There are two types of prophesying:

1. The kind where a prophet says such and such WILL happen. To such, Deut. 18:22 applies.
2. Your kind where you say such and such is what you understand WOULD happen. To such, your own caution applies: "wait [to see if] the rain starts falling."

The difference lies in the claim of (in)direct inspiration: whereas the former comes along saying, "Thus says the LORD ..." the latter proclaims instead, "Thus means the LORD by the one who said thus says the LORD." In the both cases, especially where interpretations prove fruitless, loss of credibility dampens enthusiasm, weakens faith and destroys the HOLY NAME OF GOD.

"As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'" -- Rom. 2:24

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Kland, That is nonsense. Because you have shown me that you do not agree with the evidence presented, your disagreeing with the facts does not make the evidence untrue. It testifies that you place your opinion above the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy. The Bible reveals the prophecy and the Spirit of Prophecy states that Daniel and Revelation will explain themselves by their fulfillment. Thus when the 42 months were fulfilled as 42 & 2 in harmony with the use of duo in Luke 10:1, you choose to reject the Bible and its fulfillment. That is a foolish position to take on the eve of Christ's Second Coming.



Kland, this is more nonsense. God led His people with time prophecy when He founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church. That is how God led us in our past history. And as God's people followed His leading, they did not get everything right. They made some mistakes and they kept studying until they got it right. For you to think that God is leading His people differently today, you must not be understanding how He has led us in the past. And to think that you have nothing to fear is like the antediluvians not being afraid of the rain that they knew would never come.

James,
Jonah prophesied that Nineveh would fall, it did not. Are you saying that he was a false prophet?

I was saying that as I read the prophecy it means thus and so. God allowed me to have the time to see things that I had not understood from the prophecy at the time I spoke. When more light came on the subject, I was able to update my understanding because What was partially understood became more clear.

The antediluvians had more light when the animals paraded into the ark, but they refused to update their opinions. Thus, they waited until the rain fell: Too late too late.



Are you updating your prophetic views now that new light has come or are you going to wait until it is too late?

The Beast That Is an Eighth
 
Written by:
Sigve K. Tonstad
Published:March 20, 2019
 
When the seven bowls have been emptied, one of the bowl angels stays behind to talk (Revelation 17:1). This could be interpreted in more than one way. First, it could be the angel's initiative. If so, it confirms that God is more interested in making things known than human beings are in knowing. By this logic, neither inquisitiveness nor curiosity in the human realm is the driving force. Things happen on God's initiative; God prods the audience to stay for an extra lesson. Alternatively, the trumpet angels may have seen bewilderment on John's face. His body language has been noted earlier. In chapter 5, John faced a predicament in heaven that caused intense sorrow and weeping (Revelation 5:4). In that scene, others took note of his state of mind, and they responded as though his reaction matters (Revelation 5:5). We have another scene of interaction between heaven and earth in the intermission between the sixth and the seventh seal (Revelation 7:13-17). In that scene, one of the elders asks a question that John cannot answer. "You are the one who knows," he says (Revelation 7:14). This may represent a glimpse of the heavenly pedagogy: God wants us to know, and God uses questions to get us there.
 
The scene that begins in Revelation 17 could be a mixture of these elements. God wants John to know, and John wants to know. The disclosures so far have left him perplexed. The angel's offer of private lessons seems to work if we judge by John's body language. The range of John's reactions in Revelation is now awe (Revelation 1:17), grief (Revelation 5:4), admission of ignorance (Revelation 7:14), and here -- most likely -- perplexity. There will be at least one more: shock. "When I saw her, I was shocked with an extreme shock" (Revelation 17:6) or, "I was appalled with utter disgust." The type of interaction and response that we see in John are meant to instill similar states of mind in the audience. This is not easy to do. Why was John taken by surprise so late in the day?
 
Clearer When It Blurs
 
I have read John 17 many times. The chapter is Revelation's master class. If we manage to sort things out in this chapter, we have it made. My initial sense is that the tutoring angel seeks to make things clear by images that are hyper-specific, with numbers like "five," and "seven," and "eight" for the heads of the beast (Revelation 17:8; Revelation 17:11). This hyper-particularity has sent interpreters scurrying in all directions to crack the code they imagine John to be using. Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree. The hyper-particularity does not aspire to present an array of new historical details. Rather, it is tongue-in-cheek particularity driving home a message the contours of which are already in place. Simple does it.
 
Hyper-particularity goes hand in hand with a blurring of the imagery. The mix of characters, places, and things suddenly seems unstable. Who, what, and where are no longer exactly what we expect. It is as though things get clearer when they blur.
 
The angel's private lesson begins with an invitation.
 
Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the exposé of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the inhabitants of the earth have become drunk." So he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of slanderous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality; and on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: "Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth's abominations." And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus (Revelation 17:1-6).
 
A wilderness (Revelation 17:3)? The last time there was a wilderness, the woman that gave birth to the male child was in flight mode into the wilderness, trying to escape the dragon (Revelation 12:6; Revelation 12:14). Is this the same wilderness?
 
A scarlet beast (Revelation 17:3)? Strictly speaking, we have not seen a scarlet beast before. We have seen a red dragon; that was the color of the creature hell-bent on destroying the woman fleeing into the wilderness (Revelation 12:3; Revelation 12:13). We have also seen a beast rising from the sea that had similar characteristics (Revelation 13:1). Its color might be surmised, but there is no statement about its color.
 
A woman (Revelation 17:3)? We have seen a woman before, the one who gave birth to the male child (Revelation 12:1-2) and then fled into the wilderness (Revelation 12:13-16). She barely escaped. Or did she? The summary passage about the woman's flight from the dragon ends on an ominous note. "The dragon was enraged with the woman. And he went away (in a vanishing act) to wage war against the rest of her seed, those who keep the commandments of God as revealed in the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 12:17, translation mine).
 
How did the dragon's new plan turn out? There are enough markers of continuity to be certain that Revelation elaborates the earlier story. It might have been easier if John had said the scarlet beast, or the wilderness, or the woman -- not a scarlet beast, a wilderness, or a woman. He should not say that, of course. He should say it exactly the way he does and then let his reaction say the rest. "When I saw her, I was shocked with an extreme shock" (Revelation 17:6). This detail is crucial. As to wilderness, it suggests trouble in the region of apparent safety. As to beast, it suggests a close relation to the pursuing dragon and not only to the beast from the sea. As to woman, now colluding with all her might with the scarlet beast, something terrible, unimaginable has happened. John's shock must be surprise over the friendly relations between the woman and the beast, not surprise over the awful deeds only. The two are even color coordinated (Revelation 17:3-4).
 
Two stable deed-elements stand out here just as it has earlier in the story. There is slander (Revelation 17:3), and there is violence (Revelation 17:6). The frightening, shocking constellation is guilty of misrepresentation and murder (Revelation 13:5-7; Revelation 17:3; Revelation 17:6).
 
And there is more.
 
The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to ascend from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the inhabitants of the earth, whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will be amazed when they see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come (Revelation 17:8).
 
To the great Wilhelm Bousset and many others, the meaning is clear. The beast that returns from the abyss is the expected Nero redivivus, concerning whom people in later times were convinced would come back from the netherworld." I don't agree. The symbols and the alleged historical reality would be woefully mismatched if Nero were the great surprise. Indeed, and again, the Nero myth fails to meet the ontological measure in the text. "The beast...was and is not and is to come" (Revelation 17:8) contrasts with God "who is and who was and who is to come" (Revelation 1:4; Revelation 1:8). Is not -- the point of distinction -- is not only a chronological or historical difference. The terms used in the contrast aim for ultimacy. At the level of ultimacy, Nero has no standing, and the same must be said about other candidates that fail the ultimacy test. The ontological contrast is also a contrast of character. Is not -- still the point of distinction -- can never be said about God. Revelation does not deal in abstractions, not even if the abstraction is the worthy cause of systematic theology. Those who believe that the phrase "who is and who was and who is to come" is a description of God's eternal self-existence, should think again. Rather, the phrase describes God as one who is ever present; he is never absent; he is God with us. The opponent in the conflict is neither God nor is he with us. He is against us, as proven specifically by the vanishing act described earlier (Revelation 12:17).
 
The interest of the tutoring angel centers on this "beast." By the criteria of ontology (being) and character, he contrasts with God. And now the angel pinpoints his location and his eventual fate. First, "he is about to ascend from the bottomless pit [ek tēs abyssou] -- from the abyss" (Revelation 17:8). This information is a great help. It establishes the cosmic, non-human dimension of the beast. We shall be forgiven for thinking that the angel merely had a few more things to say about the beast from the sea (Revelation 13:1), but we must now see images blur, blur in the interest of clarity. We have seen the abyss before, in relation to the star that fell from heaven to earth (Revelation 9:1). We were even given a name for "the Angel of the Abyss," in Hebrew "Abbadon," in Greek "Apollyon" (and in English, "Destroyer") (Revelation 9:11). The abyss is his home base. In connection with the two witnesses, we read that "the beast from the abyss shall make war against them and win over them and kill them" (Revelation 11:7). Neither Nero nor the Roman Empire nor some other "Roman" entity suffices for this feat. And indeed, the verbal element describing the ascent of the beast from the abyss is the same in both passages (Revelation 11:7; Revelation 17:8).
 
Second, the outsize, ultimate character of this power is twice repeated. He "is about to ascend," but he is also about "to go to destruction" (Revelation 17:8). This is repeated twice: "to destruction he goes" (Revelation 17:11). This, too, fits the story of the ultimate destroyer in the trumpet sequence. He is what he does, the Destroyer (Revelation 9:1; Revelation 9:11). This is his persona in this book, as it is in the antecedent Old Testament poem: "you have destroyed your land, you have killed your people" (Isaiah 14:20). To capture the essence of Revelation's depiction, we need to enhance the depiction with the right tenor in both places: he "is about to go to self-destruction" (Revelation 17:8; Revelation 17:11).
 
We are now ready for the most particular and peculiar text in the angel's show-and-tell.
 
the seven heads are seven mountains upon which the woman is seated. And they are seven kings. The five have fallen, the one is, the other has not yet come. And when he comes, he must remain a short while. And the beast that was and is not -- is itself an eighth and it is also of the seven, and to destruction it goes (Revelation 17:9-11, translation mine).
 
Notice how I have preserved the article for "the one who is" and "the other" who "has not yet come." Who are they, this conspicuous twosome? I won't say, but I'll give a clue: Read Revelation 13 one more time. This twosome is important, but they are not as important as the beast, "itself an eighth...but also of the seven" (Revelation 17:11). Quite a feat, isn't it, to have an eighth (head) even though the beast only has seven; quite a feat to be "an eighth" but also in the warp and woof of the seven.
 
John has blurred things in order to make them clearer. What is clearer, is the Destroyer from the abyss and his ascent (Revelation 9:1; Revelation 11:7; Revelation 17:8; Revelation 17:11), the one who was and is not and is to be present again, in his own subversive, perverse, and revelatory parousia.
 
Babylon
 
The economic predation of Babylon is a subject we must leave for another day. When we scrutinize the background texts in the Old Testament, especially Ezekiel 28:12-19, we will discover that the wicked commerce of "Babylon" is not only predatory trade. It is "trading in slander." As I have argued earlier, a broad conception is necessary if we wish to be fair-minded to the most harrowing deed on Babylon's C.V. "And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been killed with violence on earth" (Revelation 18:24, translation). "Her" cannot by this criterion simply be the Roman Empire or some entity that is Roman.
 
The Rider on the White Horse
 
I will close with the rider on the white horse, another battle scene from the open heaven (Revelation 19:11-16). How does he fight in this war (Revelation 19:11)? What does it mean that he has a name that no one knows but him (Revelation 19:12)? And the robe "dipped in blood" -- whose blood is it (Revelation 19:13)?

Too late for what?!

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A certain weatherman on a local TV channel:

1. said the rain would fall. It didn't. "My bad," he said ...
    
2. said it would snow. It didn't. "Sorry," he said ...
    
3. predicted floods. They never happened. "I'll study more" he said ...
    
4. predicted tornadoes. They never came. "Back to the drawing board," he promised ...
    
5. warned of a hurricane. Balmy weather instead. "Oops," he confessed ...
    
6. warned of hail. Nothing ensued. Stood there scratching his chin ....
    
7. resigned before he was fired.

Go and do likewise, lest egg be thrown in your face in public: and fire and brimstone follow you to hell. Jeremiah 23:30-32

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Noah kept on keeping on until the door of the ark was closed by God.

As it was in the days of Noah, it shall be in the last days.

That's how I read it

I'm not so sure Noah would be delighted to find himself being associated with a charlatan who refuses to admit non-inspiration, humbly apologize and stop treating the Bible like a crystal ball.

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Actually I am placing the facts of the Bible above your opinion.

Maybe you can show again where you get 2+2 from the just plain from the Bible 2 and we can decipher your error.

ABOVE is the right word. Presenting the evidence again won't settle anything for you, it is not evidence that you need; while you place your skepticism ABOVE everything, you will continue to blind yourself to anything that does not fit your fancy.

His child, I'm looking for facts. Including evidence from the Bible.

1417. duo duo, doo'-o
a primary numeral; "two":--both, twain, two.

The definition doesn't say four nor is it used as four in the Bible.

Mt 4:18 And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two <1417> brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen.

Simon and Andrew were 2, not four.

Re 9:12 One woe is past. Behold, still two <1417> more woes are coming after these things.

There were a total of 3 woes, not 5 woes.

Re 13:5 And he was given a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and he was given authority to continue for forty-two <1417> months.

He continued 40 and 2 months, not 40 and 4 months.

Re 13:11 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two <1417> horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon.

It had 2 horns, not 4 horns.