An Allegory of Unfaithful Jerusalem
"'But you trusted in your beauty & used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by & your beauty became his. You took some of your garments to make gaudy high places, where you carried on your prostitution. Such things should not happen, nor should they ever occur. You also took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver, & you made for yourself male idols & engaged in prostitution with them. And you took your embroidered clothes to put on them, & you offered my oil & incense before them. Also the food I provided for you—the fine flour, olive oil & honey I gave you to eat—you offered as fragrant incense before them. That is what happened, declares the Sovereign LORD.” (Ezekiel 16:15-19)
ISRAEL: ON THE WAY TO EMPIRE IN THE MIDEAST
By Rev. Ted Pike
1 Aug 06
With Israel’s flexing of military muscle in Gaza and Lebanon, it is clear that the age of the “persecuted Jew” is fading. Evidence indicates that international Zionism is accelerating toward control in the Middle East, and indeed, the world. The Bible tells us much about ascendant Jewry in the years ahead.
In the mystical book of Revelation the apostle John saw in his vision a scarlet woman called “Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” She is drunk with the blood of the saints and riding upon a many horned and headed beast. He was told that this woman symbolized a city that would rule the nations in the last days, committing spiritual fornication with the kings of the earth and corrupting mankind. (Revelation 17, 18)
Who is this all-powerful woman? Does the city she represents exist today?
To discover the answer we must go back thousands of years to a story of redemption, love and betrayal -- to the story of the birth of Israel as recounted in the 16th chapter of Ezekiel. In this stern yet tender allegory God tells how He rescued Israel from death as a rejected infant and chose her to become His spiritual bride. This was not because of any inherent goodness in her but out of His compassion. Her condition was more wretched than any other: “And as for thy nativity, in the day that thou wast born, thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee;… but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.” (Ezekiel 16:4,5) Only God’s mercy saved her from death, for “… when I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee… Live…” (Ezekiel 16:6)
Israel: God’s Unique Bride
Israel came to life. Out of the iron furnace of Egyptian bondage the tiny Hebrew nation burst forth, a spectacle to the world, plaguing Pharaoh, traversing the divided sea, surviving the drowned Egyptians, until at last under the rod of Moses they pitched in the desert of Sinai. There, by chastisement, revelations and wanderings, they attained their spiritual proportions. There God entered into the covenant of marriage with His bride:
Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest mine. (Ezekiel 16:8)
At Sinai, nearly 3,500 years ago, God testified that He so loved all nations that He would enter into spiritual marriage with one, that all might be blessed. Divine blessings continued as Joshua led the purified congregation in victory over the depraved inhabitants of Canaan. A land “flowing with milk and honey” became their prize. This was the time when Israel lived the words of Jehovah:
“This people I have formed for myself; and they shall show forth my praise.” (Isaiah 43:21)
Israel the Whore
Yet how brief was that praise! “But thou didst trust in thine own beauty,” God reproaches Israel, “and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on everyone that passed by…” (Ezekiel 16:15)
When Israel turned to idols, forsaking the love of her own husband, she incurred the everlasting reproach of a woman divorced for adultery -- for, in the end, God had to annul the covenant of marriage held with her and give her a bill of divorce.
From Moses to the prophets, Israel is repeatedly described as the imperious whore. In more that 80 instances, Israel is specifically denounced as a whore, harlot or lewd woman, while at least twice that many times she is called such indirectly. In fact, to demonstrate the depth of Israel’s iniquity, God actually required Hosea to violate the seventh commandment and find himself a whore. “Go, take unto thee of a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms,” God commands, “for the land hath committed great whoredoms, departing from the Lord.” (Hosea 1:2) Hosea was to command his harlot bride not to turn again to whoredom- yet of course it was no use. Like Israel, the mother of harlots, Hosea’s wife and her daughters were incurably whorish. “…for the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God.” (Hosea 4:12)
God revealed to Jeremiah that although the Jews were not grieved at their unfaithfulness, still God sorrowed. “Turn, O backsliding children,” He cried to them, “for I am married unto you.” (Jeremiah 3:14) And to Ezekiel God confessed His grief: “I am broken, with their whorish heart,” He said, for Jewry is “an imperious, whorish woman… that takes strangers instead of her husband.” (Ezekiel 16:30) As God told Jeremiah, Israel was overt in her whoredoms and malicious as well. “Thou pouredst out thy fornications on everyone that passed by…” (Jeremiah 16:15) “…they have committed adultery and blood is in their hands.” (Jeremiah 23:37)
The Harlot Judged
In a passage suggestive of the coming judgment of Babylon the Great, when, in Revelation 18, she is thrown off the Beast and desolated by his horns, Ezekiel cries out:
…O harlot, hear the word of the Lord: Thus saith the Lord God; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children…Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers…I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them…And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged…And I will also give thee unto their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place…they shall strip thee also of thy clothes…and leave thee naked and bare. (Ezekiel 16:35-39)
Such were the great captivities. First by Assyria and then Chaldea, Israel and Judah were successively overrun, desolated and made captive. In the exile under Nebuchadnezzar in 588 B.C., the majority of Jews were led, many with hooks in their jaws, across the sand to distant Babylon. For 70 years they paid back to God as much as they had earned from harlotry. Unfortunately, as the centuries passed, the great majority of Jews, staying in Babylon for the next 1600 years, began to identify more with their new “promised land,” occult Babylonia, than with Palestine. Only one tenth returned.
The Mother of Harlots
Having considered the Old Testament view of Israel as the archetypal harlot, we are impelled toward one conclusion: Israel of today and tomorrow is the continuation of that symbolic woman once chosen by God as His unique bride among the nations, but whom He ultimately divorced and cast away because of her adultery.
Because Israel was the first to marry Christ and have spiritual relations with Him, the concept of spiritual brideship was unique to Israel. Conversely, only apostate Israel can claim the distinction of being the “mother” of the principle of spiritual whoredom. At the time she was chosen to be Christ’s bride, other nations were also disobedient, but in the manner of a child to its parent. Only Israel was made capable of adultery to her husband. Therefore, when she became a spiritual whore, she was indelibly marked upon her forehead “Mother of Harlots.”
For this reason, while other apostate systems, such as the papacy during the Reformation, resplendent in corruption and red with the blood of the saints, may be called spiritual harlots, only Israel can be the “mother” of that scarlet sorority. Israel’s distinction as the archetypal harlot is so rooted in her unique position as the first to have spiritual relations with God and the first to corrupt it, that neither time nor dispensations nor wanderings can remove it. Further rebellion only outlines in bolder relief the epithet, “Mother of Harlots.”
Israel of old was a harlot with whom her husband still pleaded -- subject to whorish binges yet one who usually returned in penitence. But when the harlot finally shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!,” and had her divine Husband put to death, her resurrected spouse banished her from His house and lands. He condemned her to wander, persecuted, taunted, a woman divorced for adultery perpetually looking for a substitute husband -- a messiah who would take the place of the first Husband whom she killed. She dreamed of another husband, as anti-Christ as she, who would remove her reproach.
The Great City
In Revelation 17 we are confronted with the specter of a city “which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:18) It is spiritual in that it connotes the full potentiality of human degeneracy. But it is also physical, for it is greater in size, wealth, and importance than any other. “What city is like unto this great city?” the merchants of the earth wail, as they view from afar her ultimate end. Her commercial importance is such that with her fall also came the ruin of world trade.
The title, “the great city,” according to the importance Revelation gives it, is exclusive. There undoubtedly will be other great cities in the end time, but John’s vision is enthralled by “the great city,” an emporium of trade, culture and human bondage which will be unequalled.
It is therefore extremely significant that of the six times the name “the great city” (hey polis megaley in Greek) is used in Revelation, in one of those it clearly refers to Jerusalem. When the two witnesses are killed, their dead bodies lie in the streets of “the great city (hey polis megaley) …Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.” (Revelation 11:8)
Unless the overall emphasis of Revelation is in error and there is actually another city in addition to Babylon worthy of being called “the great city,” we see the strongest inference that the great city Babylon, which rules over the kings of the earth, and the great city, “Sodom and Egypt, where our Lord was crucified,” are in fact one. Both bear symbolic names of vice and perversion which reveal facets of a great and evil city to come. What city is that? Jerusalem.
St. Peter: Jerusalem is “Babylon”
The apostle Peter also affirmed that “Babylon” is symbolic of Jerusalem. In 1 Peter 5:13, he writes to Christians from Jerusalem: “She that is in Babylon, elect together with you, salutes you. . .”
In order to explain how Peter, bishop of Jerusalem, could be greeting the church from distant Babylon, some have suggested that he also became the bishop of Babylon. Nonsense!
Another explanation is that Peter was sending a greeting on behalf of the Christian church in distant Babylon. What Christian church? There is no evidence that at the time of Peter’s first epistle Babylon had received the gospel. Quite the contrary, the apostles were at that time forbidden by the Holy Spirit to go east into Asia, preaching the word in distant Babylon. (Acts 16:6)
Here is what St. Peter signified in the above verse: “She” is metaphorical for the church, “Babylon” for apostate Jerusalem. Jerusalem is dominated by “the synagogue of Satan,” those Pharisees which had come from Babylon and were saturated with its occult influences. The apostle John similarly called Jerusalem “Sodom and Egypt” because it epitomized the sexual deviance, sorcery, and bondage of those ancient cesspools of evil.
A Jewish City
The great city has an ethnic flavor, crucial to understanding its identity. When at last she is destroyed, Revelation contrasts her fall to the fall of the “cities of the Gentiles,” as this phrase is usually translated elsewhere in the New Testament. So when Revelation says: “And the great city was divided into three parts and the cities of the nations (Gentiles) fell…,” (Revelation 16:19) we have a very strong inference that a city which is contrasted to the cities of the Gentiles is, by inference, Jewish.
Regaled in crimson and drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, Rome has always seemed perfectly suited as a foundation for Antichrist. Christians, of course, even from the earliest post-apostolic times, have linked Babylon the Great with Rome, which Roman tradition described as sitting upon seven hills.
Yet Rome is situated on more than seven hills. In contrast, Jerusalem is surrounded by seven distinct hills. Schoolchildren in Israel memorize “the seven hills of Jerusalem,” which are: Mt. Of Olives, Mt. Scopus, Mt. Zion, Mt. Moriah (the Temple Mount), Golgotha, Hill of Moses, and Mt. Herzl.
Scripture only allows one “great city” to be the center of world rule in the last days. Paul states clearly that the anti-Christ will declare his one-world authority from his “seat” in the Temple at Jerusalem. There he proclaims to an awe-struck world his regency as God incarnate. (II Thessalonians 2:4) Similarly, when the two witnesses come resisting his blasphemies and dominion (Revelation 11) it is not in the streets of Rome that Revelation portrays them, but prophesying and ultimately dying in the streets of Jerusalem. Clearly, since these scriptures point to Jerusalem as the epicenter of spiritual conflict in the latter days, we are encouraged to infer that Jerusalem and Babylon are the same.
Guilt for the Blood of Abel
Further confirmation of the linkage between Judaism and Babylon is given in Revelation 18:24 where it says “in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”
One might object that, wicked and oppressive though a world system of Jewish oppression will be still, any system which could fulfill the requirement of being guilty of the murder of every righteous man from the foundation of the world must be more broad and timeless than Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism only really began about the 5th century B.C. in Babylon.
Yet upon whom does Christ lay blame for murder of righteous men, clear to the time of Abel? Yes, upon the Pharisees and the Talmudic world system they were beginning in His day. “That upon you may come all the righteous blood from Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.” (Matthew 23:35)
Further, Revelation 17:18 portends that Rabbinic Judaism, which claims direct descent from the Pharisees, will not be terminated in this world until it has resumed the persecution of Christians begun in the book of Acts. Evil Jewish leadership will be made drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus (Revelation 17:6). We should be reminded that Judaism has already begun to fill up its cup. When Jewish activists and financiers pioneered and first established communism as a major world power, they facilitated a system of butchery and persecution of Christians such as the world has never endured.
One might argue that it was Stalin who slaughtered 2,000,000 Kulaks, or Mao that murdered 60,000,000 Chinese, or the Soviet system, which, according to Solzhenitsyn, slaughtered an estimated 66,000,000 persons between 1917 and 1959. Yet such carnage would never have occured had not international Jewry established a power structure upon which indigenous communism received assistance. The blood of these millions, countless thousands of which were Christians, began to cry to God for vengeance, swelling that great chorus slain from the foundation of the world.1
Judaism is Babylonian
The fact that Rabbinic Judaism is already bloody with the martyrs of Jesus combines with several other features of Babylon the Great to forge a compelling link between Judaism and the Mother of Harlots.
Rabbinic Judaism, more than any other religion or culture except perhaps the inhabitant of modern Iraq, is Babylonian. Its greatest spiritual and legal authority is the Babylonian Talmud. The Judaism of the Rabbis was created by the nearly 1,600 years it spent upon the decadent plains of Shinar. Such was a period roughly equivalent to the entire time the Hebrews spent in Palestine. Similarly, few religions have more of a tradition of occultry than Judaism. The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that by the latter part of the Jewish sojourn in Babylon, “The most profound scholars were adept in the black art and the law did not deny its power. The people, who cared little for the views of the learned, were devoted to witchcraft. . ." Egypt “. . .gave Judaism its magic and Babylonia its divination while Hellenism served as the connecting link.” (Helping bring Jewish/Babylonian occultry to the west.) “
In view of the authority which the Talmud possessed for posterity, the magic in it could not but influence later generations.” 2 Babylonian magic, numerology, demonology, astrology, etc, suffuses the Talmud and its mystical companion the Zohar, or “Kabbalah.” As Revelation describes Babylon the Great as deceiving the entire world through her “sorceries,” so the Jews, who were known in the West as "Chaldeans", carried the black arts of Babylon to Christian Europe.
Also, as Revelation describes “the great city” of the end times as corrupting all the nations, so we see evil Jewish leaders today not only erecting a political/commercia l world empire, but pouring filth out upon the nations through the movie, television and internet media, promoting promiscuity, homosexuality, and spearheading all forms of left-wing, Anti-Christ radicalism. 3 (See, “Jews Confirm Big Media is Jewish”)
Mass Deception
Finally, there is the fact that just as Babylon the Great will deceive all nations in the end times, including, if possible, the “very elect,” so we see unparalleled deception right now.. The Zionist descendants of the Pharisees, exactly as Christ described their forefathers, are, through control of their media, presenting a whitewashed façade to the Church and nations. Such window dressing, especially effective in hiding from the world Israel’s brutality in her occupied territories and persecution of Christians resulting from ADL inspired “Anti-Hate Laws,” has never been more convincing.
The fact that the Jewish lobby in the United States has literally deceived the very elect into an unquestioning support of its ambitions and atrocities in the Middle East is awesome evidence of how compelling will be the Jewish powers of thought manipulation as we draw even closer to the end. It reminds us that when Christ warned us that the delusions of the end time would be so convincing that “even the very elect” would be deceived, if that were possible, He was speaking to us not of a time in the grotesque future. He was describing our day. He was warning us that the closer we approach the time of anti-Christ, the less we should assume that we have a perfect perception of any kind of reality -- least of all a subject as dubious as the Jews.
What we are witnessing at this very hour, then, are the continuing and monstrous complications of that great “falling out” between Christ and His chosen bride thousands of years ago. Today we are not simply approaching the foothills of antichrist. We are in them. Through intrigue and deception and changing of times and laws, the world control and commercialism of Babylon the Great has come to under-gird and surround us. Yet we have not perceived it. In fact, we have assisted it.
In short, Babylon is now.
(Adapted from Ted Pike’s book Israel: Our Duty…Our Dilemma)
Endnotes:
1 In my book, Israel: Our Duty…Our Dilemma, I extensively document how Jewish radicals, financially supported by the largest Jewish banking houses, overthrew the Czar and established Communism in Russia.
2 Jewish Encyclopedia, “Magic,” pages 255, 6.
3 Authoritative Jewish sources such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia Judaica all contain lengthy articles on such subjects as, “Babylon,” “Kabbalah,” “Magic,” “Astrology,” “Divination,” “Amulets,” “Necromancy,” “Demonology,” “Sorcery,” “Witchcraft,” “Numerology,” etc. Such Jewish scholarship documents the massive 1,600 year influence of Babylonian culture and religion upon Talmudic Judaism. It is noteworthy that encyclopedias of Christianity possess, except for the topic of Satan, virtually no such articles. Judaism, however, as the religion Christ labeled “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 3:9) is so full of occultism that it is not surprising that the Jewish media promotes astrology, ‘Harry Potter’ and witchcraft, spiritism, Satanism, and New Age with literally a religious fervor. (See, “The Jews behind DaVinci Code”)
Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservat ive watchdog group.
For many more insights concerning Israel in Bible prophecy, purchase Rev. Pike’s 345-page book, Israel: Our Duty…Our Dilemma, available at www.truthtellers. org for $24.90, postpaid, or from the address below.
Also come to www.truthtellers. org for dozens of articles explaining the threat of evil Jewish leadership to Christians.
TALK SHOW HOSTS: For interview with Ted Pike, please call 503-631-3808.
National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas, OR 97015
AB Withheld62@yahoo. com "For to us will be their return; then it will be for us to call them to account." (Holy Quran 88:25-26)
No comments:
Post a Comment