Continued....
There is a twist to all this however, because Rome at that time was under an occupying power, and enemies to the Byzantine emperor, it was necessary that the city be liberated before the pontiff could exercise his new found authority. Legal authority is issues unless it could be put into effect right? This is where prophecy comes to the fore. This took place in 538ad when Bellisarius defeated the Goths and that Arian kingdom could no longer exercise power over the bishop, for until that time the Gothic king Theodosius had the final say on appointing bishops. So you can mark 538ad on your prophetic calendar.
Prophecy gives us however a clue that history attests to as a remarkable confirmation of the identity of the beast.
KJV Revelation 13:5
5 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.
The above time span is repeated 7 times in scripture in the form of 1260 days, times, time and half a time ( 3 and half years), and 42 months. (
Daniel 7:25; 12:7 Rev. 11:2,3; 12:6, 14; 13:5.
)
Not only in reference to the life of the Antichrist, but also to the time when the church is persecuted by the Antichrist and is therefore in survival mode in the wilderness, Revelation 12:6.
So, the question, did anything happen to the Papacy 1260 days, 42 months, or times time and half a time later,? No. Not if you take those times as literal. But if you use scripture to interpret scripture, precedent reveals that one prophetic day equals one literal year. Then the question is, did anything take place 1260 years after 538ad? And the answer is an emphatic yes.
Continued....1798 was a year of dramatic change for the Papacy. This was for several reasons.
According to Daniel 7:25, the little horn was to have power over the saints (the church) for 1260 days, or in real time, 1260 years. The rule of the papacy, as I mentioned in a previous post, began in 538AD with the final expulsion of the Ostrogoths from Rome, the last of the 3 horns to be uprooted. It’s rule continued until 1798 when Napoleon’s general, Berthier, entered Rome and took the pope captive. The college of cardinals was disbanded and Rome declared a republic. All papal states were confiscated. The pope died in exile 2 years later. To all intents and purposes, the Roman Catholic church as a church/state union was finished. No longer was there a pope holding civil authority in Rome, and thus the secular authority she used to try and execute who she branded as heretics was over. Exactly 1260 years after it began.
This represents another prophetic fulfillment.
KJV Revelation 13:3
3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
When the Catholic Church lost its civil authority, all political Governments in Europe thought she was finished. Many celebrated that at long last the bondage they were held by papal authority was at an end. These prophecies, among several others, give powerful historic authenticity to the reformers testimony to the identity of Antichrist.
The claims that Gregory VII made in Dictatus Papae are radical and heretical. To cite only four: “all princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone”—angels refused human homage (Revelation 19:10). “His name alone [the pope] shall be spoken in the churches”—displaced Jesus. That he can “depose emperors”—only God can depose or set up kings (Daniel 2:21), and that “the Roman Church has never erred. Nor will it err, to all eternity”—Paul’s pastoral letters and the letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation shows that the church errs. To say otherwise is to arrogate an attribute—infallibility—exclusive to God. Indeed, the universal supremacy in religion and in politics claimed by the Dictatus Papae, no king, priest, prophet, or apostle ever claimed them in the Bible. It belongs to God alone.
Jesus Himself drew a scarlet line “from the blood of [righteous] Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:51, NIV), and predicted in John 16:2 that a “time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God” (NIV), and warned, “They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:15, 16, NIV). And the fruit of the medieval popes—unbridled avarice, venality, power politics, immorality, burning heretics, antisemitism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, magical religion—fits the bill of the “ferocious wolves” predicted by Jesus.
To those Catholics who blindly and resolutely believe their church is the pillar and foundation of truth on the basis of Jesus' promise that the gates of hell would not prevail, forget the long line of so called heretics who were mutilated, obscenely abused, dispossessed of land, family, culture, and home, because in the spirit of Christ they dared to point out the excesses, the sins, the evils and profanities that marked the downward spiral of the Papacy. It was they to whom the promise was given. It was they with whom Christ abode through all the trials and abuses. It was they who were the true pillars and foundations of truth. And it remains so today.
The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. A ‘truth’ that must use violence to secure its existence cannot be truth. Rather the truth that moves the sun and the stars is that which is so sure of its power that it refuses to compel . . . by force. Rather it relies on the slow, hard, and seemingly unrewarding work of witness, a witness which it trusts to prevail even in a fragmented and violent world.
This witness, encapsulated in the “theology of the cross,” and expressed in the self-accusing confession “I am a sinner” and commitment to fight evil in one’s life, is the crux of the Christian moral revolution. Precisely by turning to self the accusing finger that had been pointed at another, confession engendered what the theologian Krister Stendahl called “the introspective conscience of the West,” and thus shattered the “scapegoat mechanism,” the primordial, universal human practice to make oneself appear good by falsely accusing others. It was a radical departure from “the old path that the wicked have trod” (Job 22:15, NIV)—so radical that Paul said it meant death and a new life. “For we know that our old self was crucified with [Christ] (Romans 6:6, NIV). “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20, NIV).
People kill themselves in many ways, but never by crucifixion. That’s done by another. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:6, NIV). Spiritually, the impossibility of crucifying oneself and producing a new life; or, put differently, the ability of God alone to do it is what is expressed in the Protestant credo of sola gratia, by grace alone. It’s precisely the sola, the alone, that raised the ire of the medieval Papacy, because it excluded all the sacramental-liturgical and Platonic-Aristotelian additions to the gospel upon which its power and authority was based. In short, the ire was provoked by politics.
Indeed, politics is the clue to the Counter-Reformation and the modern Papacy. “Whatever the doctrinal differences the structural one remains the most intractable. As before Luther, Rome still plays politics and claims secular and spiritual dominance . . . a church that is a state and a state that is a church,” as this magazine’s editor has often noted. This unchristian amalgam, we must recall, was the specific target of Voltaire’s rallying cry Ecrasez l’infame (crush the infamy); and also of the anticlericalism, radical atheism, and dechristianization of the French Revolution, which set the modern world against Christianity, even as it is, in Holland’s words, “still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
The order of authority derives from God, as the Apostle says [in Romans 13:1-7]. For this reason, the duty of obedience is, for the Christian, a consequence of this derivation of authority from God, and ceases when that ceases. But, as we have already said, authority may fail to derive from God for two reasons: either because of the way in which authority has been obtained, or in consequence of the use which is made of it.
