BREAKdown on Antichrist's rise

Hosea 13:4 says, “Yet I am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but me: for there is no saviour beside me.”

“That’s one of those great verses where Jehovah says, ‘I am thy Saviour; there’s no saviour but me,’ ” says Jordan. “That’s a great verse to give a Jehovah’s Witness, by the way. The Jehovah of the Old Testament, over and over and over, is the Jesus Christ of the New Testament.

“In Amos 3, He says, ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.’

“God had only one nation in the earth He held relationships with from Egypt on and that was Israel. 

“He continues in Hosea 13, ‘I did know thee in the wilderness, in the land of great drought.
[6] According to their pasture, so were they filled; they were filled, and their heart was exalted; therefore have they forgotten me.’

“Whatever they needed Him to be, that’s what He gave them and when they were filled, their heart was exalted. They thought the blessings and glory of the provisions from God were their own doing.

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“Ephraim says in Hosea 12:8, ‘Yet I am become rich, I have found me out substance: in all my labours they shall find none iniquity in me that were sin.’

“What a braggadocios nut they had become! But you see they were doing everything according to their own understanding. They were ‘going about to establish their own righteousness.’

“They took the blessings God gave them and forgot who gave it to them and you know who they wound up saying gave it to them? They said, ‘We did it ourselves,’ and they attributed it to false gods: ‘Mother Nature did it.’

“You remember what Hosea said about Gomer? ‘I loved her in spite of her sin. I paid her bills. I bought her groceries. I gave her all these provisions and she gave all of her lovers credit for what I did.’

“God says in Hosea 13, ‘Therefore I will be unto them as a lion: as a leopard by the way will I observe them:
[8] I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.’

“You know, if you meet a lion by the way, that’s not a good thing. If you meet a bear bereaved of her babies, that’s not a good thing.

“All four of those beasts describe the Antichrist and God is telling them that He Himself is going to bring the Antichrist against the nation Israel. He says in II Thessalonians 2, ‘And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.’

“Literally the Lord Himself sends the Lie, the personification of ‘the Lie program,’ the Antichrist; ‘the rod of mine indignation.’

“Now, God didn’t think up the Lie. He doesn’t sanction the Lie. But He uses the wrath of men to praise him and, literally, He will allow Satan—you remember how he allowed Satan to go after Job?—to attack the nation Israel through the Antichrist in order to purge out the people who want to believe the Lie.

“God says, ‘I’m going to send him so that his persecution will purge out everybody who wants to go that way. I’m going to send him so they’ll go; so that all those who want the Lie will have it and they’ll follow it.’

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“What God does in the first few verses of Hosea 11 is describe how, ‘I loved them; I called them my sons but they were ungrateful, they turned away from me.’ Verse 3 says, ‘I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms; but they knew not that I healed them.’

“He said, ‘I took them by the hand and I tried to teach them to walk.’ What do you do with a child? You try to educate them. He said, ‘They had no gratitude for me at all. They didn’t even know it was me that was doing it.’

“Verse 4: ‘I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them.’

“ ‘I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love.’ Isn’t that a wonderful way to say that?

“That term 'yoke' is talking about bondage. ‘And then I laid meat unto them.’ He's saying, 'I gave them liberty and all kind of provisions out of my love.'

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“Now, that’s an interesting thing. Liberty came from God and His love; bands of love. You know, we talk a lot about ‘life, love and the pursuit of happiness.’ We talk a lot about being free.

"People have the idea that freedom is something that’s just a willy-nilly kind of thing out there, but freedom really comes not from revolt, not from casting off . . .

“When He says, ‘I was to them as they that take off the yoke,’ that’s what they were trying to do with their religion. You remember in Hosea 4:1, when he starts the teaching part of the book: ‘Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.’

“That thing about breaking out--all those sinful activities they were involved in; they were trying to break the cords of God. We saw that in Psalm 2 where Israel joined the Gentiles. They said, ‘We’ll break His bonds.’ They looked at God’s Word like bondage.

“God says, ‘You know what it really was? It was really liberty. Liberty from the bondage of sin and corruption.’ And that’s the key. A man who is bound by sin is not free. God knew that.

“In fact, Jesus said, ‘Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin,’ and when He says in John 8, ‘You shall know the truth and truth shall set you free,’ that’s not made for the masthead of a political newspaper like people do. That freedom in John 8: 33-36 is freedom from the bondage of sin.

“When people are bound in sin, they’re not free. They’re not free to obey God. Romans 6:20. People who are in the bondage of sin are not free to serve God. People think, ‘Oh, we’re free.’ You’re not free. You’re bound by the cords of your own iniquity.

“That principle is what He’s talking to Israel about back here, but Israel didn’t get it. They thought freedom was through what they were doing in their religion and it only made them more and more bound in the round of their sin.

“God doesn’t stampede people to Himself. The Lord is not a dictator. He’s worthy of being loved. John says, ‘We love him because He first loved us.’ And He draws us with His love. And the love of God puts an obligation on people to respond.

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“The name Ephraim means ‘fruitful,’ and the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh were the last two of the tribes of Israel. Ephraim’s a blessed tribe in Israel, and when he trembled at God’s Word and stood in the truth of God’s Word, he was exalted and God did for him what He told him He was going to do, but when Ephraim offended in Baal worship, he died.

“You can’t disobey and abandon God’s Word and go out into idolatry and prosper. ‘And now they sin more and more. They have made them molten images.’

“That’s the way sin is. When you sin, you don’t just sin. Pretty soon you sin more and more. The wages of sin is DEATH. As James 1:15 says, ‘Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’

“Sin produces death. That’s all it can produce. And when you have sin in your conduct, and sin in your conscience, what it does is deaden you. It’s like Novocain.

“There’s pleasure in sin for a season, but it only lasts for a season, and the reason it lasts for a season is because 'the wages of sin is death.' If you sow to the flesh, of the flesh 'you’ll reap corruption.' Sin doesn’t build up your life; it destroys your life.

“As you have sin in your life, what happens is it comes in with the pleasure and the excitement and the stimulation that’s there, but pretty soon that stimulation dies away, and to get that same level of stimulation, you have to go deeper into it.

“I’ve never been a drug addict but I’ve been around a lot of druggies. They call it chasing the dragon; chasing that ecstatic experience of stimulation; getting up there but you never can find it again. Alcoholics don’t start out being a two-fifth-a-day drunk. You start out with a little something in a Coke.

“Paul says, ‘Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.’ They had feeling, but now it’s been deadened and they’re past feeling. You sin until you literally have no more volition about the sin and are given over to lasciviousness. When you give yourself over to something, literally you betray yourself.

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“Here's the particular sin they get led into in Hosea 13:2: ‘And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves.’

“Imagine, they’re making images of their silver and idols according to their own understanding. They’ve completed rejected God’s Word.

“You see what the images are of in Romans 1:23: ‘And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.’

“That’s a complete, total perversion of the value system God gave man. The craftsman. You elevate the work of a craftsman to a place of divinity and worship the creature. What are they worshipping?

“It’s, ‘Kiss the calves.’ They’re worshipping the very animals that they use to farm with, plow their fields and haul their produce! It’s a complete reversal of anything that makes any common sense at all!

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“Back in Hosea 40-48, when you have that great polemic of Hosea against the false religions of the world that were corrupting Israel, when it talks about the idols, he says, ‘How dumb can you be?! You’re praying to an idol that you have to move to sweep around him! That idol can’t even do that and yet you pray and ask it to help you!’

“That’s being a blockhead, in the terms of the Book of Psalms. Doesn’t make any sense. That’s why he says in Romans 1:28, ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.’

“Notice he says in Hosea, ‘Let the men that sacrifice,’ and by the way, what they were sacrificing was not just animals; they wound up sacrificing their own children! They were so deluded that they took their own children and sacrificed them to idols; to gods.

“He says, ‘Let them sacrifice. Let them kiss the calves.’ That’s the kiss of veneration. They bow the knee and they kiss the calf. That’s Baal worship, and it so thoroughly permeated the nation Israel that they’re just completely given over to it.

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“When we study the Minor Prophets, you have to remember these books aren't just designed to be history; they're  dress rehearsals, as it were, for the ‘last days’ and these books are prophecies. Hosea was a prophet.

“What’s going on here in verse 2 when he talks about the craftsman and he talks about the images and kissing the calf . . .

“The whole context in Hosea 13 turns out to be the Second Advent and the Antichrist. Because the captivity Israel’s going into, that 5^th Course of Judgment, culminates in the personification of the lie program in ‘the man of sin, the son of perdition.’

“You’ll see the precursors of it back here. Daniel 8 says, 20] The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia.
[21] And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king.
[22] Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.

“Now the first king of Greece was Alexander the Great. When Alexander the Great died he was still a young man. The kingdom of Alexander was divided into four kingdoms. You read that in history.

"One of those kingdoms is going to be the kingdom of the Antichrist. Verse 23 says, ‘And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up.’

“You’ve moved from Alexander the Great’s day in 100 B.C. to verse 23; you’ve moved into the future from where we are. You’ve moved out of history into prophecy because now we’re talking about the latter days; the ‘end times,’ or the concluding of the 70^th Week of Daniel.

“Verse 24 says, ‘And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.’

“What I want you to see is the thing in verse 25: ‘And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes; but he shall be broken without hand.’

“He’s going to come in as a peacemaker and he’s going to have a peace policy that he brings to the Middle East to rescue the nation Israel from destruction so that he can take over.

“And as he does that, it says that ‘also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand.’ Now when you read ‘craft’ there, come to Acts 19. Craft is a very special craft. Paul was a tentmaker—that was his craft. The Antichrist won’t be a tentmaker.

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“Acts 19:24 says, ‘For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen.’

“They made idols to worship Diana. But the issue in their mind was getting rich. That’s what religion is about. You remember Paul said in Galatians that he ‘prospered in the Jews religion above many mine equals’? He said in Philippians, ‘What things were gain to me. .  .’

“Paul was making a fortune being a rabbinical scholar and that’s what religion does. It’s what it’s about. And the Antichrist is going to be in the business of bringing in that 'peace,' and through that peace policy he’s going to cause this idolatry of Baal worship to prosper.

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“You go to Revelation 17, and you’ll see the whole religion of the Antichrist is the manifestation of Baal worship. The religion of Baal worship is going to be a BIG DEAL in the tribulation. He’s the beast that rides on the woman and the woman is ‘MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.’ He comes to power RIDING on her.

“So this Baal worship Hosea’s talking about capturing Israel, goes all the way to the Antichrist. In Revelation 13, you’re going to see the Antichrist show up in detail: [11] And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.
[12] And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. [13] And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.'
 

“This character is in charge of worship. Have you ever heard anybody say the pope was the Antichrist? That’s what the Protestant Reformers said. Well, they didn’t know anything about studying the Bible rightly divided so they got it all screwed up.

“But nobody who reads the Book of Revelation thinks the pope is the Antichrist. You might think he was the false prophet, because that’s the religious dude, but the Antichrist is going to spurred on and promoted by the religion of Baal worship.

“Rome is the modern-day manifestation of Baal worship. When you take the details of Baal worship and write them on a chalkboard, by the time you’re through, you think you’re talking about the Roman Catholic Church. Now, a lot of what Rome does is found in Protestant churches, because they didn’t get that terribly far away from Rome. It goes all the way back to Genesis 11.

“Revelation 13: 13-14 says, ‘And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.’

“He can work miracles. Notice that miracle workers are not all good guys. The next verse says, 'And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.'

"You begin to see that the reason for the images is to have people prepared so that when the image of the Antichrist shows up, they’re ready to bow down because they’ve got all the miracles.

"Paul says in II Thess. 2:8-9, 'And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
[9] Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.'

"Notice that word 'Wicked' has a captial 'w'? That's his name! You go back through the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, and you see 'the wicked, the wicked, the wicked.' That's who you're talking about! This character who is the Wicked; it's the Antichrist.

“He’s going to come in claiming to be the minister of Jesus Christ and having the signs of an apostle to validate it and it’s all going to be a lie. It’s going to cause people to bow down and worship the image.

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“Hosea 13:7-8 says, [7] Therefore I will be unto them as a lion: as a leopard by the way will I observe them:
[8] I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.

You see those four different beasts? The lion, the leopard, the bear and the wild beast.

“Come over to Revelation 13 where he describes the Antichrist (Back in Hosea he says it’s going to be AS a lion; Hosea is full of similitudes, or comparisons using ‘like’ or ‘as’).

“Revelation 13:2 says, ‘And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.’

“The dragon is Satan (Revelation 12). Those are exactly the same four beasts in Daniel 7 that describe the career of the Antichrist.

“Notice his body is like a leopard that has feet like a bear and a mouth like a lion. He’s a composite, but the basic appearance is that of a leopard. You remember in Jeremiah 13 when the Lord asks Israel, ‘Can a leopard change his spots?’

“In Revelation 13, there is a mark of the beast. A leopard has a mark on him, doesn’t he? You know what the spot on a leopard is? It’s a black spot. You ever seen anybody come out of Mass on Ash Wednesday and look at what they’ve got on their forehead?

“And if you don’t put it on your forehead, because you’re going to be on TV and don’t want people to see it, you know where you put it? In your hand. In Revelation 13, where does it say they’re going to put the mark?

“By the way, when he says ‘kiss the calves’? Ever hear anybody talk about ‘the kiss of death’? That’s it. You know how Judas betrayed Jesus? With the kiss of death. That’s what this is right here.

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“Hosea 13:3 says, ‘Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud, and as the early dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney.’

“That’s four similitudes. It’s going to be as the morning clouds. What happens to the morning clouds? When the sun comes up, it just dissipates. Soon as the heat comes, it’s gone. You know what He’s saying? You know what’s going to happen to Israel? They’re just going to disappear. They're going to go off into captivity. They’re going to be like the early dew that passes away; it evaporates.

“ ‘As the chafe that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor.’ Matthew 3:12 talks about how the Lord Jesus, ‘Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’

“You know what chafe is? Did you ever take peanuts out of the shell and roast them in the oven?

“When you take a peanut out of its shell like that when it’s raw, the little husk on the peanut stays on the peanut and you just about can’t get it off. That’s one of the reasons you roast it. But as soon as you roast that thing, that little outer shell, it’s all brittle and you take it and roll it around in the pan. Don’t blow it on the porch; blow that stuff out in the yard. That’s what he’s talking about. The whirlwind’s going to come and blow it out the door. The whirlwind’s the Second Advent of Christ. Job 37.

“He’s talking about the fact they’re going to go into captivity and they’re going to dissipate and they’re going to be dispersed in that captivity; they’re going to be scattered like the chafe; like the smoke.”