i) The Forceful Woman of the World goes - Rev. 18:9-19:6 (cf. 17:15-17,18).

She has provided as the spiritual hostess, mistress and desire of the world, or much of it, just that panache, display, cruelty in power and zest for glory in her own right (cf. SMR pp. 912ff.), which has appeal to the benighted, thrill for the feverish, hope for the this-worldly and expectation of strength in it, for those whose trust is in the visible, in the glory that man can create, or more often, feverishly imagines to be within his power. Often does man visit her.

Always a spiritual harridan, she has deceived kings, slaughtered saints and had a reign on the beast: now that her end has come, her very city, Rome (17:9) is doomed, her power despoiled, and the beast blights her. Divinely deemed "the great harlot" (19:2), "who corrupted the earth with her fornication", so that God "avenged on her the blood of His servants shed by her", picking up from Revelation 17:4, where she is called "the mother of harlots", she is a massive slayer of saints, indeed "drunk with the blood of the saints", and spreader of "the abominations of the earth" (17:5-6).

The mother of harlots in other words, begets more of them, in her own spirit and temper and trade, and such are Ignorance, by which for centuries she sought to REMOVE the knowledge of the Bible (cf. Cook and Martin's Story of the Light that Never Went Out, which details many such things in Britain in particular), the Bishop of London even seeking to quash Tyndale's English translation by burning it in quantities, and in so doing, giving the money which enabled him, indirectly, to pay for and manufacture many more, duly imported. On this, see Psalm 119:13, 20.

Ignorance allowed much confusion and concoction of evils, religious cocktails and tales, the very stuff of 'harlotry', sin habitually using ignorance, wilful or otherwise, to dash the truth; and what more critical in truth, than the Gospel! (cf. II Cor. 11, Galatians 1). Another child of the mother of harlots is Total Subjection as a condition for spiritual life, like a harlot who demands fealty to herself at all cost; and this has been a major feature of the Jesuits, relative to the papacy, and an implicit feature  of the Unam Sanctam which asserts that "it is altogether necessary to salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff."

You CANNOT of course serve two masters (Matthew 5:24), and one being God with the provision of personal satisfaction for sin, and the other but a human creature and sinful, they are disparate to the point of infinity. There is, said Christ, but ONE, and no one else may have a place (Matthew 23:8-10, Proverbs 30:6), and the mastery is written in its Gospel and its revelation, not changeable in the least (Galatians 1, Revelation 22), or subject to any addition.

There being only ONE master and teacher, so that NONE may so much as spiritually be called 'father' (Matthew 23:8-10), this sort of ADDITION is an alternative god, so that it draws like a harlot, those who mix their 'marriage' to the Lamb with a carriage with the papacy, which not being God, constitutes a parallel to the Baals of old, who were 'lords' also. Other such children of harlotry would be elements such as Equivocation, famous Jesuit principle (contra Colossians 3:9),  where truth is not the criterion but the objective is deemed to determine morality; and this begets more like it in other places, such as the Liberals who defiled the Bible and whose slithery tongue misled many churches, having done strong service in a similar cause!

Visions of angels (cf. the prohibition in Colossians 2:18, of such fealty, such trembling religious acceptance) are another way of intruding into the word of God, and the Mormons show an affiliation to this with Moroni, no less than does Rome with her visions. This is another child of the temper of Rome. Other christs, such as that in the Koran, the radicality of Liberalism, Neo-Orthodoxy, constructions imagined by man and not wrought from the historical record, christs without deity, or variable gods, these too are linked.

Such is her motherhood and such are some of her spawn, incorporated in the mystery of Babylon, of which Rome is the centre and 'mother', Babylon itself the ancient exemplar (cf. SMR pp. 946ff., 729, 1032-1088H).

 

ii) The Marriage of the Lamb - Rev. 19:7-10 comes.

By contrast, we observe in 19:10 the spirit of authenticity - the angel who speaks to John is not the Lamb: for it is not functionaries, but the Lord alone who is to be worshipped, and Christ is Lord. His will, word and ways, wisdom are immutable, beautiful, eternal. Do not worship ME, says the exalted angel, for "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy". Yet as God multiplied visions of truth (Hosea 12:10), so man has multiplied ways of avoiding Him. Wafers, glasses, angels, books, canons of corrupt churches or States, meditations - they vie for a following.

Yet there is no way but Jesus Christ (John 14:6), and there is NO OTHER NAME of access (Acts 4:11-12). The cut-off is simple, eternal and clear. “WORSHIP GOD,” says the angel, forbidding John to worship him, “for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” The testimony of truth is all about Jesus, who is the truth, and the very spirit of it focusses Him, and none other. ONLY Christ IN all creation can be worshipped, since He created it! He came into it, as an author into a book (Colossians 1:15ff.) Other names (cf. Acts 4:11-12) are an index of spiritual harlotry, and such pre-occupations are for the children of Babylon.

If you want another name, you must not call it the same, but what it actually is; and if you want another governor, guidance, perspective, spirit, gospel or grace, yes or disgrace, or to add one to the Master, then you must confess it (Matthew 23:8-10, Luke 9:22-26).

Confusion has long been the devil's goad to collapse, and misnaming has been a very tradition of inveiglement, a source of seduction and Te Deum to what is not the Trinity. To worship ANYTHING or give obedience as to GOD to ANYONE not God, but man masquerading his mouth (II Cor. 11) or imposing his ultra-infra-sub or other varieties of word on the faithful, is to have the daring to have public marriage with a seducer, even while ostensibly under the roof of the first husband.

It is an unqualified corruption and an unthinkable double-image, invented without ocular defect, by the mind that has appetite for it. If you want to add to the word of God (Proverbs 30:6, Galatians 1, Revelation 22), then you subtract from fealty to Him; for anyone can change a testimony by his own desire, even in one word, and much more in hundreds of thousands given power to contain the original!

This is the very spirit of Babylon (cf. *2 below), vastly impudent, wholly impious, rancorously rebellious, with open face performing what the Lord by His own record, detests; and it is found in ALL religions which dare to present some christ of their own choosing, whether that of Islam, Mormonism, Romanism, or of any leader whose word constitutes the final authority along with the Bible, some other authority, book, canon, law, counsel, not wholly derivable from the Bible and but fancy beyond it, below it, like a companion, fulfilling the intent not the Spirit of God, but the spirit of rebellion.

The definitive word of God Himself,  this judges (John 12:48-50, Galatians 1:6-9), and it is useless to subject oneself to the thoughts of man; for this is not merely lèse-majesté, but self-deceit (II Timothy 4), and one foretold to blossom like weeds in a rose-garden. Nor does the word of God come at the will of man, for it came by the power of the Spirit of God (II Peter 1:19ff.), before the defining face of Jesus Christ (I Peter 1), and is as open to addition as a knife that cuts, or to subtraction as is no money when you wish to purchase (Revelation 22:18ff.). Moreover, you could as well reconstruct a 'christ' from what has not known Him, as did the apostles, as make any other idol, dependent not on empirical, historical reality, but the testimony of one mind, one psychic phenomenon, one 'visit' from whatever source to the mind of man!

A 'christ' left for centuries for his definition, after the event of His coming: this is not the one predicted to die around AD 30 by Daniel, who died then, and who rose with the redemption for which He paid. God did not send the foretold Saviour to save freely without works (Isaiah 55, 27) in order to have Him hidden, the criterion of truth and the Word of God, in some maze of competing liberals, Moslems, other sects, imaginers, conceivers.

Christ was begotten of a virgin as foretold (Matthew 1 cf. SMR pp. 770ff.), and not of the mind or spirit of man. He did not present Himself, a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6), or a commander, witness and a leader (Isaiah 55:4), in order to be led, made, concocted, invented in the spirit of a man whom He came to save! Far less was He sent that His word and portrait should be annulled, replaced; for this is precisely that making of a false Christ, which He foretold as something to become a popular pursuit ^*1A , which it has, from Muhammad to Barth , from Arius to the various modern radical, and innovative, idolatrous misconstructions.

False prophets are foretold - these may make false christs as part of their trade and occupation. Both are to abound (Matthew 24:24). The time would come, said Paul, when people could not STAND sound doctrine and they would patronise teachers to satiate their restless desire to avoid the truth (II Timothy 4 cf. II Peter 2, and II Timothy 3 as to the moral and spiritual RESULTS!). All this has happened, like a fever, and the temperature on this earth is rising! There is a far more dangerous moribund effect of these things, than any Greenhouse Effect.

What more abundant in this last century, than sects, prophets without rational or sustainable base, ideas from Jonesville to angels, from bread to guns, as the means! It is costing the earth, and the earth cannot pay. It is only Christ who can pay, and the payment although adequate for all, has no tender to the unrepentant, the creators of their Creator, the manufacturers of christs at call!

Anyone can think up, blink or wink up a christ, just as humanists blink their eyes and behold a vision which leads to the death of millions, as with Marx; but to DO what has to be done is as different from this as forecast and fulfilment from machination, as performance from dream. It is where the effect is, the narrative is sustained by events, the preliminaries attest what it will be, and none can overwhelm it, even when with such notice, it arrives, it is there that the eyes look, the mind travels and the spirit finds solace. Not wars to force, but words and works to confirm: this is the need, abundantly fulfilled in the whole scope of history only once, except in the preliminaries of prophecy which make that road one long built, and at last a four-lane highway of holiness.

Jesus Christ, the Messiah dying at the date predicted by Daniel (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4) was not a leader to the Gentiles in order that Gentiles should make Him, and so lead Him where they would, whether in a contradictory book or forbidden piece of bread, as if suicide not crucifixion had been the means of His death, and the Last Supper had for ever removed all hope of dying for sin on the Cross (Galatians 6:14)!

There is JUST ONE Christ who fulfilled all the predictions of the Old Testament prophets who, as Muhammad rightly said, were of God, and whose definition of God is not left undefined, for man to meddle with, muddle or recast (Isaiah 59:21). It is He who being God, is God the sent from God the Sender, all of one trinity (Isaiah 48:16), the One who being pierced, is yet the LORD! (Zechariah 12:10), who is addressed as God, whose throne is His own (Psalm 40), and who, with God the only Saviour (Isaiah 43:10-11), is yet Saviour and the One who PAYS, and so saves (Isaiah 53), Himself.

To add or modify this is pure idolatry.

Small wonder John has no small challenge to those who would mutate the Christ!

Add, says John in the Spirit of God, to these THINGS and God has something to add to you for your action. It is an arrogance unthinkable, a Babylonian abomination, a part of that 'mystery Babylon' which moving like a fire through the ages, from the literal Babylon, comes as in Revelation 17 as the end roars into sight, to the contemporary face of the city of the seven hills, which, a very mother of harlots, to use the phrase given in the word of God, will be forsaken in spirit and in location (Revelation 17:15, 18:1ff.).

What says Isaiah 2:6ff. of such attitudes? It is this:

"For Thou hast abandoned Thy people, the house of Jacob, because they are filled with influences from the East, and they are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they strike bargains with the children of foreigners..." (NASV).

Not only do such seducers add in this mode, spirit and adventure, but they even flatly contradict what is written, multiply provided, emphatically declared in the Bible, and call it 'interpretation' which is rejection, as if confusion were king, and dust were clear air. But what does the Lord say to Israel when it did such things, in a word to all who listen, concerning His will, ways and witness ? It may be seen from Isaiah 2:12ff.).

"For the Lord of hosts will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lofty, and against everyone who is lifted up, that he may be abased...and the pride of man will be humbled, and the loftiness of man will be abased, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day ... Stop regarding man whose breath is in his nostrils, for why should be be esteemed!" (NASV). For illustration, see SMR pp. 912ff.).

A child is out of place when it comes to wielding the blacksmith's hammer, and how much more a rebel when it comes to the word of God, immutable, intractable, unnegotiable, as insusceptible to addition as income once made when the time is past, to subtraction as spending already done! (Jeremiah 23:23-31).

 

iii) The Fine Linen definitive in lustre.

It is this distinctive and definitive linen which is present in the marriage; and following this, it is also pressent in the host at the advent of the Lord of Lords, coming once more to earth, this time to rule (cf. I Thessalonians 3:13). He comes with His saints, and it is this clean and white linen which marks out the wedding participants. Having come, He acts! The ensuing Divine Response to the lords of sin on earth is now categorical in action as before in word (Rev. 19:8,14ff.).

This advent of Christ, the Messianic King is in a way like a Wedding Reception, the aftermath of the wedding: but among those to whom He comes on earth,  there is much mourning! (Revelation 1:7)! They never attended the wedding, being occupied with other alliances.

Imagine if on some excursion such as that much earlier  of Queen Elizabeth in her younger days, to Australia, there had been lamentation, weeping, sorrow, mourning to greet her ? That might be so if she had come in judgment, and the people had been rebels. Here it is so, with the Messiah!

Rebellion against God means to refuse His words, His laws, His commands, perhaps to seek to make another god and worship it, calling it by the same name or not, according to fancy and preference, and the wedding reception is not for those who rejoice, but for those to whom the participants come with the Lord Himself, long absent from light, now being compelled to face it, as truth has become manifest, and its very face now speaks.

iv) The Five Names of the Lord Jesus Christ appear (Revelation 19:12-16).

These are heralded, and there is one more cited, this one known only to Himself, since God can be regulated and manipulated by none, inviolable, intractable, true, The five  are Faithful and True, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the Word of God. So great is the Lord that His very Word is personal, and lives for ever.

No other Lord can come from man, since Christ alone came down from heaven as man, to bring man to God. No other king can rule man, since only God knows the heart (Jeremiah 17:8-9). No other word can bring mandate to man, manufactured of God as he is, to secure the station of salvation and enable the correspondence of faith and reality, that Christ brings (Romans 11). None other is so faithful and true, for no one else having all power, and having all the treasures of wisdom, can speak with consistent realism, and bring to pass insistent works of dynamism, which none can void. The sword in His hand in Revelation 19, is that of supreme power, and the result is that all the power this world and its ways, wit and words have to offer, is inconsequential. When it is a question of power, and love has had its way, mercy its focus, then the end is short!

So is it in Revelation 19!

 

v) The End of the Spiritual Fraud practised for millenia, is exposed.

 Confronted at the conclusion, it looks as it has always been: cheap - Rev. 19:19-21; but its cost and payment is dear. The vanity of urbanity is here shown, as the very birds devour the protoplasmic remnants of the war on God which at last (Rev. 19:19) became as explicit as it really is, more normally hiding in the implicit. There is however nothing implicit about confessing the Lord Jesus Christ and not being ashamed of Him, or the result of denial of His deity, His redemption and His claims on man (Luke 9:26), or preferring your own life to the life which comes spiritually from God, as first physically. Refusing birth means morbid post-mature problems; and neglecting the new birth can mean a lingering death, called life but actually a mere externality denying its point (Matthew 16:24ff.).

 

vi) The Millenial Demonstration with the General Resurrection - 20:1-6,  now are seen.

These appear, with bondage bonded! The wonder of divine rule appears (as in Isaiah 11, 65, Psalm 72); and 20:4 has a message for those to be resurrected; for here are all whose worship has been of the Lord, and not of the bestial building which this world loves (cf. I Thessalonians 4, Revelation 7), some beheaded, but all in one way or another, in one day or its ilk, refusing the mark of the beast in its exemplar or its many and various prototypes, that primacy of this world, of its powers and precepts, its conditions and its commands, having preferred to be in alliance instead, with the power of God and the grace of His salvation, which nothing can tear from their hearts.

 

vii) The Revolt that Terminates Global History fires up.

This makes its last yearning endeavour to supplant God - 20:7-10. It fails and heaven and earth now removed (20:11), we see the Judgment sit. Sin cost the earth!

WHY does it cost the earth ? If you were given an inheritance of one million dollars and bought five expensive sports cars and a small aeroplane, and refused to service them all, and then set out to wallow in world tours, doubtless it would in the end cost the bank bulk. Is it surprising then when people given the grace of life and the power of salvation, receive the one and neglect the other, refusing and rejecting with superior smile or secret mockery, marvelling at the folly of those who prize and rejoice in the gift which they merely toss away as if it were never of value and could not even be held in the hand, and then find the cost is irrevocable.

Their inheritance is lost. It will never be regained. So when this earth, filled with wonders of creation, beauties inconceivable until seen, interactive devices of majestic splendour, lavish lashings of mind and splendid sanctions to secure the spirit of man, is smitten with man's voluntary sin, often seduced into involuntary sin as character is defiled, destroyed, depressed, becoming like wrack, begins to receive its come-uppance, the mocking illustrations of sin whether in snake or spider, travelling garbage collectors in black feathers or tearing wolves of the sea with white teeth and insatiable appetite, squalid opportunists like wasps with aphids, wily foxes that mimic their human counterparts and whirl-winds to show the ultimate inadequacy of the ultimate human contrivances for safety, is it not time to repent ? Not at all, says the world, it is time to become cleverer.

When their cleverness oppress the earth, till like Shanghai, its very boisterous growth is enough to make the lungs mutiny, what then ? Then they proceed as if death were an illusion and human life were a passing shadow. When it begins to look more and more like just that, as terrorists worship death and display it for others in abundance, adding their own distorted and tormented corpses like a down-payment for hell, is it still time to ignore the only security life has, in its author ?

Not at all, they then dream on in their so-called evolution, that unwinding of what is not wound, and that development of what is not there, calling need the father of fact, as if the millions who die for lack of food had only to establish for the mindless mind of 'nature', a need and they would be fed!

Myths multiply^*1, as foretold in II Timothy 4:1ff., and man slays man as if to capture some development to make better, what is fiendish in itself, with increasing dynamic, and do they then repent ? Not at all, they become more and more grossly self-preoccupied, and find newer ways of becoming dross with life attached, like a house built on a cess-pool, the latter created as a garden for the surrounding beauty.

Thus is it in this tidying up of the end for man on earth. When the beast is sentenced and the false prophet with him, when the always nugatory nothings of their persuasive propagandas lie dead, and the resurrection is past, what does the devil decide on ? and who are those who implement his decisions to the best of their poor, lost lives ?
 

Is it not precisely those who, surrounded with the blessed and noble rule of Christ in person, returned to this earth so that "the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea" (Habakkuk 2:14), yet seek to scorn the truth and secure their own destiny, though the devil take not only the hindmost but the foremost of this deluded lot, ungrateful for ever, always the subject of vain ambition of a racial kind, the tormented troop of the deluded ? Arising to overturn the rule of the Lord, they find that infinite power is not even measured in finite terms, and infinite patience does not extend to the point that man, who in weakness has limits, is forever to be radically racially infested with madness, forlorn lusts of the mind and scattered desires of the severed spirit. They fail.

The devil, that proud and arrogant, haughty and high-minded spirit, father of lies, maker of myths, machinating maladies and seeking heights from the depths chosen, inveterate in malice, filled with self-affirmation, self-belief and self-conceit, as if to affirm what is made would made one more than the Maker, or to place down the fist in anger made the ground to appear, creation to arise, destiny to repent of itself and do what it was told by this other prince, this evil leader: he goes to his appointed place.

All that avarice and pretence could possibly construct, the devil has deeply invaded; and his aims and those of all his flock being now revealed by history, that book, alike record of the flames of faith and the fires of godliness, for God makes his servants a flame - is closed.

As to image, the files are complete.

As to literal fact,  the created structure for the tests, that universe, product of the Author of prodigies, shaken already (Hebrews 12:25-28), is disbanded now. Indeed, it departs with a roar (II Peter 3), echo of that same prodigious energy, enshrined in matter, splendid in mind, soaring in spirit, which created man and his astral heights.

It is over. Love has sought to the uttermost, grace has been poured forth to the absolute, mercy has spoken in absolute terms, the very source of life becoming man in order to transfer the assets of righteousness to man, and those of sin to Himself, and He being infinite, is no less for it. The very spirit of man would fail (Isaiah 57:15), being finite, in infinite address, so in infinity the God of all grace, love and comfort, pity and power has known before the worlds were made, who would in fact be His, and none is lost, nor is anything that love might find, unfound, nor is any foundling brought home whose home in the uttermost resources of his spirit as known to God, is alien to the end.

How careful therefore must any one be who, being brought near to God, hardens the heart, with the savour of mercy in his nostrils, deems it a stench, or who calls the aroma of imputed righteousness a cow-yard atmosphere; for while God knows from the first, His love works to the last! (Isaiah 55). Branding for beauty the desire of the alien heart, branding not beauty becomes the construction of destiny, foreknown but well worked out to the uttermost point by pity, and this tossed autonomously aside, then in judgment.

 Indeed, now has this time gone, and the millenium past, the very terminal events have soared into existence, according to the mind of God, and the day of judgment.

The test is now concluded, and the heaven and earth depart, their being no place found for them (Revelation 20:. Their day is done, like school when you leave at matriculation. It is over. There is no more place for it; and since this is not for the individual alone, as the time for the race ends and the clock strikes, but not for the end of the examination alone, but even for the human occupation of this earth of wonder by man, there is no more earth and heavens. With a loud noise and intense heat, II Peter 3 adds, they are gone as in Revelation 20:11.

Thus does obstinate refusal of light end not only in darkness but in devilish devices, sundered by judgment itself (20:10,13-14). What torment lies in truth when it is reviled, and what pangs of the created conscience vie with time for place, when light has shone into inveterate darkness and judgment has sat!

But let us to the brilliance of Light, real, surreal, physical, spiritual, moral and rejoice that it is personal, as God is who is that light! (John 1:5, Psalm 27:1, James 1:17, Psalm 36:9, 97:11).