TRANSCRIPT:
Hello my name is Anthony Ewers, I am also the artist on this website who produces all the music and the content that hopefully you will enjoy.
I just wanted to deliver a really short message about, Revelation 17 and how I believe it links into some Proverbs.
I’ve been reading The Proverbs ever since I came back to the faith after some years of backsliding. I sort of came back into the faith in 1999 so it’s been 22 years now and basically at the time when I came back into the faith I was heavily reading The Proverbs. This passage that I’m going to speak about is taken from Proverbs chapter 2 verses 12 – 19. You could read the whole chapter but just for brevity I’m going to read actually from verse 12.
They will save you from the way of evil and from those who speak deceitfully,
Proverbs 2:12-19 CJB
who leave the paths of honesty to walk in the ways of darkness,
who delight in doing evil and take joy in being stubbornly deceitful,
from those whose tracks are twisted and those whose paths are perverse.
They will save you from a woman who is a stranger,
from a loose woman with smooth talk,
who abandons the ruler she had in her youth and forgets the covenant of her God.
Her house is sinking toward death, her paths lead to the dead.
None who go to her return; they never regain the path of life.
Now that is quite serious to me. That’s Proverbs 2, I read from verses 12 to 19 and I read from The Complete Jewish Bible, nothing incredibly special about that translation, it’s okay but I’m sure that there are better ones. Now, basically there you can see that this this passage is talking about wisdom saving people from people who are deceitful, people who walk in darkness. It’s also talking about wisdom saving you from a prostitute or an adulteress, and when you think about the scripture in Revelation 17, you know this is talking about Bavel or Babylon you may have in your translation, “Babylon The Great Mother of Whores And Of All The Earth’s Obscenities”. Think about that. If I read from Revelation chapter 17, and I’m going to read from verse 1.
Then came one of the angels with the seven bowls and he said to me, “Come I will show you the judgment of the great whore who is sitting by many waters. The kings of the earth went whoring with her, and the people living on the earth have become drunk from the wine of her whoring.” He carried me off in the spirit to a desert, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast filled with blasphemous names and having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet and glittered with gold precious stones and pearls. In her hand was a cup filled with the obscene and filthy things produced by her whoring. On her forehead was written a name with a hidden meaning,
Revelation 17:1-6
BEVEL THE GREAT
MOTHER OF WHORES AND OF
THE EARTH’S OBSCENITIES.
I saw the woman drunk from the blood of God’s people, that is, from the blood of people who testify about Yeshua.
So I’m just going to pause it right there because for me these two scriptures link. Revelation 17 is talking about a system of spiritual worship that is adulterous and like a prostitute, very promiscuous; and if you think about how the old testament is written, maybe you haven’t read much old testament, it’s worth reading, because a lot of the scriptures there link in to the events of Revelation and the themes brought up in the old testament, though I don’t like using that phrase, but a lot of people understand what I mean; the themes brought up in the old testament carry through into Revelation heavily.
When you think about Ezekiel Jeremiah, Hosea these prophets; and Israel as a nation is referred to as being adulterous or living like a prostitute. What this really means is, instead of the people being faithful to Yah they have branched off and they’ve perhaps worshipped Baal or these other gods which the Israelites were tempted to worship. So instead of having the purity in their worship, it is adulterated by other things.
Now people will say that the old testament is, you know, dead but it isn’t we know that all scripture is god breathed and useful for instruction and correction and all these things, and it’s actually even more critical because, if you really get into the prophecies written in revelation you will see how they refer back to the religions that the Israelites, or at least some of the religions that the Israelites were told to discard and discount and keep away from, not to learn the ways of the nations, and what we have is a mystery system of religion with Christianity that actually encompasses some of the pagan elements which worshippers of Yah are not supposed to get involved in.
So we have people who are deceitful telling us how to worship Yah. They’ve brought these things in, but they’re not commands of Yah, they’re not found in scripture that we should obey. They are commands of men; and as we should know, The Messiah, when he came to earth he rebuked people who put up the traditions of men, making those traditions overrule the word of Yah. This is something we need to be careful about, because religion is shifting away from what it is saying in scripture, and the example of The Apostles and the example of Messiah, and the example of The Prophets, and it’s becoming something quite different by stealth over time.
And it’s not just a oh 40 years ago everything was okay, or a hundred years ago or in the time of Calvin, or Martin Luther. We have to look back to Messiah and The Apostles, because really from probably the second century A.D, you know 100 years or 150 years after The Messiah ascended to heaven, we have people shifting away from the faith to bring in these new institutions. For example changing the Sabbath to Sunday that’s A.D. 321) with [Emperor] Constantine.
There’s something called The Quartodeciman Controversy, which is sometimes called the Passover/Easter controversy, and again we had Polycarp who was a disciple of John who wrote Revelation, he observed the ways which he had been taught by John, he observed passover on the 14th day of the first month. The bishops of Rome said no, we’re going to go for a new thing and that’s going to be Easter and we’re going to celebrate this [festival] on a changeable day, however they work that out, I still haven’t figured it out.
So even there you can see how we are starting to bring in new things, which takes us away from the faith that was once entrusted to the saints. You know, that was entrusted to us through The Messiah and his apostles. But man has steadily eroded over hundreds of years, millennia; the true teachings, so that today we have something quite different from what is in the scriptures, and we kind of happily go along with it, but we shouldn’t. We should be challenging this, and even if you can’t challenge you need to educate yourself to realize truth from lies. And that for me is what this part of Proverbs is about.
There’s another proverb, Proverbs chapter 14 verse 12. “There is a way which seems right to a man but in the end it leads to death.” For me that essentially is like what all of scripture is saying. There are people who are trying to enter through that broad gate, but it leads to destruction, and Messiah says you have to enter in through the narrow gate which leads to life.
So there is something that you have to do mentally and spiritually to actually prepare yourself to understand what scripture is saying and that is through getting wisdom, and of course all those other good things such as love and charity but even Hosea will tell you, “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” [Hosea 4:6] so you must have knowledge too.
You can’t not have knowledge because otherwise what will happen is, people will take advantage of you, because not everybody in a congregation has your best interests at heart. There are people who are there who are false, there are people who are sincere but get things wrong, and you have to test all these things to make sure that you’re not walking in the way of people who are being deceitful, or people who are going to lead you astray into a type of religion that looks nice, and may be very tempting, and it may be very gratifying, but the end of those religious ways is death.
So that’s just a little talk, and I’m going to keep dropping talks like this to explain some of the scriptures and hoping that it reaches people and edifies. Yah bless, bye bye.
