Dragon by Beast from the Sea in Revelation 13 represents the second phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast during which the Little Horn would arise; and finally, the demise of the third and final Satanic beast of Revelation is one and the same as the end of Daniel 7’s fourth beast and the obliteration of Nebuchadnezzar’s image through its feet and toes of iron and clay being smitten by the stone cut out without hands in Daniel 2.

So well understood was this by the English Puritans that they longed for and pursued after the Kingdom that was to be possessed by the saints in Daniel 7:18,22, albeit they made one crucial mistake: they did not grasp the timing of its emergence, failing to realise its appointed time was still centuries into the future from their lifetimes.

Prophetic Datum: AD 765, Daniel 7's "Little Horn", and AD 2025

Before proceeding to examine the Satanic beasts of Revelation further, it is importtant to consider further the Little Horn of Daniel 7’s Fourth Beast, which emerged after the fourth beast appeared and was consolidated as a geopolitical entity, and possessed “the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things” (Daniel 7:8), before whom three of the beast’s original ten horns were “plucked up by the roots”.

This Little Horn would also “speak great words against the most High” and would “wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws” (Daniel 7:25), and, from the point of his emergence as a fully matured force himself, the saints were to be “given into his hand until a time, times and the dividing of a time”, whereupon or shortly whereafter he was to fall under judgment and lose all his dominion, with “the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven” to be “given to the people of the saints of the most High” (Daniel 7:26).

The Reformed interpretation of the Little Horn was, of course, the Papacy, who did indeed change times and laws (adjusting the calendar in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII’s Inter Gravissimas Papal Bull), and before whom indeed three kingdoms were plucked up and delivered into the possession of the Pope under the terms of the Donation of Pepin in AD 756, concluded within what the Papacy refers to as the “Patrimony of St. Peter”.

Those three kingdoms were, according to Gill:

1. Campania (“Campagnia of Rome”).
2. Ravenna.
3. Pentapolis.

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia article on the Donation of Pepin has it thus:

1. Lombard lands in Spoleto and Benevento (the latter being part of Gill’s “Campagnia of Rome”).
2. The Exarchate of Ravenna with its lands in Romagna.
3. Pentapolis.

But there was a problem.

The Germanic Lombards, whose lands those kingdoms were, refused to be subjugated by the Papacy and so it was not until they were defeated by the Franks in AD 765 (upon Papal request), nine years after the Donation of Pepin, that their lands began to be actually ruled by the Pope.

It was at that very point, in the year 765, that the Antichrist (i.e. the Papacy) reached apotheosis in that he at last began to exercise both ecclesiastical power and direct temporal power over large numbers of Europeans.

The year 765 is therefore a critical prophetic datum.

And that is because it marks the starting point of the church transcendent's (i.e. the Woman of Revelation 12) fixed entrenchment in the spiritual wilderness, at which the mission of the Lord’s public witness (styled as the "two witnesses" in Revelation 11) began, that mission being to protest from the fully marginalised sidelines against not just the sins of the nations, doctrinal error and the ecclesiastical claims of the Popes as hitherto, but now also against the temporal authority assigned to the Papacy.

As the Antichurch's claims and operations reached maturity, so they began to be exposed and opposed by a matching suite of refutations in 765.

That year also marked the starting point of the faithful church transcendent being largely eclipsed and worn out by the Antichurch and its enforcers, throwing its weight around as a peer of the political powers in Europe rather than simply as their spiritual advisor.

The duration of the Papacy’s (and its Antichurch’s) supremacy over the church transcendent was to be “a time, times and the dividing of a time”, unrolled thus by Gill:

...by "a time" is meant a year, the longest part of time; by "times", two years; and "the dividing of time", half a year; in all three years and a half, which is the same with 1,260 days, or forty two months, the time of the witnesses [Gill here refers to Revelation 11:3] prophesying in sackcloth, and of the reign of Antichrist [This is a reference to Revelation 13:5’s description of the lifespan of the Beast from the Sea, a beast which Gill and the Reformers mistakenly concluded as the Antichrist alone rather than understanding that Antichrist was to be merely part of it throughout its duration, rather than comprising the entity in toto. The Antichrist was confined to the Little Horn and the blasphemous doctrinal elements of the voice of the Beast from the Sea, which beast itself was/is the second phase of the geopolitical entity that is Daniel 7’s fourth beast]. (John Gill on Daniel 7:25)

This supremacy was not to be interrupted by the glorious Reformation which, despite its early gains, would rapidly lose influence and wither to a de facto “dead” state during the Sardian church era, as confirmed by Christ in Revelation 3’s opening verses.

So, establishing the year 765 as prophetic datum for the mission of the Two Witnesses means that their testimony is to be terminated, in accordance with Revelation 11:7, at (or around)³ a full 1,260 years after 765.

Clearly, 765 + 1,260 brings us to the year 2025, albeit not one of the old writers (to the best of my knowledge) grasped that 765 was the starting point of the Two Witnesses' mission; but at least one, Oliver Cromwell's pastor and leading English Puritan theologian, Thomas Goodwin, had the sagacity (by the grace of God) to assert in An Exposition of the Revelation that when the mysterious year of the termination of the Two Witnesses' mission would arrive, their slaying would be a process that would begin in that year, at the behest of the Beast from the Bottomless Pit (i.e. one and the same beast as Revelation 17's Scarlet Coloured Beast) instigating wicked laws designed to silence them.

And now we know (speaking in 2026) that by 2025 a raft of Satanic new "hate speech" laws had been brought into force in several western nations; for both online and in-the-street deployment; and so one can see how systemic hostility to any semblance of public witness (however doctrinally dismal) is in every western country:

Phase 1 of the Encapsulation: The Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12

The Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12 was the rulership of the ungodly at the helm of the pagan Roman Empire (this is greatly expanded upon in my commentary on Revelation 12).

As a device of Satan, Pagan Rome brought great trouble upon the church transcendent, culminating in the heinously bloody ten year Diocletianic Persecution of the Christians from AD 303 to AD 313, a decade that fully comprised the mercifully brief Smyrnean church age, a suffering which Christ foretold would last “ten days” (i.e. 10 years – see Revelation 2:10).

The Lord brought Smyrna’s tribulation to an end at the appointed time via a “war in heaven” (Revelation 12:7) that saw Satan and his angels (i.e. his godless agents among fallen humanity) ejected from the political heavens and Satan himself cast “into the earth” (from exercising control over high office in the empire) when Constantine ascended to power, ushering in the Pergamos church era.

This victory for the church was to be very transient, as Satan went to work amidst the “inhabiters of the earth and of the sea” (Revelation 12:12), that is, he stirred up the ungodly masses at plebeian level within the empire (“the earth”) and the barbarians beyond its boundaries (“the sea”) to prepare ambient conditions hostile to the Woman (the church transcendent), being no longer able to oppress her on a top-down basis.

In time, Satan would regroup his forces and, from the rubble of the collapsing Roman Empire, would formulate a new strategy against the Woman that would drive her, bit-by-bit, from the public fore in the so-called civilised world of Europe to the periphery of society and discourse.

That endeavour would take time, and first consisted of trying to assault her with a flood of beguiling errors on the spiritual front, none of which were able to overwhelm her, only being absorbed by the reprobate, carnal masses in the non-barbarian world, i.e., the earth, said to swallow up the flood (Revelation 12:16).⁴

Seeing that had failed, his next move was to focus on developing an Antichurch and that was starting to crystallise during the Pergamos era; this was done plainly in the hope of creating a very plausible facsimile of the true church that would be capable of eclipsing it and appropriating unto itself exclusivity and supremacy.

If he couldn’t destroy the true church with false doctrines, he would set up a counterfeit in parallel that would keep as many souls as possible away from the true.

In this enterprise, still within the Pergamos era, Satan was far more successful, and “Satan’s seat” was thus established in Pergamos (Revelation 2:13), with the principle of Christians being persecuted by an apostate Christian leader now begun, which I believe (as does Gill) is the meaning of the days of Christ’s “faithful martyr” Antipas (a contraction of the term “Antipater”, literally “against the father”, which Gill believed should to be understood as “opposed to the false spiritual father” - see the section on Pergamos in my article, Church History Foretold with the Seven Churches in Asia).

Phase 2 of the Encapsulation: The Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13

It should not be a surprise to learn that it was during the Pergamos church era that the bishops of Rome first became known as “Papa” or Pope, the original incumbent being Damasus 1 in AD 366.

However, it would take a further four centuries before the Papacy would reach its fully matured state of blasphemy and start to exercise both ecclesiastical and temporal power in Europe, by which time several proto-kingdoms on the continent had begun to form within the bounds of the fallen western branch of the Roman Empire.

By that time (the mid 700s), the Papacy had grown in stature, boldness and aspiration, and then, with 756’s Donation of Pepin coming into operation in 756, western Europe was finally recognisable as the Beast from the Sea, that is, a conglomeration of kingdoms populated by the descendents of the barbarian tribes who had flooded into the crumbling ruins of the old western empire and ruled by wealthy kings and princes, forming a formidable transnational civilisation that the rest of the world could not match militarily or economically until the present day, compelling the reprobate majority to “wonder after” this beast, in proud, boastful awe of so-called Christendom:

"...and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?" (Revelation 13:4)

The arrival of this second and long-enduring phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast marked the opening of the Thyatira church era that saw the Woman’s flight to the spiritual wilderness conclude with her safe arrival there and, to reiterate, being the point at which the three kingdoms were plucked up before the Little Horn of Daniel 7, was the point at which Daniel 7’s fourth beast became transformed into its second phase, its “Beast from the Sea” guise.

Spiritually, this Beast from the Sea took its doctrines from its exalted and self-exalting Little Horn that was the Papacy, and connived for centuries at the Little Horn’s claim of temporal authority yet all the while remaining distinct from it and, as was the case during the multi-decade Avignon exile of the Papacy, extensively involved in manipulating it and appointing its incumbents.

The Beast from the Sea could therefore be best described as the western European power elites throughout the entirety of the Thyatira (765 - ca.1514) and Sardis (1514 - now) church eras, during which time they would be either committed or ostensible members of the Little Horn’s Antichurch or of its harlot offspring (apostate Protestantism), giving a “Christian” veneer to western civilisation belying the fact that only a tiny few within the West ever were, in fact, true believers.

This Beast from the Sea had “a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies” (Revelation 13:5), which I believe refers to the grandiose claims and ambitions of the West’s elites as well as to the false doctrines of the Antichurch (and its harlot offspring) that historically defined those elites and, more broadly, western civilisation in the sight of the onlooking world beyond; and, latterly, it might additionally refer to the atheistic heresies of the West’s elites and masses.

The Beast from the Sea also had, among its seven heads, one wounded mortally yet remarkably restored to vitality (Revelation 13:3).

The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea each had seven heads and ten horns, the former having a crown upon each head denoting that supreme sovereignty lay with the types of ruler (e.g. consuls, emperors) over the Roman Empire, whereas the Beast from the Sea’s crowns were upon its horns to show that sovereignty (or the on-the-surface appearance thereof!) had shifted to the individual governments of the western nations for the vast majority of the lifespan of the Beast from the Sea (with admissible brief deviations such as that which occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s rule in Britain as Lord Protector, or such as the transition of the western bloc into its final scarlet state towards the close of the Beast from the Sea’s tenure, during which time it has become increasingly obvious to the switched-on among us – but not to the rest – that sovereignty lies beyond the western governments).

The Beast from the Sea is also depicted as possessing a leopard-like form (suggestive of the western nations’ predatory nature, perhaps especially that seen in their colonialism), with the feet of a bear (suggestive of the immovability of the western bloc) and with the mouth of a lion (ravenous in its consumption – so true of the West in the sight of the world beyond! – and terrifying in both its roar and bite, to the deterrent and constraint of the barbarian nations of the East).

Power was given unto the Beast from the Sea to continue forty and two months, that is, 1,260 years but here reckoned in units of the night (months, derived from the phases of the moon, as Gill points out), to emphasise the ungodliness of western power (not in contradistinction from eastern power, which is also ungodly, but by comparison to the Lord’s Kingdom), and so, knowing that it began in the year 765, we can say that the West in its nominally Christian, but predominantly apostate and latterly atheist forms would continue until the year 2025, whereupon its transition into its final phase, as Scarlet Beast from the Bottomless Pit, would be undeniably visible to saint and sinner alike the world over.

And, right on schedule, there is now a flurry of conservative commentators calling out as communist tyranny the sudden surge in online censorship and public harassment and gagging by the police of Christian preachers in the UK, Australia, the EU and Canada, with so far only the Republican parts of Trump’s MAGA America holding fast to freedom of expression, but that too will succumb under the right conditions of say, a national security crisis, the gagging legislation for which is already in the works.

Returning to the Beast from the Sea, one of its heads was to receive a “deadly wound”, which means that during its 1,260 lifetime one type of rulership within its fold would become greatly degraded by an existential strike, only to recover.

John Gill understood it of the Roman emperorship’s demise and subsequent replacement by the Papacy, but since that would be two different heads (type of rulership) rather than one being devastatingly injured only to recover, I think it better to treat it as Thomas Goodwin did in his An Exposition of the Revelation, namely, that it refers to the Papacy stricken a deadly blow by the Reformation.

This saw great damage done to the reputation and influence of the Papacy by the Reformation’s exposure of its true identity as the office of Antichrist hosting the temporal governance that is the Little Horn, a gain for Protestantism now largely lost to true believers, especially in North America, with seemingly most of them having imbibed the Jesuit eschatology of futurism (which was designed from the outset to rehabilitate the reputation of, and deflect attention, from the Papacy).

Aside from a remarkable undoing of that shocking realisation amidst Protestants, the Papacy was also left vulnerable to vanishing as an office as a consequence of the Reformation, had the Reformation been wholly received, embraced and advanced by the rulers of Europe.

However, that did not happen; at best, they paid lip service to it and leveraged it for their own selfish reasons (as was seemingly the case with the libidinous King Henry VIII of England) and geopolitical ambitions vis-à-vis those of their rivals, and then were party to diluting the Reformed doctrines with the Counter-Reformation toxins of Arminianism.

At the same time, the Reformed churches failed to expunge every artefact of the Antichurch, triggering a chain reaction that, in my view at least, went thus:

Reformation => compromise on infant baptism => tolerating then embracing man-made hymns and music in praise at the expense of the Reformation’s Regulative Principle => tolerating then embracing Arminian doctrine and evangelisation methods at the expense of the Reformation’s Calvinism => tolerating then embracing futurism (a Jesuit eschatology) at the expense of the Reformation’s historicism (leading to no longer regarding the Papacy as the Antichrist) => ecumenical toleration of apostate churches and, in extremis, Rome itself, as “Christian” => women pastors and all manner of modern liberal abominations, including the “health and wealth gospel”, charismaticism and promoting LGBT => homosexual and lesbian bishops and same-sex wedding services.

In other words, as the Papacy recovered more and more from the deadly wound, Protestantism increasingly fell prey to its very own deadly wound, to the point that now, bar a “few names”, it is fully Sardian, that is, “dead” in the sense of Revelation 3:1.

It may be objected, however, that the Papacy is no longer a meaningful force in this world and therefore, has it not succumbed after all?

While it is indeed true that the Papacy had diminished in power and influence, and been humiliated by the loss of the Papal states in Italy and thereby suffered the loss of its temporal power, none of those happy developments accrued on account of the deadly wound it received from the Reformation but rather from the machinations of ambitious kings and more latterly from the transformation of Daniel 7’s fourth beast from its apostate Christian (“Beast from the Sea”) state to its final atheistic, “scarlet” state.

And so I submit that the recovery from the deadly wound was not necessarily meant to be understood of an enduring return to erstwhile universality of acceptance of the Papacy in the western world throughout the remainder of its assigned tenure, but only long enough for the Reformation-inflicted wound against it to appear healed.

Moreover, while the Papacy has been a spent force geopolitically since its secular humiliations and is no longer extant as a form of political rulership (i.e., its Little Horn characteristic has withered away), it nonetheless still exists as an office, tolerated and born aloft, along with the Antichurch it presides over, by the beast system in the West’s final, atheistic, Scarlet Beast condition.

None of that diminishes the Papacy’s role as spiritual head and historical blaspheming mouth of the West’s elite establishment in its nominally Christian guise, nor their collective role in waging warfare against, wearing out and overcoming the saints of the Lord, especially in the days of the Inquisition, when the civil magistrates in European lands executed many believers at the urging of the Romish clergy, but also in lending their support and patronage to apostate forms of Protestantism as so-called “defenders of the faith” (while being, in practice, deniers of the faith⁵), to the hurt of the cause of God and truth and to the vexation of His faithful few servants, in a salutary reminder that even the most noble of unbelievers in authority is nonetheless, wittingly or not, in service to Satan and accordingly opposed to the Lord, the interests of His people and the advance of His Kingdom.⁶

Phase 2's Adjunct #1: The Two-Horned Beast from the Earth of Revelation 13

“And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.” (Revelation 13:11)

After completing the description of the Beast from the Sea, the Apostle John proceeds to tells us of a new beast that appears from the earth, as distinct from the sea from whence the main beast of Revelation 13 arose.

Whereas the sea denotes the tumult of European barbarian tribes that surged over the collapsing western Roman Empire, a scenario out of which emerged the multiheaded, multi-horned Beast from the Sea, the earth, on the other hand, represents the so-called civilised world, originally consisting only of the largely stable pagan Roman Empire, but afterwards its direct successor on which the Beast from the Sea, having stepped out from its watery depths (figuratively speaking, obviously), would stand.

And so this new beast of Revelation 13 was to rise up in western Europe and become an active agency at a time when the barbarian incursions would have reduced and the western European tribes had begun to settle down in forms that would start to be recognisable as the incipient modern states we know today.

However, this beast is not another empire or bloc within the western European bloc, but rather is an organically connected adjunct of the Beast from the Sea whose interests and policies it plainly exists to serve.

It nonetheless retains its own peculiarities that separate and distinguish it from its master, not least of which is the fact that unlike the Beast from the Sea, attention is never drawn to its head, that is, form of rulership and by implication, it would at first glance appear to possess no domains of its own, an omission suggestive of a single, consistent head throughout its lifespan, that head being that which rules over it, that which it serves, which would be the Beast from the Sea as a whole.

And because we know that all three phases of Daniel 7’s fourth beast collectively comprise all that constitute the western European realms from the beginning of the Roman Empire until the time when the Lord’s people shall begin to “possess the Kingdom” (Daniel 7:22), we should further interpret this Beast from the Earth not as a concurrent empire in subservient alliance with the western European realms and their apostate Christian spirituality, but as an abstraction operating within that geopolitical-spiritual hybrid’s territories that the Beast from the Sea occupies.

Additionally, we are told:

“he had two horns like a lamb”

As Gill notes, this can be rendered as “he had two horns like to THE Lamb”, Jesus Himself.

In either case, whether it be a reference to how harmless Jesus appears to His children or to how harmless literal lambs look, this beast’s horns are not to be taken as horns of governmental power, but of two other kinds of power (horns in prophecy, to remind the reader once more, symbolise power per se, not automatically kingly or governmental power):

1. Some kind of ecclesiastical power, and,
2. Some kind of profane (i.e. irreligious) power.

This harmless looking lamb-like entity is an agency that to all intents and purposes looks gentle, harmless or at a bare minimum, unthreatening, if not positively friendly.

But then it opens its mouth, whereupon we find:

“he spake as a dragon”

That is, this agency that superficially seems meek and inoffensive is, in actuality and discernible to those who have the Word of God and who weigh and judge all things by it, Satan’s messenger and mouthpiece, a veritable angel of light (see 2 Corinthians 11:14).

This, therefore, is a relay of the Beast from the Sea’s mouth speaking great things (i.e. temporal-political declarations) and blasphemies (spiritual-doctrinal declarations), rendering the Beast from the Earth an umbrella term for the two distinct things mentioned above, and expanded upon thus:

1. Insofar as it fully represents and speaks for the geopolitical-spiritual hybrid that is the Beast from the Sea, it is its religious ambassador and, if you will, also includes those involved in mediatorship between the chief spiritual representative of the Beast from the Sea (the Pope himself) and the common man in the western European domains. So, more than being the Pope’s messenger, it is also the mediatorial voice of apostate Christianity in the West in all forms, i.e., the apostate clergy.
2. With respect to the Beast from the Sea’s temporality, this is the secular voice of ungodly influence in the West opposed to the Kingdom of Christ and to the Lordship claims and rights of King Jesus to rule over the affairs of men. That is, this second beast is also the secular voice of influence and opinion-shaping, namely, the experts, the professors, the educators, the orators, the politicians, the activists, the influencers, the movie actors, entertainers, music stars, sports stars, the movers and shakers, and latterly, the writers and media, in sum, every person of influence beating the drum of “the message”, the narrative-du-jour in opposition to Christ, His Word and His Kingdom.

As such, the Beast from the Earth is a metaphor for all that might equally be termed, and is equally termed later in Revelation, the False Prophet (Revelation 19:20).

Or to borrow a term from John Bunyan, it includes western civilisation’s worldly wise men⁷, telling us to “trust the science”, “trust the church”, “trust the teacher”, “trust the professor”, “trust the expert”.

Lamenting why “normies” never listened to the warnings of the switched-on clarion cries predicting vaccine mandates, restrictions on travel and assembly, lockdowns, etc., Dave Cullen, the Irish conservative vlogger, commented:

“When we warned them in advance, our warnings didn’t mean anything to them because we don’t have authority in their lives. The reason they caved later on down the line was because the government, media and health officials told them that they had to do it. As soon as pressure from the system came to bear, they bottled and gave in. The masses, for the most part, only respond to and follow, those with power. We don’t have any, so our warnings didn’t carry much weight with them. We can tell them everything that’s going to happen, step-by-step, but it doesn’t become real to them until it comes from the television.” (Dave Cullen, vlog: Bracing for the Endgame, 6th April 2023).

Part of the reason this is even possible has to do with the inability of modern westerners to engage in critical thinking, defaulting instead to how they have been trained and conditioned to think through state education.

Even the very brightest of people are in bondage to this mentality that not only elevates and exalts the expert caste and assigns to them attributes that they simply do not possess, but makes de facto experts out of the most unfit candidates on the basis of unrelated qualities:

“The fatal misstep of intellectuals is assuming that superior ability within a particular realm can be generalised to superior wisdom or morality overall.” (Excerpt from Intellectuals & Society, by Thomas Sowell).

This is not just relevant to experts themselves developing a “God complex”, but extends to people in general investing blind faith in:

1. Experts (especially those within the medical profession) portraying themselves as know-it-alls beyond their own area of expertise, and,
2. Intellectually lightweight vulgarians like Taylor Swift and Julia Roberts (to name just two high profile hyper-leftist celebrities) proffering political opinions that carry far more weight with the stupefied masses than those of well-read, properly informed, intelligent nobodies.

“The whole system revolves around the idea that the majority can be made to believe anything, so long as it is repeated loudly and often. And it works.” (Edward Snowden, 9th February 2023 on X / Twitter)

Hence it is the case that most people today only trust the word of the experts (or the likes of Taylor Swift) on all major issues, be it climate change, the pandemic, the history of the two world wars or the now forgotten “war on terror”, to cite a few examples.

Ever since the Prussian model of education was introduced in the West, state schooling has been the primary means of conditioning society for a lifetime of heeding the government’s, and its expert caste’s, narratives.⁸

Of course, they teach your children how to read, write and juggle numbers somewhat, and some schools are better at that than others, but the main goal in all cases is to eventually herd adolescents into narrow niches of expertise rather than to encourage generalist outcomes because the Prussian model seeks compartmentalisation for the following reasons:

• It eschews any possibility of those it processes from developing the capacity for lateral thinking and so it makes it a point of principle not to teach the classical subjects of rhetoric and logic.
• It reinforces the “cult of the expert”, which is a prerequisite to seducing society into trusting the priesthood of the narrative.

As American teacher and author, John Taylor Gatto, noted in Dumbing Us Down, state education is designed to instil in children a reliance on continual confirmation from the experts rather than trust in their own deductive reasoning.

By implication, this also extends to distrust in the voice of one’s own parents or older generations, and of course, in the Word of God.

The ungodly state's education system is therefore quintessentially opposed to the Lord’s Kingdom, that is, it seeks to replace the Word with the secular, atheistic, crypto-Marxist narratives; state education is accordingly fundamentally Satanic and anti-Christ (hence we have a deductive mandate for homeschooling).

Returning to the symbolism of the Beast from the Earth, we note that it exercises the Beast from the Sea’s power (Revelation 13:12)

The apostate clergy’s role has always been to bring worship to and compliance with the spirituality of the Beast from the Sea, most emphatically to the Papacy, but also to all the institutions of apostate Christianity, whatever form it has assumed in the West, since the spiritual picture of the West considered as a collective ungodly civilisation has always been the shared value-set or “glue” loosely providing common ground between its often mutually distrustful, and sometimes recalcitrant, member states together in some recognisable “Christendom” or other since 765.

So when we read that this False Prophet exercises all the power of the first beast before it, this power only refers to authority over the narrative, as opposed to exercising any high level temporal power, as the latter is formally exercised exclusively by the horns (the governments) of the Beast from the Sea, including the Little Horn while the Papal States existed, and as indicated by the crowns being on the Beast from the Sea’s horns (Revelation 13:1); but such temporal power does not reside in the two benign-impression-forming horns the lamb-like Beast from the Earth possesses.

Here we have, therefore, a kind of plausible deniability insofar as this False Prophet, this caste of priests and experts, appears to the ungodly masses to be acting as a distinct entity from the formal governments of the West, so that it can urge and manipulate and coerce in such a fashion as to make people believe the things it is promoting are the result of natural, organic forces within society, rather than tacitly state-sanctioned manipulation.

It exists, then, by necessity within western regimes saddled with the social contract concept that the more openly tyrannical governments of the East are less encumbered by;⁹ it fulfils a role that the western governments (the ten horns on the Beast from the Sea) could never fulfil themselves due to populist disenfranchisement with, and cynicism towards, ruling authority, especially in the past two to three centuries.

Returning to the specific mission of the False Prophet here in the West, it serves to coerce and compel “the earth [western Europeans] and them which dwell therein [all ungodly non-westerners living in the West]” to bow down to the native, common false religion or values pushed by the elites in any given western land at any given time:

• For the vast majority of the 1,260 year timespan that began in AD 765, that object of obeisance has been apostate Christianity in any guise, but ideally (from a Romish perspective), Roman Catholicism itself and with it, to its Antichrist, the Pope, that particular one of the Beast from the Sea’s heads (i.e. class of government in the West) “whose deadly wound was healed”.
• As Daniel 7’s fourth beast transforms from its Beast from the Sea state into its third and final state (the Scarlet Beast from the Bottomless Pit), the object of obeisance the False Prophet directs western society to is increasingly the new religion of all that the atheistic scarlet system lauds as sacred: LGBT, Critical Race Theory, Islam, the climate cult, feminism, and so on.
  
  

But the Lord goes further and informs us of a means in which the false priesthood that is the Beast from the Earth deceives and wins the trust of those unequipped with knowledge and understanding of the Word of God: it performs miracles (Revelation 13:13).

As False Prophet, the Beast from the Earth not only looks as harmless as a lamb to those who trust him; it also possesses gravitas, an appearance of authoritative wisdom that commands admiration and respect, much of which would seem to arise from the misguided faith placed in it through the cult-of-the-expert mechanisms described earlier.

In its apostate clergy garb, it promises to miraculously expedite the deliverance of lost departed souls from Purgatory (in exchange for money for the “church”), and in its cult of the expert guise it cites the advances in technology that science has made, the same body of science that now tells us there is no God, a doctrine that is a sinner’s charter.

Accordingly, it enjoys the same prestige that it would if it routinely and literally performed miracles and wonders, and brought fire down from heaven in the sight of men.

None of the foregoing is to deny that governments everywhere, not just in the West, have long engaged in propaganda as a means to shape public opinion, but now, as we approach the time of Daniel 7’s Kingdom, we have to deal with concepts such as “ "full spectrum warfare”, entailing not just traditional means of coercive force, but also cyber warfare and psychological operations against foreign and domestic enemies:

“Waged successfully, cognitive warfare shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives... [the aggressors] could conceivably subdue a society without resorting to outright force or coercion.” (NATO documentation, Countering Cognitive Warfare: Awareness and Resilience (2021)).

But predominantly, the domestic populations of the western lands have long been targeted by our ruling elites for coercive control through the deception of a trustworthy, unofficial, non-governmental voice of opinion-leading in the form of the apostate clergy and the cartel of godless experts pushing “the message”, all of whom are collectively represented by the symbolism of the False Prophet / Beast from the Earth.

Moreover, that evil agency, now identified as the voice of the godless narrative that rallies public support for the policies (and doctrines) of the machine that is the main beast system, is then revealed in Revelation 13 to be the driving force behind the masses creating the Image of the Beast that comes to life, demanding worship and compelling the masses to receive the Mark of the Beast.

Phase 2's Adjunct #2: The IMAGE of the Beast of Revelation 13

There are numerous bad notions today about what the Image of the Beast really is, the latest of them being Artificial Intelligence (AI), with plenty of self-styled prophets and dreamers claiming God has warned them that this is what the Image is.

But by no metric has AI thus far expanded into a synthetically sentient singularity demanding worship for itself or for the regime.

Yet the Image of the Beast, meanwhile, demands full compliance with its value set, which happens to be the same as that of the beast system itself at any time.

The Image of the Beast is then brought to life by the False Prophet¹⁰ – not by the masses or by any computer programmer – so that it vocally demands obeisance upon pain of death.

In plain language, the godless voice of informal authority and influence urges the basest people among the ungodly to make, as their idol or object of worship, not an updated version of the Beast from the Sea (as, logically, an abstraction cannot be duplicated thus) but anything and everything that the Beast from the Sea, that is, the ungodly western power elites, would like to be set forth as “sacred cows” or articles of compliance for the masses.

Having presented the masses with this new value set, the False Prophet then urges invested activists to promote the value set, effectively giving it a voice of its own, a voice that demands wholesale compliance with it.

This unnatural, ungodly and self-vocalising value set is thereby called an image, that is, an idol that incorporates expressions of the “approved” opinions for any given zeitgeist throughout history since the western nations began to become consolidated (more or less) in their present forms.

Accordingly, in the days of the Inquisition, bowing to the Image would have included going along with Romish arguments justifying the extirpation of heretics.

In later times, submitting to the demanding the Image would have consisted of espousing Erastianism, as was the case in Britain during the infamous Killing Time that saw the persecution of the Scottish Covenanters and English Puritans.

In the Twentieth Century, the Image’s demands would have started out as expressing subscription to atheism, free love, “Big Bang” theory, feminism, etc., among a host of secular pressures to conform, and spiritually (in notionally Protestant settings) such abominations as the Marxist insertion of Situation Ethics (basically a mandate to justify any sin by calling it “love”) into theology.

At every turn, the Image of the Beast is that which society imagines it has fomented as a grassroots progression in thought, but which it has been subtly manipulated into calling for, thanks to the machinations of the narrative-building voice of informal influence and authority, and thereby, the beast system’s hidden rulers have been able to artfully stir the western masses up into calling for its own secretly prescribed policies that the elected and therefore “accountable” frontmen politicians then legislate for, a mechanism in stark distinction from the more direct and openly autocratic form of rulership in the East.

And so the Image of the Beast’s utterances amount to demands for conformity.

That is, conform with the received narratives, conform with “the message”, conform with anything and everything that the ungodly who rule over us set forth in exaltation against the righteous Word of God and Christ’s claims and rights to Kingship over the nations.

And the penalty for not conforming?

“Death” (Revelation 13:15), that is, “cancellation”, ostracisation, imprisonment, exclusion, marginalisation, discrediting, banishment and, at times over the centuries, literal death itself.

Today, of course, the Image is alive and well, and set to continue screaming demandingly for our submission to it throughout the short-lived residency of the beast system’s final scarlet phase now in view, and we know that it carries on past the lifespan of the Beast from the Sea and right to the demise of the Scarlet Beast because it is not undone and destroyed until the judgment outlined in Revelation 19:20 is meted in the course of the seventh and final of the Seven Last Plagues, the very same one that brings on the Philadelphian church state and the fulfilment of Daniel 2:44, Daniel 7:18,22, etc.

And it is plain to see the present-day form the brought-to-life Image has now taken (even in Trump’s America, as events will soon show): comply with regime narratives or else!!!

Phase 2's Adjunct #3: The MARK of the Beast of Revelation 13

Throughout Revelation, the Image of the Beast is inextricably connected with the Mark; there is not one without the other, as these passages show:

“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads” (Revelation 13:5-16)

“And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand...” (Revelation 14:9)

“And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.” (Revelation 15:2)

“And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.” (Revelation 16:2)

“And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.” (Revelation 19:20)

This mutual link is for good reason: the Mark is a visible or observable sign that someone worships the Image (i.e. complies with its demands, and thereby “worships” (complies with) the godless dicta of the beast system).

Although not obvious from our King James Version, the actual verb used for receiving the Mark is reflexive, meaning that the Mark is something that one does to oneself.¹¹

In plainspeak, the Mark is any expression, or other noticeable show, of approval, support or loyalty to the abominations contained within the depraved value set that comprise the Image of the Beast.

It is symbolically said to be in the forehead or right hand, an obvious allusion to the Hebrews’ binding of the law of God in those parts, which I take to be indicative of being in the forefront of both one’s work and one’s thinking, which makes the reference suggestive of committed ideologues and / or impassioned adherents¹², perhaps expanded to include those who, for the sake of getting along in life, pretend to espouse those wicked value sets.

In the very near future, the western governments will foist their digital ID systems (such as the EU Digital Identity Wallet, set for launch in 2026) and digital currencies on us, for which it would be extremely naive of anyone to imagine that no databases already exist with social credit scores assigned to each and every one of us.

Those social credit scores, modelled on the wicked system in place in tyrannical China, are based on data mined electronically on all of us with respect to our associations and our political and religious positions, so they already know who has marked themselves as compliant with the Satanic narrative and who has not, and they intend to restrict and fetter, and make life difficult for, those of us who are not thus marked.

Mercifully, that oppressive system will not last long and will quickly fail but, for a period measurable in months, things could become very obstructive for Christians and principled conservatives (for whom I would suggest there is deductively genuine elective hope).

All of the foregoing naturally implies two further points:

1. The Mark is technically a West-only phenomenon, albeit in the East it already has an equivalent-cum-prototype in China based on complying with the CCP’s narratives rather than the abominations the various western governments promote.
2. It is not simply an implantable chip, a quantum tattoo, an invisible barcode, etc., although such things may accompany it in some jurisdictions; rather, the key point is that the Mark denotes allegiance to the abominations of the approved value set of the godless elites here in the West, i.e, allegiance to the demands of the Image of the Beast.

Phase 2's Adjunct #4: The NAME of the Beast of Revelation 13

The Name of the Beast is a mystic name, obscured and difficult to interpret, and impossible to do so if one begins with the incorrect definition of what the Beast from the Sea is.

This explains why the old writers, including Gill, could not quite understand the meaning of the Name, given that they misunderstood the Beast from the Sea by confining it to the Papacy alone, rather than seeing it for what it really is, namely, the ruling cabal of the western European nations who lurk behind the facade of accountable democracy.

The starting data for identifying the Beast from the Sea are:

1. The fact that it is contained within the whole of Daniel 7’s fourth beast, which the old writers correctly understood to be a geopolitical force.
2. The fact that “the rich rule over the poor” (Proverbs 22:7).

Those are our two anchors for decoding the Beast from the Sea and, thereby, vital clues in determining its spiritual name.

Let it be further considered for careful watchers of social affairs that power is actually dispensed by the so-called establishment, not from elected representatives; in the UK and the US, this is discreetly referred to as the Anglo-American Establishment, which forms the title of a book on that very theme by Carroll Quigley.

There are numerous relevant valid conclusions to be drawn from the grotesque spectacle of the world’s “Superclass” and their factors attending secretive conferences in Davos and elsewhere, the so-called Bilderbergers and World Economic Forum grandees.

These gatherings are the telling smoke from an obscured fire, and the calls for action made there and the ensuing outcomes point to a fully coordinated, single-hymn-sheet, uni-policy, uni-plan dynamic flowing from the richest people in the western world down to the NGOs and activists who agitate for policy change, as well as more directly to bureaucrats and political leaders, movers and shakers in every single western country.

What I am driving at here is the fact that the elites who truly hold the reins of power hide behind the charade of democracy, or, as someone else once phrased it, “all forms of government are cover for oligarchy”, and that being so, the Beast from the Sea represents a class of wicked person, a type of evil man:

The elite, ultra rich man who hides his rulership.

And so the Hidden Elite Man is, in fact, the de facto Name of the Beast and keep that point in mind as we come to count the Number of the Beast, because the Number and the Name are organically linked going by Revelation 13:17, and the Number confirms the Name, as we see below.

Phase 2's Adjunct #5: The NUMBER of the Beast of Revelation 13

The number 666 is given in Revelation 13:18 and said to be “the number of a man”, which, to reiterate, I argue is to be understood as the number of a class of man, as opposed to a single individual (which most modern Christians mistakenly think) or office (as the Reformers and Puritans thought).

And so, just as in Revelation 11 the Two Witnesses are a symbol for the Lord’s 1,260 year public witness against error beginning at the prophetic datum year of 765 and continuing until the present day, so the "hidden elite man" is a symbol of the whole ruling elite clique; that is to say, just as the Two Witnesses are not two literal men, so this is not a literal man who gives his name and number to the Beast from the Sea, but a class of man, the so-called "Superclass", the very kind of person that is subject of a 2008 book called “Superclass”, by David Rothkopf.¹³

The Superclass’ name is, again, effectively the "hidden elite ruler".

Now consider that Alexander Hislop, writing in The Two Babylons (1852), points out that the votaries of the Chaldean Mystery Religion served a divinity whose name was revealed only to them, thereby hiding his identity from outsiders; the name of this "hidden god" was Saturn, pronounced "Satūr" in Chaldee (from whence we derive our Saturday), but written as "Stūr".

The name, as Hislop pointed out, possessed a value in the Chaldean numerical system:

S=60, T=400, U=6, R=200, giving a total by counting of 666.

Meanwhile, the pagan Romans indulged in a midwinter feast they named the Saturnalia (as part of their worship of the sun god on account of his midwinter “birthday”, a Pagan “holy day” from whence the Papists derived their Christ-Mass).

Perhaps what is less well-known is that the original name of the city of Rome was Saturnia, as attested to by such famous Roman writers as Ovid, Pliny and Victor Aurelius.

Meanwhile, according to the Latin poet Virgil, the Romans claimed to be descended from Latinus (although we would regard such claims as mythical), and that Latinus was ostensibly the "child of the sun" who, while said to be a real man, bears a striking resemblance to the Babylonian and Roman divinity, Saturn (Stūr), who was also viewed as the "offspring of the sun", by the Pagans.

Furthermore, while Virgil's myth renders Latinus the human grandson of the god Saturn, Hislop further argues, quite convincingly, that Saturn, as "hidden god", would have been referred to as Lat, which is Chaldee for "hidden", and that accordingly, Saturn and his deified human offspring, Latinus, were actually originally one and the same divinity.

Ovid and Virgil both affirmed that Latium (known as Lazio in modern Italian), that region in which Rome resides, derived its name from Saturn himself.

Through this etymological process, Hislop proposes that Saturn and Latinus are one and the same, and while the Romans retained the word Saturn as the name of this divinity long after their geographical seat and language were named after his synonym Latinus, the Greeks referred to Saturn via a Hellenised version of his synonym: Lateinos (λατεινοσ).

Now, having shown that the hidden god's name, when assessed by Chaldean numerology applied to the Chaldean form of the name, yields the mystic number 666, it is very jarring to observe that his name in Greek, Lateinos, also adds up to the same value in the Hellenic numeric system:

L (λ) = 30, A (α) = 1, T (τ)= 300, E (ε) = 5, I (ι) = 10, N (ν) = 50, O (ο) = 70, S (σ) = 200, giving a total by counting of 666.

Hereby we again have a name (Lateinos) that has a number (Revelation 13:17), a number that has to be counted to produce 666 (Revelation 13:18 - The counting aspect means that notions of the triple six being meant as an emphatic, threefold expression of evil, are bogus.)

And again, it is the same identity (Saturn), only in a different language.

Would we call that a coincidence, or does it look too far beyond the odds of probability to be such?

There is a further twist, though.

The Greek term Lateinos is not only a synonym for Saturn, the "hidden god", but it can also mean the "Latin man" or the "Latin speaking man", whose etymology in turn is literally the "hidden one" or the "hidden man".

Its translation in Hebrew is rendered Romiti (יתימור – note that Hebrew is written from right to left), which, like Chaldean and Greek, also has a numerical system (Alep א =1, Bet ב =2, Gimel ג =3, etc.)

In the Hebrew numeral system, that name is counted out as follows:

I (י) = 10, T (ת) = 400, I (י) = 10, M (מ) = 40, O (ו) = 6, R (ר) = 200, again giving a total by counting of 666.

It seems quite bizarre then, that the same basic term (“the Latin Man”, as codeword for “the hidden man / god”), in three classical languages, possesses the very same numerical value using each language's distinctive numerology.

In one language, it could probably be reasonably dismissed as happenstance; in two as extremely unlikely coincidence; but in three, it would be denialism to call it anything other than Divine coordination.

However, it is the common identity of the “hidden man / god”, named variously as Saturn, Lateinos, and Romiti, through the multiple witnesses¹⁴ of three separate languages, whilst yielding the number 666, that makes term, Latin (literally, “hidden”) man / god, stand out.

And since the western elites include many Anglo Saxons, the “Latin man” option is untenable, and because the Number of the Beast refers to “a man” (Revelation 13:18), it has to point to Lateinos being the “hidden man” abstraction (albeit one might reasonably argue that the elites aspire to act as gods ruling over us and socially engineering us to conform to their will).

Naturally, we could easily find ourselves drawn off-course by the term Latin man seeming to point to the definitive “man of Rome” that is the office of the Papacy; however, as the Avignon exile and other humiliations endured by the Papal office at sundry times past throughout the 1,260 year period demonstrate, the true powerbase of the Beast from the Sea, that is, the western European domains, has never lain wholly with the Pope, but instead with the powerful ruling families of the disparate nations of the West throughout that era, on whose support and patronage the Papacy frequently, if not always, depended.¹⁵

And so the superlative meaning of the Latin man motif is found in the hidden ruling caste that is the ongoing de facto successor to the Roman Emperors of old and, in literal terms, reduces to the incomprehensibly rich elites in the various nation states of the West, which for most of the 1,260 year era since AD 765 have consisted of royalty, aristocracy, financiers, and all who discreetly comprise the hidden hand behind the charade of parliamentary rule or congressional democracy.

These individuals have always discreetly composed the shadow governments or the so-called “Deep State” alumni, acting as behind-the-scenes power-brokers, "owning" every political party and movement, "owning" the apostate churches,¹⁶ the education system, the judiciary, the military, the intelligence agencies, the police services, and every major bank and corporation in their host countries.

And so there is no “head of the snake” to ever cut off, no top man to ever execute, and most certainly, no definitive, end-of-the-age, world leader Antichrist.

Bearing the Number of the Beast’s Name therefore is to be a member of those elites, whether a royal family member, a blue-blood “old money” man in the US, or a billionaire-trillionaire, etc.

And from their very own iconography, it seems the elites know and wilfully own that number as theirs:

Phase 3 of the Encapsulation: The Scarlet Coloured Beast from the Bottomless Pit (Rev 11 & 17)

"And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them." (Revelation 11:7)

"The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is." (Revelation 17:8)

The False Prophet, the Image, the Mark, the Name and the Number of the Beast, although all established during the reign of the Beast from the Sea, shall carry on until the entirety of Daniel 7’s fourth beast system is destroyed, and accordingly they continue beyond the 1,260 year lifespan of the Beast from the Sea and on through the whole of the VERY BRIEF final phase of Daniel 7’s fourth beast, the Scarlet phase.

The Scarlet Beast is first referenced in Revelation 11:7 simply as “the beast from the bottomless pit”, as the agency behind the killing of the Lord’s public witness in the West, but is subsequently given more detail in Revelation 17’s depiction of it, in which it carries the Whore of Babylon aloft on its back.

Scarlet is bright red, which is the colour of the beast system’s final ideology, and by the time of its appearance it is to be something that had been considered expired, yet somehow recovered, hence it is said of it, “it was, and is not, and yet is” (Revelation 17:8).

Presumably the reader can readily think of a red-hued ideology that has made a sneaky comeback, just on time for the close of the Beast from the Sea’s assigned reign (i.e. 2025) after having been supposedly defeated and vanquished into non-existence...

An ideology that permeates the policies of the Superclass and provides animus to the value sets (idols) it wishes us to bow to...

This ideology may call itself globalism, it may call itself progressive liberalism, and where sufficiently emboldened, even socialism, but it only ever was communism, the ultimate RED system for preserving oligarchy’s selfish interests, beta-tested, refined and perfected in the East and now emerging from the shadows here in the West as the policy-creed of the Deep State.

Like the Beast from the Sea preceding it, the Scarlet Beast has seven heads and ten horns, only this time there are no crowns visible on the horns, indicating that the appearance of national sovereignty or homeland-centric rule has been removed from the governments of the West, due to power being centralised within the beast system’s owners.

And so, whereas in its from-the-sea phase the elites of each western nation delegated power to their respective governments for mediation on downstream to the people, now those elites have formed a clique that is supranational, or as they like to term it, “post-national”, seeing nationhood as an inconvenient hindrance to their collective dream of a one-world superstate, a "Babel V.2.0", ruled according to “globalist values”, which upon scrutiny are manifestly ideologically Marxist and therefore tyrannical in application.

This explains why every western government now acts in lockstep over every major issue, and why they all share the same uniparty value set when it comes to issues like gay marriage (which Trump still supports), feminism, digital ID, digital currencies, and so on.

This also means that now, as of 2026, none of the official leaders of the western nations fully exercises power themselves, unlike the state of affairs throughout almost all of the Beast from the Sea’s tenure when, even though the power elites “owned” and constrained the governments, the governments nonetheless at times seem to have enjoyed substantial free agency and substantial sovereignty of their own within those constraints.

Rather, as Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to the UK’s ex-PM Boris Johnston, disclosed in an online interview, the UK’s cabinet is a charade and that unelected officials beholden to the British (he should have said "supranational") establishment make (or rather communicate) all the key decisions and merely assign the public declaration of those decisions to the cabinet!

Note that ex British PM, Liz Truss, has pretty much said the same, i.e., that the will of the public is disregarded and that there is an entrenched unelected officialdom that transmits the marching orders, and she hints that the World Economic Forum (among other globalist organisations that front for the elites) articulates policies that become enforced regardless of who is elected to “power”. Although she is halfway there, there remains much she has not cottoned on to yet – see this mid 2025 interview:

The western governments themselves are represented by the ten horns (though there be more than ten of them, ten is effectively the number of fallen human government and in Revelation 17 appears to be used mystically to associate them, via succession, to the ten horns of the Beast from the Sea) of the Scarlet Beast from the Bottomless Pit, as was the case with its predecessor phase, and they are said to “receive power as kings one hour with the beast” (Rev 17:12) and “have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast” (Rev 17:13), a state of affairs in the West already described above by the uniformity of policy of the western governments, their receipt of instruction from the globalist-Marxist Superclass, and their slavish service to that beast system, as seen in the otherwise inexplicable and illogical admission of countless numbers of dangerous, culturally incompatible aliens into every western country, to the great distress of the indigenous populations.

This reality may best be brought home when one considers the present day power structure here in the UK, the much-lauded birthplace of modern democracy and political accountability:

• Supranational "invested" or "stakeholder" elites (including the monarch) at home and abroad, all sharing the same globalist, post-nationalist, hyper-socialist (crypto-communist) ideology. This group is discreetly at the head of all western nations, dictating a common policy on all key issues, but hides behind front organisations like the WEF and sends proxies as delegates. Unbeknownst to most of the British public, the monarch retains Royal Prerogative, i.e., the power to declare war, pardon crimes, establish treaties, etc.
  
  This level constitutes of the inner core of the Beast system (the "seat of the beast" of Revelation 16:10), and might be considered colloquially as the headship of the every western nation’s Deep State.
• The Privy Council with obscured but real executive power and control over military and intel agencies; composed of ex PMs, bishops (i.e. apostates), high level judges, heads of intel agencies, etc., all appointed upon advisement from "invested" elites, whose interests – not the British people’s – it serves; its public image has been managed to convey the false impression it is merely "ceremonial"; its members must swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch, not to the British people, and its apparent role is to maintain continuity of policy from government-to-government, making elections merely cosmetic exercises in perception-management and explaining why the UK, like every other western nation, is effectively a uniparty state.
  
  This level might be termed as the private face of the Deep State, and has a counterpart in every western nation.
• Unelected Whitehall "mandarins" / civil servants who draft official policy documents faithful to the wishes of the higher echelons of the establishment and present them to cabinet as "fait accompli" decisions, as disclosed by Dominic Cummings (advisor to ex-PM, Boris Johnston) in a 2025 interview.
  
  This level might be termed as the Deep State’s apparatchik corps.
• The cabinet (government) comprised of publicly elected career politicians in sworn loyalty (like all MPs) to the monarch and which the public is disgracefully misled to believe makes the key decisions and runs the country.
  
  This level refers to the horns of the Beast system, that receive power as kings “one hour” (fleetingly) with the Beast and give their power + strength to it, and all have “one mind” (uniformity of policy).

Naturally in every western country this arrangement is assiduously hidden from the public eye, availing of the media, the education system, the apostate church leaders, the generals, the admirals, the intelligence agencies, the civil service, the judiciary, the police and the politicians, all wittingly and unwittingly (in accordance with their level of awareness) complicit in the subterfuge.

It is further said that the ten horns, i.e., the western governments, “shall make war with the Lamb” (Rev 17:14), which they are proactively doing in comparison with their predecessors in the majority of the Beast from the Sea period who, though never friendly to the concept of Christ’s Kingship over the nations, and who occasionally persecuted true believers at the agitation of the Antichurch and her harlot offspring, were never fully co-ordinated in, and preoccupied with, persecuting the church transcendent; these, however, are today far more concerned with silencing the Lord’s public witness through “hate speech” laws (or perhaps even “national security” / “anti-terror” laws) and, when the digital ID and digital currency combination take hold, those of us who are not flagged as loyal votaries of the value set and pet causes of the Superclass (i.e. those of us who do not bear the Mark) will find it harder to participate in everyday affairs.

The Scarlet Beast itself has some other attributes assigned to it that make its identification straightforward:

1. It bears aloft the Whore of Babylon, i.e., the spiritual antithesis of the Woman of Revelation 12; ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Antichurch of Rome, the Jezebel of Revelation 2, the Mother of Harlots, bedecked in finery and “purple and scarlet” (colours for centuries reserved for the cardinals and bishops of Rome), drunk with the blood of the martyrs (slain by her Inquisition of past times). And as corporate head over her offspring (other forms of apostate Christianity), they too are tolerated and connived at by the Scarlet Beast system, posing no threat to its value set and, in fact, often promoting it.
2. It “was, and is not, and yet is”; as mentioned above, this appears to refer to its ideological condition at the time of its succession of the Beast from the Sea, exhibiting the doctrines and dogmas of the so-called “spent force” that was communism, supposedly vanquished at the close of the Cold War.
3. It is "full of names of blasphemy" which, being an atheistic entity, is so well described thus, with its Darwinism, its “Big Bang” theory, its anti-Christian ethos, its Situation Ethics doctrine that it secreted into mainstream denominations, its Critical Race Theory, its feminist rebellion against the created order, and so on.
4. It was to ascend out of the Bottomless Pit, a triple metaphor meaning (a) its ideology was to be developed and refined in the East (aka “the Abyss”, i.e., the deeper, wilder, more expansive, more barbarian parts of “the Sea”), (b) it should emerge to the ascendant at a time when the world would be in “the Abyss”, i.e., turmoil, and (c) it is “of the Pit”, that is, Hellish in its attributes.
5. It is to “go into perdition”, meaning it will endure very briefly – perhaps for the literal 3.5 years from the second half of 2025 until the first half of 2029 – before it, i.e., its membership comprising those cursed elites, is cast into Hell, chiefly by the instrumentality of the event condensed into the language of Revelation 11:13, which I take to describe a sudden and shocking execution of justice upon the Superclass immediately upon the great political earthquake accompanying the ascent in the West’s foremost nation to the political and societal "heavens" of the Lord’s public witness when it is restored from its slain condition. This "into perdition" fate of the beast represents the termination of the beast system as a whole (as described in Daniel 7, as follows:

   “ But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end. [the end of the ungodly rulership in the West, to be followed with the same in the East] And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.” (Daniel 7:26-27)

Finally, The Scarlet Coloured Beast is to be the eighth of a succession of “kings”, i.e., types of rulership, five of which had fallen in John’s day, one still extant and another to come between that of John’s day and the emergence of the Scarlet Beast.

This riddle is resolved thus: that it is “of the seven (kings) and is the eighth” refers to the Scarlet Coloured Beast, ideologically considered, being a new and superlatively evil system of ungodly rule, surpassing the worst aspects of the preceding seven forms preceding it, i.e., it is of them, that is, it is evil and opposed to Christ’s Kingdom, and it features some of their baser characteristics and aspects of rulership, yet stands distinct from them and surpassing them in wickedness.

From John’s perspective in Revelation 17:10, as writer of the Revelation, those “kings” (forms of rulership) within western European civilisation (as distinct from the barbarian world beyond) were, according to Gill:

(a) “five are fallen” (before John’s era):

1. Kings.
2. Consuls.
3. Decemviri / Decemvirs ("councils of ten", or, in Latin, "decemviri consulari imperio legibus scribundis").
4. Dictators.
5. Tribunes.

(b) “one is” (contemporaneous with John’s era):

6. Emperors.

(c) “is not yet come” (in the future from John’s era):

7. Popes, and we note that the Papacy arose in 366, when Damasus I became the first bishop of Rome to bear the horrible title of Pope, and this development occurred before the western empire expired ca. 476; the Papacy began exerting greater influence over the affairs of the empire, without itself assuming formal control, as the empire collapsed and increasingly afterwards in those territories, particularly in Italy.

The “short space” of Rev 17:10 in this model might accordingly be (a) a metaphor for the short timespan from the first Pope’s emergence until the demise of the western Roman Empire (110 years, during which the popes were arguably the only stabilising constant), or (b) a sarcastic metaphor for the Papacy’s temporal rulership over its lands in Europe (the Papal States), officially from 756-1870, but in reality from 765-1870 (1,105 years)), or (c) a sarcastic metaphor for its enduring tenure throughout the centuries up until its demise during the coming Philadelphian church era’s early decades.

The beast system as a whole, that is, the entirety of Daniel 7’s fourth beast, has experienced all of the seven kinds of real rulership listed above, and during the latter centuries of the second phase (i.e. the Beast from the Sea) the first of these, i.e. the European kings (and queens), was obscured behind the mask of sham democracy to make the plebeians believe we really had some leverage over the major decisions our governments made.

The Scarlet Beast, however, marks a departure from that pattern in that it collectivises the ruling establishments of each western country and pools them into a single, cohesive, unified, crypto-Marxist clique; to recap, it being of the seven, yet distinct from it, means that it is as ungodly as the other forms of control by the elites were, and incorporates select elements of the seven, but is nonetheless wholly novel in its implementation, the conscious wilfulness of its opposition to Christ (in contrast to the situation in preceding centuries, when apostate rulers thought (or professed that) they were supporting Christ’s cause), and its core ethos, which is atheist-communist.

What we are now seeing coming into clear view is the West is a de facto Chinese-style communist state, as attested to by the observations of numerous secular commentators horrified and alarmed at the sudden silencing of political dissent in the western nations through the new online “child protection” laws coming into force at the time of writing, as well as the “digital wallet” that all EU nations must have ready in 2026 and a similar one in the works in the UK, with comparable to ensue in the US very shortly also.

YouTube, already a very heavily censored and manipulated platform, is now in Australia requiring facial recognition for its use, as are social media platforms in the UK and the same is about to be rolled out in Trump’s “free speech haven” of America, but it is notable that in the US these laws are so far being introduced and forced through more on a state level than on a federal level, somewhat absolving Trump of apparent blame and thereby preserving him as champion of the conservative right, which is important for morale-building in the approach to global war.

Happy Ending: The Violent Demise of the Beast System

The triple-phased fourth and final beast of Daniel 7 has a pre-ordained terminus that shall arrive when the happy conditions of Daniel 7 fall out:

“...the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given unto the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom”. (Daniel 7:22)

“And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.” (Daniel 7:27)

“And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.” (Revelation 11:11-13)

"Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands [i.e. Divinely orchestrated, not by the scheming, voting, uprising, etc., of men], which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them [i.e., an irrevocable end to ungodly power on this earth]: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth [this describes godly governance obliterating and replacing the current ungodly governance of the nations, in a progressive fashion].

...And the fourth kingdom [i.e. Daniel 7's fourth beast, which comprises the three Satanic beast systems of Revelation] shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise [as western civilisation typically always has, whether as the Roman empire, as the European empires that followed, or in the modern age, when western hegemony has dominated most of the globe]. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes [i.e. the ten horns (national governments of the West) of Revelation's Satanic beasts], part of potters' clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided [as the western nation always have been, into factions, some strong and enduring, some weak and fragmentary over history]; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. And in the days of these kings [i.e. during the closing days of Daniel 7's fourth beast system, when it is in its third and final, "scarlet" phase, that is, its present-day form] shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever." (Daniel 2:34-44)

This end of ungodly rule, to be followed by true Christians being in government, will perhaps bitterly disappoint any reader still in the thrall of the futurist errors injected into Protestant eschatology at the urging of the Jesuits, and who accordingly expect Christ’s imminent return.

Yes, this is the Daniel 7:22 "coming" of Christ, but it is not yet His second coming.

Instead, it is an interventionist motion of God in accordance with Daniel 2’s destruction of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream’s image through it being smitten in the feet and toes of iron and clay (Daniel 2:34), disintegrating the long continuity of godless rule over the nations and thereby creating a power vacuum that is to be filled (Daniel 2:35) by replacing ungodly governments with rulers in humble, reverent, loyal, watchful, uncompromising service to Christ and His Word, and it will be permanent, just like the contemporaneous conversion of the Jews to Christ that will signal the opening of this new, happy era that will be the true Philadelphian church age at last.

The smiting of that image in the feet bespeaks a very sudden but irresistible obliteration of western power by Divine intervention in man’s affairs, and I submit that part of the mechanism for that, or rather, clearing the way for it, will be a terrible global war (World War III) brought about under the final of the Seven Last Plagues, in which governments around the world, in both East and West, will (I speculate) be decapitated by the mutually destructive forces unleashed by the stirring up to war of the Satanic agencies operating under the terms of the sixth of the Seven Last Plagues in Revelation 16’s Armageddon event (which is the same event as Joel 3’s “valley of decision”).

In the midst of the global conflagration, "one tenth part of the city" will fall, i.e., a major western nation will fall into the governance of the godly; some or most of the old Reformed writers generally presumed that nation would be the UK, but for me it has to be the pre-eminent western nation, our cousins across the Atlantic in America.

In this process, the dead public witness of the Lord against error (i.e. The Two Witnesses of Revelation 11) will be revived and restored by an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon it concurrent with, or following swiftly upon, the Jews' conversion to Christ (see my commentary on Ezekiel 39), beckoned "to heaven", i.e., invited to become part of, and participate in, temporal government of that nation, filling the power vacuum left by the Lord's removal from power of the ungodly at that time and fulfilling the principle of wise, godly men participating in just rulership, as set out in numerous Scriptures, for example:

“And in controversy they shall stand in judgment; and they shall judge it according to my judgments: and they shall keep my laws and my statutes in all mine assemblies...” (Ezekiel 44:24 ~ this passage speaks of the proper role of a godly, regenerate priesthood in governing the temporal affairs of humanity.)

Satan appears to be well aware of this looming takeover of the western nation's governments by the godly and has been making two visible moves to attempt to pre-empt it; even though he knows he cannot succeed, sin is both irrational and addictive, as any honest alcholic or drug addict will admit concerning their self-destructive tendencies.

Those two Satanic moves are as follows:

1. There is a stir amidst some evangelicals, as well as liberal atheists, to oppose the merger of government and state, most notably in the country where I assess the Kingdom of Daniel 7 begins, i.e., the US; the atheists pushing for this, one can understand, but professing Christians and conservatives waging war on doing the same belies the wretched state of doctrine and practice in the ranks of so-called Protestantism today.

   

2. Satan has his own ready-to-go imposter version of the Daniel 2 / Daniel 7 Kingdom promised to the Lord's faithful, and that is seen in the mainstream Christian Nationalism movements, which appears to be pro-Antichurch of Rome and for other forms of apostasy rather than genuinely Christian; in the UK, Tommy Robinson's anti-Islam movement has increasingly taken on a return-to-Christian-tradition feel in recent years, but, as can be seen by Tommy's pro-LGBT stance, this is not a call for national repentance out of love for God and hatred of sin; rather, it is a reaction to the mass Islamification of Britain (itself a judgment from God, be it noted) and consists of "Christian" iconography, lip-service to Christ, and so on, all wedded to British patriotism.

Meanwhile, because we know that the supreme powerbase in the West lies not with the governments, but with the Superclass, and that such individuals have access to immense resources and have been well documented in recent years to be preparing bunkers to survive such a war (which they apparently believe can be won and will be useful in reordering society in their own Satanic image), it becomes imperative that they too be extirpated and removed from the temporal realm around the time of the terrible war.

And, thankfully, as mentioned earlier herein, there is an indication in Revelation 11:13 that this fate shall indeed befall them, because by no means can the ringleaders of the beast system be permitted to live when the godly ascend to power in the West; rather, natural justice and Divine justice demand that they be put to death for their crimes against humanity and against the church transcendent, those being capital crimes, and punished with them will be, among the survivors of the "great hail" of Revelation 16 (the terrible war), their remaining willing adjutants, acolytes and lieutenants in the judiciary, the apparatchik class, the police, the education system, the intelligence agencies, the military, and so on.

That is, there will be a righteous and very necessary witch hunt followed by a very public display of retributive justice exacted upon those identified by it, and this will, as Gill also suspects, fulfil Psalm 149’s merciless but just temporal judgment upon all involved in the reign of the wicked at the time of the demise of the beast system:

“Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; To execute upon them the judgment written [e.g. in Micah 5, Revelation 11:13]: this honour have all his saints [i.e. those alive at the time of the reckoning upon the Superclass clique, when Christians will rule over temporal affairs and call for and execute just penalties upon “kings and nobles”, on Christ’s behalf, based wholly on His Word]. Praise ye the Lord.” (Psalm 149:5-9)

Revelation 19:20 summarises the demise of the beast system and its False Prophet being “cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone”, which is much more terrible than the slaying by the sword of Christ’s mouth of the rest of the ungodly masses.

This I take to refer to the immediate arrest and execution of the Superclass and its narrators (the atheistic experts, the inventors and promoters of woke dogmas, and perhaps also its executors), with the rest of the ungodly survivors of the great hail who refuse to submit to Christ’s kingship and the rule of His servants being extirpated for their inevitable acts of rebellion in due course, as it would be untenable to allow guerilla resistance or any public voice of atheism or communism to continue; they wanted to permanently silence us, but it will be their voice and ideals that shall be silenced and removed from this world forever.

Finally, the ten horns will proceed to make war with the Whore (Revelation 17:16) being moved by God to hate Her, and this falls under the final of the Seven Last Plagues that also include the great hail, the great earthquake, etc., which I cover in my full exposition of Revelation 16.

As Gill suggests, this means that the western governments, considered as united in purpose once more but only this time with godly rulers at the helm, will undertake a coordinated strike at the Antichurch (or what remains of it) to decisively and finally remove it from this scene of time, by making it “desolate and naked” (Revelation 17:16).

Concluding Thoughts: A Warning!

Christians today – and pretty much since the mid 1800s – have been infected with and enslaved by bad eschatology, brought about by the twofold mechanisms of (a) general ignorance of church history on the one hand and (b) the near universal adoption of the Jesuit-inserted futurist interpretive model on the other.

The higher causes of this are to be found in Protestantism’s failure to be watchful, a charge levelled against the Reformation-until-now-era church state, Sardis, in Revelation 3:3.

And looking at the history of the Reformed churches, the gestation of the malady is blatantly obvious.

Like the Israelites in the days of the Judges, they became lax with regard to the forms of worship and admitted into their midst weak pastors who tolerated and even promoted innovations in worship (notably the use of uninspired hymns), in total disregard of the Regulative Principle that held sway in the early aftermath of the Reformation.

Next came the toleration, then acceptance, and finally the addictive embracing, of the grotesque doctrines of Arminianism, a rehash of the old Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian heresies that assaulted the Woman prior to her flight to the spiritual wilderness.

Those two gross sins (the forsaking of the Regulative Principle and embracing Arminianism) brought an almost imperceptible judgment on the church, a visitation “like a thief” (of Revelation 3:3) for its failure to be watchful, in the form of eschatological blindness timed from the mid 1840s or thereabouts until the closing years of the present Sardis church era (i.e. the present day), a blindness so severe as to obscure from the church what era it is actually living in, with a near universality to the view that we are living in the last days of the Laodicean church state!

This is why Christians everywhere will tell you, either with great sobriety or wide-eyed joy, that “Jesus is coming soon!”

And tacked on to that expectation is the further notion, for many at least, that He will orchestrate a “Rapture” of His children to spare them from the coming “Great Tribulation”, the Mark of the Beast, etc., with this false doctrine even being the subject of many intense disputes about its timing.

Along with this are fantasies about a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem; here once more we see ignorance of church wedded to ignorance of Christ’s prophecy (Matthew 24:2, which was taken by the early church as implying ann irrevocability to the Jewish temple’s demise)¹⁷ and bound up in a fundamentally corrupt and Satanic eschatology (futurism).

And here we come to the nub of why the correct eschatology matters.

When professing Christians start making public assertions before the world about major world events and near-term developments, only for those predictions to flounder (just as the temple and Rapture claims shall), it discredits the cause of God and Truth.

Likewise, among themselves, when they misidentify the Antichrist, it leaves a wedge in the door for his emissaries to present themselves as reasonable, godly men and in the process of time, to draw as many ostensible Protestants into the ecumenical fold as possible.

And yes, that actually happened on a grand scale with the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, et al., and then, as the beast system began transitioning from its nominally Christian form into its current atheistic, hyper socialist form, those “churches” led the way in embracing the real Mark of the Beast, with homosexual and lesbian ministers and bishops now de rigueur among them, marking the endgame of a long process of compromise in Sardis that began with failure to be watchful, hence the Lord’s emphasis on watchfulness in His address to Sardis:

"Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.” (Revelation 3:1-3)

Aside from highlighting the problems bad eschatology poses, knowing what the Satanic beasts of Revelation really represent also enables us to know that the present malaise in this world cannot be resolved by “ordinary” means and spares us from wasting time investing hope in pied pipers like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, et al., all of whom are wicked, immoral men.

And likewise there is plainly no protesting our way to a better situation, or getting there by a "return to tradition", as some are artfully calling for (I say artfully because, look a little more closely at them, and you begin to sense a hint of Antichurch thinking).

There is no voting our way out of it either; Christians and conservatives who think, “if only we had the right leader in charge of the country” just don’t grasp the realities of how power works in the West and worse, don’t get what is happening at the moment on the spiritual level, as some of our Trump-exalting MAGA cousins are now painfully discovering too.

And, given that the present distress is judgment upon the world for its iniquities, there isn’t even any military or paramilitary remedy.

The only way out of the present world situation – for both the church and the ungodly – is through the strait gate that is Christ Himself, with particular attention to his own prescribed remedy in Revelation 3's opening verses.

We Sardians must therefore return to and maintain a firm grip on (i.e. “hold fast”) that which Sardis first received and heard (the Reformation).

And the ungodly must turn away from sin and seek mercy and salvation in Christ alone.

Sadly however, it will take the rigours of the first six of the Seven Last Plagues before the church heeds Christ’s message to Sardis (note the Sardian tone of His interjection in Revelation 16:15, which anchors those plagues at end of the current Sardis church age - again, see my notes on Sardis).

But Sardis shall come to its senses at the appointed time, by God’s grace, in a few short years from now, on the eve of Armageddon, as the world stares into the nuclear abyss, and the Lord will providentially spare and sustain it, perhaps including through the instrumentality of the preceding plagues driving His people out of the cities, just as Lot was taken out of Sodom before its destruction.

But as for the ungodly... According to Revelation 16:9 and 16:21, they will generally become more hardened as the plages worsen, just as the Egyptians did under their plagues and, tragically for today’s wicked, it seems most of them (in the developed world at least) will die as a consequence of the final of the Seven Last Plagues, which shall entail the last great war this world world will ever endure.

However, since those events will bring on the glorious Philadelphian church era, the time of the Woman hiding in the wilderness will promptly end and, with it, doctrinal disunity and error will be expunged from the church transcendent under the promise of doctrinal purity outlined in Joel 3:18, which describes the aftermath of the coming great war.

And with that being the case, and the Lord’s severest temporal judgments on the nations finished forever, the Gospel of Grace will begin to succeed on a level scarcely imaginable to us today, until the whole world shall be filled with the knowledge of Christ and Truth.

So, the final Satanic beasts abiding (the Scarlet one and the False Prophet) are on the cusp of their total defeat and eternal ruin, to clear the path for the near-imminent Philadelphian church age, making this an exciting time to be a lover of the Lord’s cause.

But first, we must live through the rigours of the death throes of Satan’s geopolitical instruments and the last great temporal chastening upon the church as a whole, a chastening designed to bring it back to what it “first received and heard” (Revelation 3:3) when the Reformation began, and to set it on course for advancing those first Sardian gains much further.

Accordingly, a kind of “second Reformation”, much like those predicted by the English Puritan divine, Thomas Goodwin, back in the 1600s, is almost here.

Therefore I urge you, the reader, to be prudent in making temporal preparations for the storm that looms before that glorious dawn, and even more so, to seek to be one of those few worthies Christ says abide within the Sardian church age, that you too might walk with Him in white!

"Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy. He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels." (Revelation 3:4-5)