Welcome to Part 3 of the Papacy is
the Antichrist by the Reverend Dr. J.
A.
Wiley, read by W.
J.
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And now to the message of Part 3
from the Papacy is the Antichrist.
We pray that the Lord Jesus Christ will
greatly bless you as you listen.
Chapter 15.
Antichrist exalts himself above God.
To make earthly kings his vassals and earthly
thrones his footstool came far short of the
measure of the papal ambition.
The popes have planted their foot upon the
throne of God himself.
That the magistory of Rome should give place
to the vice Christ was but a small
matter.
The majesty of heaven must descend from his
seat that the pope may mount into it.
He as God, says the apostle, sitteth in
the temple of God showing himself that he
is God.
The pope is claimed to be God, first
in words, second in acts.
Let us listen to the words the great
mouth has spoken and also to some which
his friends have spoken for him.
Let us mark first where Antichrist is said
to sit.
He sitteth in the temple of God.
This temple cannot be that of the Jews
of Mount Moriah, for the apostle is speaking
of an act which was to be done
by one who was not to appear till
after the fall of the Roman Empire.
But long before the empire fell, the temple
of the Jews was laid in ashes.
In acts, the Jewish temple is spoken of
twenty-five times.
In all these passages, the word used is
heron, never naos.
The term here used by the apostle is
naos.
The name temple is carried over to the
Christian church and in places innumerable in the
New Testament.
It is used to denote sometimes an individual
believer and sometimes the whole body of professing
Christians.
Writing to the Corinthian Christians, Paul says, Know
ye not that ye are the temple of
God?
And again, collectively, We
conclude that the temple in which Antichrist is
here seen to sit is the Christian church.
This interpretation preserves the unity of Paul's prophecy.
Antichrist, or man of sin, was to be
the outcome and head of the apostasy.
But the apostasy was to spring up in
the Christian church, for the falling away was
to be, and only could be, a falling
away from the Christian faith.
Antichrist, therefore, could sit, that is, establish himself
and exercise jurisdiction, nowhere but in the professedly
Christian church.
As a vice-Christ, it behooved all his
visible characteristics and all his environments to be
professedly Christian and ecclesiastical.
This effectively disposes of all those theories of
Antichrist, which would find him in some powerful
atheistic confederacy, or in some masterful political chief,
or in some embodiment of monstrous iniquity and
tyranny yet to rise, and which, during a
brief but terrible career, should desolate the world.
Such a power could in no sense be
said to sit in the temple of God.
It would be a power outside the temple.
And so far from aspiring to office and
dignity in the temple, that is, in the
church, such a power must needs, from its
instincts and character, make war on the church,
under the banner of open hostility, and with
a cry of, Raise it!
Raise it!
That's R-A-Z-E, by the way.
Moreover, no one man Antichrist, or Antichrist whose
reign is to last for only three and
a half years, can fulfill the conditions of
Paul's prophecy.
How could he spring into being, climb to
a height which mortal had never reached before,
exhibit his lying wonders, deceive the whole world,
compel all its nations and kings to serve
him, make war with the saints, and overcome
them, all in the brief period of three
and a half years?
Though the anti-Christian host had issued from
the pit, fully armed and mustered for battle,
and had spread themselves on dragon's wings to
the four corners of the earth, they could
hardly accomplish such a feat.
The awful visitation would have been overpassed before
men had well known that it had befallen
them, and where would have been the need
for the faith and patience of the saints,
or for the cry of, How long?
Antichrist could not make his first appearance full
-grown.
This would have been fatal to his pretensions
as vice-Christ.
The first appearance of the true Christ was
as an infant in a manger, wrapped in
swaddling clothes.
Not unsimilar must be the beginnings of Antichrist.
He was working in Paul's day.
He grew up and developed stage by stage.
And in process of time reached his full
stature.
He was not to be destroyed till a
far future epoch of the glorious coming of
Christ.
The years of his life were to be
counted in centuries.
They were far to exceed the days of
the life of man.
They were to fulfill the period between the
time when Paul wrote and the appearance of
Christ at the millennium.
The system was to be presided over, and
necessarily so, by a race of rulers who
were to take their place in succession at
its head.
But inasmuch as there was to be identity
in the system from first to last, and
it was to grow as man grows by
regulated stages, and inasmuch as its chiefs were
to be linked together by oneness of spirit
and aim, Antichrist is spoken of as a
corporate individuality.
The conditions of the prophecy, we repeat, could
be fulfilled by no one man, however superhuman
his power, however stupendous his wickedness, whose rise,
reign, and ruin were to be acted on
and over in the short space of three
and a half years.
We return to the majestic counterfeit, so loftily
enthroned, whom the blinded nations mistake for God,
and are seen bowing in worship before it.
He is God, sitteth in the temple of
God, showing himself that he is God.
The Pope is claimed to be God, first
in words, and second in acts.
Let us listen to some of the words
which have come from the great mouth itself,
and next to some utterances to the same
effect which have fallen from some of Antichrist's
friends.
Sitting in the temple of God, that is,
speaking ex cathedra as vice Christ, the Pope
has, in the most unequivocal manner, claimed to
be God.
To this daring pitch of ambition and blasphemy
has he carried the parallelism or imitation.
The true Christ is God, therefore the vice
Christ must claim to be God also.
In canon law, the Pope is called God.
Again he is called Lord and God.
And again, Innocent says, in the Decretials, speaking
of the Pope, God, because he is God's
victor.
The canon law and the Decretials are called
by Romanist writers the Pope's Oracle.
They are a true expression of the pontifical
mind.
To the same effect, the Papal Cajuists say,
as Christ was God, he too was to
be looked on as God.
The Sacrum Ceremoniae has the phrase, the apostolic
chair is the seat of God.
The Roman Pontiff says the Decretium of Gregory,
not as mere man, but as true God,
reigns in the earth.
Not to multiply instances in which the Pope
calls himself God, or accepts the title from
others, we close by referring to a recent
illustration.
Sir Culling E.
Smith, in a tour in Italy, found a
book published 1794 with the title, History of
the Ancient Republic of Amalfi, dedicated to the
vice-God, Benedict XIII, with permission of superiors.
So does the Pope bear testimony to himself.
A greater than he said, if I bear
witness of myself, my witness is not true.
He has sought to support his claim to
this great title by great deeds.
Whatever God does, the Pope professes to do
also.
Does God require that to him every knee
shall bow?
So too the Pope.
He requires to be worshipped with prostration and
kissing.
Does God reveal himself as the only holy?
So too the Pope.
He claims to be siled his holiness.
Is God the only wise?
So too is the Pope.
He claims to be inerrable.
Did God plant his throne on the summit
of Sinai, and thence promulgate those Ten Commandments,
which are the world's law?
So too the Pope.
He has planted seat on the seven hills,
in the character of the world's supreme lawgiver
and judge, and he claims an equal authority
and infallibility for all that he is pleased
to promulgate ex cathedra, as Jehovah claims for
the precepts of the Decalogue.
Is it God's prerogative to pardon sin?
The Pope assumes the same great prerogative.
He pardons the sins of the living and
the dead.
Is God's prerogative to assign to men their
eternal destiny?
This too does the Pope.
He pretends to hold the keys that open
and shut purgatory, and while he reserves to
his followers a sure passport to the realms
of paradise, he consigns all outside his church
to eternal woe.
In fine does God sit between the cherubim
and receive the homage of his people in
his sanctuary?
The Pope, seated on the high altar of
St. Peter's while incense is burned before him
and the knees bent to him, is invoked
as the Lord our God.
Romanists are accustomed to call the altar the
throne of God, inasmuch thereon they place the
host.
The Pope, the use the Pope finds for
it on these occasions, is the not very
dignified one of a footstool.
He is God, sitteth in the temple of
God, showing himself that he is God.
Chapter 16 Man of Sin and Son of
Perdition We've traced the parallel to its grand
culmination and shown how close is the imitation
in every stage of its course.
The Apostle adds a few touches to complete
the portrait of the Antichrist and in closing
bestows a glance at the awful termination of
his career.
Let us rapidly survey what remains.
The Apostle styles him as the man of
sin and son of perdition.
Christ is the man of holiness, the only
holy man the world ever saw.
That holy thing, said the angel when he
announced his birth, thy holy child Jesus, an
apostle of him, while another wrote of him,
holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.
He was typified in the Lamb of the
Passover as without blemish.
The Pope, or vice Christ, is the man
of sin.
He has invented sin.
He has taught sin.
He has enacted sin.
Established iniquity by a law, he has traded
in sin.
He sells indulgences and pardons.
He has grown rich through the sins of
Christendom.
Sin is his being, and sin is his
work.
Popery is as purely an incarnation of sin
as the gospel is of holiness.
Everything that popery touches, it converts to sin.
It possesses an accursed alchemy by which it
transmutates what is good into evil.
It has taken all the commandments of the
Decalogue and converted them into sin.
It has taken all the doctrines of the
gospel and converted them into sin.
It has taken all the sacraments of the
church and converted them into instruments of sin.
It has taken all the offices and officers
of the church and made them agents of
sin.
It has taken all that is subtle in
intellect, all that is brilliant in genius, and
all that is noble in eloquence, and used
them in the service of sin.
The policy of popery is not to deny
truth.
It ever acts as a vice-Christ, as
a pretended friend.
Its policy is to pervert truth, to metamorphose
it, and to make it fight against itself.
There is not a doctrine in the Bible
which popery does not in appearance admit.
There is not a doctrine in the Bible
which popery does not in reality deny, and
the saving effects of which it does not
make void.
It takes what is wholesome, and by its
infernal skill changes it into what is poisonous.
The spiritual apparatus which God has set up
for His own glory and man's salvation, popery
is laid hold of and works for just
the opposite ends even, God's dishonor and man's
ruin.
It is a second and greater Jeroboam who
has made Israel to sin.
Verily it is the man of sin.
Paul further styles him the son of perdition,
a phrase of terrible significance.
It is used in Scripture only once before,
and in a connection that imparts to the
phrase an awfully tragic meaning.
It is applied to Judas, after the devil
had entered into him and so worked upon
him that he resisted not till he betrayed
his master.
This first son of perdition went forth from
the bosom of the infant church where he
had just partaken of the Passover cup.
He rose up from the very presence of
the God-man to enact his awful apostasy.
The second and greater son of perdition, in
like manner, arose in the bosom of the
primitive church.
Satan, having entered into him, his ambition began
to burn, and he went forth to the
princes of the world and said unto them,
What will ye give me, and I will
betray Christianity unto you?
Manifest ye are not able to overthrow it.
It has taken root and is filling the
earth despite your armies and your edicts.
The fires of ten persecutions have blazed around
it, but all in vain.
The bush has burned, yet it is not
consumed.
You are laboring at a work beyond your
power.
If Christianity shall ever know extinction, its overthrow
must come from within.
It must come from myself and no other.
Give me my hire, give me the seat
of Caesar, give me the kingdoms of the
world and the glory of them, and I
will go forth and show myself to man
as the vice Christ, and the world will
believe on me and follow me.
Where your force has failed, my craft will
triumph.
The policy was astute as deep.
Need we say who was its prompter?
The apostle makes the point clear.
The coming of the man of sin, he
had said, was to be after the working
of Satan.
The head of the apostasy was to be
energized, prompted, sustained, and led on by Satan,
the dragon, that old serpent, which is the
devil.
Popery is the son of perdition, the spawn,
the offspring of Apollyon, the destroyer, and it
must needs do its father's work.
As it is God's work to create, so
it is Satan's work to destroy.
The fair fabric of nature he would, if
he could, destroy.
The moral constitution of society he has so
far destroyed.
His name is Apollyon, the destroyer, and the
work of popery is the same.
The principles of morality and evangelical virtue in
man it destroys.
The principles of renewing power in the gospel
it perverts and destroys.
Wherever it has found a seat in Europe,
there is the blackness of perdition, ignorant men,
moldering cities, and enslaved and demoralized nations.
Apollyon, the destroyer, has passed this way, we
exclaim.
Here are his footprints.
All along his track is the blackness of
physical, moral, and spiritual death.
We think of the pale horse, and his
name that sat on him was Death, and
Hell followed him.
Chapter 17 Antichrist is doom.
If a son, then an heir.
And what is the inheritance of which he
is the heir?
It is perdition.
The kingdoms of the world and the glory
of them first, perdition in the end.
It was written of him before he arose,
he goeth into perdition.
Better to have had the bitter first than
the sweet after.
But no, the day of his glory over
and past, there comes the voice, Son, remember
that thou in thy lifetime had thy good
things, and Lazarus, the church, his evil things,
now thou art tormented.
This inheritance is conveyed to the papacy in
the same charter, and made sure to it
under the same seal as the glory that
goes before it.
The king of heaven has made this decree
and sealed it with his own signet, and
the decree may no man change.
As sure as the papacy has had its
glory, so surely shall its doom come.
Paul, before closing his prophecy, pauses, and in
solemn and awful words foretells the night of
horrors in which its career is to end.
That wicked, whom the Lord shall consume with
the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy
with the brightness of his coming.
2 Thessalonians 2.8 There is here a
dual destruction suspended above Antichrist, a slow wasting
first, for it may be centuries, and a
sudden and utter extinction in the end.
This duality in the doom of Antichrist has
been noted in prophecy ever since its beginning.
It is emphasized by Daniel, speaking of the
little horn which had a mouth speaking great
things, eyes like the eyes of a man,
a look more stout than his fellows, and
which made war with the saints, and was
to have dominion over them, until a time,
times, and the dividing of time.
That is 1260 years, the prophet says.
The judgment shall sit, and they shall take
away his dominion to consume and destroy it
to the end.
Daniel 7.26 Another proof, by the way,
of identity between the little horn of Daniel
and the Antichrist of John.
In the predicted doom of the papacy there
are two well-marked stages.
There is first a gradual consumption, and there
is second a sudden and terrible destruction.
The consumption, a slow and gradual process, is
to be affected by the spirit of his
mouth, by which we understand the preaching of
the gospel.
This consumption has been going on ever since
the Bible was translated and the gospel began
to be preached at the Reformation.
Men have begun to see the errors of
popery, its political props have been weakened, and
in some instances struck from under it, and
its hold generally on the nations of Christendom
has been loosened, and thus the way has
been prepared for the final stroke that will
consummate its ruin.
Great systems like the papacy, with their roots
far down and spread wide around, cannot be
plucked up while in their vigor without dislocating
human society.
They must be left to grow ripe and
become rotten, and then the final stroke may
be dealt them with safety to the church
and the world.
When that hour shall have come, then will
the second part of the doom of the
papacy overtake it.
The Lord shall destroy it with the brightness
of his coming.
The form of the judgment is left vague,
but enough is said to warrant us to
conclude that it will be swift and final.
It will come with lightning flash, and its
holy vengeance will be so manifest that, to
use the figure in the prophecy, it will
irradiate both heaven and earth with a moral
splendor.
Whether Christ shall then come as he came
at the period of the flood, and as
he came at the burning of Sodom, and
again at the destruction of Jerusalem, when, himself
remaining on the throne of heaven, he girded
the ministers of his wrath and sent them
down to earth to execute his vengeance on
the ungodly, or whether, leaving his seat in
glory, he shall in very person descend and
confront his vicar, whether he shall return to
close the apocalypse and the divine magnificence in
which he appeared to John and Patmos when
he came to open it, it is not
necessary that we should here decide.
Enough that this day of wrath will be
unspeakably great, and will rank as one of
the greatest days of vengeance that have been
on the earth since the foundation of the
world.
Paul dispatches it in a single sentence.
John expands it into a whole chapter.
And in what other chapter of the Bible
or of human history is there such another
spectacle of judgment, such another picture of blended
horrors, of awestruck consternation, of loud and bitter
wailings and cries of woe as in the
eighteenth chapter of the Apocalypse.
The kings of the earth shall bewail her
and lament for her when they shall see
the smoke of her burning, standing afar off
for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas,
alas, that great city, for in one hour
is she made desolate.
But this dark scene has one relieving feature.
It is a scene that will not need
to be repeated, for it will close earth's
evil days and begin the hallelujahs of the
nations.
And a mighty angel took up a stone
like a great millstone and cast it into
the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that
great city Babylon be thrown down and shall
be found no more at all.
These quotations were from Revelation 18, verses 9
through 19 and verse 21.
Chapter 18 Does not the likeness fit?
Let the reader remember that the portraiture he
has been studying is not ours, but Paul's.
And when he lifts his eyes from the
picture, let him cast them around and try,
if he can, to discover the original of
this likeness.
The features are so vividly depicted, so sharply
cut, that surely there can be no difficulty
in detecting him whose image they present.
Paul did not paint at random.
His is no vague sketch which may fit
loosely any or most of the systems of
error which have arisen in the course of
the ages.
When we read his prophecy, we have the
overwhelming impression that Paul has in his eye
some one, grand, sharply featured, long-lived, daringly
wicked, and fearfully blasphemous confederacy which, under the
mask of friendliness, was to wage undying war
against the gospel.
We are blind indeed if we cannot find
the original of Paul's portraiture.
Here is one who has erected his throne
in the Christian temple, who has usurped all
the titles and functions of Christ, who has
professed to mediate between God and man, to
hold the keys of heaven and hell, to
do great wonders and make fire come down
from heaven, who has changed laws, spoken great
words, forbidden to marry, commanded to abstain from
meats, has clothed his priests in purple and
scarlet and fine linen decked with gold and
precious stones, one who has made war with
the saints and been drunk with the blood
of martyrs, who has put his foot on
the neck of kings, nay, has clothed himself
with the robe of the Eternal King, infallibility
even, in fine one who has said, I
am vice Christ, I am vice God.
We go up to this man and we
say to him, Thou art the Antichrist.
Let who will cringe and bow before thee?
Let who will patch anew thy visor which
begins to wax threadbare and to remit the
horrid features that lurk beneath it to shine
through?
Let who will palliate thy crimes and deny
that ever thou didst persecute and those simulating
the meekness and innocence of the Lamb art
a ravening wolf?
Let who will befriend thee in the arrogant
and blasphemous claims thou art still putting forth?
We say of thee, Thou art he of
whom Paul in old time, writing by the
Holy Ghost, spake, Hear what he called thee.
He named thee the man of sin and
son of perdition.
Ah, you readjust your mask and double the
folds of your mantle and looking down on
the kings of earth once more at your
feet you say, Am I not God?
We know thee who thou art.
Thou art the fallen apostle, the minister of
Lucifer.
Thou camest from the abyss and to the
abyss shalt thou return.
We do not hesitate to say that we
have nearly as full and convincing evidence that
the Roman papacy is the Antichrist as we
have that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ.
In conclusion, let us note that Christianity stands
alone in having its Antichrist or counterfeit.
Mohammedanism has no such counterfeit.
Buddhism has no such counterfeit.
There is not power or truth enough in
these systems to call into existence a great
opposing counterfeit system.
Without the Son, there can be no shadows.
The Son of Christianity has been accompanied all
down the ages by this shadow.
So far, Antichrist does homage to the divinity
of the gospel.
Unless Christ had gone before, Antichrist could not
have come after.
Let the reader seriously ponder that this is
the divine testimony regarding potpourri.
As portrayed by a divinely guided hand, whose
are its liniments, its spirit, and principles?
They are those of Satan, the archenemy of
God and His church.
This monstrous shape is the wicked one.
Let us think what a formidable antagonist we
have in this system.
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, against
the power and cunning of man.
We have to encounter the power of hell,
the cunning of the devil.
Ephesians 6, verses 12-17 says, For we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in
high places.
Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of
God, that ye may be able to withstand
in the evil day, and having done all,
to stand.
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with
truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness,
and your feet shod with the preparation of
the gospel of peace.
Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith
ye shall be able to quench all the
fiery darts of the wicked.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the
sword of the Spirit, which is the word
of God.
This ends The Papacy is the Antichrist by
the Rev. Dr. J.
A.
Wiley, read by W.
J.
Mankaro, and produced by Stillwater's Revival Books.
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