JERUSALEM; ROME; REVELATION - The Preterist Archive

347. Sadly, both the Eastern and the Western Churches had become deformed through
their own idolatry - as still seen in the ‘Mass’ and in the honour many of them still pay to
statues and/or pictures of ‘Jesus’ ( sic!) and Joseph and Mary etc. So God unleashed the
plagues of Islam against them, to punish His wayward Church. Sadly, however, “the rest of
the men who were not killed by these plagues, still did not repent of the works of their hands
and stop worshipping demons and idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and of wood
which can neither see nor hear nor walk. Neither did they repent of their murders nor of their
sorceries nor of their fornication nor of their thefts.” Revelation 9:14-21.
348. Revelation chapter ten tells how John was commanded to take and eat a little
book, and then to prophesy again to many peoples and nations and tongues and kings. 169 This
seems to refer to his Post-70 A.D. mission to build up the Gentile churches in particular, until
the end of his life. But perhaps it also refers, as some believe it does, even to the much later
invention of printing and the publication of Bibles at the time Constantinople was falling to
the Turks. For it is the printing of the Scriptures which very soon led to the Protestant
Reformation of the Christian Church. Cf. the Dordt Dutch Bible, Albert Barnes, Philip
Mauro, Lenski, and B.H. Carroll.
349. Revelation chapter eleven gives an account of how John was told to measure the
inner temple of God, while being told that the Pagans would trample down the outer court and
the holy city for forty two months. 170 In the first instance, this probably applied to the Pagan
Roman 3.5-year-long besieging of Jerusalem from 66.5 A.D. onward until that ancient city’s
final destruction in A.D. 70. See sections 21 to 28 & 72 to 73 & 170 to 172 & 257 to 259
above. This would also date John’s Apocalypse at before 70 A.D. 171 Thus Alcazar, Grotius,
Hammond, Moffat, R.H. Charles, Zahn, Lohmeyer, Schlatter, and many others.
350. On the other hand, if the day-year principle of prophecy is here employed (at least
at the secondary level in respect of the further central prediction to be fulfilled in later Church
History), these 3.5 “years” (or 1260 day- years) 172 would indicate the powerful revival of the
faithful witness of the Law and the Prophecies in the Christian Church from about the time of
the Protestant Reformation onward. Cf. Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, Bellarmin, Joachim,
Luther, the Geneva Bible, the Dordt Dutch Bible, Poole, and Albert Barnes.
351. “And after three days and an half, the Spirit of life from God entered into them....
And the tenth part of the city fell. But the remnant were afraid, and gave glory to the God of
Heaven!” 173 Note here that even if the 42 months is taken literalistically to mean only 3.5
years from 66.5 to 70 A.D., the “three days and a half” subsequently mentioned cannot
similarly be taken literalistically and may therefore well refer to 3.5 day-years alias 1260 years
- and thus bring us to the very edge of the Protestant Reformation.
352. It is precisely through the Spirit-filled witnessing of the Protestant Reformation
and its ongoing successors, that the christianization of the World is finally to be accomplished.
Cf. Second Thessalonians 2:8f & 3:1. Then “the seventh angel sounded (his trumpet, after
the accomplishment of the christianization of the World.) And there were great voices in
Heaven, saying: ‘The kingdom of this World has become that of our Lord and of His Christ!
And He shall keep on reigning, for ever and ever!” 174
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