88. Brief Analysis

Seven chapters in the Book of Revelation concern the corrupt state of the Protestant churches, and two chapters concern the corrupt state of the Roman Catholic churches. This and the now condemned condition of these churches has been shown in the explanation of the Book of Revelation titled Revelation Unveiled — and shown not with idle guesswork but with overwhelming evidence.

The dragon in Revelation 12 means Protestants who split God into three and the Lord into two and who separate goodwill from faith by saying that their faith is something spiritual and effective for our salvation but goodwill is not. See Revelation Unveiled 532– 565 and the memorable occurrence immediately following in §566.

The same people are also described as the two beasts, one of which rises up out of the sea and the other out of the land in Revelation 13. See Revelation Unveiled 567– 610 and the memorable occurrence immediately following in §611.

The same people are also described as the locusts that come out of the pit of the abyss in Revelation 9. See Revelation Unveiled 419– 442.

This belief (when adamantly clung to) is depicted in Revelation 11 as the great city that is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where the two faithful witnesses were killed. See Revelation Unveiled 485– 530, especially §§500– 503, and the memorable occurrence in §531.

This belief is also depicted, in Revelation 9, as the pit of the abyss, from which smoke came out like the smoke of a great furnace, darkening the sun and the air, and from which locusts then came forth. See Revelation Unveiled 421– 424.

75. Brief Analysis

See §73 above for the point that Matthew 24 presents the Lord’s predictions and descriptions of the successive states of decline and corruption the Christian church would go through. As this chapter in Matthew continues, there is a mention of false prophets yet to come who will bring on an abomination of desolation (Matthew 24:11, 15). That chapter speaks of “a great affliction such as has never existed since the world began until now and will never exist again” (Matthew 24:21). Clearly, then, a “great affliction,” both here and elsewhere in the Word, means an attack by falsities against truth until no genuine truth drawn from the Word, no truth that has not been falsified and completely ruined, remains.

This has happened because the churches have not acknowledged that God’s unity in trinity and trinity in unity exist in one person rather than in three persons. As a result they have based their church on a mental picture of three gods, but an oral confession of one God. By doing this they have separated themselves so far from the Lord that they have completely lost the idea of any divinity in his human manifestation (see Revelation Unveiled 294). Yet the Lord in his human manifestation is the divine truth itself and the divine light itself, as he himself teaches comprehensively in his Word. This is why there is such a great affliction today. As we will see in what follows [§§79– 81], this affliction has been caused primarily by the churches’ teachings that whether we possess faith (as the churches define it) or not is the sole thing that determines whether we are justified and assigned Christ’s merit.