If you read the Bible for many years and get acquainted with the history of God’s people, you will find a pattern repeated almost constantly. The pattern tells the story of two brothers both sons of God, Adam and Christ. One rejected the paternity of God and set mankind and the world into a collision course with the natural order. Christ, the other brother, accepted the paternity of God and made the ultimate sacrifice to return the world to the path intended by the Father’s will.
After Adam’s fall, his own children reproduced the same disagreement. Cain and Abel played that ancient drama for the first time and so, one after another, we find so many characters in Scripture repeating the same type. In time, God selected a nation for the purpose of revealing the Obedient Son to the world. This Son, the Messiah or Christ, had to be the opposite of the original by atoning and repairing the damage caused by Adam. They both produced an offspring, one according to the flesh –keeping Adam’s course and perishing– the other according to the spirit, making all things anew. Both peoples are progeny and enemies of God at the same time, mixed until the end of the age of sin when they will be separated and judged. (See Matthew 13:1-23)
Please read the following texts carefully and see if you can detect the connection between them.
Israel rejects God: “But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to govern us.’ Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.” (1 Samuel 8:6-8, NRSVACE)
Israel rejects Jesus, the Christ: “When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus outside and sat on the judge’s bench at a place called The Stone Pavement, or in Hebrew Gabbatha. Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ Then he handed him over to them to be crucified.”
God’s people create their own god in accord with their religious leader, Aaron: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ Aaron said to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’ So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears, and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, formed it in a mold, and cast an image of a calf; and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.’ They rose early the next day, and offered burnt-offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.” (Exodus 32:1-6, NRSVACE)
A very insightful comment by Fr. Leonardo Castellani circa 1950: “The Church, assisted by the Holy Spirit, impedes that manifestation and lessens it, resting on the human order that the Roman Empire organized in a body of laws and political practice; but the day will come for the end of this age, and the One who now holds it back, the Obstacle, will be removed. The Holy Spirit will perhaps abandon that social-historical body we call Christendom, sending his own to the most barren isolation, giving them “the wings of the great eagle to fly to the wilderness.” And then the existing temporal structure of the Church will be caught by the Antichrist and will fornicate with the kings of the Earth (if not all the Church, at least a noticeable part of it, as it has already happened in history) and the abomination of desolation will enter the holy place. “So when you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it ought not …” then it is fulfilled.” (Will Christ return or not? published in Spanish as Cristo ¿vuelve o no vuelve? 1951 by Paucis Pango, chapter 6 p. 30 “The Mystery of Iniquity.”)
A representation of the Church after fornicating with the kings of the Earth: “Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the judgement of the great whore who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the inhabitants of the earth have become drunk.’ So he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.’ And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus.” (The Apocalypse of Saint John 17:1-6, NRSVACE)
The faithful brother and the unfaithful brother continue to echo through history. One says “Where else are we to go? You have words of eternal life!” and the other is saying: “We don’t have any king but Caesar!” Their offspring is still divided between those who recognize the paternity of God and those who prefer to build themselves an image of the golden calf, a false god and a false aleph, an illusion behind which there is no power to give life, an abomination that can only cause desolation and death.
The day the people of Judea elected Caesar over Christ two churches were born. One was born in Calvary from the side of Christ after He was pierced by the spear of a Roman centurion. Curiously, one of the translations for ‘Cain’ is ‘spear’ and the Hebrew word sounds very close to kina, the Hebrew word for ‘envy’ ! What an image! The heart of the Son is cut open by the ones He created and refused to be sons of the Father. The other church is the antichurch of Revolution. See, the French Revolution was not a new idea, it was a rehash of the old rebellion against the Father that began in Heaven crying “Non serviam!”
The actors of this drama are three: The Church that the Father has sent into the world as an expression of His love for humanity, the temporal human order represented by Caesar in the cry of the people of Judea before Pontius Pilate, and the Revolutionaries, the anti-Chirst mob, who seek to hijack the powers of this world to make war on Christ and his Church. When the end of the age arrives, the age of the Ten Kings and the Beast, the Revolutionaries have finally managed to control though infiltration the Church that Christ established. They have also infiltrated and controlled the powers of this world, the remnants of the old Roman order. That is represented by the beast that the Harlot is riding. See, this is a very unstable situation. A woman rides a powerful beast and she is drunk. Not exactly a representation of peace and stability, the image transmits a terrifying message, one that would not be missed by a king of ancient times, the King of Babylon (of all places) who asked to use the sacred vessels of the Temple of Solomon to drink merrily with his courtiers. It was late at night when that king got a message from Heaven:
King Belshazzar made a great festival for a thousand of his lords, and he was drinking wine in the presence of the thousand. Under the influence of the wine, Belshazzar commanded that they bring in the [sacred] vessels of gold and silver that his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the vessels of gold and silver that had been taken out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. They drank the wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.
Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote. Then the king’s face turned pale, and his thoughts terrified him. His limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. […] Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar became greatly terrified and his face turned pale, and his lords were perplexed. (Daniel 5:1-19 NRSVACE)
Then Daniel answered in the presence of the king: […] “You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven! The vessels of his temple have been brought in before you, and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines have been drinking wine from them. You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know; but the God in whose power is your very breath, and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored. So from God’s presence the hand was sent and this writing was inscribed. And this is the writing that was inscribed: mene, mene, tekel, and parsin. This is the interpretation of the matter: mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; tekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’ […] That very night Belshazzar, the Chaldean king, was killed. And Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old. (Daniel 5:17; 23-31 NRSVACE You can read the whole chapter here.)
It was the Father of king Belshazzar who had a dream that Daniel interpreted, the dream of the great statue with a golden head and feet of clay mixed with iron. (See Daniel 2)
“As the toes of the feet were part iron and part clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. As you saw the iron mixed with clay, so will they mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever;” (Daniel 2:42-44)
Those ten toes of clay mixed with iron are the ten kings of the last hour of mankind, and the ten horns of the beast that the harlot rides. The harlot is the unfaithful church, the ape of the real Church. That false entity fornicates with the powers of the world represented by those ten kings, toes or horns. The Scriptures we are quickly reviewing today are all variations of the same theme. Like the dizzying images of the Mandelbrot set, they have been appearing through history over and over again but what is important to us is how the story ends: the God of Heaven is about to establish His Kingdom, our patria. That is the land of Our Father, our true homeland, the Kingdom we pray for when we say “Let your kingdom come!”
In the days to come we will see many odd and extraordinary things happen. We have seen some already. The evil powers that run this world are well aware that their eleventh hour has come. They are gathering the nations of this world as one large army to wage war against the King that is coming to claim what is rightfully His. They will try to revive the old order of the Roman Caesars, the closest thing that ever existed resembling a World Order. But Caesars they are not. They will collapse before the awesome power of God for whom they amount to nothing. Their epitaph will be the confusion and terror of the damned descending into the fiery abyss.
Our part is to give the witness of Jesus Christ and remain completely unmoved. They can kill our bodies, in fact this has –since the days of Cain– always a matter of killing those who are faithful to God. Those who expect a benevolent new humanist order for this world are as naïve and misguided as the Russians who expected Lenin to be a benevolent and illuminated leader of a New Russia. The final days of this world will be a brutal festival of murder and mayhem that will begin with the persecution of the saints and then continue with the destruction of the harlot, the unfaithful church.
That is why we don’t have to be disturbed if crooks take over the country and place the Beast in power. They are allowed to do that by God who sees much more of the world’s evil activities than we do. Remember their days have been counted and they have been weighed on the divine scales and found wanting.
Finally consider these words from Psalm 2:
Why do the nations conspire,
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds asunder,
and cast their cords from us.’He Who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’ (Psalm 2:1-6 NRSVACE)
One more time: Stay still and see how God purifies the world. The signs are everywhere.