From a presentation by Jeff Pippenger

We’re looking at the spirits that are guiding the three powers that make up modern Babylon and the world to Armageddon. In our last presentation we finished looking at the political aspect of the Dragon and looked at the spiritual aspect which today we know as the New Age movement which encompassed all the religions that go to make up spiritualism today.

There are miracles happening within the realm of spiritualism that are preparing it’s adherents and others for the deceptions and the end time events which we’ve so clearly been warned about in the Spirit of Prophecy. Now we’re going to look at the spirit which is guiding the forces of the beast power—Catholicism.

"All are to hear the last message of warning. The prophecies in the book of Revelation, chapters 12-18, are being fulfilled. In the eighteenth chapter is recorded the very last call to the churches. This call is now to be given. In the nineteenth chapter, the time is pictured when the beast and the false prophet are taken, and cast into a lake of fire. The dragon, who was the instigator of the great rebellion against heaven, is bound, and cast into the bottomless pit for a thousand years. Then follows the resurrection of the wicked and the final destruction of Satan and all the wicked, and the final triumph and reign of Christ in this earth." The Upward Look, 277.

The Spirit of Prophecy has identified Revelation chapters 12-19 as Present Truth for us today and that is where the focus of our study should be as we compare the event’s around us with the prophetic word to identify that we are at the end of the world. To start this study of the spirit guiding the Beast of Catholicism, we would like to read a passage from Manuscript Releases, vol. 18, 29-31.

"As we near the close of time, there will be greater and still greater external parade of heathen power; heathen deities will manifest their signal power, and will exhibit themselves before the cities of the world and this delineation has already begun to be fulfilled."

If you are not aware of it, I don’t know where you’ve been, but around the world today these heathen deities are appearing and manifesting. Some may not want to call the apparitions of Mary a heathen deity, but nonetheless they are, and as Seventh-day Adventists we have to understand them as that.

This is a follow-up study to Daniel 11:40-45, ‘The Final Rise and Fall of the King of the North’, where we looked at Daniel 11:30-36 as verses the pioneers identified as describing how Papal Rome came into power at the beginning of the Dark Ages. Verses 32-35 describe the persecution that takes place after the Papacy comes to rule in the Dark Ages. In Daniel 11:36 we see a verse that most Bible commentators say is the verse that Paul uses to paraphrase the passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:3,4 where he talks about the man of sin.

Our contention is that from verse 30 onward to the end of the chapter, the main subject is the Papacy. Some take verse 37 and onward and suggest that it’s describing France and the French Revolution, some people say Turkey. We believe with what we understand to be sound reasoning that if verse 36 is describing the characteristics of the Papacy, 37-39 is as well.

There is a verse in Daniel 11 that will help us identify what’s going on in Catholicism today as we are at the end of the world. In verse 36 it talks about the king that exalts himself, this is the Man of Sin, the man that sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. We submit that this narrative of the Papacy simply continues in verse 37. "Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all."

Certainly the Papacy’s characteristic is magnifying itself above all and Bible commentators that understand this verse to be describing the Papacy say that he doesn’t regard ‘the desire of women’ is identifying celibacy as one of the rules of the Papacy. I feel a better understanding is this; ‘the Desire of women’ likely refers to Christ, as faithful women down through history until the birth of Jesus, longed to be the one chosen to be the mother of the Messiah.　 So this power doesn't regard the God of their fathers, or Jesus, or any God, because he sets himself above all Divine authority.

Verse 38 "But in his estate shall he honor the God of forces: and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honor with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things."

This verse has been a mystery to Bible commentators through the years because it says here that if this is the Papacy, that ‘in his estate’, and that Hebrew word means the pedestal, the base, in the very heart of the Papacy, they would honor a God of forces. If you’re familiar with the Papacy it is nothing more than Paganism with a Christian garb put upon it. It is simply taking the worship of Nimrod and his wife and Christianizing it.

Estate: 3653; same as 3651 a stand i.e. pedestal or station:-base, estate.

"And he said unto me, To build it an house in the land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base." Zechariah 5:11.

base: 4369; same as 4350; a spot:-base. 4350: fem, of 4349; a pedestal also a spot:-base.

When the commentators tried to come to grips with this ‘god of forces’ that the Papacy was destined to honor in verse 38, they drew a blank, because there was no god of forces in antiquity. But that word ‘forces’ is translated more correctly, ‘the god of fortifications’. No pagan deity had been known as a god of fortifications and virtually every aspect of Roman Catholicism can be directly traced back to a prior type of worship that’s found in Paganism.

But even though there is not a god of fortresses in pagan history, there is a goddess of fortresses. You can see pictures of this goddess of fortresses and this lady has on her head a castle that is similar to the tower of Babel. More important to the symbolism, this tower is turreted, identifying the wall that would surround a city and allow for defenders of the castle to fight off those that were trying to overtake the city. This hat that this goddess had on her head was identifying the goddess that was worshipped for being the one that created fortresses.

In the mythology of the worship of Nimrod and his wife, it was Semiramis that was identified as the one that invented fortresses that gave protection to the people during the time of Nimrod and Semiramis.

In pictures you can see that this goddess has many breasts and she was worshipped as the mother of gods. She was a fertility goddess and these many breasts symbolized that. In verse 38, it says ‘in his estate’, or in the very heart of Catholicism, shall he, the Papacy, honor the goddess of fortresses. This is an allowable translation; he’ll honor Semiramis the goddess of paganism, associated with fortresses. Notice this from the book, ‘The Two Babylons’, by Hislop:

"In Daniel 11:38, we read of a god called Ala Mahozine*i.e., the 'god of fortifications.' Who this god of fortifications could be, commentators have found themselves at a loss to determine. In the records of antiquity the existence of any god of fortifications has been commonly overlooked; and it must be confessed that no such god stands forth there with any prominence to the ordinary reader.

"But the existence of a goddess of fortifications, every one knows that there is the amplest evidence. The goddess is Cybele, who is universally represented with a mural or turreted crown, or with a fortification, on her head. Why was Rhea or Cybele thus represented? Ovid asks the question and answers it himself; and the answer is this: The reason he says, why the statue of Cybele wore a crown of towers was, 'because she first erected them in cities.'

"The first city in the world after the flood (from whence the commencement of the world is often dated) that had towers and encompassing walls, was Babylon; and Ovid himself tells us that it was Semiramis, the first queen of the city, who was believed to have 'surrounded Babylon with a wall of brick’. Semiramis, then, the first deified queen of that city and the tower whose top was intended to reach to heaven, must have been the prototype of the goddess who 'first made towers in cities.'

"When we look at the Ephesian Diana, we find evidence to the very same effect. In general, Diana was depicted as a virgin, and the patroness of virginity; but the Ephesian Diana was quite different. She was represented with all the attributes of the mother of gods, and, as the mother of gods, she wore a turreted crown such as no one can contemplate without being forcibly reminded of the tower of Babel. Now this tower-bearing Diana is by ancient scholiast expressly identified with Semiramis. When, therefore, we remember that Rhea or Cybele, the tower-bearing goddess, was, in point of fact, a Babylonian goddess, and that Semiramis, when deified, was worshipped under the name of Rhea, there will remain, I think, no doubt as to the personal identity of the 'goddess of fortifications.'

* "In our version, Ala Mahozim is rendered alternatively 'god of forces,' or 'gods protectors.' To the latter interpretation, there is insuperable objection, that Ala is in the singular. Neither can the former be admitted; for Mahozim, or Mauzzim, does not signify 'forces,' or 'armies,' but munitions,' as it is also given in the margin--that is 'fortifications.' Stockius, in his Lezicon, gives us a definition of Mahoz in the singular, robur. arz. locus munitus. and in proof of definition, the following examples:--Judges 6:26. 'And build an altar to the Lord thy God upon the top of this rock' (Mahoz, in the margin "stong place"); and Daniel 11:19, 'Then shall he turn his face to the fort (Mahoz) of his own land.'" The Two Babylons, 29-31. Alexander Hislop.

He will honor her with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things. In Bible times, you remember, how the languages were confused at Babel, and the people who went to the different parts of the earth with different languages continued the same worship. But the names for the religious practices and deities were changed because the languages had changed. In Bible times in Ephesus, Semiramis was still worshipped as the primary god in Ephesus, but her name was Dianna. And Dianna was none other that the Ephesian version of Semiramis. Dianna was considered to be the mother of the gods and she also was given the attributes of the one that invented fortresses. She is the goddess of fortresses. It’s interesting that early in the history of the Catholic Church, there was a council at Ephesus.

Ephesus was the seat of the worship of Diana—equivalent to the Old Testament Ashtoreth, the fertility goddess. The worship involved temple prostitution, and great licentiousness. Diana was known as "the great mother," or "the great mother of the gods." It was at the Council of Ephesus, in 451 A.D., for the first time, the church incorporated into its worship the virgin mother of Christ, and assigned to the Virgin Mary, the title "mother of God." This is the direct descendent of the worship of Dianna of Ephesus, which is none other than Semiramis.

Verse 38 in Daniel 11 identifies that in the heart of Catholicism a god that the previous fathers of the Christian religion had not honored—the ‘mother of god’, Semiramis, was going to be incorporated into their religion; she was the goddess of fortresses. Through time this goddess (verse 39) would be increased with glory and Catholicism would honor it with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.

If you’re not aware of it, today the fastest growing religion in the world is the Marian movement. I have a book by the Marian movement of priests and this religion, although it’s a branch of Catholicism, the worship of the mother of god, is sweeping the world. At the printing of this book and it is a few years old, there are over 5,000 priests in the Marion movement alone, that believe they are receiving direct messages from Mary or Joseph or Jesus that correspond to the ushering in of the millennium of peace.

Here is a paper from Tacoma, Washington, and it says, Virgin Mary honored in Tacoma procession. In Protestant America, the virgin Mary is appearing and being worshipped.

Here is an article from US News and World Report from Oct 27^th 1997, there’s a picture of people looking for the apparitions of Mary that occur in Georgia once a month. The second ‘sabbath’ of the month, they have over 500,000 people come to this town in Georgia to witness the apparitions each month. Now this is Protestant America!

At the same time that these apparitions are occurring, we see the media of the world lifting up the idea of Mary over and over to those that are out in the world. Here’s one from Newsweek, ‘The meaning of Mary; the struggle over her role grows within the church.

This book called ‘Thunder of Justice’, is probably the most well known Catholic book that documents the history of the apparitions of Mary in this century. It puts forth certain conclusions about the prophecies that Mary has been bringing to the world. It says that she’s bringing four different conclusions—there’s going to be first a warning, a great miracle in the near future, then a chastisement and then an era of peace.

In our last presentation we emphasized the information that came through the white buffalo lady, because there is a great similarity in what Mary is saying. A chastisement, a great time of trouble, according to Mary, will precede this era of peace. This is in agreement with what this white buffalo lady said.

The book documents the occurrences of the Virgin Mary around the world. The information keeps coming through these prophets and seers that are seeing Mary, that there is first going to be a warning, a miracle, a great chastisement and the thousand year millennium reign of peace.

We won’t look in detail at these prophecies but we will say this, a magazine that came out in August of 1997, Newsweek, is going to a secular audience where the book is designed for a Catholic audience, and this magazine article does nothing more than give a very nice synopsis of what this book says. The world at large, not just Catholicism, is being conditioned to understand and recognize the prophecies that the Virgin Mary is supposedly bringing in these apparitions.

When I say prophecies, let me remind you that these prophecies are satanic miracles, they are not simply imaginations, although there are a lot of faked apparitions no doubt, and many of these things are just people’s emotions, but some of the things that are going on are beyond coincidence.

Here is a brief synopsis of a book called the ‘Final Hour’ which is one of the many Catholic books which document the apparitions of Mary. In this book it lists prophecies that were given to some Rwandan seers in 1981. Catholic seers received messages from 1981 to 1989 from Mary, who’s appearing in Rwanda at that time period. They were shown terrifying glimpses into the future, trees in flames, rivers of blood, many abandoned, decapitated corpses. They saw pictures of people killing each other and bodies thrown into the rivers, bodies without their heads and just a tremendous blood-bath that was supposed to occur in Rwanda.

Now, if you watched what’s gone on in Rwanda in the past 10 years, you realize that what these visionaries were shown in 1981-1989 time period was well in advance of the events that have recently taken place in Rwanda and yet they were very accurate.

One of the descriptions that when you read about the blood-bath that has occurred in Rwanda, that always comes up, is how the rivers there would be full of bodies without heads. Certainly Satan knew that he had created the circumstances where he could bring about this civil war and he had the ability to forecast it and make sure it took place. But that’s not an argument against what we’re saying, which is, the messages that Mary is bringing are definitely inspired of Satan, but he is doing great advanced ground work to make sure these things come to pass in order that those who are following these messages will be swept in to the delusions and the predictions which he is making.

In this book is a listing of where the apparitions have occurred, and at what time. The history of this book begins in the year 1531, where there was an apparition in Guadeloupe Mexico. It was a very important apparition; has to do with abortion, believe it or not. Here you can see listed off year by year, city by city, where apparitions have occurred. 1¼ page cover the time from 1531 to 1980, and from 1980 till 1991 we suddenly have a whole page and this only goes up to 1991.

What this book demonstrates is that over and over again in different places around the world, the Virgin Mary is appearing and bringing messages that are conditioning the world to make choices when certain things happen that are designed to prevent the 3 angels’ messages from occurring.

We’re going to look at just one little miracle that appears in connection with these apparitions. It’s not simply the appearance of Mary and her bringing messages, there are other miracles invariable associated with it. In Conurs, Georgia, there was a time when in a clear blue sky, suddenly it was raining rose petals, everywhere, and that was on film. The scent of roses many times accompanies the apparitions of Mary. Another miracle that occurs many times is phenomenon in the sun where it dances in the sky, or flashes. People that are taking photos will get the film developed and there’ll be some kind of supernatural picture portrayed in the photograph which they just thought was a normal photograph.

Another miracle that’s taking place in conjunction with these miracles is the stigmata. It comes in a variety of ways. In the Catholic understanding, some people supernaturally experience the wounds of Christ. Supernaturally there have been people that will bleed from the palms of their hands and from their feet and from the slash in the side that Christ received on the cross and maybe the crown of thorns He was wounded with before the cross. They will suddenly begin bleeding. Some only bleed the wounds of Christ in the hands, some bleed all the wounds, some bleed for days upon end and some bleed only at certain times of the year.

We have a brief film from a secular news program of one of these stigmatists that bleeds these wounds of Christ. We are taking information from the secular sources because part of what we are trying to share about these spirits of Revelation 16 that are leading the world to Armageddon, is that the world is being conditioned to these things as we speak. This is consistent with Revelation 16:12-14 that one of the characteristics, that accompany the work of the United States forcing the whole world to worship the beast of Catholicism, is the supernatural satanic miracles that it is allowed to do. These miracles are already conditioning the world for these end time events.

This news clip tells of a lady from Syria, that each year on Good Friday bleeds the wounds of Christ and they make comments about this. One of the things to remember is that Syria is not known as a Catholic country. Yet in the Arab world, these phenomena of Mary are occurring just as well as in the Christian or Catholic world. They are also occurring in Asia, in the Hindu, Buddhist world, anywhere you go, the apparitions of Mary are occurring and many times we will find the miracle of the stigmata associated with the people who are receiving these apparitions.

It is clear in this secular news clip that the people describing the event feel that it is genuine and a clearly supernatural event. [It is interesting also that they always have some kind of weird ghostly music to accompany such news stories that rises in crescendo with the main points of the narration especially at the mention of the Catholic Church.]

These events are occurring as we speak, if you were to go into a Catholic bookstore you would find many, many books similar to these, that are just tracking what’s being said by Mary, where she’s appearing and giving their conclusions about where these messages are taking us.

There is another occurrence happening in conjunction with these apparitions, the idols of Mary are bleeding blood and visionaries, as they call those who are receiving the messages from Mary, say the reason the statues and pictures are bleeding blood is because of the great sin in the world—Mary is crying blood to call us back to a life of repentance and service to the Lord.

Daniel 11:30 to the very end of the chapter is nothing more than a description of the Papacy and in verse 31 we see the abomination that maketh desolate set up. We have always understood as Seventh-day Adventists this is identifying the beginning of the 1260 year Papal rule that is known as the Dark Ages. In verse 36 we see nothing more than a narrative describing the characteristics of the haughty arrogance of the Papacy and the worship that it imposes and the belief that it has the authority to change the law of God.

In verse 38, what’s brought into this narrative is the Papacy is going to begin to honor a goddess of fortresses, which is none other than Mary. In the books like ‘Keys of this Blood’, that speak of John Paul II, it’s clear that he viewed the virgin Mary and her messages as the guiding influence of not only the Catholic Church but of his papacy. He had been miraculously saved, he believed, through the assassination attempt, by the powers of the Virgin Mary and after that event he went to Fatima Portugal to give homage to the Virgin of Fatima that he believed saved him. This is just one many books that speak of Fatima.

We would like to return your thoughts to the information we went through in the study on the King of the North in Daniel 11:40-45. We know that in verse 40 although the King of the South is identified prophetically in the beginning of verse 40 as France, which was the power at that time controlling spiritual Egypt—atheism. France wrote Atheism into its constitution. In that verse there came the time when Russia, the premiere power that controlled spiritual Egypt in 1917, wrote communism into its constitution as well—atheism.

1917 was a very important historical event in the course of the King of the South. It was the Bolshevik revolution where the last King of the South was established in Russia. After WW II he expanded to the Soviet Union. Many historians that talk about the Bolshevik revolution call it the October revolution because it took place in October. if you study the information of the apparitions of Mary occurring in the world today, you’ll find without a doubt, the commentators to a man will say that the most important apparition of this century took place in Fatima Portugal in 1917.

It occurred over a several month period, the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to three children during that time period and she promised that in October of 1917, the same month as the Bolshevik revolution, on the 13^th of that month that she would return and perform a miracle, so that everyone that wanted to, could believe that the messages that she had left with the three children were genuine.

In the preceding months, the children at first had met an angel and then began meeting with the Virgin Mary thereafter. It was disbelieved that the children were having any kind of supernatural encounter. But each month they would go to the appointed place in Fatima, they would meet with the Virgin Mary, and she would commune with them and given them information. They received three secret messages and we’ll talk about those messages briefly here in a moment.

On the 13^th of October, there had been so much contention about these ongoing miracles, that there was a crowd of 50 to 100 thousand people to see if the virgin was really going to perform a miracle. Now this was 1917 and it was in Portugal. There were dirt roads and when the time came for this miracle to be performed, you need to remember one other factor; Portugal was at that time a communist country. Communism was the opposing force to Catholicism and the communist government had no sympathy for the supposed miracles that were taking place with these Catholic people. They even tried to incarcerate these children to prevent them from meeting with the Virgin Mary. They were released but by the time October 13, 1917 arrived the children were free and going to meet at the place and see the miracle which the virgin had promised them. There was between 50 and 100 thousand people there to witness this event.

There were also reporters from every newspaper in Portugal, there to debunk this supposed miracle. On the day that the miracle was supposed to take place it had been raining and raining. It was muddy and wet and there was mud and water standing in the road. The people went out to where the miracle was supposed to occur and at the time the clouds parted in the sky and the sun appeared. Suddenly the sun started dancing back and forth. This is similar to many of the apparition sights around the world that testify to this same phenomenon and they have video recording that you can see the sun dancing in the sky and technologist say it is not faked footage.

In 1917 in Fatima Portugal this was going on and suddenly the sun began to spin and throw off colors and when it threw off blue that whole ground and all the people would be illuminated in a blue color and then when it threw off orange everything would be orange. It went through a series of colors. Then suddenly the sun began to fall to the earth and between 50 to 100 thousand people went face down into the mud. The sun stopped before it hit the earth. Those people thought the end of the world was here but when the sun stopped and returned to its place in the sky, they were all converted to this Mary of Fatima.

When the sun returned to the sky, the people got up off the ground, and suddenly there was a wind. They could feel the wind and they could hear the wind but if they looked around at the bushes and the leaves on the trees nothing was being shaken by the wind but you could hear it and feel it. As they began to look around they realized that the ground was totally dry and their clothes, that were recently in the muddy water and had been rained on for several hours, were totally dry. All those people left the place believing that they had seen the greatest supernatural miracle of all times.

If you want to see testimony to verify that this took place, the best place to look is in those communist newspapers of those days, because the reporters that reported on this event, even though they knew that they were taking position contrary to what they had been ordered to testify about, they gave this testimony; something took place there of a supernatural nature.

The reason that the Catholic authorities view this as the most important apparition of the century, was because there were three messages left with these three children. A brother and sister were among these three children and they died shortly thereafter and only one lives on. She is a lady in a convent. She was told that she would live until these end time events portrayed in these messages take place. She’s still alive, (1997) she’s very elderly, and she must be about 80 some years old.

Two of the three messages that these children were given, were openly accounted for; they were common knowledge but the third was a secret. The first one was the bringing of the communist government of Portugal into the fold of Catholicism. The others had to do with dedicating the country of Russia to the Virgin Mary and this had to be done by a pope. The pope had to call a conclave where he brought all the cardinals and bishops together and at one time they would all dedicated Russia to the Virgin Mary. If a pope would do this, the world would be saved another great war and many other errors and great crisis that would come from a lack of doing this.

These messages were given just before the time that the Bolshevik Revolution took place. So these were predictions about the impact that communist Russia was going to have in the world before Russia was even communist. These messages were given to the children before the miracle, therefore when they were given these messages it was still czarist Russia. But the month that the miracle occurred, communist Russia began and in agreement with that of course we see WW II. We see in the history of Catholicism that popes that came to rule after that time period, refused to call that conclave where the cardinals and bishops came together and dedicated Russia to the Virgin Mary and because of this secret spirit message. There is still much under discussion about what’s contained in the secret, it’s in a special box in the Vatican and each new pope has the right to go in and read this secret and he can have an understanding of what it is and how he’s supposed to relate to it.

From the Catholic scholars that have pulled out bits and pieces of this and that of what this third secret was about, is that if the popes were unwilling to call this special conclave and dedicate Russia to the Virgin Mary that the world would have to go through a great chastisement at the end prior to the ushering in of the millennium of peace.

Now this is echoing the prophecy of the white buffalo lady. The present pope believes in the apparitions. Not every pope has been supportive of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary but he believes in it.

When this occurred in 1917, Fatima Portugal was just a small dusty town and now it has a great Cathedral because the people who began to worship Mary at Fatima raised money to build a great center of pilgrimages and there’s a school there for Catholicism. The way they raised money to bring this about was they made a little virgin of Fatima statue and they sold it to raise money and they had such great success that they decided they would build a great big statue of the Virgin of Fatima and they sent it around the world after it was built and it went to 17 countries and every country it went to there were miracles when it arrived.

When it arrived in Egypt, suddenly the Virgin Mary began appearing at the church it went to. One country that had been in a civil war, when it arrived the civil war stopped. In Brazil when it arrived a flock of doves landed at the foot of the statue and though thousands of people walked around the Fatima statue in the square the doves never left and never ate or drank for two weeks and if you know about doves, they don’t go without water for 2 weeks without dying but those doves stayed alive.

Every where it went these miracles were performed and finally it came to the 17^th country which was Poland and the communist government said we don’t want it and they sent it home. The 16 countries that it had just been at called the communist government of Poland and said, you really should have received that statue, it was a great blessing and they put pressure on the Polish communist authorities and they said OK, we will take the statue.

So they went to the cardinal of Poland at that time, cardinal Whycinski, and they said, we’ll take the statue, we’ve had second thoughts and Whycinski said, we don’t want the statue; we want to build a church. And they had an argument back and forth about that, and the communist authorities said OK, you can build a church. And for the first time since WW II a Catholic church was erected inside the domain of a communist country, inside the domain of the Soviet Union, inside the domain of the King of the South. Inside the domain of the power that began its history in 1917, the very year that the miracle of Fatima had occurred and of course Catholicism directly relates this to this Virgin of Fatima statue that was refused by the communist authorities.

The story goes that when the statue was built, and of course in Catholicism’s stories about their miracles, you can find different versions of it, that when this church was built, the bishop that had overseen the building of this church had erected a large cross in front of it and the communist authorities came and tore it down. He rebuilt it and they tore it down and this happened three or four times. Finally this bishop put the cross back up and the communist authorities gave up. Many Catholic historians say that this is the event that broke the communist mentality in Poland to where they did not have the upper psychological hand over Catholicism and this is first turning point that started the wave that ultimately brought Solidarity into existence and brought Poland down and with Poland down the whole Soviet Union was swept away.

This event of Fatima in 1917 corresponds to the month and year that the King of the South was established in history and they continued to but heads with one another as history unfolded. Here today the messages that Mary is bringing around the world are saying that we have a time of crisis to go through before this era of peace and the reason that the world has to go through this great chastisement is because the popes never honored the messages sent to the children of Fatima by dedicating Russia, the King of the South, to the Virgin Mary. And because they didn’t do that, what’s ahead of us is that great chastisement.

It is interesting to note that the bishop back there in Poland that went through this psychological game with the communist authorities, was later known as Pope John Paul II. He is what we would call the King of the North at the time and he was directly involved with this struggle with the King of the South and it’s directly connected with this goddess of fortresses that is going to continue to grow and influence the power and strength of Catholicism.

As the history of this struggle continues on, we find that Catholic authorities believed that it was from the Soviet Union that an assassin was hired to kill the pope, of course, he was wounded. The Soviets believed that he was the one man that had the political savvy and the political power to bring the Soviet Union down, and sure enough, it was this particular pope that played that hand in alliance with the United States and Ronald Reagan.

When the pope was shot and he was taken to the hospital, he said that the miracle that we described took place in Fatima in 1917, reoccurred outside his hospital window. He realized that he was the pope that was destined to fulfill the cataclysmic events and the events that are in this third secret in the Vatican. He sent for that message while he was in the hospital and he re-read it and he believed that he was being guided and directed by the messages of Mary especially as they have come from Fatima Portugal in 1917. He believed that he was the pope that would usher in these end time events associated with these messages.

In the messages that Mary was bringing to the world, these are satanic messages, I’m not endorsing them, but the year that things were to fall apart in these messages was 1998. This says to me that the angels are still holding the winds and Satan does not have as much control as he would like.

It is clear to see as you look at the prophecies he’s brought to the New Age movement and to Catholicism through Mary, that he is laying down ground work way in advance. He’s attempting to accomplish things for his own purposes and much of what he says has come to pass but not as much as he would like to come to pass.

Revelation 16 is identifying three spiritual influences that come out of the mouth of the Dragon of spiritualism, out of the mouth of the beast of Catholicism and what’s coming out of the mouth of Catholicism are the messages that come from Mary. These messages are leading Catholicism and the world to Armageddon.

Not only are these three powers of Revelation 16 leading the world to Armageddon, but these are the same three powers illustrated in Daniel 11:40-45 as struggling against themselves through history and prophecy in order to bring the King of the North in Daniel 11 to the point to where he comes to his end and none will help; which is Daniel’s way of describing Armageddon.

If you’ve ever wondered how the Moslem world will be drawn into the Sunday Law its interesting to consider the Virgin of Fatima. In the Moslem world they do not worship idols, the only possible idol is a statue of a woman in a Moslem mosque and they insist they are not worshipping her, they just reverence her. This statue can identify one of two ladies in Moslem history, one the height of motherhood and the other the height of daughterhood and that’s the only idols or statues you’ll find in Moslem worship. The lady in history that they uphold for the ideal mother, is none other than Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary is held in high regard in the Koran. She’s spoken of in the Koran in good terms and in some Moslem temples you’ll find a statue of a woman that is designed uphold motherhood as represented by Mary.

The other woman that the statue can represent is Mohamed’s niece, which lived with Mohamed and performed the function of a daughter. She represents the ideal daughter. What do you suppose her name is? Fatima. We see in the Moslem world that they’re being prepared for these end time events by the icons that exist within their religion, because the one idol that you may find in their worship is the Virgin Mary or specifically Mary of Fatima.

Revelation 16 and the three spirits that are leading the world to Armageddon, are well under way. The spirits guiding these different aspects of modern Babylon have different manifestations to meet those religions where they’re at. They’re pretty consistently telling the same story. That there’s going to be a millennium of peace and before that time you can look for great disasters, great trouble.

We have no reason accept that as anything but false prophecy but it isn’t out of line with what the Spirit of Prophecy says. We can expect crisis to escalate in order to prepare the people of the United States to turn to the legislators of the land to enforce a Sunday Law and the only part that we’re not expecting is the millennium of peace. We’re expecting the return of Jesus Christ.

It’s easy to see that we’re very close to the end and as we take up the third spirit of Revelation 16, in our next study we’re going to look at the spirit that’s guiding the False Prophet of Revelation 16 and that movement is well underway in our day as well.

"Through paganism, and then through the Papacy, Satan exerted his power for many centuries in an effort to blot from the earth God's faithful witnesses." Signs of the Times, November 1, 1899.

"This compromise between paganism and Christianity resulted in the development of 'the man of sin' foretold in prophecy as opposing and exalting himself above God. That gigantic system of false religion is a masterpiece of Satan's power—a monument of his efforts to seat himself upon the throne to rule the earth according to his will." The Great Controversy, 50.