Amazing Facts

Guest (Male): This presentation is brought to you by the Friends of the Amazing Facts Ministry. Coming to you from New York City at the historic Manhattan Center with your host, Doug Batchelor. Join this exciting journey of discovery as we learn the truth about Bible prophecy, explore the timeless wisdom of God's Word, and see how it relates to our lives today. Stay tuned. Your Amazing Facts adventure begins now.

Doug Batchelor: The study today is based on Revelation chapter 12. If you have your Bibles, you may want to thumb your way there right now or on your Bible device that you're holding. Beginning with a really amazing fact. In 1954, a four-year-old girl was abducted from her home in Colombia in the mountains with the idea of kidnapping her and asking for ransom. We don't know exactly what went wrong, but something went wrong, and they didn't want to kill the child, so they took her off down a logging road in the jungle and they let her go. Four years old.

Of course, she cried and mourned for a while, and she didn't struggle so much with thirst because it did rain frequently. There was water there, and the climate was somewhat mild, and so she did not freeze. But she wandered around and looked for food, and eventually a group of capuchin monkeys were intrigued with her, and they began to drop food. She lived in the jungle for five years. It's just an amazing story. Often tormented by insects, eventually she wore her clothes off.

She followed this troop of monkeys that were watching her from the tree that kind of adopted her. She even got to the place where she could climb pretty well and learned to forage for food, and she stayed alive. When she was finally found after these years of living in the jungle, she had lost all of the natural social inhibitions. She had no clothes, she had forgotten how to speak her native language, she didn't remember her name, and they did not ever find her real parents.

They gave her the name Marina. She eventually was young enough where she could still learn, relearn to speak both English and Spanish. She moved to Britain, she was married, and all of this is contained in the fascinating book called *The Girl with No Name*. God provided for her in the wilderness in a miraculous way. Right now, she's nearly 70 years old, and she can still climb trees.

The Bible talks about a woman, which is a symbol for the church, and we have a true woman and a counterfeit woman in Revelation 12 and Revelation 17. We're going to study a very important subject. There are Christians all over the world who go to different churches. How do you know? Does it matter what church? Is there a true church? Do you even need to go to church? We're going to find out what people on the street think about this subject. Let's take a look at some of their comments.

Guest (Female): I guess you don't really know, right? I guess just whatever feels best for each person, right?

Guest (Female): I think it really depends. I think a lot of religions have a lot of different things, but I think Revelation is one of the important things. I think there's only so much that Old Testaments and old things can predict. There are only so many coincidences, I feel like.

Guest (Male): I guess typically it would be how you're raised originally. Then, as you get older, you do your own investigation.

Guest (Male): The one I grew up with? I think you just got to go back to whatever your parents are and stick with that. Don't change it.

Guest (Male): How do you know what churches are false? Well, depends which gods you're into really, doesn't it?

Guest (Male): People just need to pray a lot and get some discernment. Read, do their own research, read their own literature, and that's probably the best way.

Guest (Female): We don't. Every church has its flaw. You believe what you believe in your soul, and that's how you live.

Guest (Female): Well, how can a church be false? It may not appeal to you or to another.

Guest (Male): Like if there's no cross in the top or like no religious sign.

Guest (Male): I don't believe so. I wouldn't say it matters too much.

Guest (Male): I believe it does, only because the Bible preaches baptism for remission of sins, and so I believe you must be baptized, and there are a lot of churches that don't teach that.

Guest (Male): No, it doesn't. Just have the same... if it's the same Bible, it's fine.

Guest (Male): Not really. At least you're attending church and believe in something.

Doug Batchelor: Does truth matter? Most important question that was ever asked was when Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, "What is truth?" and then he walked away from Jesus and did not wait for the answer. He was standing there in front of the person who is the embodiment of truth. He said, "What is truth?" and with cynicism, he walked away, figuring nobody can really know the truth.

You can tell from the answers that we've been hearing, some people say, "Well, you've got your truth and I've got my truth, and there is really no absolute truth. Whatever you believe is good for you and what I believe is good for me." How many of you would like to go to a doctor that's doing brain surgery on you and have him say, "Well, I think it's a brain, but he thinks it's a cantaloupe, so whatever you believe is okay"?

Or when you're on the airplane and you're flying across the ocean and the pilot comes on the air and says, "I realize that some of you think there are absolute laws of aerodynamics, but I'd like to try an experiment. I think this plane will work just fine as a submarine because I believe it, and I'm sincere"? Would you want to get on that airplane?

Or how many of you want to know that that pilot has learned there are certain absolute rules of aerodynamics and aviation, and if you violate those rules, there are terrible consequences because it's unforgiving? There is absolute truth regarding God and eternal life. This notion that has become popular in society that says, "Well, you got your truth and I got my truth and who can know what truth is," that’s not what the Bible teaches.

God says, "Thy word is truth." That's what Jesus said. There is truth. Jesus said, "I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life." Don't believe the devil's lie that it doesn't really matter and as long as you're sincere. How many of you have been sincere and you found out you were wrong, and it didn't help that you were sincere?

I was driving cross-country one time, going from California to Texas. Late at night, finally needed some gas, got off on the cloverleaf and looped around. This is before you had GPS. I looped around a couple of times and I found the gas station. I filled up and I got back on the freeway, and I was feeling pretty good that I was going to make great progress. But as I was going down Interstate 10, I kept seeing their signs that said Interstate 10. I said, "I'm on the right interstate."

But then I started saying, "Wow, they must have a chain of those restaurants everywhere because I just saw one a few miles back." Then I realized I was looking at the same restaurant and it said Interstate 10 West. Well, I'm going to Texas; I needed to be going East. I had been perfectly happy and sincere, but I was never going to get to Texas going the wrong direction.

It didn't matter how sincere I was. There's a lot of people in the world today that think, "Well, it doesn't really matter as long as you're sincere." Oh, it does matter, friends, what you believe. The truth will set you free. Every element of Bible truth makes you freer. So number one, first question: How does Revelation picture God's true church? Turn to your Bibles; we're going to read it first. Turn to Revelation chapter 12, please. We'll read a few verses here.

"And now a great sign appeared," verse 1, "a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland," that means a crown, a *stephanos*, "with 12 stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labor and pain to give birth." This woman is great with child. "And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great fiery red dragon having seven heads," how many heads? "seven heads and ten horns," how many horns? "and seven crowns on his heads.

His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and he threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she bore a male child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God that they should feed her there 1,260 days fed in the wilderness."

We're going to talk about that and we're going to go back to the Bible in just a moment. So the answer: Revelation chapter 12, what does it say about this woman? It says a "woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and on her head a garland of 12 stars being with child, she cried out in labor. She's going through labor pains and in pain to give birth and she bears a male child who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron." Who do you think that is?

That male child is Jesus the Christ. He is caught up to God's throne. We know Jesus ascended to heaven. Who is the woman? What does a woman represent? In the Bible, when it talks about this woman, she represents God's bride. This woman who's great with child is a symbol of a church. What is she wearing? She's clothed with the sun. That's the light of God's truth that you find in the New Testament.

Standing on the moon. Does the moon give light at night? Does a moon have light of its own or does the moon reflect the light of the sun that will rise? It is the Old Testament reflecting the light of the Sun of Righteousness who would arise with healing in His wings. The New Testament church stands on the foundation of the promises of God in the Old Testament. Above her head, above the head is a symbol of leadership. You've got the 12 stars and that represents the 12 tribes in the Old Testament.

You've got the 12 apostles in the New Testament. You even had the 12 princes of Moses leading Israel, the 12 judges of Israel in the Book of Judges. Twelve, a symbol of leadership. This is God's church. She is clothed with sun, moon, stars. Who made the sun? Who made the moon? Look at Genesis. Who made the stars? This is God's light. The Bible says to the bride, "You are the light of the world. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

So this woman represents the true church. How do we know that? You read in Jeremiah 6:2, God's church is symbolized by woman: "I have likened the daughter of Zion to a lovely and a delicate woman." The sun representing the light of Jesus, Psalm 84, Malachi 4:2, the moon represents the promises and the history of the Old Testament which the church was built on. The stars above her head symbolize the leadership of the church. You read about the stars there in Revelation chapter 1 which were the ministers of the church; it was leadership.

The one who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron, this man-child is Jesus. Amen? And the dragon wants to devour the man-child as soon as it's born. Now you see this woman, but she is juxtaposed against a different woman that you find in Revelation 17. Okay, back to our Bibles. Go in your Bible to Revelation chapter 17. We're going to start with verse 3 and you'll find that these two women are actually opposites. This woman exists in the world today, too.

Revelation 17, start with verse 3: "So he, the angel, carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet colored beast that was full of names of blasphemy, having," how many heads? "seven heads and," how many horns? "ten horns." Now when was the last time you saw a beast with seven heads and ten horns? They're not that common, are they? How many would agree this is the same beast? By the way, it appears in Revelation 13, too.

This beast who is trying to destroy the woman in Revelation 12 is in cooperation with the woman in Revelation 17. What is a woman? A church. You've got the one woman clothed with God's light, but this woman, it says she's "arrayed," this is verse 4, "purple, scarlet, adorned with gold, precious stones, pearls," all things you would find on earth that can be man-made.

"Having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication." And if you have any doubt about this woman, she's got on her forehead—people have things in their foreheads in Revelation—she's got this stamp: "Mystery Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots." She's got daughters that have come out of her, "and of abominations of the earth," and the woman is drunken with the blood of the saints. So this is the wrong woman.

You got these two women. So a woman represents what? Can we use the Bible and Bible prophecy to try and find out if God has a people in the world today? Is the Bible pretty clear there is the true woman of light and there is a counterfeit? One is riding with the beast; the other's being persecuted by the beast. Does it matter what church you're in? You don't want to be with that woman in Babylon because you read Revelation chapter 18, 19, it says Babylon is going to be destroyed.

That harkens back to the Tower of Babel, man-made worship that was confused and cursed by God there in Genesis chapter 11. These are the keys to understanding these things. It says a "woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls." So you've got this woman riding a beast in Revelation 17. This beast is a great persecuting power that we find if we go from chapter 12 to chapter 13, you're going to see that beast appears again.

Number two, who is the great red dragon and what does he try to do? Now we're going back to chapter 12: "That great dragon was cast out called the serpent of old, called what? the Devil and Satan." So it's saying that the devil is manipulating this power, this beast. Now when you read in Isaiah 14, it describes the devil, but it uses the king of Tyre. If you look in Ezekiel 28, it talks about the devil, but he's working through the king of Babylon.

When you read Revelation 12, it talks about the devil, but he's operating through the kingdom of pagan Rome. It says the dragon tries to "devour the man-child as soon as he is born. The dragon stood before the woman who's ready to give birth to devour her child as soon as it was born." So this dragon is an enemy of Christ, wants to destroy Christ. There are several times in Bible history when the devil has tried to stop the Savior from coming.

The devil knew that the Messiah would come. He knew the incarnation would happen; he didn't know exactly when. When the children of Israel were in Egypt, he thought now would be the time when God would send the Savior, so what did he do? The dragon tried to destroy all the male baby boys. Do you remember the Pharaoh was telling them to throw all the baby boys to the crocodiles in the Nile River? But Moses is spared; one is spared. He becomes a savior.

Do you know back during the time of Athaliah, if you know your Bible, if you get to 2 Kings, it tells about a wicked queen, she's the daughter of Jezebel, another wicked queen? By the way, in the time of Jezebel and Athaliah, there is a three-and-a-half-year period, 1,260 days, just like Revelation. Her son, Ahaziah, is killed in battle by Jehu. She does not want one of the sons of David to rule. Athaliah is a pagan; her mother Jezebel's a pagan. She wants to be queen. Well, among the Jews, they had kings; they didn't have queens.

The men ruled. So but she wants to be queen, so she kills all of the babies of David, the descendants of David. She kills all of her grandchildren. Talk about cold-blooded. But one escapes; his name is Joash. He ends up being in the temple of God; he comes out of the temple of God when he's seven years old. They blow the trumpets, they coronate him king, she is destroyed. Something like when Jesus, our Savior, the son of David, Christ, is going to come from the heavenly temple, the trumpets will blow, the people will rejoice, and Babylon's destroyed.

What you see happening in the Bible is going to be repeated in the future. This is what Revelation is talking about. So the devil under Herod, using the Roman power, how many remember when Herod sent his soldiers to Bethlehem? They said, "Well, there's a baby, he's a new king of the Jews." You know what Herod's official title was? The Romans gave him the title "King of the Jews."

So when the wise men come into Jerusalem, they said, "Where is he that is born King of the Jews?" and Herod said, "What did you say?" He said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I'd like to know about when you find him, tell me when you find him, I would like to worship him, too." He wanted to kill him. The devil was working, the dragon through pagan Rome. Then later you find the devil starts working through the church papal Rome during the Dark Ages.

Number three, what happens after Satan fails to destroy Jesus? Did the devil try to destroy Jesus on the cross? Did he try to keep Him in the tomb? Could the devil keep Him in the tomb? Did Christ ascend to heaven? Now the devil cannot hurt Jesus anymore, can he? He's out of his reach. So what does the devil do now? It says her "child was caught up to God and His throne." As the disciples watch in Acts chapter 1, Jesus ascended and he's caught up in a cloud of angels.

The Bible said that as he left, he will come. Amen? He's coming in the clouds with all of the angels of heaven. But in the meantime, the devil now vents his fury; the devil wants to hurt Jesus by hurting what Jesus loves. If you want to hurt somebody, you don't just torture them, but torture their child in front of them. I remember once when one of our boys was 18 months old, he had spinal meningitis. They didn't know, so they had to do a test; it's called a spinal tap.

Because we had come to the doctor off hours, they had an intern there that was in training. They call it practicing medicine. We watched as the hospital staff held down our beautiful 18-month baby boy and he tried to push the needle into his spine and find the right spot to drain out spinal fluid. Our little boy, they can't numb them at the time, and our little boy's looking up with his eyes wild with tears, he's going, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, why are you letting them hurt me?"

It broke my heart. I would have traded places with him just like that. The devil knows that Jesus loves us. He wants to hurt Jesus by hurting His people. That's why he persecutes the church. After Jesus is caught up to heaven, what does Satan do to the church? "When the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the child." After Christ ascended to heaven, some of the most severe persecution came upon the church.

How many have heard the stories of what Nero and Diocletian and the different Roman emperors did to the Christians in the Colosseum? It's not just a fable; they were fed to wild beasts. Nero smeared pitch on the Christians and lit them on fire alive to light his gardens as they writhed in pain. It was terrible. Why do you think the catacombs are under Rome? Because they had to go underground, so to speak.

It was called *religio illicita*. Even in the Bible, you can see where Paul and the Jews had been expelled from Rome by the Emperor. See, the Roman Empire had tolerated many religions as long as you still held up the Roman religion as supreme, but when the Christians said, "No, we're not going to offer incense to your pagan gods," they outlawed the religion. It became *religio illicita*. That's why Paul says it may be better if you don't get married and have a family right now because of the persecution is so intense.

So the devil tried to destroy the church with Plan A. Plan A was annihilation, extermination, genocide. Feed them to the lions, kill them off in the mines, work them to death, crucify them. When Nero burned Rome, he blamed it on the Christians. Nero burned Rome because he didn't like the wooden tenements; he wanted marble structures and he thought, "I got to get rid of all these poor people."

He set the city on fire, watched it burn, played his fiddle; you've heard the story. When they were outraged, he said the Christians did it. He said, "By the way, you know the Christians are living underground and they're cannibals? They believe in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus. They're cannibals," and they had terrible propaganda against Christians. The Christians experienced a terrible persecution.

Not only that, during this time, the Jews rebelled against the Romans, and people saw Christianity and Judaism, they kept the same Sabbath, they worshiped the same God, they read the same Bible, they saw them as sort of the same thing. So Judaism and Christianity were both outlawed, and Christians and Jews were being exterminated in mass, destroyed, enslaved, property taken away, scattered around the empire.

But you know what happened? The seed of Christianity is the blood of the martyrs. The more they mowed them down, the more they grew because the pagans would come to the Colosseum and they'd watch these Christians before they're being fed to wild animals calmly pray. They had expressions of peace and joy. They looked like they were on their way to a wedding because they knew their next conscious thought was the resurrection and seeing the Lord, and they said, "Why are they so peaceful? Why are they so brave?"

And they started asking questions, and Christianity kept spreading. The devil said, "This is not working." So he went to Plan B, which was, if you can't destroy them from the outside, destroy them from the inside. He legalized Christianity and he commingled paganism and Christianity. Constantine ostensibly legalized Christianity and he said, "Yeah, well my mother has converted to Christianity so I can't kill them off, they're really not hurting anybody," and all of a sudden, it became very vogue to be a Christian.

Jesus came into our world for three reasons. First of all, he came as our example, to live a life that we might follow his steps. He came to show us the Father; he said, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." Then he came as our sacrifice; he died on the cross as a substitute for all our sins. But we must come to him; we repent of our sins, we confess, he'll receive us with loving arms. Why don't you ask him now?

Doug Batchelor: Hi friends, I trust you've been blessed by what you're watching. If you want to be doubly blessed, then you're going to want to get the Prophecy Odyssey study guides that go along with these presentations. There are 15 study guides, they're beautifully illustrated, and they will greatly enhance your Bible comprehension. So if you'd like to get them, simply follow the instructions that you see on the screen. You will be glad you did.

Guest (Male): Have you ever wondered why there are so many different church denominations? You might be surprised to learn that God foretold this would happen in prophecy. To learn more about it, make sure and request your free copy of *The Bride of Christ*. This fascinating study guide is going to show you the Bible prophecies that answer this important question. To get your free copy, simply follow the instructions on your screen.

What you've seen just now is only part one in this presentation. Make sure and join us for part two in our next broadcast for some of the most important points on this topic and to complete the corresponding study guide. Until then, God bless.

This presentation was brought to you by the Friends of the Amazing Facts Ministry.