How should we react to the conclave that selected an American, Robert Prevost, to be Pope Leo XIV? Most thought leaders in the SDA Church counsel calm. In his article at the Review, Shawn Boonstra writes that we should forego prophetic prognostication and speculation—and especially fear—and concentrate on our mission. Stay calm and just keep doing what you’re doing. He writes:
One of the biggest side benefits to remaining concentrated on our mission is the mitigation of fear. Sometimes, when we become obsessed with interpreting current events, we begin to focus on the seemingly scary things that are predicted in Scripture. But if prophecy continually scares you, you might just be reading it wrong.
Yes, pay attention to what’s happening, but take the signs of the times as God intended: evidence that He’s keeping His promise to redeem us, and that nothing that happens will catch heaven by surprise. There really is Someone watching what’s happening, and we can leave the worry entirely to Him.
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Did we just witness a sudden lurch forward toward Revelation 13? Who really knows? Maybe. But whatever happens, our primary assignment does not change:
“In a special sense Seventh-day Adventists have been set in the world as watchmen and light bearers. To them has been entrusted the last warning for a perishing world. On them is shining wonderful light from the Word of God. They have been given a work of the most solemn import—the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages. There is no other work of so great importance. They are to allow nothing else to absorb their attention.” 9 Testimonies to the Church, p. 19
So Boonstra says we should not be worrying about the papacy’s encroachment on the United States; rather we should be proclaiming the three angels’ messages.
What are the Three Angels’ Messages?
Many conservative Adventists repeat that, “we should be preaching the three angels’ messages,” without stating what we believe them to be. This has become a mantra, repeated with Ignatian discipline as if to drive out conscious thought and enter the cloud of unknowing. But the three angels’ messages are real messages; they have content.
Seventh-day Adventists have laid special claim to these messages, interpreting them as describing the unique mission of our movement. The first clause of the first angel’s message, “Fear God and give glory to him for the hour of His judgment is come,” refers, we believe, to the opening of the investigative judgment in heaven in 1844. The second clause, “and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of waters” is a reference to Exodus 20:11, the Fourth Commandment, so we interpret it as a call to proclaim the true seventh-day Sabbath of creation.
The second angel’s message is, “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.” Rev. 14:8. In the New Testament, Babylon is a coded reference to Rome (1 Peter 5:13). Could it be referring to the pagan Roman Empire? No, because “adultery” is a prophetic term describing unfaithfulness to Christ by His bride, the church. Pagan, polytheistic Rome never claimed to be the bride of Christ, but the Catholic Church does make that claim.
Moreover, “Babylon” is described in Revelation 17 as a prostitute, a woman clothed in purple and scarlet (did anyone notice the costume at conclave?) who has committed adultery with the kings of the earth. In prophetic symbolism, a church is represented as a woman, and an unfaithful church is depicted as an unfaithful woman. Finally, this prostitute is depicted as sitting on seven hills (Rev. 17:9)—unmistakably Rome.
So there is no question that the second angel’s message refers to the papacy, and highlights its error and spiritual adultery; it is all about the doctrinal errors and sins of Rome, and the mass murder, torture, and genocide committed by the papacy during its 1260 years of religio-political supremacy (from 538 AD to 1798 AD) in order to “make all nations” submit to her false teachings.
The third angel’s message is a terrifying warning not to worship the beast, which again is the Roman Catholic Church during the middle ages (Rev. 13:1-10), or its image, a similar church-state combination that the United States will erect in the near future (Rev. 13:11-18), the false worship of which will take the form of coerced worship on the papal sabbath—Sunday. Adventists don’t believe that the prophetic language of the third angel—the “smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever”—means that those who worship the beast or his image, or receive the mark, are really tortured throughout all eternity. But clearly we are meant to understand that our decision regarding the beast, the image, and the mark is a momentous decision of the utmost importance, with eternal consequences.
Given that two of the three angels’ messages deal directly with the papacy, Brother Boonstra is telling us to stop worrying about the papacy and go back to preaching about the past and future horrors of the papacy.
Should we be Wary of Rome?
The three angels’ messages tell us that we should be watching Rome, that we should be concerned about the rapprochement between Rome and the formerly Protestant United States, and that we should be watching America to see if she is building an image to the Roman beast.
America, a nation founded on Protestant ideals and a Protestant worldview, is de-Protestantizing at a rapid pace. We have now had two Roman Catholic presidents, Kennedy and Biden. Beginning under Reagan in 1984, we send U.S. ambassadors to the Vatican; Obama had the pope speak to a joint session of Congress in 2015. President Trump made a state visit to the Vatican in 2017, and attended Pope Francis’ funeral in Rome just a few days ago. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Roman Catholic. The two men who are in the lead to succeed Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, both have ties to the Roman Catholic Church: Rubio was born into that church, Vance is an adult convert.
Obviously, a substantial faction of the cardinals gathered for conclave had a pre-arranged strategy to elevate an American to the office of pope. Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago and began his career there (although he spent many years in Peru) was elected on just the third ballot, early on the second day of conclave. It seems clear that this was done to further cement the belief and perception that America, too, is a Catholic country, binding America yet closer to the papacy. Rome is reaching its hand across the gulf, and as recent events so clearly demonstrate, American politicians of both parties are enthusiastically grasping it.
And not just the politicians. The Protestant theologians, who should know better, see Rome as just another Christian denomination, not the beast of Bible prophecy. There are exceptions, of course, such as John MacArthur, but most non-Catholic clergy have no real problem with Rome. Even the Seventh-day Adventist Church has not fully come out of “Babylon” (Rome), as the second angel implores us to do (Rev. 14:8).
The Unfinished Adventist Reformation
There are some voices within the Seventh-day Adventist Church who agree with Rome on the central conflict of the Reformation: salvation by faith. Early in the history of our movement, we discovered that the Sabbath was the seventh day, Saturday, not Sunday, the first day of the week, and that the Fourth Commandment was being traduced by the Sunday-keeping Christian world. This led to an emphasis on the continuing obligation of Christians to keep the Ten Commandment law. Forty years into our movement, we had “preached the law until we were dry as the hills of Gilboa.”
There was a need to re-emphasize the central truth of Scripture, rediscovered during the Reformation of the 16th Century, which is that salvation is through the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on our behalf—salvation by grace alone claimed through faith alone. This emphasis was brought forward by A.T. Jones and E.J. Waggoner at the 1888 General Conference Session. They taught that power for overcoming—the imparted righteousness of Christ—eludes us until we claim Christ’s imputed righteousness and cling to Him as our only hope and surety. Ellen White believed that such enormous power would attend the 1888 message that the latter rain would begin, the loud cry would swell, and Jesus would soon return.
But despite Ellen White’s strong endorsement of this message, most of the leaders of our movement rejected it.
Keeping the law cannot justify anyone (Galatians 2:16). But instead of yielding to this truth, and embracing Jones’ and Waggoner’s gospel message regarding Christ’s atoning death on our behalf, the unconverted legalists quibbled over the texts. They argued that the law in Galatians was not the moral law but the ceremonial law, hence Jones and Waggoner had proven only that there was no salvation in things like circumcision—the implication being that there might be salvation in keeping the ten commandment law. (This position ignores multiple redundant passages throughout the Bible. See, e.g., Isa. 53:11; Luke 24:46-47; John 3:16-18; Acts 13:38-39; Romans 3:20-30; 4:5; 4:6-8, 16; 5:1; 9:30-32; 10:4; 11:6; Col. 1:13-14; Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:22.) Thus, the nature of the law in Galatians, whether moral or ceremonial, loomed large at the 1888 session.
The rejection of the 1888 message of justification by faith derailed the Adventist movement. The loud cry and the latter rain (of the Holy Spirit), which Ellen White believed the 1888 message would usher in, never really got started, nor did Christ return in the 1890s. Ellen White was sent to Australia in 1891 by men who had rejected the 1888 message.
The history books say that those who rejected the 1888 message “repented” within the next few years, but while they might have repented of the unchristian attitude displayed at the Minneapolis session, the doctrinal divisions remain to this day. The right wing of the church believes that we are saved, at least in part, by imparted righteousness, not by faith alone, but this is the Roman Catholic position going back to the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s (held to counter the Reformation), whereas the left wing believes in a justification-only gospel that does not include imparted power for overcoming (and increasingly denies that some sins are really sin). We have never overcome the Minneapolis debacle.
What of the Beast from the Abyss of Revelation 11?
Some of you might be surprised that I am taking such a hard line toward the Papacy, because my focus of late has been on revolutionary Leftism, the beast from the abyss of Revelation 11, as explained by Ellen White in Great Controversy Chapter 15. The pioneers thought the French Revolution was a one-off, and it would have been had Christ returned in the 1890s as expected. But He did not and the conflict between civilization and atheistic, revolutionary Leftism (which ought to be called “anti-civilization”) has dominated the last 250 years, with special intensity (Soviet Russia and eastern Europe, communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela, etc.) during the past century.
Yes, we are still in far more danger from the king of the south (atheism, revolutionary Leftism—figurative Egypt and Sodom) than from the king of the north (the papacy, corrupt religion). The Left has completed the “long march” through the America’s institutions—academia, government, big business, media, entertainment, even the military. The Left now controls the commanding heights of our culture, and has a far greater grip on power than the papacy.
The Left controls all the institutions with but one important exception: the Supreme Court of the United States. That is not controlled by the beast from the abyss of Revelation 11. But with a 6 to 3 majority of Roman Catholics, one might say that the SCOTUS is controlled by that other beast, the one in Revelation 13.
Just now, we are in the midst of a judicial insurrection. District court judges (trial-level judges) have decided that they, rather than the elected president, should establish policy for the executive branch of the federal government, even in matters of national security. These judges are never elected by the people, not in any jurisdiction, but they have taken it upon themselves to usurp the nationally elected president and impose judicial tyranny. The Roman Catholic-controlled Supreme Court could put a stop to this nonsense, but so far it has not done so, and it seems it will not. Sadly, the SCOTUS is not a friend of liberty or constitutional self-government.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appalling opinion in Murthy v. Missouri (a case seeking to stop thousands of U.S. Government agents from coordinating with the tech titans to censor counter-narrative social media posts about Covid, the vaccines, and other issues) shows that free speech is not a value for either one of the beasts. Leftism is open rebellion against, and hatred for, God, whereas the papacy is hidden rebellion, cloaked within the trappings of religion. Leftism wages a remorseless, hateful, violent, never-ending war against human nature and humanity, while Catholicism places nebulous concepts like “the common good” and “social justice” above adherence to written statutes and constitutions. We end up in the same place—tyranny—with either beast.
Conclusion
Don’t calm down; don’t go back to sleep. These are momentous times; this is an age of prophetic fulfillment. The true followers of Christ are caught between the king of the north and the king of the south. Yes, there is prophetic significance in the election of an American pope. Yes, we need to be preparing for the soon return of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Yes, we need to be preaching the three angels messages, but if you are reading and interpreting the third angel’s message correctly, it ought to frighten you.