Questions and Answers, Part 16
Selected Scriptures
We do want you to have the opportunity to ask some questions that might be on you heart. I might just made a comment. There's been a lot of talk today about the Pope and being shot and all of that in St. Peter's Square; comes in there every Wednesday to do a speech and rides around and was getting out of his vehicle to go up to where he gives his speech. I was there one Wednesday when he did that in the St. Peters and he goes up and they throw a deal over a balcony window thing and he comes out and talks and he was shot.
Just to put things in perspective I think it would be interesting for you to know just a few little details perhaps about him. He's a first non-Italian Pope in four or five centuries. He's Polish. But there's been a lot of talk about whether or not the Pope is a Christian and in fact one very famous Christian leader that the Pope is every bit as much a Christian as I am and I have some questions about that, frankly, and I'll tell you why.
Recently the Pope has, this Pope, John Paul VI, right, II, John Paul II, the last one was VI, I can't keep it straight. There have been times in history when there was three at the same time all fighting for the victor ship of Christ, but anyway, he has adapted a new symbol. Every Pope identifies himself with a symbol. He has a logo, right, like you put on stationary, whatever, a seal. His logo is very interesting. The traditional Christian symbol is a cross, very simple cross. This Pope has a cross off center with a long piece and then the crossbeam is very short on this side and very long on the other side. It almost looks like half of a box with a ragged edge sticking out and in the middle of the box is a great big huge bold black M for Mary, so that the cross is moved off center and simply boxes in Mary. If there's any illusion where he stands in terms of redemption that ought to pretty well explain it. He affirms the co-redemptrix character of Mary; that Mary is equally able to redeem with Christ, which is heresy and denies the singular atoning work of Jesus Christ.
So, there's no way that a person can postulate that Mary is a redeeming person and adhere to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I'm not saying he's not a good man as men go. He may well be. Okay question.
QUESTIONER: I think you kind of answered my question already is many of the a -
JOHN: ESP. Okay go ahead.
QUESTIONER: Many of the Catholic priests were saying all day long we have to keep communicating the gospel of love and I was just wondering what they mean by that? Is that the same gospel as ours or a different gospel and if it is different in what way?
JOHN: It's definitely different. The gospel of love is hearts and flowers. It's a substitute for the reality of the gospel and it's a typical statement today. The gospel of love. Its sort of a humanistic let's be kind, let's be loving. It's been amazing, it's amazing to me that when this thing came on the radio people like Mayor Tom Bradley said, "I'm praying for him." And Senator said, "I'm praying." Everybody is praying for him. All of a sudden in this irreligious atheistic nation where no one pays any attention to God, everyone is praying. If I was in any of those interviews I would have said to every one of those people, "By the way, to whom are you praying for him?" I would just be curious. It's amazing how there's just sort of a latent confidence or belief in God in spite of all of our denials.
The gospel of love, that's a term that substitutes, I think, for the true gospel, sort of a liberalized perspective. What they mean is we've got to be loving and kind. And that's really true. We are a very ugly society because we're fallen and we're always going to have those harebrained people that do things like that and that's a terrible thing to do, but I wish I believed that the Roman Catholic system had the truth, but I'm confident that it doesn't because I know this church is literally filled with people who were in it for years and years and never knew the truth. So I don't know what they mean by the gospel of love but it's something shy of what the true gospel is.
By the way I can just add a few footnotes. Let me do that before we go on. You need to understand that the Roman Catholic Church is a hybrid system. You will find in the Roman Catholic Church just as much stuff taken from Babylonian cultism as you will taken from the Bible. For example, Lent has absolutely nothing to do with Scripture. It never appears in the Scripture. 40 days, where it does appear is there was a false legend that Baal was killed by a wild boar and so Baal was the son of Asteroth, who was the queen mother of Babylonian cults, that built the tower of Babel, and all the mystery religions and the occult and so forth and so forth, and when Baal was killed they mourned for 40 days and then he was raised from the dead. And the 40 days of mourning for Baal got algomated into Christianity and that's where Lent came from. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Bible. The term Queen of Heaven, you know that term they use for Mary? That term is in the book of Isaiah, I mean the book of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and it refers to Asteroth the mother of Baal. It refers to the false pagan cult and they are forbidden to worship the Queen of Heaven.
In fact, in Ezekiel God came in and destroys the temple because the people there are worshipping the Queen of Heaven. And the mother/child cult of Mariolatry, the Pieta and the Mother and the Baby are not truly representative of Mary and Jesus but they are the Queen of Heaven. They are Asteroth and Baal dragged over into Christianity and it dragged its way through all the pagan religions.
Did you know, for example, the official shield of the Pope has in the middle of it the goat's head, which is the symbol of all the occult? It's a very strange conglomeration of stuff blending together Christianity and paganism and it has been that way throughout the years. Okay.
ELAINE: Hi, my name's Elaine. I have a question about I Samuel 16:14, "Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him." I'm just curious about that evil spirit from the Lord.
JOHN: Right. The statement there is an evil spirit from the Lord and the question is how can a good God send forth an evil spirit? Right? Obviously the answer to it has to be in line with all other Scripture, right? All you have to do is keep this in mind. the fallen angels at the command of Jesus Christ? Sure they are. When in Mark 5, Jesus approached the maniac of Gadarea, do you remember? And they said to him, "Do not," what? "Send us out but cast us into," what? "Swine." They knew that they would have to do what he commanded them to do. You see in Ephesians I it says, and I will read it. It says, "The exceeding power, the exceeding greatness of his power, which he wrought in Christ, show forth far above all principalities and powers and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that age which is to come. He's put all things under his feet given him to be the head over all things," right? Doesn't matter what it is.
There are times when God, himself, in his sovereign will actually allows the demon hosts to carry out his will. And I think in that case He simply, in align with his sovereign will, acted authoritatively over a demon to send him or to allow him, permit him to do what he was going to do. So I think we have to give the ultimate sovereignty to God. Okay. Good question. Yes.
QUESTIONER: What was reason or reasons for God's silence in the period approximately 400 hundred years between the Old and New Testament?
JOHN: What he's saying is responding to a historical fact. When God closed the Old Testament Cannon and then opened the new there's a period of 400 years. The final books, I guess would be Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, final books of the Old Testament, though they're not the final ones in our English order, they are the latest ones. And when they were finished the Old Testament was complete. It was laid down. The law was there.
I think having completed the Old Testament only God knows why that gap was there, but in a very real sense it is, and I want to be careful that you don't misunderstand me, it is inconsequential that there was 400 years of silence because the Old Testament was enough. We have had 2,000 years of silence, have we not? In Revelation 21 it says, "If anybody add anything to what is written in this book shall be added in the plagues that are written therein, the faith was once for all," what? "Delivered to the saints." This is the once for all delivered to the saints faith. And we've had silence for 2,000 years but that doesn't mean we don't have the word of God. So God in His wisdom had said all he wanted to say and He entrusted this to them.
Ezra, for example, was a masterful scribe and it is said that he had memorized every letter of the Old Testament and that he could sit down and write the entire thing from memory in the Hebrew language. And so the scribes, like Ezra, were putting it into the hands of the people after it had been pulled together. And so there was that period of 400 years in which the Old Testament was available to them and then it was broken, the silence was broken. The next time a prophetic voice spoke who was it? John the Baptist, and he was the forerunner of the Messiah.
So as to specifically why that is a very difficult question to ask, but that does not mean that they were not responsible because they had the whole revelation of God as much as we do for the 2,000 years since the New Testament was completed. Okay you want to fire another one?
QUESTIONER: Once before you said that Russia's greatest enemy was China and from reading The Late Great Planet Earth many times and following the study we did in Daniel on Sunday nights, which again was terrific, I understood that Russia and China would be aligned against Israel so that-
JOHN: Yeah, I'm not sure that they'll be aligned with each other, but they definitely will be against Israel. I think what you're going to have is you're going to have the West, the North, the South and the East; the West being the ____ Roman Empire, the South being an Egyptian Confederacy, not of great consequence, the North being the tremendous power of Russia aligned with Cuspate, Persia and modern Iran or whatever, and then you're going to have the kings of the East. Although they all agree that the