Last study, we ended with a little peek into Rev 13. This week, we’ll be diving right in and unpacking some of this amazing vision. And I can promise that even though it’s in the N.T., and written hundreds of years after the subject of our last studies in Daniel, we’ll recognize some similarities. But before we dive in, we need to establish some things that will help us as we read Revelation. Some tools, to give us clarity. 

The most important thing for us to know and keep in mind when we study the book of Revelation is that there are some obstacles to overcome in our understanding of this Book. Kinda like locks designed to keep out trespassers. But these obstacles are also the very keys that open the locks and allow the Holy Spirit to reveal the Truth to us.

1- It’s written in symbolic imagery, so if we try to view it with a literal interpretation, we can easily lose sight of what’s being revealed, which can then lead us into a misunderstanding.

2- It’s written in circular time, not linear, which means that it moves from what HAS happened in the past, to what IS happening in the present, to what WILL happen in the future, and then back again, and sometimes even simultaneously. And remember, some of the things that are in John’s future as he wrote the book, are in our past as we read the book.

3- It’s written in parallel prophecy form, meaning a large percentage of the Book of Revelation is really a sort of repeat of previous prophecies given in other books of the Bible, but with more detail. The same way that Daniel interpreted a dream about a statue, then had a dream about 4 beasts, then had another dream about a goat and a ram, and all those were about the same subject. They were parallel prophecies.

Let’s look at some examples really quick… 

Here’s another easy example to see. Right at the beginning of the Book, we’re told that John was instructed to write what WAS, what IS, and what IS TO COME. Not necessarily in that order. 

We can see the symbolic imagery, with the olive trees and the lampstands. And yes, even those numbers, 1260 days, are symbolic and prophetic. We’ll get to that… in the future. But for now…

We can see the circular time, with how Rev 11 reaches right back to the end of Zech 4, after Rev chapter 1 reached to the beginning of Zech 4.

We can see the parallelism with the visions being about the same subject matter, but from slightly different perspectives, like there’s two different people describing the same thing. Probably because that’s exactly what happened.

Now, regarding this particular part of the vision, there’s a lot of conjecture on who these two witnesses are, and the way we see them often depends on how we’ve been taught. We won’t get into that in this study, but let’s expand our view just a little and suggest that instead of trying to figure out WHO the two witnesses are, we instead maybe shift our perspective and consider WHAT the witnesses are.

Maybe they aren’t people at all, just like those horns in the other prophecies weren’t really horns, maybe these 2 olive trees that grow olives, that produce oil and these 2 Lampstands that produce light from that same oil, are something else. Maybe these 2 witnesses and 2 testifiers of God’s Word are something that we haven’t unraveled just yet.

Ok, we’ve got the keys and we’ve laid the foundation, now let’s jump to the “main course” of this study… 

There’re a few things that make Rev difficult to understand, even with the 3 keys.

For one, the perspective keeps changing. For some verses, John’s perspective will be from his present, looking forward into the future, and for other verses he’ll be placed in the perspective of the future and looking back into the past. It could be the same event or subject, but from different angles of time. That’s the circular time we learned about.

Another difficulty is that the appearance of the subject keeps changing. The same way that the subject of the statue in Daniel 2 changed into 4 beasts in Daniel 7. That’s those parallel prophecies. Rev has many examples that are parallel, not only with other prophecies in the Bible, but with prophecies in the book of Rev itself. The same subject, but a different appearance.

A big obstacle that I didn’t mention before, is history. That’s because it’s more of a magnifying glass than a key. As we’ve seen, history can help us understand prophecy much better. But that’s only when the history of a subject is able to be seen. When reading Rev, sometimes we’re missing the history that would give us better vision. Not because we overlooked it, but because it just isn’t there, at least not anymore.

For instance, if the Bible were to mention secret societies in prophecy, (and I’m not saying it does specifically), then it would be very difficult to see because our historical point of reference would be hidden. However, if we’re good students and we diligently seek, Christ told us we would find. He has still given us enough clues in history and His Word to point us in the right direction, even if the enemy hid it from us.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s try to unravel these 2 verses. From our last studies, we learned that the Roman empire eventually split in two, then the Western division split again into 10 kingdoms. The beginnings of that split happened in the year 330 AD, when Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the empire to a city in the East called Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople. He had grown tired of the tension between the pagans and the newly converted Christians. So, like a sword cutting through a melon, he severed the power from Rome, the once mighty city and capital of the entire world and took all his authority and prestige with him. From that point on, Pagan Rome’s days were numbered. 

After that move, Rome as a city and empire began to steadily decline. It lost more and more power, while Constantinople grew more and more powerful, eventually becoming the Byzantine Empire. Rome had lost its political power and was all but dead. Then something amazing happened. As it died politically, it was resurrected religiously. As we learned in previous studies, the East had all the political and military power, but the West kept a stranglehold on the religious power, eventually getting so powerful, that even the Byzantine Emperor, and every monarch after, had to seek the approval of the Bishop of Rome to get married, and even recognize him as “The vicar of Christ on earth”. That’s ‘Papal Rome, or “The Pope’s Rome”. After a time, with no real threat to Rome’s religious power, it again gained political power. By the time the Byzantine Empire in the East fell, Papal Rome in the West was once again in power, but now, it was both political and religious.

We’ll skip ahead a few verses in this study because it’s important for us to see something here, but rest assured, we’ll come back to verses 5-10 next study, because we need to learn about those 42 months mentioned in verse 5. But first let’s jump to verse 13…

This is a cicada. We call them locusts in the south. Something interesting about them is that some species can spend 17 years in the ground as a nymph. After hatching and shedding 5 times over 17 years, they emerge from the earth and transform into something completely different looking, but still the same. The same purpose, but a different appearance. 

Keeping that cicada’s life cycle in mind, imagine John seeing this first beast coming from the sea, with the appearance of fierce predators mashed together. It receives a deadly wound and dies, then miraculously it’s healed and “raised from the grave,” emerging from the earth as a different beast. 

Same purpose, different appearance. It resembles a lamb, but it speaks with the forked tongue of the dragon, full of false fire and lying wonders. It has all the authority of the first beast, and it deceives the world into worshipping the first beast, without them even realizing it. 

That’s the definition of deceived. We are intentionally misled into doing or believing something wrong, without realizing it’s wrong. Someone has deceived us. And maybe that someone was deceived by someone else who was also deceived, all the way back to the father of lies, the dragon.

So, here’s the other suggestion of how to view this part of the prophecy: Maybe the first beast was the “final form” of what the dragon had hatched all the way back in Nimrod’s Babylon. That’s why it has the characteristics and power of all those other empires, so that we can recognize it. And the apex of this “final form” was Pagan Rome. When Christ came to set the captives free, the dragon tried to stamp out Christianity from the outside with rulers like Nero, but that didn’t work. When Constantine converted to Christianity, it struck a death blow to Pagan Rome, but not the power behind it. So, the dragon allowed that form to die and took a new form that resembled the Lamb of God. And if we aren’t paying close attention, even we can be fooled. 

Did you know that a lamb doesn’t have horns. A sheep does, but a lamb, (which is a baby sheep) doesn’t. In fact, the Greek word used here is found 30 times in the whole N.T., and all of them, except for 2, refer directly to Christ as the Lamb of God. One of those 2 refers to His followers as lambs, so it still relates to Christ. That leaves us this strange verse in Rev 13:11. People reading this verse back then, would have noticed the oddity of a baby lamb with horns, but, (unless we’re sheep farmers), in our day and age we can read right past that and never consider those two horns of power on that baby lamb.

To bring it all back together, maybe this vision is showing us the “death” of Pagan Rome, with all its fierce heads and horns, and the “birth” of Papal Rome with the appearance of the Lamb of God. 

With the two horns of political and religious power, and the forked tongue of the dragon, it deceives the whole world into looking back at the “shell” of Pagan Rome (like that locust shell) and accepting it as master, even though from this point on in the chapter, that first beast is only an image of its former self.