Apocalyptic? #38: Release the Dragon!

 

Do you think a major conflagration/war is developing between Good and Evil during your lifetime?  Do you worry that your children are being taught Evil in the school system?  Do you sense that sexual perversion is in the process of being normalized—as it was in the eras of the Greek and Roman Empires (Daniel’s Beasts Numbers 3 and 4)?  Do you feel a sense of being coerced into keeping your mouth shut about it—as Babylon threatened Daniel with lions and his three companions with a fiery furnace (cancel culture)?  While Christian literature dominated the thousand years from the Christianization of Rome to the Renaissance, have you noticed that Christian literature is being increasingly suppressed and censored in the schools and universities and the broadcast and electronic media?  Would it surprise you to learn that the United States and Communist countries China and Cuba, plus formerly Communist countries Russia, Latvia, Hungary, Mongolia, and Bulgaria have the highest abortion rate(s) in the world (20-25%)?  (Conversely, would it impress you that Mexico has the lowest abortion rate in the world, at .01%?)  Sources:  Wikipedia (Russia) and  Abortion Rates by Country (worldpopulationreview.com)  Does it concern you that genocide is much more rampant in the world in the past two centuries?  Have you noticed that nationalism has been on the rise since the Renaissance?  Does it appear that wars are becoming more devastating and the potential for further World Wars always seems to be on the horizon? What about the development of biological warfare (that may have been the plan in the engineering of COVID) and space warfare added to atomic warfare?  What has happened?  The dragon has been released.  It happened immediately upon the end of his 1000-year imprisonment.  Revelation 20:7-8 (NKJV) states: “Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations.”

 

I write on pages 171-172 of my book The Logic of Christianity:  A Syllogistic Chain:

 

John Thomas Didymus, and his article “Failed End-of-World Predictions of Jesus’ Coming:  Montanists and the Ecumenical Council (1000 A.D.)”:

 

The Ecumenical Council sitting in 999 declared solemnly that the world would end on January 1, 1000 A.D. That was the signal for mass madness. On the last day of the year, St. Peter's at Rome was filled with a crazed mass of people, weeping, trembling, screaming in fear of the Day of the Lord. They thought that God would send fire from heaven and burn the world to ashes . . .  But New Year came and passes [sic] and nothing happened.  (Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5476263). 

 

I credit . . . that 1000 A.D. event (or lack of an event) for shocking the world into the Renaissance (a logical abandonment of the teaching of the Church), because the Church had relied on the Book of Revelation . . . in predicting that Jesus’ reign on earth would last one thousand years.  Certainly, the Ecumenical Council believed that John’s Revelation was predicting that the BEGINNING of the thousand-year reign and the thousand-year imprisonment of the Dragon (aka, the Millennium) would be during the First Century A.D.  The impetus for the Renaissance began when Christians’ faith in the end of the world did not materialize at the time they expected it.  Not only did the Renaissance bring with it a rebirth of humanism, but also a new rise in “nationalism.”  According to http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/west/11/FC79:

 

Just as the turmoil of the Later Middle Ages had cleared the way for sweeping economic, cultural, and technological changes in Western Europe, it likewise produced significant political changes that led to the emergence of a new type of state in Western Europe: the nation state.

 

Is it mere coincidence that Revelation predicted a millennium in which the Dragon (who raised up world powers) would be inhibited in his “deceiving the nations” only to be released at the end of the thousand years to “deceive the nations” again?  Yet, this happened!  . . . “Rome suffered nearly 400,000 casualties without batting an eye.”  By contrast . . . during the millennium following the Roman Empire, “warfare . . . was defined by quick skirmishes fought between tiny forces. There were no campaigns, no decade-long struggles.”  But, once the thousand years were concluded, the deceiving of the “nations” begins again.  From the Hundred Years War of the 14^th and 15^th centuries to the War of Roses to the Italian Wars to two World Wars of the 20^th Century, clearly, nationalism and attempts at creating new world empires have been rising.  Revelation’s predictions are, once again, true.  The Dragon has been released.

 

It's Noticeable in the History of Church Growth

I presented a table of the uninterrupted growth of Christianity in the previous blogpost—from 500,000 in the first century to 80,000,000 in the twelfth century (1100s).  Now, notice the twelfth through the fourteenth century numbers:

 

Growth of the Church in Numbers.

Era	Estimated Christians
Twelfth century	80,000,000
Thirteenth century	75,000,000
Fourteenth century	80,000,000

The Christian population was at a stand-still for three hundred years—and even dipped by 5,000,000 in the thirteenth century.  This was, I believe, due to the release of the Dragon, and the resulting Renaissance of Greco-Roman culture. Of course, the bubonic plague in the last half of the fourteenth century could have contributed to a slower growth of Christians in that era, but the Church had begun its rebound by then.  The thirteenth century (1200-1300) was a statistical low point.  What happened in that century?  The Renaissance began.

The Renaissance

Wikipedia dates the Italian Proto-Renaissance “from around 1250 or 1300” while the Renaissance in general is typically placed in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries:

The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. 

 

Certainly, not everything pertaining to the Renaissance is negative.  I have twice enjoyed visiting the birthplace of the Renaissance (Florence, Italy), along with other major Italian Renaissance centers (Venice, Genoa, Bologna, and Rome).  I have also visited Belgian Renaissance centers (Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels).  Christian scholarship was actually enhanced during the Renaissance:

[T]he Greek New Testament [documents were] brought back from Byzantium [Constantinople—center of the Greek Orthodox Church] to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists . . . would help pave the way for the Protestant Reformation (Wikipedia).

 

Nevertheless, that “human”-centered biblical scholarship would get carried to extremes by Modernist biblical scholars in the nineteenth century, as Mark Noll reports on page 45 of his book Between Faith and Criticism, which I cite in my book The Logic of Christianity:  A Syllogistic Chain, page 107:

 

Noll observes that, after 1900, “a new paradigm emerges for the practice of normal science (The Bible, however sublime, is a human book to be investigated with the standard ASSUMPTIONS that one brings to the discussion of all products of human culture [emphasis mine]).”

 

 

Humanism:  The “Worship” of Humans

What is “worship”?  Think of it as “worth-ship.”  It is the mind-set that believes that any one particular individual or group of individuals is supremely “worthy” of praise and honor and obedience.  “Worship” was exemplified in Revelation chapter 4, as God Almighty was proclaimed worthy “to receive glory and honour and power: for [He has] created all things, and for [His] pleasure they are and were created” (4:11). “Worship” was exemplified in Revelation chapter 5: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing” (5:12).  He was found “worthy . . . for [he was] slain, and has redeemed us to God by [his] blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (5:9).  In short, “worth-ship” is conferred upon those who accomplish the seemingly impossible—such as creating a universe, redeeming mankind from the wages of sin.  The angel in Revelation 14:7 exhorts the world: “Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.”  Revelation, however, also shows that the Beast received “worship.”  Several individuals argued that the Jews could not possibly “war with the Beast (Rome).”  Revelation 13:4-7 (NKJV) states: “So they worshiped . . . the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”  These who worshiped the Beast were, in effect, of the mind-set that Rome was capable of accomplishing the seemingly impossible—they could defeat any foe on earth.  The High Priests Ananus and Jesus, along with Josephus (and perhaps, John the Son of Matthias) represented the kings whom John could have described as “giv[ing] their power and authority [and kingdom] to the beast” and “worship[ing] the beast” if “worship[ing] . . . the beast,” in Revelation 13:4, consists in “saying ‘Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?’” By John’s definition, Ananus, Jesus, and Josephus were all worshiping the beast.

Since the Renaissance, the trend has been toward worshipping “humans.”  How impressed society was with the great philosophical, political, and mathematical geniuses of the Greeks—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.  The term “Renaissance,” itself, indicates the rebirth of our reliance on humans.  Renaissance scientists, too, have claimed our adoration—from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Galileo.  Renaissance artists have commanded our respect—Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Botticelli, da Vinci.  Inventors down through the years, since the Renaissance, have become our idols—Gutenberg, Edison, Franklin, Tesla, the Frenchmen who invented flight, Berners-Lee, and Lumiére (and don’t forget the Greeks like Archimedes and Thales), but the list is becoming too long!  Then, there are the medical miracle-workers—Pasteur, Fleming, Snow, Röntgen, Crick, Landsteiner, and Jenner.  Small wonder that Joe Biden could successfully run a campaign for U.S. President by promising to put the “scientists” in charge.  Never mind that science is not set in stone; there are always dissenting opinions and research.  Many nations in the world have bowed the knee to “science”—at least that science that is produced by the WHO.

Of course, humans were created in the image of God and told to “subdue” the earth, because they were given such capacity by God, but since the Renaissance, there has been a particular bent for declaring “humans” worthy, rather than God.  The dragon has been released.  He doesn’t need the world to worship him; he is quite content that the world worships the Beast or any graven image or false god, or even other humans—so long as the world does not worship God and Jesus.

In my next blogpost, I will turn to that portion of Revelation that predicts what is still in the (earthly) future—the Battle of Gog and Magog.  Since John’s predictions throughout the first 19 ½ chapters have been so amazingly accurate, readers can take confidence in the fact that his future predictions will be accomplished, as prophesied.