Mystery Babylon Revealed
The woman of Babylon, clothed with purple and scarlet, is defined to be a city that sits on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Those seven heads represent seven mountains on which the city is built on. It is also described to be part of a worldwide religion? Some people suspect that the city is Mecca, the capital of Saudi Arabia and the center of the Islamic religion. Others believe that mystery Babylon is in America. And others believe that it's Jerusalem, where the Jews practice their religion, and since it has violated itself from being the Holy City into a dwelling place of idolatry. But Jerusalem cannot be the woman riding the beast because it was not built on seven hills. The only city that was built on seven hills has to be Rome, where the headquarters of Roman Catholicism is and the future of the revived Roman Empire.
Roman Catholicism was part of the roman government and now part of its return and it has been falsely declared as the first only true church. While it believes that the papacy is infallible, it had enforced new teachings contrary to the term "sola scriptura" that was rediscovered during the Reformation in the 16th century. There would then be a reaction within the church called the Council of Trent (or the Counter-Reformation) that will one day betray the Reformation as an ecumenical movement. That is why it is important to distinguish the history of the church by re-establishing fundamentalism.
Luther's Revelation
A short retelling of his awakening will give us a glimpse into who he was and what he figured out to be the world's greatest mystery.
On a cold and stormy night, Luther was on his way home from school in Erfurt and was struck by lightning. “St. Anne help me! I will become a monk,” he yelled. The lightning bolt would cause him to fear God from the scientific predicament in his conscience that was being induced. His father, Hans Luther, wanted him to go to law school to become a lawyer, but he was busy studying theology and humanism in relation to Erasmus.
The near-death experience made him go to a priest for confession, only to find that he was being driven under the strict disciplines of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to find acceptance with God, he would torture himself through prayers, fasting, and freezing to escape the confusion that was haunting him in his mind. While the church believed that priests represent or hold the keys to God, they were found to actually being subject to the extortion of Roman pontiffs, to exercise absolute power in the most suppressive way. After Luther stayed with them as a monk, he embarked on a road to discovery by leaving the monastery. It all started on his first trip to Rome when he would decide to leave the priesthood altogether.
At the Scala Sancta in Rome, where Luther began to witness the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, were the Holy Stairs that Jesus stepped through during his trial with Pontius Pilate. Those stairs were moved from Jerusalem to Rome by St. Helena in the fourth century. Rome was named the new Holy City at the time Apostolic Succession took place, a period when bishops, priests, and cardinals formed into a hierarchical system under the pope. Emperor Constantine appointed the Council of Nicaea to unite the Roman Government and the church into an ecumenical body. Constantine may have been the first Roman Emperor to allow Christianity to be the state religion, but it was not the Christianity that was spoken about in the book of Isaiah, which prophesied the first coming of Jesus. It was the pagan worshiping religion that was spoken about in the book of Genesis.
In the land of Shinar, Nimrod and his wife Semiramis became the leaders of Babylon, which is a city located in Mesopotamia, not far from Baghdad, Iraq. Nimrod is now worshiped as the sun God and Semiramis as the goddess Ishtar. She is found in the Bible to represent the woman who rides the beast with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the inhabitants of the earth have become drunk. (Revelation 17:2). The beast, having seven heads and ten horns, are ten kings at the top of seven mountains on which the woman is seated.
She is described to be holding a golden cup that is identical to the chalice used during the practice of Catholic mass. In John’s vision, the woman is said to be “drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus” (see Revelation 17:6). So the Catholic Mass, being the very heart of Roman Catholicism, is explained to be heresy in Luther’s book — The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.
Part of this book explains how the sacrifice of the mass is done by the priest. When the priest says a prayer over the bread and wine over the altar, he is believed to turn it into the literal body and blood of Christ — known as transubstantiation. But that is actually a re-representation of what Christ has already finished upon the cross. At the last supper, when Jesus broke the bread and poured out the wine, he said: “do this in remembrance of me.” The bread and wine cannot be turned into the literal body and blood of Christ that’s taken repeatedly and simultaneously as a re-sacrifice for the remission of sins. Remembrance is the action of something that has already happened so you cannot reenact a process that occurred at a specific time to spiritually cleanse you from sins. It is actually an unbloody repetition of mass because there is no way to re-sacrifice what Christ already did.
He paid the full penalty for sins at a very bloody scene in Jerusalem, where he was scourged, crucified, and resurrected after three days. If we spiritually belong to the body of Christ, how can you be redeemed with the simple elements of bread and wine while believing that it’s God’s body and blood at work again? That is an unbloody mass that is continually being offered every day around the world. Jesus was able to turn water into wine, but a priest is not elevated to the level of turning wine into his blood again, nor does he represent God to take away anyone’s sins.
However, Martin Luther did affirm that God was present in a certain way during communion, in what was called “sacramental union,” but he did not believe that a priest can perform that kind of activity. A priest is part of a branch to the papacy where the pope is the head of that order, and he desires all people to unite under his religion. Sacramental union meant that if God is present in the communion, it would only be in union with thee, not in union with the church. But in a treatise, Luther confirmed that the mass is a bloodless repetition of the sacrifice.
The pope, also known as the Vicar of Christ, implies that he has the same power that Christ did over the church. Christ did not give Peter that kind of power but “I will build my church upon this rock,” he said. Although Peter was the first pope, Christ did not build the church off of a line of succeeding popes holding his power; it is built off of his disciples holding the power within themselves. That is why the Catholic Church has always been part of the Holy Roman Empire to gain wealth for the state.
Money was also gained injunction with the Holy Roman Emperor by appointing one of his ushers named Raphael, who was a painter for the Vatican. Raphael knew about Luther’s Reformation going on, and he was sent by the pope to help the Emperor gain more wealth through the selling of indulgences. Indulgences were one of Luther’s main accusations against the church, but all he could do was see that they were practicing what tradition teaches. At that time, he could only argue what was happening in the church without the evidence to assure people of its error: that people who partake in the mass can purchase their relatives out of purgatory. While many would simply believe that he was disputing the belief in God, he had reason to underestimate those who claimed him to be a heretic. In their eyes, anyone who rejects the church rejected God, but they were the ones going against Jesus by taking part in the practices of Roman Catholicism.
by Mark Slaney
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