In Revelation 2:20 the Lord Jesus says, “I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My slaves astray to commit fornication and to eat idol sacrifices.” This woman is the same as the one prophesied by the Lord in Matthew 13:33, the woman who added leaven (signifying evil, heretical, and pagan things) into the fine flour (signifying Christ as the meal offering for the satisfaction of God and man). This woman is the great prostitute of Revelation 17, who mixes abominations with the divine things. The pagan wife of Ahab, Jezebel, was a type of this apostate church.

Revelation 3:1 says, “To the messenger of the church in Sardis write: These things says He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works, that you have a name that you are living, and you are dead.” The church in Sardis, which signifies the reformed Protestant Church, is living in name but dead in actuality. Hence, there is the need of the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars. The seven Spirits of God are for the church to be living intensely, and the seven stars are for her to be shining intensely.

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish you were cold or hot” (Rev. 3:15). This is the Lord’s word to the church in Laodicea, which signifies the degraded recovered church. Concerning the condition of this church, the Lord says, “Because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am about to vomit you out of My mouth” (v. 16). This warns us that once we become lukewarm, we are not fitting for the Lord’s move and shall be vomited out of His mouth.

Revelation 3:20 says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with Me.” Here we see that the Lord as the Head of the church is standing outside the degraded church, knocking at her door. The degraded recovered church must realize this! Such a church needs to realize that although she has knowledge, she does not have the presence of the Lord.

Revelation 17:5, speaking of the “woman sitting on a scarlet beast” (v. 3), says, “upon her forehead a name was written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of the Prostitutes and the Abominations of the Earth.” “Mystery” here indicates that Babylon the Great in this chapter is not the material one, as in chapter eighteen, but the religious one. Religious Babylon, the apostate church, is truly mysterious in what she is, in what she practices, and in what she teaches.

Since the “Mother of the Prostitutes” is the apostate church, the prostitutes, her daughters, should be all the different sects and groups in Christianity who hold, to some extent, the teaching, practices, and traditions of the apostate Roman Church. The pure church life has no evil transmitted from the apostate church.

In this message we have covered five matters that need to be overcome: the situation that frustrates us from believing in the Lord; the world, which is against our following the Lord to the end of our life; Satan, the one who formed the satanic system and who instigates people to be against the believers; the antichrists, those who teach heresy concerning the person of Christ; and all the degradations in the church. If we overcome all these things, we truly are the overcomers, those who have overcome the situation that opposes our believing in Christ to have eternal life and to become sons of God and who have overcome the world, Satan, the antichrists, and all the degradations of degraded Christendom.
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