Beast of Revelation.pdf - Friends of the Sabbath Australia

The Beast of Revelation
and final revival must be yet to come. Your life is to be profoundly
affected by events yet to take place in the “Eternal City”!
The Lady of Kingdoms
Let’s look at the pope-sanctioned revivals thus far. With the
conclusion of the Gothic Wars in A.D. 553, Italy was left in poverty
and disorder. Rome had been besieged, starved, captured and
looted. Finally the Byzantine armies succeeded in reconquering
Italy and remnants of the Western Empire. Justinian, already the
emperor in the East, was now the restored emperor in the West.
But how was he to govern this recovered territory? The answer lay
in an alliance of church and state that has shaped the history of
Western Europe ever since. Though secular authority in the West
had collapsed, “the survival of ecclesiastical organization [under
the bishop of Rome] appeared even
to the emperors as the salvation of
the state. In 554 Justinian promulgated
a decree requiring that ‘fit and
proper persons, able to administer
the local government, be chosen as
governors of the provinces by the
bishops and chief persons of each
province’” (Durant, pp. 519–520).
This healing of Rome’s “deadly wound” is known in history
as the “Imperial Restoration.” The emperors in Byzantium would
continue as nominal rulers of a revived Imperium Romanum
(“Roman Empire”) in the West from 554 until 800. By the terms
of Justinian’s decree, however, the Roman popes took the real
reins of government in the West—metaphorically sitting astride
and riding the imperial Beast.
This remarkably parallels the prophecy in Revelation 17. The
story of seven revivals is told here too—symbolized by another
“Beast” with seven heads and ten horns. However, it is important
to note a significant difference between this Beast and the ones
described in Revelation 13 and Daniel 7. Unlike those, the Beast
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Byzantine Empire
Under Justinian