Gooding, David: 7 - Victory Over the Beast

Now, in particular, today, this afternoon and this evening, we shall be thinking of two major topics. Using the colorful language of this book, and we'll explain it later, we shall be thinking this afternoon about the beast and his two ladies, if that's what you might call them. Colorful ladies indeed. Some people think that he has but one lady, and it may be so. Whether one or two, their names are Babylon. And the beast that we shall be considering together is depicted in Holy Scripture as having this colorful, unfaithful, and evil woman riding on his back. We shall be thinking then of the beast and the woman on the one hand. On the other hand, by vivid contrast, we shall be thinking together about our Lord Jesus Christ, who is here depicted as the Lamb of God. We shall see him, therefore, God's true son, depicted as the Lamb of God, in striking contrast to the devil's man depicted as the wild beast. Then not only shall we be thinking of the Lamb of God, but we shall be thinking of the Lamb's wife, his woman, his wife, his bride and consort for all eternity. The beast and his woman, the lamb and his wife. This afternoon is liable to be a little bit gloomy. That will be in keeping with the weather. Let's hope the weather dries up and we get some sunshine, for this evening it will be all weddings and brides and glory, jewels, sapphires, diamonds, amethysts, and all the rest of those delightful things with which God has illustrated to us the glories of those who belong to the Lord Jesus and forever shall be playing the role of queen to his role of king, bride and wife of the Lamb. So then this afternoon we begin to think of the beast and then of his two women. And we are to think in particular of victory over the beast. That will be our predominant theme this afternoon, victory over the beast. And for that purpose, we shall begin by reading in the Revelation and chapter fifteen once more, the book of the Revelation fifteen, Beginning to read there at verse two. And I saw, as it were, a glassy sea mingled with fire, and then that came victorious from the beast and from his image and from the number of his name, standing by the glassy sea, having harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty. Righteous and true are thy ways, thou King of the ages. Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify thy name? For thou only art holy. For all the nations shall come and worship before thee, for thy righteous acts have been made manifest. And then in chapter seventeen, if you will, chapter seventeen, there we shall read verses nine to fourteen. Chapter seventeen. Nine to fourteen. Here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sitteth, and they are seven kings. The five are fallen, the one is, the other is not yet come, and when he cometh, he must continue a little while. And the beast that was and is not is himself also an eighth and is of the seven, and he goeth into perdition. And the ten horns that thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. These have one mind, and they give their power and authority unto the beast. These shall make war against the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they also shall overcome that are with him, called and chosen and faithful. And finally, in chapter nineteen— I could hope that as we read these passages and you turn the pages of your Bible, that you are noticing that these descriptions of the beast and of his end are given us in two three uh, two and three quite distinct parts of this book of the Revelation. Now we're reading in chapter nineteen and beginning in verse nineteen. And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against him that sat upon the horse and against his army. And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought the signs in his sight, wherewith he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. They twain were cast alive into the lake of fire that burneth with brimstone, and the rest were killed with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, even the sword which came forth out of his mouth, and all the birds were filled with their flesh. And God give us good understanding of his holy word. This afternoon, therefore, in our first session of the conference, we are to think of the theme victory over the beast. And the beast, as you may know, is a picture that God gives us in his holy word so that we might visualize the coming great political power that one day shall rule in the West, and indeed some think on the basis of Holy Scripture, the great coming political power that shall attain to almost universal dominion in the earth. This wild beast then represents this government, and in particular, it also represents for us, under the figure of one of the beast's horns, the head of state that shall be the head of that great coming political kingdom that shall have such dominance in the West and in the world generally. We saw in our study on Thursday evening that that beast will in fact be empowered by his satanic majesty himself. Doubtless a genius of his own right, the head of state shall also be empowered by Satan, and his ministry of propaganda, his ministry of so-called truth, will have powers more than human given to them by Satan himself, that with those powers he might convince mankind of his supreme authority. He shall deny that there is any God in heaven, and he shall set himself in the temple of God and exalt himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped. He shall bring about what our Lord referred to as the abomination of desolation. He shall demand not only obedience, but he shall demand the heart loyalty of every member within his geographical bounds. And his ministry of information and truth will pass its laws to the effect that every citizen in the kingdom must, on pain of death, worship the image of the beast, and if any refuse to take his mark in their hand and in their forehead, then they shall be prevented from buying or selling, and therefore in the end from eating and living. So the Bible warns us that at the end of this age, there will come into force, in Western Europe in particular, but throughout the world, this vast international government, formed when ten independent kingdoms choose to cede their sovereignty to an international government, headed up by a ruler who shall in the end deify the state and deify himself and seek to bring about unity and peace in the world by getting everybody owning ultimate loyalty, no longer to the God of heaven, but to the state in the person of the head of state. It will be a fearful time, Scripture tells us. Our Lord warned us that the reign of that beast shall be marked by terrible deceit, so cunning, so sophisticated, so pseudoscientific, so devilish in its deceit, that it were, were it possible, he would succeed in deceiving the very elect. Of course, it will not be possible. Here in the book of the Revelation, John the Apostle warns us of the very same thing. The beast and his ministry of propaganda shall put out such propaganda that, uh, of such, uh, specious truth. It will look so true, it will look so scientific, it will appear in the end to have proved scientifically there is no God. It will deceive men and women, so Holy Scripture tells us. And the Apostle Paul adds his comment when he tells us that just before the appearance of our Lord Jesus in power and great glory, there shall arise this man of sin, this head of this great empire of which we have been speaking. His coming is after the working of Satan with all lying signs and wonders and deceivableness. He shall deceive mankind. We read in that same part of scripture that for some people, God himself will intervene, and he shall send them a strong delusion that they believe that lie of the beast. Why? Because these people once had the opportunity of believing the truth. They heard the gospel of God. They heard the truth of our Lord Jesus Christ. They were offered God's unbounded salvation, and deliberately, and with their eyes opened, they rejected God's truth. God, in his poetic justice, in the end, shall give those people the choice that they themselves made and fix them in it, so the choice can no longer be reversed. And because they received not the love of the truth, God shall send them a strong delusion that they believe the lie, that they all might be damned who had pleasure in unrighteousness. I warned you that our session this afternoon is going to be gloomy, but then we're adults, aren't we? Most of us anyway, and we wouldn't want to put our heads in the sand. We know right well that if we sow a grain of barley, when it grows to harvest, the harvest will be barley. Conscience and intelligence will tell us that if now in our day and generation we choose to neglect or reject God's truth and live as though there were no God, live as though we were self-made men and women, then the seed of our untruth will eventually grow into an overwhelming harvest, and we shall believe the lie and find it lead to destruction. We, however, for all the gloom, are going to think this afternoon together about overcoming the beast, you'll see. So let me pause to explain to my theological brethren, that whereas here in the book of the Revelation, we are thinking first of all of the future and this great evil head of state who looms us, uh, who looms up in the fog of the future, the Antichrist. Nevertheless, the Bible tells us that ever since the time of the apostles, there have been many antichrists. Listen to our brother, the Apostle John, in his chapter two of his first epistle, and he says, you know, beloved, it is the last time. And if we say, but John, how do you know it's the last time? Well, says say- says he, it's the last time, and many antichrists have already gone out into the world, whereby we know it is the last time. So there is to be the great antichrist at the end of the age. But all down the Christian centuries, according to Holy Scripture, there have been many minor Antichrists. Many Antichrists have come, gone out into the world, and their fell intention is to soften men up, to get them on the side of the great Antichrist when he comes. So, in a sense, while we are looking forward this afternoon to the coming great Antichrist, the beast, we are ourselves involved in this war against Antichrist. And our interest is, how do you Overcome. overcome? On the other hand, while some things are clear i- i- in the book of the Revelation, it is, by common consent, isn't it, a difficult book. I don't know if you found it so, I have found it so. A very difficult book sometimes to make head or tail of. Now, there are all sorts of things we can do to help ourselves understand it, and one of them is this. We can take the illusions that this book makes to the Old Testament. And if we do so, we shall find that when it alludes to the Old Testament, it is offering us pictures, stories from the Old Testament that we can use and think about, and then use them as models for thinking with about the present and about the future that is to be. Here on your sheaf of notes, for you who might be interested to to follow it out, I have listed on, uh, pages three following, the allusions to the Old Testament that we find in the letters to the seven churches. And if you place them side by side, the seven letters to the seven churches on the one side and the Old Testament passages on the other, you will find that the allusions to the Old Testament follow logically and in chronological order from the beginning of the Old Testament in the Garden of Eden, right up to almost the end of the Old Testament, where Israel are spewed out of the land and banished to exile in Babylon. The allusions, I repeat, to the Old Testament found in the letters to the churches follow the chronological order of events in the Old Testament from creation to the exile. When you turn over to page five, I've listed to you the major visions in the rest of the book of the Revelation. And there you will find that most of them, not all of them, of course, but most of the major visions are taken from prophecies given to Israel about their return from the exile and the restoration of their city and land and temple and king. Indeed, about the final restoration of all things that God has spoken of ever since the prophets have said anything at all. I have not the time now to work out with you the implications of the facts I'm just pointing out. Now, for you, those of you who wish to study further in this book, you might find it an interesting topic to, uh, uh, do some little research on. What is the, what is the Holy Spirit saying when he thus, in the book of the Revelation, follows these illusions from the Old Testament, from the beginning in the Garden of Eden to Israel's exile at Babylon, and then in the rest of the book takes up the great prophecies and promises of the restoration of all things. I want to concentrate on just one thing, however, this afternoon. We're going to talk about the beast and how to overcome him. And if we look back into the Old Testament, we shall find that that is a topic that is already dealt with in the Old Testament in some great length and in some great detail. In fact, as you may know, in the prophecy of Daniel, Daniel tells us in his chapter seven that uh he was given a vision of this selfsame beast. And I remind you now of the details of his vision. Chapter seven of the book of Daniel, Daniel tells us that in the visions of the night he saw four great beasts rise up out of the Mediterranean Sea. Four wild beasts representing four great Gentile imperialist powers. Powers of Babylon, of Medo-Persia, of Greece, and of Rome. He describes these beasts in detail, and when he comes to the fourth, we shall recognize in that fourth beast that Daniel saw, the same old beast that we are now going to look at in the book of the Revelation. He was a tremendous multi-form beast. He was possessed of superpower. He was exceedingly destructive. He was exceedingly sophisticated. This beast had the eyes of a man and the mouth of a man. Then Daniel tells us a lovely thing. He said, as he stood there watching this beast and heard it blaspheme the very God of heaven. Then the Ancient of Days came, God himself, the Supreme Lord, came, and thrones were set up, and the Ancient of Days took his place on the heavenly throne. His head and his hair were white as wool. Thousands, thousands ministered to him, and a fiery stream came from before his throne. And as the Ancient of Days sat upon the throne, says Daniel, the books were opened, and at long last, divine rationality began to insist that reason should prevail and that beastliness and its destructiveness should be put to its end. Therefore the command was given, and the beast was taken, and his body burned with fire. Then says Daniel, I saw in the night visions, and with the beast burned. Then there came one like unto a son of man, and he came near to the ancient of days and to the throne. And the government was taken from the beast and was given to the son of man and to the saints, that is, those who believed and followed him. When we listen to Daniel describing to us that great vision, we can see, can't we, how very similar it is to visions that we have been and are about to study in the book of the Revelation. Consider, for instance, chapters four and five that we studied on Tuesday evening. For there John saw heaven opened, and he saw the vast and glorious throne in the heavens, and he saw the Ancient of Days sitting upon that throne. He saw in his hand a book, and as the thousands and thousands ministered to him, John saw the Son of Man, here depicted as the Lamb of God, and he came to him who sat upon the throne and took the book out of his hand, and it was given to him to have authority to execute the judgments of God and eventually to take over the government of our world. So John tells us. And his vision is very similar to the one that Daniel saw. But then we notice a difference in John. That in chapters four and five, John sees the vision of the throne, and he sees the vision of the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days, but there's no beast there. He's not even mentioned. You will have to come many chapters along before you find the beast mentioned at all, and the first major reference is in chapter thirteen, from the past, the context of which we have just read. Here is the big beast now, and here are his blasphemies. He's blaspheming God, he's persecuting the believers, he's in league with Satan, he has universal dominion, and he is demanding divine worship. And then we notice another interesting thing. Here's our beast then at last, but whereas Daniel saw the beast destroyed, John doesn't see the beast destroyed. Reference to those that gained victory over him, no mention, no explicit mention of the destruction of the beast. And then the chapters go by, and we come to chapter seventeen, And once more there's the beast, and a tremendous detailed description of the beast. And on his back is this filthy, unfaithful, adulterous woman riding the beast and trying to control him. Ah, now there's one little verse that gives us a prophecy that one day the Lord shall come and his saints with him, and the beast shall be destroyed and all his attendant kings. But it's a prophecy, and it doesn't actually take place in the course of that vision. And so we have to take the chapters and go over them again until at last, and at last, and at last, we come to another vision in chapter nineteen, when finally we see the Lord Jesus as a rider on a white horse. He comes out from heaven, and he destroys beast and false prophet and delivers them into the lake of fire. So much for the facts. Now we ought to ask their significance, didn't we? And my little question is very easy. Obviously, John and Daniel were seeing very much the same thing. Why did Daniel tell us this and paint the whole thing all at once? The beast, the throne, the coming of the Son of Man, and the destruction of the beast and the kingdom given to the Lord in one vision. Whereas John takes no less than three separate and quite distinct visions to tell us the same full story. Why is that? Now, you know, some students, when they find this kind of thing in Holy Scripture, what they do is simply this. Guided by Daniel, they've got his story in front, and there's the whole picture, you see. It's like the painted picture on the reverse of your jigsaw puzzle lid, and there it is, uh, all together. So they come to the revelation, and they pick something out of chapters four and five, and they pick something out of chapter thirteen, and then they pick something out of seventeen, and then they pick something out of chapter nineteen, and they put it all together. And they say, here you have the full story of the beast. Well, that can be helpful. Just a tiny bit perverse, isn't it? For if in the book of the Revelation, God has deliberately separated the story into four separate parts, and put it in different contexts, we ought to respect what he's done, did we not? There is a verse, relates to another connection altogether, and it says, what, uh, God hath put together, let not man put asunder. I think when it comes to Bible, the reverse is true. What God has put asunder, let not man put together. How shall we make it out? Well, I've given you some cold, uh, difficult facts. Let's give ourselves time to d- to digest them, shall we? And then we shall think about their significance. I suspect that there is not one single man, woman, boy, or child that doesn't in his heart hope that one day the problems of our world will be solved. In the ancient prophet Isaiah, God talks to us of a coming day when the nations shall beat their swords into pruning hooks, their spears into plows. Nations shall learn war no more, shall learn war no more. There shall come a glorious reign of peace and prosperity. And as we read that kind of thing in our Old Testament, most of us, at any rate, sense immediately a sympathy with it. War is a stupid thing, isn't it? Here we are, sophisticated modern men and women who can peer into the very secrets of nature, and yet facing us are endless possible terrors because of the human heart, because of the threat of war. In spite of all our sophistication, while half the world is fed, the other half starves. And we say in our hearts, oh, that one day somebody might find the secret of putting this world right, and the whole world enter into a time of peace and of plenty. The Bible assures us that that time of peace and plenty shall come. But then the Bible tells us quite bluntly how it will come. The Bible's view of things is this, that this our world is so deeply injured that there is no hope of that coming age of peace, peace and plenty until the Lord Jesus come and smash every form of human government, and putting it on the side, take over the reins of universal government himself. What the theologians call the apocalyptic view of the future. I repeat. Its view is that the institutions of this world, its governments, its economics, its commerce, that these things are so fatally flawed at their heart, that in the end God shall himself shall not be able to improve them. They will have to be destroyed by the coming of the Lord Jesus, and in its place he shall set up his kingdom. Now, I don't know how you react to that promise of the Bible and to its diagnosis. I have plenty of friends who, when they hear it, shakes their heads in disgust, if not in despair. And they say to me, yes, of course we're looking for a golden age of peace, but your view is so gloomy. You know, it despises all the improvements and the progress that mankind has made all down the centuries. If your view is right, we might as well pack up trying, go and sit on a mountain somewhere, like some extreme cults do, and hope for the coming of the Lord Jesus next Tuesday, or at least in a month's time or something. And therefore, men and women are not inclined to believe it. They say that's, that's too like Jeremiah, that's too gloomy, that view, that the only hope for our world is the coming of Christ and the destruction of the world's present institutions and the replacement by his government. They said that's far too gloomy. We can't have it. And so they go on hoping and hoping and hoping that the present, uh, progress that humankind has made, and it's made a lot, hasn't it, hasn't it, will sometime, give it enough thousands of years, will sometime at last reach the glorious age of peace and plenty. Well, now God takes us by the hand in his prophets and shows us that if that is our hope, uh, then we are mightily deceived. Why is it? Let's hear first of all, what the prophet Daniel has to say when he comes to talk to us about the beast. We'll hear his version of the beast and what he's got to say to us. And when we've heard him for ten minutes, then we shall listen to the Apostle John and hear what he's got to say to the beast, and it won't be the same lesson. Of course, it won't contradict the first lesson, but the two of them together will form a very balanced view of things. So John talks to us about the beast, and you, sorry, so Daniel talks to us about the beast, and when Daniel talks about the beast, it's part of God's critique with past and present and future governments in this world, and particularly imperialist governments. In chapter seven of Daniel, Dan- God likens these empires to wild beasts. We'll come to that in a minute. But God is fair, you know, and reasonable. And in chapter two of the prophecy by Daniel, God gives us another picture of those world empires. And in chapter two of Daniel's prophecy, he doesn't, uh, describe them as beasts, he describes them as a beautiful, glorious image of a man. God has two pictures of Gentile government in the prophecy of Daniel, one in chapter two and one in chapter seven. You see, God is reasonable, isn't he? And realist. Let's take the first vision first. How does God look upon the governments of our world? Well, I tell you, says God, and he gave to King Neb- Nebuchadnezzar, emperor of Babylon, a view of the governments of the world from one point of view as God sees them. And Nebuchadnezzar had a dream, and in his dream he saw this image standing on the plain of Dura, and in his dream, you know what dreams are like, he couldn't think you put it there, and he never ordered it to be there. And what artist in his academy had gone and built such a, an image like this? It was a tremendous image. The head was of gold, and the breast was of silver, and the thighs were of copper, and the legs were of iron, and the feet were of iron plus clay. And as Nebuchadnezzar looked at this, what struck him first was, it was the image of a man, a very big man. So big, it was almost frightening to look at. You know, a man about six foot's enough, isn't he? Six foot six, well, he's getting rather big. A man is a vast colossus. When men get very big, then he begins to get frightening, doesn't he? And Nebuchadnezzar saw this colossal of a man, he was to learn this is human government as God sees it. Mighty and brilliant, head of gold, chest of silver, thighs of copper, legs of iron. And of course, in the Babylonian of the Babylonia of the time, they had all the technology. They could have made a beautiful image like that. And that was God being fair, isn't it? But when you think of human government, I don't know how you view it, but I certainly would want to say that it has been a marvelous achievement. Huh? You think of the time when we in Ireland, had you come over there, were pulling our wives around by the hair of their head and, uh, dressed up in a few old skins and painted blue, and no central heating in our mud floors and living like animals, and we hadn't passed for a century. You'll say, who? We're not savagely like that now, are we? Thanks to all sorts of moves in civilization, and particularly among the Greeks with their political theorizing and the Babylonians, we've inherited an enormous achievement. Oh, thank God for it. A magnificent achievement of humankind in the development of government, in trying this kind of government and that kind of government, till in this country at least we think we've hit upon the best that is possible before the Lord comes, a kind of democracy. Anyhow, whichever is the best, mankind has experimented, and at least we don't altogether live like animals in the jungle, do we anymore? We are human. It has been a tremendous feat of human progress. And you say to me, well, there you are, Mr. Preacher, now you're admitting what my viewpoint is, do you see? Uh, we've progressed so far. Admittedly, we've got some difficult people, according to your political, uh, persuasions, whether it's Gorbachev or Margaret Thatcher. We've got some difficult people around, but, uh, give us a few more hundred years. Shall we, uh, at last come to a perfect world government, and we shall all live in peace and prosperity? And the answer is no, you won't. Why not? Well, Daniel, as he had to point out to Nebuchadnezzar, that marvelous image of a man that stood for Gentile governments and man's achievement was basically unstable. Its feet were iron and clay, which won't mix, and there was its weakness. It was liable to topple any minute. As I read that vision, I take it as a parable to myself, whatever else it means. Man has achieved a tremendous amount, hasn't he? But, uh, I think even you will recognize man has a hidden weakness, hasn't he? A fatal flaw. I know I have. I don't know about you. You should hear me Monday mornings when I get up, and the dim light of dawn reminds me that another day's come. Now, I say to myself, now, Gooding, out of bed, Gooding. And, uh, I'm very good at governing and laying down the law. I say, Gooding, you shall do this today and that today, and you won't be so stupid as you were last week, and you will do God's law, and you will keep it, and you'll behave very well to your aunts, particularly the maiden ones, and your, uh, uh, brothers and sisters, and your students and all the rest. You will, you will, you will keep the law, and you'll make society a very pleasant place. Oh, I'm jolly good at governing. I could have been a Nebuchadnezzar any day of the week. And then? I find I've got a fatal flaw. I'm very good at laying down the law. I am not so good at keeping it. And I have to say with another old wretched man that I am. The good I would do, that I don't do. And the evil I don't want to do, that I do. And you say, why do you behave so crazily like that, Gooding? I say, sir, it's because ultimately I am a fallen man. I come of a fallen race, born in rebellion to God. I find even my own body and mind is not perfectly obedient even to me. I'm like a prisoner in my own castle. And what is true of the individual is true of nations, isn't it? If you come inside a nation, the government might be quite right, but we don't always obey it, do we? We mean to, but we don't. And when it comes to international relationships, plagued by this weakness that the Bible calls sin. Not until an answer is found to that weakness is there any real permanent hope of an age of peace and plenty. The answer to that weakness, of course, is to be found in the supernatural power of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Today God waits because today God is working on individuals, coming to me in my problem over sin and weakness, the fact that I cannot keep his law and deserve eternal death for it, and offering me salvation and a new birth and supernatural power of God in being born again. One day he shall come in power and great glory, and he will insist on putting the nations right. There shall come the political regeneration when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his glory. Ah yes, but if in Daniel two God shows us one aspect of Gentile power and chooses to emphasize the glory of man and man's achievement in government, but that glory, uh, flawed, fatally flawed by man's inherent weakness. In chapter seven of Daniel, God gives us another view, and here comes our beast. He's one of four. He's the last of four. They're all wild beasts, but he's the worst beast amongst the whole lot of them. Wild beast, says God. You say, is God Almighty being, being unfair and unkind and rude about human government? You're not going to call our British government a beast, are you? Oh, wild beast, Germans and the Japans, wild beasts? Well, ladies and gentlemen, you must make an effort to try and understand the term. Yes, in some sense, governments are animals, aren't they? You say, whatever do you mean? Well, let me take an example. Um, it's not wise of you to take a lion as a pet, you know. You can do it. Uh, you have got to keep a lion in your backyard, and you, when he's nicely fed and he's had all he wants to drink and he can't eat anymore anyway, then you could go along and coax him and whisper sweet nothings in his ear and twizzle his tail, and he'll be nice to you and he'll smile at you in a way that lions smile sometimes. But you wouldn't mistake it. Seems to be friendly today, that's because he doesn't want anything. If tomorrow there was a meat shortage and, uh, you both, you and the lion had run out of meat, and, uh, you had a little bit of meat and he had none, he wouldn't say please, because he's an animal. He'd grab the meat that you got and you as well and eat both, and he wouldn't apologize afterwards either. Why is that? Because he's an animal. He has no sense of morality. He doesn't proceed on any sense of morality. He's just an animal. You don't expect your Fido to have moral judgment, do you? He's an animal. And I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that if, uh, today America has enough oil to keep her constitution going, well, she'll be friendly. Suppose by some hap America ran out of oil and all her economy was threatened, and nobody, the Britons nor the Russians, would sell her any, and Captain Gaddafi either. What do you suppose America would do? Sit down and die? No, I tell you straight, they'd come and take your oil. And they wouldn't apologize either. Why? Because governments are like animals, says God. They are not immoral, but they are amoral. Survival is the name of the game, and they're going to survive by moral means if they can, but if they can't, they're going to survive. And the biggest animal wins. Ah, but you say, surely, Mr. Preacher, that's a gloomy view as well. Haven't governments become more humane and tolerant in modern times? They have indeed, ladies and gentlemen, and God foresaw they would too. In Daniel chapter seven, when he talks about the beasts, he pictures number one beast, for instance, the Babylonian beast, and it was a lion, and it had eagle's wings on its back, and says John, I saw until its wings were clipped, and it was made to stand up on two legs like a, like a man, this lion of hair, and a man's heart was given it. In other words, it became humanized. That's happened to many governments. It's happened to the British government in my lifetime. In my town, at least, in my youth, used to see children running about naked and half fed. You don't see it now. There was no compassionate health service or anything. There is some kind of health service now, isn't there? In my country, if you'd stolen a sheep or a horse in the early eighteen hundreds, you'd have got hung for it. You won't get hung for it now, not even if you steal the Queen's Rolls-Royce. We've become more humane, haven't we? You say, give us a time, give us a chance, and and in the end we'll bring in the age of peace. No, you won't. No, you won't, says God. For consider that while governments have become more humane, consider that fourth beast, if you will. And what about him? Ah. He got the eyes of a man and the mouth of a man, but not the heart of a man. Just you imagine that. If the lions could unlock the secrets of nature and was had such intelligence that they could discover the atom and the atom bomb, what should we do? Now we're at a time when man have done just like that with human insight into the very secrets of nature. Governments have it in their power to destroy the whole world, and they're animals still. You see, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd have come to this country from abroad to beat us up like all William the Conqueror did, we should have come out to you with bows and arrows, and if you got too near, we should have clubbed your health head to pulp with an old cudgel. If you come to Britain now to attack us, we shan't fight you with bows and arrows because we're civilized. We shall irradiate you and eliminate you with laser beams and things. And if you should survive, your children will be hopelessly lunatic from the changes in the genes. To civilize. And we see now, as two generations before us have seen, this fearful combination of the models of an animal coupled with human insight into nature. The result in the fourth beast was that it was exceedingly destructive. It stamped and it bit. And God himself had to intervene to, to destroy it for the sake of the survival of the human race. Hear the gospel. You stand under the shadow of the atomic bomb and what the nations will do. God has his answer. One day the beast of Gentile imperialism will be burned, and the government shall be handed over to the Son of Man, according to God's books of rational accounting, and his divine wisdom, his hair like white as wool, will decree that the government of this world shall be in the hands of the perfect human Jesus, the Son of Man, and the government be given to the saints. And the Lord is coming. What a lovely thing, and what a hope. So far, Daniel then. And now I must remind you of how John saw it. And when we come to the book of the Revelation, as you have in your notes in column two, there is the picture of the throne of God. There is the Ancient of Days sitting. There is the Lamb of God, the Son of Man, coming to him that sat upon the throne. But for a moment, there's no beast. Nice to look at something without a beast, isn't it? For in the Revelation four and five, as we were considering the other evening. Now, it's not a question of politics, but of creation. And the throne is the throne of the Creator. And the situation is that all heaven is calling upon the Creator to rise up and take his creatorial rights. He made the world, it was made for his pleasure, it has gone astray, and then hence the chaos of bewildering wars and factions. One day, our blessed Lord will be given the authority by the Creator to rise up and bring the creation back to serve the will of the Creator. And so in that vision, there's no need to consider the beast. We're thinking not in political terms, but in terms of creation. Then when we come to chapter twelve and thirteen and fourteen, now once more we begin to consider the beast. And this time we're going to think about God's victory over the beast and how it shall be done. So some of us on Thursday evening were considering this, and first of all, to understand it, we were taken in thought way up into God's heaven, to look at things here on earth from heaven's point of view. And we thought originally of how man was made, and man was made, says Genesis, in the image of God, and made to have dominion. That was God's idea of humanity, that man might rule for God, man might be God's voice in the earth and develop earth and make something of earth for God. Man, God's viceroy, so long as man remained in dependence of God. The story then is how the a- a- the serpent, the devil, for his own s- uh reasons, caused man to disobey God, to seize independence of God. He baited the hook, did Satan, with the promise, eat this fruit in disobedience to God, and you shall be as God, independent of God, knowing good and evil. And it's a lie that has nestled in the heart of human beings all down the centuries. Every now and again it breaks out in some world ruler, that man be God. Darius, the emperor of the Persians, tried it. Some of the Roman rulers tried it. Alexander the Great tried it. Hitler came very near to it. If he didn't deify himself, he deified the state. And the Bible promises us at the end of this age, there shall arise an international government, and they shall demand it. They shall deify the head of state. They shall say that science has proved there's no God out there. In order to get the obedience of the masses, man will be required to give his allegiance one hundred percent to the state and to the head of state and worship him. And anybody that refuses to give that allegiance to the head of state will be eliminated. So now we think of the victory over the beast. How is it achieved? Well, first there has to be a victory, says scripture, over the devil that empowered him. And so in the early visions of chapter twelve, it represents the devil as the old serpent standing before the woman who's about to be delivered of a man child. In figure, the woman being humanity. And the promise given to Eve that her seed should eventually bring redemption and bruise the serpent's head. Her seed eventually a picture, of course, an indicate- indicative of Jesus Christ our Lord, the man, born of a woman, born of the Virgin Mary, born of the seed of David according to the flesh, born to be our deliverer. Now it's not a question of man trying to be God, but of God actually becoming man and entering humanity to win the battle for us. We see in the vision, and we're told in scripture, how Satan tried to get hold of that promised seed and destroy him, but he was caught up to God on his throne, and Satan was defeated. And on Thursday, we rejoiced as we thought of the Lord Jesus, the foul spirits that surrounded his cross and tried to do him to death, how that he died and was buried and is risen again and gone to glory, sits enthroned in the heavenlies, and Satan has lost. Ah, but if we got the victory over Satan, how do we get the victory over the beast? You say, I know how. How? Shoot him. The beast, you mean? Yes, you say, why doesn't God destroy him? And then we should win, shouldn't we? Oh, wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen. Suppose the impossible and the ludicrous remain. Suppose somehow or other it had come to be that I had to be put in the boxing ring with Cassius Clay, you know, the great and famous. And here was the mighty Cassius Clay, and here was me with my sixty-year-old knees and knocking. And you say, however will he get the victory over Cassius Clay? You say, I tell you what, you want to station somebody, uh, underneath the floorboards and at the right moment shoot Cassius Clay. That will give me the victory. Well, not really, would it? That would deliver me from old Cassius Clay, but I shouldn't have conquered him, should I? And that's why, in our great vision of the beast in chapters thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, God doesn't destroy the beast. Why not? Because he wants you to get the victory over him. He wants me to get the victory over him? I must tell you the last of the story. We read how that the victors over the beast stood at last by the Sea of Galilee, and they sang the song of Moses and of the Lamb. And that takes us back to the Old Testament, when Israel were in Egypt, and there was a terrible old tyrant then whose name was Pharaoh, and he defied the living God. So God sent the plagues upon Egypt and demonstrated there was a true God. Then the people got victory, and how did they get victory? Why, first, by getting release from the wrath of God. As the wrath of God was about to come upon that guilty land and its tyrants, God told his people how to get deliverance and shelter themselves under the blood of the Passover lamb, and they were delivered from the wrath of God. Ah, but that was only the first stage. Redeemed now from the wrath of God, how did you get free of Pharaoh? So God led them out to the wilderness, didn't he? And there they came across the Red Sea flowing strongly in front of them. And as they looked back, here came Pharaoh up behind with his chariots and all his tanks. And they cried out, what should we do? How can we get deliverance from Pharaoh? And God said, stand still. And he commanded Moses to raise his rod, and Moses raised the rod, and the seas parted, and Israel were given the choice. You want to get free from Pharaoh? Well, then you must be baptized to Moses in this cloud and in this sea, and be prepared to commit yourself one hundred percent to Moses. And the Israelites took their choice. It looked like going into certain death, but there you are, it was the only hope. And they went through the waters on both sides and the cloud over the top, and they gave their allegiance to Moses one hundred percent. They were baptized to him in the cloud and in the sea. That's how they got the victory over the beast. When they got through, the waters came back and drowned the Egyptians, and that was the end of them. You would get victory over the beast. Sooner or later, ladies and gentlemen, God will show it to us all. But while the beast hasn't yet come in that sense, every unregenerate man, woman, boy, and girl is born in the kingdom of Satan. How do I get victory? One, by being redeemed by the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, set free from the wrath of God on this ungodly world. Number two, I have to make up my mind. Am I going to stay in the kingdom of Satan, eventually to face the rise of the beast? Or am I going to stake my allegiance and give it to Jesus Christ um one hundred percent? So if I were to do that, trust the Savior, be baptized to him, and follow him. Oh, but it would cost me my friends. My dear good sir, it would cost you your life. Already it's cost millions of people their lives to trust Christ and follow him. But we have to decide, don't we? Some of my friends in Eastern Europe, they're in prison now. Before it costs. But you say, if we're not prepared thus to follow Christ, then Satan's won, hasn't he? Bought us with material benefits, bought us with the fear of death. How shall I break that bondage? How shall I get victory over the beast? I say, cost what it will, were it to cost my very life. If never before, then I do it now. And I trust Jesus Christ. And I get myself baptized to Jesus Christ. And I give him the utter one hundred percent allegiance to my heart and follow him all the way home to glory. If so you do, you too will be among those that stand at last by the glassy sea, having gotten victory over the beast.