A couple of years ago, I wrote the first four installments of my study of Revelation 11: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
But I wandered off to other projects, and never went back. I am currently clearing the decks for a return to Revelation 11.
Clearing the decks
There will be only one more installment of my re-edit of F.D. Nichol’s “Answers to Objections.” The book was first published in 1932, but Nichol added apologetical writings over the years such that by 1952 (the addition of the book I have) the answers to objections were but half of the book. Nevertheless, I do not anticipate re-editing and posting any of the rest of the book. The project I found interesting, and committed to finishing, was the answers to objections.
I also want to do a fifth installment of my series on the “daily” of Daniel 8 [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4], which will cover the Ellen White statements on the topic. While I addressed her statements on an ad hoc basis in response to some of the comments, I intentionally left a systematic treatment for the part 5 that I never wrote. But that should be the last step in “clearing the decks” to continue the series on Revelation 11.
The Road Ahead
The purpose of this two-part three-part column is to create an outline of the Revelation 11 project, a roadmap to where we will be going and the topics we will be covering. The French Revolution was the precursor and pattern of all subsequent Leftist eruptions, including those in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
I intend to conduct a thorough study of revolutionary Leftism from the French Revolution up through today. This is a long saga, so I expect there will be around 100 installments, and the project will take at least three years.
Spiritual Sodom and Egypt
Revelation 11:8 is a prophetic picture of the French Revolution. Revolutionary France is referred to as figurative "Sodom and Egypt" because it was characterized by atheism and sexual rebellion and licentiousness. Egypt, although it had many “gods” and idols, represents atheism in biblical typology because of Pharoah’s statement in Exodus 5:2, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.” (The story of Sodom in Genesis 19 is too infamous to need commentary.) Here is Ellen White’s commentary on figurative Sodom and Egypt:
“The great city” in whose streets the witnesses are slain, and where their dead bodies lie, is “spiritually” Egypt. Of all nations presented in Bible history, Egypt most boldly denied the existence of the living God and resisted His commands. No monarch ever ventured upon more open and highhanded rebellion against the authority of Heaven than did the king of Egypt. When the message was brought him by Moses, in the name of the Lord, Pharaoh proudly answered: “Who is Jehovah, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not Jehovah, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” Exodus 5:2, ARV. This is atheism, and the nation represented by Egypt would give voice to a similar denial of the claims of the living God and would manifest a like spirit of unbelief and defiance. “The great city” is also compared, “spiritually,” to Sodom. The corruption of Sodom in breaking the law of God was especially manifested in licentiousness. And this sin was also to be a pre-eminent characteristic of the nation that should fulfill the specifications of this scripture. The Great Controversy, p. 269.
“Where also our Lord was crucified”
Revelation 11:8 also contains the identifying description, “where also our Lord was crucified.” Ellen White explains that Jesus Christ was crucified in France in the persons of His followers. She specifically named three groups of reforming Christians who were persecuted in France: (1) the Albigenses or Cathars; (2) the Waldenses or Vaudois; and (3) the Huguenots.
“Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While the Waldenses laid down their lives upon the mountains of Piedmont “for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” similar witness to the truth had been borne by their brethren, the Albigenses of France. In the days of the Reformation its disciples had been put to death with horrible tortures. King and nobles, highborn women and delicate maidens, the pride and chivalry of the nation, had feasted their eyes upon the agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots, battling for those rights which the human heart holds most sacred, had poured out their blood on many a hard-fought field.” The Great Controversy, p. 271.
We will cover the story of these people, and their persecution by the Roman Catholic Church in France.
The “Deadly Wound”
Other prophetic passages are implicated by the events of the French Revolution. 1798 is an important date because it is the end of the 1260 years of papal domination, which began in 538 AD. What brought this period to an end was the arrest and exile of the pope by revolutionary France in 1798. This was undertaken by France’s revolutionary government specifically to reduce the political power of the papacy.
We believe this was the “deadly wound” to the papacy which was prophesied in Revelation 13:3. This “deadly wound”—delivered by the same “beast from the abyss” power discussed in Revelation 11:8—stripped the papacy of most of its temporal power. It is thus very important to discuss this event.
The King of the South Will Push at Him
Daniel 11 is also implicated. I believe that we are now in verse 40, at “the time of the end,” which began in 1798. This era began with the French Revolution, but the struggle between Leftism and Christian civilization has characterized the last 230 years, increasingly so as we approach history’s climax.
After the death of Christ, the physical Jewish nation exits Bible prophecy, and all who believe in Christ, whether Jew or gentile, are merged into spiritual Israel. It is to spiritual Israel—the Christian Church—that we apply references to Israel in Bible prophecy that plainly apply either currently or in the future. This means that the prophecies taking place during “the time of the end” must be interpreted according to their significance to the true believers in Christ, not according to their compass azimuth relationship to the biblical land of Israel, or the modern state of Israel.
Daniel 11:40 states, “And at the time of the end [1798 and after] shall the king of the south push at him.” The King of the North represents the papacy, and the King of the South represents atheism and sexual rebellion, spiritual Sodom and Egypt. During this time, the ideology of atheism and sexual rebellion will “push at” (KJV) (or “attack”, NKJV, NLT, RSV; or “engage him in battle,” NIV) Christian civilization. This is obviously what has been happening for much of the last 230 years.
What we have seen over the last quarter millennium is the struggle between the atheistic and sexually rebellious Left and Christian civilization as stood up and enforced mainly by the Roman Catholic Church. As we work through the many excrescences of revolutionary Leftism, we will see that Leftist revolutions are almost invariably a reaction to the Papacy or to a similar corrupt religious system, such as the Russian Orthodox Church. The model of the French Revolution is followed in surprising depth of detail in each subsequent Leftist revolution, and connections to France abound.
Christian Reaction to Leftist Revolutions
The Christian world was appalled by the French Revolution, and the other European powers quickly engaged France in a war that continued, on and off, for over 20 years, until Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. Similar zeal was shown in putting down the widespread European socialist revolts of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871, a Leftist uprising that briefly controlled Paris after France’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.
Ellen White, in The Great Controversy, Chapter 15, is clearly horrified by the events of the French Revolution. She took pains to make clear that the revolution was a reaction to a long train of Roman Catholic abuses during the previous centuries, but in no way did this excuse, in her mind, the horrors of France’s atheistic, God-hating revolution.
Had Jesus returned in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, as Adventists believed He would, the French Revolution would have been a one-off, a one-time event, just as it is treated even now in Adventist prophetic interpretation. But Christ did not return, and the French Revolution was not a one-time event. Again, the struggle with the atheistic Left has characterized much of the time since 1798, especially the 20th Century.
The 20th Century
Largely contained during the 19th Century, Leftism burst its bonds in the early 20th Century; the struggle with Leftism was soon to become the world’s dominant narrative. A precursor to the Russian Revolution was the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, which featured the usual pattern of the Left reacting against a corrupt, unstable Roman Catholic culture, in this case that of Latin America, with its elite consisting of large landowners, the church, and the military.
Germany intentionally loosed revolutionary Leftism on Russia when, in April, 1917, they transported Lenin from his exile in Zurich, Switzerland, to St. Petersburg, Russia, giving him 40 million Marks to fund his revolution (almost $200 million in today’s dollars). Germany’s bid to take Russia out of the Great War was successful, as Leninist Russia agreed to a ceasefire in December, 1917, and concluded the Treaty Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, permanently removing Russia from the war—but what a tragedy for the world! How many scores of millions would die because of this act! And it was all to no avail because, even after shifting men and materiel from the eastern to the western front, Germany could not offset the freshly mobilized troops from the United States, and was forced to sue for peace in November, 1918.
Western Christendom, exhausted by the cataclysm of the Great War, made only a halfhearted attempt to strangle communism in its Russian cradle. The United States and a few other countries sent troops to Russia, but not nearly enough to defeat the Red Army and change the course of history. The establishment of Soviet Russia as a powerful communist base allowed the Left to act globally, bringing conflict to the entire world for the next 70 years.
There was much sympathy for Soviet Russia among Western intellectuals, including in the media. The first positive coverage came during the revolution of October, 1917, from John Silas Reed, a native of Portland Oregan, a Harvard graduate, and a communist (but I repeat myself). Walter Duranty, a correspondent for the New York Times, did more damage when he refused to report truthfully on the Ukrainian famine, now called the Holodomor, which killed an estimated seven to ten million Ukrainians. The famine was entirely man-made; Stalin was seizing most of the grain that Ukrainians could produce and selling it to the West for hard currency, which he then used for other projects. The Ukrainians were reduced to cannibalism.
Sympathy for communism extended into the U.S. government, including to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The extent of communist penetration of the government under the Left-leaning Roosevelt administration, which lasted for over 12 years, is worth re-visiting. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the Second World War, but Roosevelt decided that Japan could wait, and that helping Stalin defeat Hitler would be America’s priority. Roosevelt seems to have fought WW II as much to help Stalin as to destroy Hitler. Stalin was massively strengthened by the war and came to dominate half of Europe.
The communist penetration of the U.S. State Department is evidenced not only by the Yalta conference, which gave eastern Europe to Stalin, but perhaps even more so by the otherwise inexplicable failure to aid Chiang Kai Shek in the Chinese civil war with communist leader Mao Zedong, which Mao won in 1949. The communist takeover of China confronted America with a world that was communist from central Europe all the way to the eastern edge of Asia. The United States was at last aroused to the communist threat, and the “cold war” began.
In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur led a United Nations force against the communist North Koreans (and soon the Chinese) that eventually halted the attempted communist takeover of the entire country. The irony is that China, an enormous and crowded country, could likely have been saved for a fraction of the blood (38,000 Americans killed) and treasure we expended to save just the southern half of the Korean peninsula. A question just as pertinent today as when it was first asked in 1949 is, “who lost China?”