THE
BOOK OF REVELATION
By:
Bertrand L. Comparet
Lesson
#8 Of A Series Of 14, Transcribed From Audio Tapes
Transcribed
By:
Clifton
A. Emahiser’s
Teaching
Ministries
Phone
(419) 435-2836
[Unless
in brackets, all of the message is by Bertrand L. Comparet.]
We’ve been going through the Book of Revelation and we got past the first two of
the woes – that is, we’ve covered nine chapters of Revelation so far. We saw
that the first woe was the Saracen invasion. What we had studied last was the
matter of the first and second woes in the 9th chapter of Revelation. You
remember, there it was saying “woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitors of the earth by
reason” of these things that were going to happen. We saw that the first of
these woes was the Saracen Arab invasion which conquered and destroyed, as a
political entity, a third of the Roman Empire, that being the southern third –
North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and indeed a good deal of Syria. [In other words, the Arab conquest took the entire southern
portion of the Roman Empire, from
Starting
the eleventh chapter, a new thought is suddenly introduced here. Revelation
chapter 11, verses 3 to 6: “And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they
shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in
sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing
before the Sovereign of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire
proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will
hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven,
that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to
turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with every plague, as often as they
desire.”
Probably
few things, even in the Book of Revelation, have been the source of so much
argument and disagreement as the identity of the two witnesses. And yet, I think
the Bible gives the key to it pretty clearly. A few years ago there was some odd
crank, up in the
So
how about these two witnesses – the two olive trees and the two candlesticks?
Well, the first vision of this sort that appears in the Bible – and remember,
the only key to any symbolic statement in the Bible – the only key to it is in
the Bible itself. Never will you find, anywhere else, that key. History will
tell you whether you properly understand it because you can be sure that
Yahweh’s prophesies actually come to pass. So let’s look back to Zechariah 4,
verses 1 to 14. I’m leaving out a few verses that are just repetitious and don’t
get to our particular point:
“And
the angel that talked with me came again, and wakened me, as a man that is
wakened out of his sleep, And said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have
seen, and behold a candlestick all of
gold, with a bowl upon the top of it, and his seven lamps thereon, and seven
pipes to each of the lamps, which are
upon the top thereof: And two olive trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the
left side thereof.” Thus, he asked
the angel, and he says: “Then answered I, and said unto him, What are these two olive trees upon the right
side of the candlestick and upon the
left side thereof? ... Then said he,
these are the two anointed ones that
stand by the Sovereign of the whole earth.”
Your
King James Version, whether it’s Old
Testament or New, says candlestick, and uniformly, Old Testament or New, it’s
wrong. That’s part of the 27,000 odd mistranslations you find in it. The word is
lampstand. You may have seen pictures of the ancient lamps. They looked like a
rather shallow, flat teapot. Through the hole in the top, the bowl could be
filled with oil. In the spout there was a string wick which was lighted so that
the flame burned at the tip of the spout. These were not candleholders in which
you put wax candles, but they were lampstands which had either a flat surface on
which a lamp could be set, or a socket into which a projection on the bottom of
the lamp could be fitted. In either case, they were to hold lamps. You next run
into this in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. At John’s first
vision, he said that (this is Revelation 1, verses 12 and 13): “And having
turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven
candlesticks one like unto the Son of
man...” In other words, his vision was of Yahshua the Christ, in all his glory,
standing beside these seven lampstands, and he said, “having in his hand seven
stars.” Then in verse 20, Yahshua the Christ gives them the explanation: “The
seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks ...
are the seven churches.”
We
went over this matter of the seven “churches” right at the beginning of this
thing and we saw that these symbolized seven different periods in the history of
the Christian “Church” – from the time of the resurrection of Yahshua the Christ
on to our present day. Thus, these candlesticks or lampstands represent the
Christian “Church”, or actually, since we first pick up this symbolism in the
Old Testament in Zechariah, it represents not only the Christian “Church”, but
it represents the
We
are told that the two witnesses are the olive trees and candlesticks. Who have
been the great witnesses to the Word of Yahweh throughout all history? One class
were the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles in the New Testament.
Those who were able, not merely to repeat other’s teachings but to be able to
say that “I myself have heard it” – thus saith Yahweh – their witness was
written down in the Scriptures. But besides the occasional prophet who came
along in the Old Testament, you had a considerable Levitical priesthood who did
not personally receive new revelations of their own but were to study the
writings of the prophets and to teach the people, so that under the Old
Testament, just as under the New Testament, you have had as one witness the
written testimony of those who were directly inspired. And you had the further
testimony of those who had studied the Scriptures. In John 5, verse 39, Yahshua
the Christ reminded the Pharisees of this. You see, in those days, just as in
the present day, you had a lot of people who were one-verse Bible authorities.
Somebody had called their attention to one or two verses and they thought they
knew the Bible. Whoever can found a belief in anything using a single verse is
grossly ignorant of the Bible, because it isn’t all there in any one
verse.
So,
Yahshua the Christ said to these Pharisees, “search the scriptures because ye
think that in them ye have eternal life, and these are they which are witnesses
of me.” At that time, the only Scripture they could study was the Old Testament.
Then, in the first chapter of the Book of Acts, before Yahshua the Christ went
back into heaven after His resurrection, He spoke to the people who were
assembled. This included a lot more than the apostles who had furnished written
Scripture in the Bible. He said: “Ye shall be witnesses unto me in
Sackcloth was a symbol of calamity and of
mourning. In those days they made a great show of mourning for the dead and so
on, and instead of wearing their normal, reasonably fine cloth garments, they
put on coarse sackcloth. At funerals they had hired mourners to wail and yowl
and put on a great show. Because sackcloth was a symbol of grief, you note that
in many places where the people’s continued rascality was bringing down upon
them punishment – a judgment from Yahweh – they were told to put on sackcloth by
way of showing mourning and grief for the wickedness in which they had engaged.
Hence, sackcloth here is a symbol of sorrow and persecution. We know from
history, that from the establishment of the power of the papacy in the Catholic
“Church”, which as near as you can fix a precise time for it would be 606 A.D.,
that anybody who objected to the paganism that was being made more and more a
part of Catholic doctrine and Catholic ritual suffered terrible persecution,
usually in the form of murder, often by horrible torture, burning alive and that
sort of thing. These people who were witnessing to the truth in the early days,
when there was as yet no Protestant movement, were just those individual people
who objected to the destruction of true Christianity and the substitution of
paganism for it. They were undergoing persecution
continually.
The
Pope, you remember, finally got considerable territory. I guess he had fully a
third of the whole
It
says some other things about them which obviously are, again, symbolic rather
than literal. Speaking of the two witnesses: “these have the power to shut the
heaven that it rain not during the days of their prophesy.” The only thing that
permits life to exist on earth is the rain that enables vegetation to grow,
without which all forms of animal life would also die of starvation. Whenever
you get a prolonged drought you get a famine following it, so rain is the
essence of continued life, and the Bible, in a number of places, uses rain as
symbolic of the word of Yahweh. For example, Moses, at the end of his career
when he was finally summing up to the people what had happened and what they
should do, said this at Deuteronomy 32, verse 2: “My doctrine shall drop as the
rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb,
and as the showers upon the grass.” Hosea 6, verse 3, is another example: “And
let us know, let us follow on to know Yahweh: his going forth is sure as the
morning; and he will come unto us as the rain, as the latter rain that watereth
the earth.” [Comparet failed to identify what
translation he was using here.]
You’ll
find the New Testament consistently carries on the established symbolism of the
Old Testament. In James 5, verse 7, he says: “Be patient therefore, brethren,
unto the coming of the Prince. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious
fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early
and latter rain.” When Yahweh became sufficiently annoyed at His people’s
misconduct, He sometimes sent a drought, with the resulting famine as a
punishment upon them. That’s recorded several times in the Bible, and once, just
to make sure that nobody missed the meaning of it, one of the greatest of the
Old Testament prophets, Elijah, drives home the lesson firmly. He’s talking to
the wicked king Ahab of Israel. This is 1st Kings 17, verse 1: “And Elijah the
Tishbite, who was of the sojourners
of
Now
here were these witnesses, not yet an organized
In
another place [Rev. 8:7-8] it said that “a star
fell into the sea and turned a third of the sea to blood.” We saw that that
spoke of the time when the so-called barbarians became a mighty sea power, from
their North African possessions, and just swept the Roman navy off the sea. In
fact, they even ravaged the coast of
“And
to smite the earth with plagues” – this came as a latter phase of it, but you
will note that, beginning with the Communist revolution in France, which spread
outward, and the Napoleonic wars following afterward, that the Catholic nations
which had persecuted these Protestants found themselves undergoing the most
frightful scourge of warfare.
The
next part we come to, while seemingly hard to understand, yet we’ll see that
history fulfills it to the exact letter. Revelation 11, verses 7 to 13: “And
when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up out of
the abyss shall make war with them, and overcome them, and kill them.” We are
going to take up in more detail (as we get to later chapters) this matter of the
beast that comes up out of the sea, but it will suffice to say right now that it
represents a continuing system of religious, political and economic
evil.
The
Babylonian succession of empires which have carried on the same set up:
politically, they represented tyranny; economically, they represented greed,
whereby some were enriched, but the great majority of the people impoverished;
and religiously, you can trace right down to the same old paganism, the worship
of Satan and his fallen angel followers. Some of you perhaps noticed a couple of
months ago – oh, more than that; three or four months, I guess – in the
newspapers, the fact that the Pope had expressed doubts about certain of the
Catholic saints who were worshipped as such, including among them, I think, some
forty of them whom he had toppled from their thrones. It included Bacchus –
Bacchus, the pagan God of drunken debauchery. I gave you a talk once on how
Bacchus became a Saint. The Pope did so with a lot of the other [so-called] “saints”. [See
note #4 at end of lesson.]
You
can trace, behind much of Catholic doctrine and ritual; the old Babylonian
religion. You can pick it up in the records of
In
fact, our whole banking system as it exists today in this country is organized
exactly as it was in ancient
Today
we speak of them as international bankers because, while for convenience sake,
they will claim citizenship in the country they’re temporarily in, they go
hither and yon, and are as much at home anywhere else as they are here. When
they have brought one empire to destruction and stolen everything they could get
out of it, they move on to the next. Thus, the symbolism was used that you had a
beast with seven heads, representing seven successive stages of empires which
were ruled according to this system, ruled until they had been bled white and
destroyed, then abandoned, to take up another and do the same thing. They were
all heads on the same beast. It was the same animal, and as we shall see, you
had evidence here that the
That
great city was obviously
Likewise,
these same evil forces are going to bring about a period when the Protestant
witnessing to the truth is silenced, and thus symbolically killed [Revelation 11:9]: “And from among the peoples and
tribes and tongues and nations, do men look upon their dead bodies three days
and a half, and suffer not their dead bodies to be laid in the tomb. And they
that dwell on the earth rejoice over them, and make merry; and they shall send
gifts to one another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwell on
the earth. And after three days and a half the breath of life from Yahweh
entered into them (that’s these two witnesses), and they stood upon their feet;
and great fear fell on them that beheld them. And they heard a great voice from
heaven saying, Come up hither. And they went up into heaven in the cloud; and
their enemies beheld them. And in that hour there was a great earthquake, and
the tenth part of the city fell; and there were killed in the earthquake seven
thousand persons: and the rest became affrighted, and gave glory to the God of
heaven.” [Again, Comparet’s translation unidentified.
It may be his own paraphrase.]
All
right now, let’s look at the timing of this. From the papacy becoming
established you had some persecution of all who were not willing to be ruled by
it religiously. But that didn’t become acute for a few centuries after that. The
reason for it was this: Remember, the Book of Revelation points out this
corruption that is coming, and points it out in a way that identifies the
Catholic “Church” and its papacy as being “the man of sin”, who is also called
Antichrist, and so on. But it wasn’t until the papacy had manifested these
characteristics for some time that the people could recognize it, and some
started to point it out. Therefore, they have not finished their testimony until
they reach the point where they are showing that here is deep and terrible
corruption within what passed for the Christian “Church”. The identity of the
papacy as the “man of sin” and “Antichrist”, and one of the heads of the fourth
beast, was not preached until the 12th century A.D., during the 1100s. When they
started recognizing this thing they were reaching the point where they were
finishing their testimony. [See
note #7 at end of lesson.]
In
southern
Under
the interdict, no priest would perform any religious ceremony. You couldn’t be
married. If one of your relatives died, you could dig a hole in the ground, but
not in a consecrated cemetery. You couldn’t have any funeral ceremony for him.
And remember that everybody believed that unless you bought his way out of
purgatory, by paying a good sum of money to the “church”, that he was going to
burn in flames for thousands of years. Maybe this was your beloved mother that
was just buried – she couldn’t ever go to heaven – she hadn’t been buried in a
consecrated cemetery and no priest was going to say a Mass for her. Likewise,
all Catholics, everywhere, were forbidden to carry on any kind of transaction
with people who were under that interdict. If your country needed to import part
of its food supply, that was shut off. Who was going to sell it to you? If you
needed to sell your products abroad, who was going to buy from you? In other
words, everything in a nation just simply came to a screeching halt. The people
were told “now look, your relatives that have died in this period have all gone
forever to hell, and you yourself are going there too because the ‘Church’ isn’t
going to get you out of it unless you get rid of this king.” It didn’t take long
for that kingdom to have a very effective revolution for the king to deal with.
Thus, when the Pope told the king of any country “There are heretics in your
kingdom, and I command you to slaughter them all and stamp out heresy”, that
king was going to do it. And he did it.
Nobody
kept exact statistics of the number of Protestants murdered during this twelve
and a half century period, but the minimum estimate that anybody has made on it
that’s tried to dig out what statistics there are, runs to 40 million people.
Pretty careful students, some of them have come to the conclusion that there
were 50 million, or more, who were murdered by the
The
Waldenses finally merged with the Calvinists after the Reformation was
established. You had the Wycliffeites, the poor preachers in
So
the Bohemians weren’t having any of it. The object of this Lateran council was
to complete the extermination of heresy. Thus, their council met May 5th, 1514,
and no one appeared to present any contrary doctrine. There was no witness to
the word of Yahweh. All had been silenced and killed (you remember the two
witnesses would be overcome and killed, and as I say, to the extent of a good
many millions, that killing was literal). There was tremendous rejoicing by the
It
was May 5th, 1514 that the witnesses were overcome and killed, completely
silenced. Then October 31st, 1517, three and one-half years later (three years
and five months if you want to be very exact), Martin Luther nailed on the door
of the “church” at Wittenberg these 95 theses or propositions of corruption and
false doctrines of the Catholic “Church” that he was prepared to debate with
anybody. So for three and one-half years (the symbolic three and one half days
of the prophesy), no one dared speak in opposition to the Catholic “Church” to
witness to the truth of Yahweh. But at the end of three and one-half years,
Protestantism took off like a skyrocket. Within a month after Martin Luther had
nailed up these theses there, pointing out the corruption in the “Church” and
the falsity of its doctrine, the news had spread all over Europe and things were
really getting going. In a very brief period of time, practically all the
Germanic and Scandinavian peoples were Lutheran, Protestant. The “church” no
longer could get in and massacre them because here you found whole nations ready
to resist.
The
Then
it says, “the tenth part of the city fell.” Remember that the
Then
it says: “The tenth part of the city fell, and there were killed in the
earthquake seven thousand persons.” The Bible, especially the Old Testament, has
sometimes used that term “thousand”, not literally as of just that many people,
but as representing an organization such as a family, a sub-tribe. You take for
example Micah 5, verse 2, one of the prophesies of the coming of Christ, where
he was to be born: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the
thousands of Judah, yet out of thee
shall he come forth unto me that is
to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from
everlasting.” The reference to thousands there is obviously a reference to a
governmental subdivision. You’ll find also, in the earlier books of the Old
Testament, with reference to the men in command of certain tribal forces as head
over thousands, where it probably represented not a literal thousand, but a
family organization which might be larger or smaller than a thousand. Between
the years 1579 and 1629, seven provinces in the
Now,
let’s look back over this thing. There is only one period in history, one set of
events that can answer to the description given here in symbolism. The witnesses
we have pretty well identified. You know many people have made many guesses, not
based upon the Bible but upon what they thought it might logically be. But what
the Bible identifies as witnesses would be the written witness of the Scripture
and the spoken witness of the faithful who continued to preach this truth. You
have a period where they were stamped out, silenced, and most of them literally
killed. You have a period of three and a half years when that condition existed,
the three and a half days of prophesy. You have the sudden revival of
Protestantism on a scale never approached before. It just spread like wildfire
after Martin Luther. So they were taken up, as it says, called up into heaven.
Heaven is used symbolically in places in the Bible as representing the seat of
power in the
In
the 11th chapter, we’ve gone through this business of the two witnesses, and all
this time nothing has been said about whether the second woe was still going on
or whether it was over, or when the third woe is coming. After all this matter
about the two witnesses, then Revelation 11, verse 14, says: “The second woe is
past; and, behold, the third woe
cometh quickly.” That second woe was the great Turkish invasion, so let’s see
whether the end of the second, or Turkish woe, came after the revival of
Protestantism. The Turks were still extending their conquest of European
territory through part of this. They conquered
The
great sea battle of Lepanto in 1571 was a disastrous defeat for the Turks, and
it really is the beginning of Turkish downfall. They didn’t recognize it yet, as
they thought they could still come back and keep making repeated wars of
conquest, but from this time on the Turks were blundering into one disaster
after another. They again besieged
CRITICAL
NOTES ON LESSON #8
Comments
by William Finck initialed W.R.F.
Comments
by Clifton A. Emahiser in brackets in lesson text as “your
transcriber”
or
initialed C.A.E. in critical notes.
Note
#1:
The correlation of the two witnesses of Revelation 11 to the written Scriptures
and to the spoken testimony is quite interesting, and Comparet makes a
persuasive case for it; yet I am not convinced of it. The “two anointed ones” of
Zechariah 4:14 are literally two “sons of oil”, a different phrase from any
other translated “anointed” in the A.V., as evident in Strong’s, and the Greek of the LXX reads here, “sons of fatness”
(metaphorically “sons of wealth”), which indicates to me that the two witnesses
are people – or groups of people – and not inanimate objects, such as even the
Scriptures are in written form. It occurs to me that the two witnesses are two
olive trees: the House of Israel and the House of Judah. Revelation chapter 10
describes the (greater part of, at least) children of Israel in the Reformation,
breaking away from the rule of the Catholic “Church”, and so this may be
correlated to the taking away of the Pope’s dominion, described at Daniel 7,
verse 26 – which will hopefully become evident later, and so Revelation 11:12
may be correlated to Daniel 7:27, for ever since the eclipse of Papal supremacy
over Europe, for better or worse the Saxon peoples of England and America have
had world hegemony (except that the children of Cain among us are another topic
entirely). Comparet has done well to notice that Revelation chapter 11 is
fulfilled by the time of the passing of the second woe – the woe of the Turkish
aggression.
The
two witnesses were to “prophesy a thousand two hundred and three score days”, or
1260 years. By Comparet’s own exposition, Scripture was not used by the Catholic
“Church” at all before the Reformation, and so Scripture certainly couldn’t have
been prophesying during this period – except that I can identify one group of
people who were prophesying (teaching) with Scripture during this period:
The Celtic “Church” of Ireland and Scotland – which also brought Christianity to
many in Britain and on the Continent, and which did fulfill a 1260-year period
of time. I know not enough about the history of the middle ages to comment
further than I have here. W.R.F.
Note
#2:
The waters became blood at Rev. 8:7-8, speaking of the Goths and Vandals. At
8:11, speaking of the Huns, the waters became wormwood, and not blood. W.R.F.
Note
#3:
Here Comparet alludes to, but does not sufficiently cover, the 30 Years’ War
waged by the Catholics against
Note
#4:
Revelation 11:7 may be correlated with Daniel 7:25, and also alludes to both
Rev. 13:11 (13:11-18 describing the Papacy) and Rev. 20:7 (which has not yet
transpired at this point – although the process leading to it has well begun).
W.R.F.
Note
#5:
The beast of the abyss represents the people behind the power which is
perpetually being organized throughout all of our institutions – not just the
“Church”, and its nature is political and religious as well as economic. W.R.F.
Note
#6:
The great city of
Note
#7:
The “man of sin” is not the pope, or the papacy, or the Catholic “church.” As
Comparet said already himself earlier in these sermons, the Catholic “church” is
a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The “man of sin” collectively
are the Adversary, the children of Satan in the world, and Paul uses the label
to describe the Kenite-Edomite jews, the offspring of Satan, in 2 Thess. chapter
2: for it is the Edomites who had taken over the high-priesthood in
Note
#8:
I would not liken the seven thousand of Rev. 11:13 to seven provinces in