Revelation: The Abomination of Desolation Ends the Final Two Tribes and the Levite Priests

Copyright © 2017 Bill Blakeney.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-1370-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1371-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1369-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912604

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 08/22/2017

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   The Time Is near and Will Take Place Shortly

Chapter 2   Church of Ephesus

Chapter 3   Church of Sardis

Chapter 4   The Door Was Open, and John Saw God’s Throne

Chapter 5   The Book with Seven Seals

Chapter 6   The Beginning of God’s Prophecy of This Generation and the Jewish Wars with Rome

Chapter 7   The Interlude: A Time Set aside to Mark and Seal the Dead Saints

Chapter 8   Rome Attacks Jerusalem and Vicinity

Chapter 9   The Bottomless Pit, Abaddon, and His Locusts

Chapter 10   The Little Book

Chapter 11   The Two Witnesses

Chapter 12   The Woman Israel and the Woman the Church

Chapter 13   Rome and the Two Beasts

Chapter 14   Gathering the Dead

Chapter 15   Seven Plagues and the Wrath of God

Chapter 16   They Deserve It

Chapter 17   The Date of the Writing of Revelation and the Mystery of the Harlot

Chapter 18   The Identity of Babylon

Chapter 19   Final Destination of the Beast and False Prophet

Chapter 20   The Thousand-Year Reign

Chapter 21   The New Heaven and the New Earth

Chapter 22   The Tree of Life

The Conclusion of Revelation with Thoughts

INTRODUCTION

The apocalypse of John means to remove the cover or reveal. The book of Revelation, written by the apostle John, is supported mainly by prophecies from Daniel, Jesus, and Matthew’s gospel.

Do not make the book more difficult than it is. The Christians in Jerusalem understood the book of Revelation, and so can you. This book will explain the chronological framework and help clarify the symbolic language used in each chapter. The apostle John is writing while exiled to the Isle of Patmos as a prisoner of Rome, and he must get this book to his intended readers. To do so, he uses Old Testament scriptures with which Israelites were familiar so that they could understand but the Roman soldiers could not.

Some people who write about the book of Revelation use subjective thinking and manipulate the scripture to suit their preconceived ideas. They do this because they have never understood the book of Daniel and the warning from Jesus in Matthew 23 and 24. This book will help you understand those scriptures, as it becomes necessary to explain them.

The twelve tribes of Israel were God’s chosen people to bring into the world the Messiah. They existed to protect the Messiah from infant sacrifice. When the Canaanites built a new house, an infant would be sacrificed and its body would be placed into the wall.¹ Also, in Megiddo, archaeologists found infants in jars who were sacrificed to Ashtoreth.² Because of their idolatry and disobedience, God was furious with the ten northern tribes and allowed them to be wiped out by the Assyrians. God expected the remaining two tribes and the Levite priests to fulfill His purpose by bringing the Messiah into the world as a sacrifice for the sins of man. God’s sacrifice had to be freely given, and not given against His will by a pagan force.

God also expected all of Jerusalem and Judea to accept Him as the Messiah. He had provided enough prophetic proclamations and scriptures to identify the Messiah. But most of the tribal residents of Jerusalem refused to believe the scriptures about Jesus. God gave mankind free will, but He fully expected His Israelite children to use their free will to help bring mankind to accept God’s sacrifice on the cross. God as the Messiah was devastated when it became apparent that the remaining two tribes and the Levite priesthood were ignorant of Daniel’s timetable for the arrival of the Messiah. The two remaining tribes and Levite priests were not open to the miraculous works of Jesus and to the wisdom of His teachings. Instead, the two remaining tribes became inflamed with prejudice and rejected Jesus as the Messiah. They did not want a suffering servant as messiah. Instead, they wanted a divine spectacle with a glorious entrance, so the chosen people could control the world. If they had accepted Him, then God would have had about two million evangelists to get the message to the world. With such a large number of testifiers, a greater number of people could have been saved. But God as the Messiah saw the horrible conduct of His chosen people and realized His workforce was small. As Jesus said, only a few would find the gate to salvation (Matthew 7:14). God the Messiah (Isaiah 43:10, John 1:14–18) did not have the evangelistic force that He expected. Therefore, God chose twelve apostles, a remnant, to go to the synagogues to convince as many Jews as possible that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. Today the Gentiles of all nations can be grateful for the apostles and the Jewish synagogues for their salvation. But God had only a small group of workers at first, to get people saved, and what wonderful workers they were. God wanted the men and women of Jerusalem to have a predetermined attitude to keep their free will always ready to serve Him. Instead, the Messiah found a nation of unbelief and selfishness.

You will discover in this study that God expected to be worshipped, honored, and given the glory for His creation. He would utterly punish those who refused the sacrifice of Jesus the Messiah. Just as God ended the ten northern tribes for disobedience, He ended the final two remaining tribes and the Levite priests for the same reason.

It has been almost two thousand years since the end of Jerusalem and the last two tribes. By now the Jews should have figured out that their forefathers made a terrible mistake. However, today the Jewish prejudice against Jesus as Messiah remains the same, but God does not fail. Throughout the Bible God has eliminated the worst kinds of people, but He retained a remnant to complete His task.

Assyria obliterated the ten northern tribes’ effectiveness by corrupting their genetics. The Jews believed they were God’s chosen people based on their genetic ties to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. To their way of thinking, a son or daughter of Abraham could never be lost (John 8:23–59). That is why Jews lived in communes away from the sinful Gentiles. To this very day, they have the same mind-set. Little did they understand that the reason God chose them was to bring Jesus the Messiah into the world. When the Messiah accomplished His mission, the Holy of Holies would be changed from a man-made temple to a human temple of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33). Before that change could take place, the Messiah had to be cut off (Daniel 9:26) as the perfect sacrifice for man’s sins.

Jerusalem had been destroyed once before, by Babylon back in 597–587 BC because of idolatry and disobedience. However, God still needed the two tribes to fulfill the promise of the Messiah. So God promised the Jews that they would return to Jerusalem from Babylon after seventy years to complete His promise, and after the seventy years, they did return. When Jesus the Messiah arrived as prophesied, Jerusalem had deteriorated, possibly worse than in 587 BC when God used Babylon as the destroyer. The book of Revelation is God’s warning and judgment to Jerusalem again. This time Rome will be the punisher, instead of the Babylonians. This time the apostle John would use the same kind of prophetic language used by Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and a few minor prophets. The apostle John would refer to Jerusalem as Babylon, as a reminder to them of Jerusalem’s history. Even the apostle Peter referred to Jerusalem as Babylon because of the spiritual condition of the city (1 Peter 5:13).

The rabbis and the tribes of Benjamin and Judah (Jews) should have been looking for the Messiah. They were spiritually blind and fully ignorant of the major signal issuing in the Messiah. That signal would mainly come from the prophet Daniel. So the countdown was formally provided in Daniel 9:24–27. God told Daniel to inform the Jews to expect the Messiah in 490 years to be on the earth, and the Messiah appeared around 6 BC as accurately prophesied. However, the Jews had not kept up with Daniel’s prophecy. They should have expected the Messiah, but they were not looking for a baby of flesh. They were looking for a full-grown god to astound them with an extraordinary entrance.

Let’s review Daniel 9:24–27 to become familiar with the prophecy: Daniel wrote that seventy times seven years (or weeks meaning years) had been decreed for the Israelites and Jerusalem. The seventy times seven would equal 490 years. Daniel’s prophecy was only for seven things:

1. To finish the transgression

2. To make an end of sin

3. To make atonement for iniquity

4. To bring in everlasting righteousness

5. To seal up vision and prophecy

6. To anoint the Most Holy Place

7. To cut off the Messiah at the cross, thus satisfying the above six items

From the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, there would be forty-nine years (seventy times seven) with a delay and then 434 years (sixty-two times seven). Together they would equal 483 years, and sometime during that 483 years the Messiah would be born. Then, after the 483 years and during the last seven years, the Messiah would be crucified. He would be crucified in the middle of the last seven years. All this would equal 490 years. In Matthew 24:15, Jesus finishes Daniel’s prophecy about the Roman prince Titus, who is yet to come in AD 70 with His warning. The book of Revelation is a follow-up by John the apostle, to spare the Jews who accepted Jesus from being massacred in Jerusalem by the prince who was to come.

When did the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem come into effect? There are four possibilities:

1. Cyrus, 539–538 BC (2 Chronicles 36:22–23; Ezra 1:1–4, 5:13)

2. Darius I, 520 BC (Ezra 6:1, 6:12)

3. Artaxerxes I Longimanus, 458–437 BC (Ezra 7:11–26)

4. Artaxerxes I Longimanus, 444 BC (Nehemiah 2:1–8)

[1 and 2] The first two could allow the Jews to get into the possible range, but they would be too far off for the cross of Jesus. There was a delay when the work stopped.

[3 and 4] The last two could both work, each on a different system, but neither works out perfectly.

[3] 458–457 BC–AD 30 works the best with a three-day discrepancy of 487 years.

[4] 444 BC–AD 30 has a sixteen-day discrepancy of 474 years.

The Jewish calendar went from new moon to new moon for each month, as God commanded them to do with trumpets (Genesis 1:4; Isaiah 66:23; Psalm 81:3; Numbers 10:10, 29:1). The Romans used a Julian calendar, but they adjusted the yearly deficiency with a Mercedonius month. The Gregorian calendar added a leap year. The Jews probably had the best system from the creation (Genesis 1:14).

If Daniel’s prophecy had meant anything to the Jewish priesthood, they should have been looking and ready.

When Daniel’s 490 years arrived, the world was fully pagan with idols, vain statues, invented religions, and man-made gods. Foolish paganism was practiced everywhere—Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, Cybele, Pan, Sarapis … The list is endless. These worshippers were dangerous, and killing an unbeliever was normal. Jerusalem and the Jews were just as intolerant with their religion. Mighty Rome was on a conquering rampage, with Jerusalem in the center of it all.

As you study the book of Revelation, keep in mind that Roman soldiers were stationed in Jerusalem, where no Roman politician wanted to be assigned. The Jewish Zealots were radicals who harassed those soldiers. Rome had a history of worshipping its emperors, and Julius Caesar called himself a god. Claiming to be Zeus incarnate, Augustus Caesar required worship outside the city of Rome. Caligula forced people to bow to him and his statue. Claudius disliked Jews and kicked them out of Rome, and Nero persecuted Christians. Domitian insisted on being called lord and god. The religious leaders were arrogant and fanatical. The Sadducees and the Pharisees disliked each other, and there was great contention between them.

CHAPTER 1

The Time Is near and Will Take Place Shortly

The first thing that needs to be done is to determine the time involved in the prophecies in the book. Revelation 1:1 reflects the things that must shortly take place. Revelation 1:3 indicates that the time is near. Revelation 1:7 reveals a time when the people who pierced Him will see Him. This needs clarification, and very soon we will cover this. Revelation 1:9 confirms that the apostle John was involved in the tribulation that was occurring then. Jesus Himself in Revelation 22:6–7, 10, 12, 20 reflects