Then God came in to call another man by the name of Abraham. Through Abraham God gained a people whom He brought out of Egypt to Mount Sinai. There God gave them the law, the Pentateuch, through Moses. We may say that this was the origin of Judaism, the origin of the Jewish religion. It was founded absolutely according to God’s holy Word, but gradually the children of Israel became corrupted and rotten because they forsook God Himself as their source, the fountain of living waters. In Jeremiah 2:13, Jehovah said, “For My people have committed two evils:/They have forsaken Me,/The fountain of living waters,/To hew out for themselves cisterns,/Broken cisterns,/Which hold no water.” All the idols are broken cisterns which cannot retain water. The two evils are forsaking God and joining with Satan in worshipping idols. These are the two evils that resulted in the failure of the people of Israel, who were the descendants of Abraham in an earthly sense as the dust of the earth (Gen. 13:16). God sent the Babylonians to come to devastate Jerusalem and the temple and carry the people away into captivity in 606 B.C. Of course, God brought a remnant of them back after seventy years to rebuild the temple (Jer. 29:10), but that recovery did not last too long.

The four Gospels show us how evil the Jewish people had become by the time that the Lord Jesus came. The entire holy land was full of demons. Wherever the Lord Jesus went, He confronted demons. The Lord Jesus appeared to the people of Israel as their Shepherd to shepherd them and even as their Savior to rescue them, but they totally rejected Him.

In Matthew 23 the Lord Jesus lamented over them and told them, “Behold, your house is left to you desolate” (v. 38). This indicated that they would be rejected by the Triune God. The Lord said that from that day the temple, which was the house of God, would no longer be the house of God, but “your house.” Then when the disciples came to Him to show Him the buildings of the temple, He said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, There shall by no means be left here a stone upon a stone, which shall not be thrown down” (24:2). The Lord was predicting that the temple with the city of Jerusalem would be devastated, not leaving one stone upon another stone. This was fulfilled in A.D. 70 when Titus and the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem, shortly after the Lord had ascended to the heavens. That destruction was an unprecedented event in history. Josephus, the Jewish historian, spoke of the cruelty and slaughter inflicted upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem by the Roman army.

After this destruction by Titus, the Jews were scattered all over the earth. Since that time, Hosea tells us that the Jewish people have been “without king and without prince and without sacrifice and without pillar and without ephod and teraphim” (3:4). Among the Jews for nearly twenty centuries, there have been no kings, no princes, no prophets, no priests, and no sacrifices, because there have been no temple and no altar to receive the sacrifices. Hosea predicted that this time of desolation would last two days, or two thousand years (6:1-2). According to history, this period of two thousand years should begin from Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. From that day until today among the Jews, there have been no kings, no princes, no priests, no prophets, and no sacrifices; nor have there been any idols among the Jews since that time. The Jewish people invented their way of synagogues to worship God, but the Lord referred to the synagogue as a synagogue of Satan.

Later, the church came into existence, but it was not too long before the church became worldly, married to the world. That worldly church eventually became the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the sixth century when the papal system was established and the pope was commonly recognized. This Roman Church is typified by the woman Jezebel in Revelation 2:20.

Now I would like us to read Revelation 17:16: “And the ten horns which you saw and the beast, these will hate the harlot and will make her desolate and naked and will eat her flesh and burn her utterly with fire.” This verse was written at the end of the first century in approximately A.D. 90, but most Christians do not know that there is such a verse in the Bible. They do not know that the Lord Jesus sounded the trumpet seven times in Revelation for us to overcome, nor do they know what to overcome. My burden is for us to see what we need to overcome, and Revelation 17:16 will help us to see this. The ten horns in this verse are the ten kings (v. 12), and the beast is Antichrist (Rev. 13:1-10). The harlot in Revelation 17 is the Roman Catholic Church (vv. 1-6). Antichrist is the head, and the ten kings belong to Antichrist, so they all agree to do one thing. They will hate the Roman Catholic Church and make her desolate and naked and will eat her flesh and will burn her utterly with fire. This will be the end of the Roman Catholic Church.

Antichrist will be empowered to be the last Caesar of the revived Roman Empire (see Rev. 17:10-11, notes 101 and 111- Recovery Version), and he will make a covenant with Israel for the last seven years of this age, but after three and a half years he will break this covenant (Dan. 9:27). He will rebel against God and persecute any kind of religion (2 Thes. 2:3-4). He will not allow anyone to worship anything or anyone but himself. Then with the ten kings under him he will desolate and burn the Roman Catholic Church. Revelation 17:16 makes us clear that at the beginning of the great tribulation of three and a half years, the Roman Catholic Church will be desolated and burned by Antichrist. This is not a spiritual burning but a physical burning. Not many know that there is such a verse in Revelation.
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