Expert: Marvin Howard - 11/30/2004

Question
Please give me more information on the prophecy of Rev. 12:6.  Pope John II "Lord of church" etc.
Where can I find mors information. Very interesting.

Keep up the good work.

Answer
Hi!

Ken, I have long known of this declaration of the pope. You see, I am 42 now, and I have known this since I was 14. I had to search a while. I am now disabled, and homebound; everything I ever learned, from outside of the Bible, must now have new sources found. This declaration was first stated by Emporer Justinian, but was rapidly accepted by catholicism. It has just been so long since I looked it up (and that from books). Thank you for making me study it again, and prove it once more.

See these sites for evidence of this declaration:

http://www.glenacres.org/Columns/Documents/NT293HistoryTimeline.htm

and

http://www.geocities.com/preacherman_1962/ChurchHistory.html

Justinian actually made this claim for the papacy in 533. The first chart I gave you only has things done by century, not by actual year. It appears they believed ballparking was good enough, not realizing this was the fulfillment of prophecy.

I apologize for the size of the second chart. It is someone else's work which I merely reformatted for web publication. There is so much information contained therein, to make it smaller would make it illegible. If you have need to see it all laid out, save the image to a disc or CD and take it to Kinko's. They will print it out for you for about 2 to 3 dollars.

The context of the prophecy is Satan's standing by to devour Christ as soon as He was born. However, He was taken up to God's throne. Here is the verse of the prophecy:

Revelation 12:6, "And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days."

In 1793, the church came out of hiding in the form of the "Restoration Movement." This movement was begun by many people at the same time, all independantly from each other. I plainly see the hand of God at work here. In all, I think I remember correctly, there were more than 10 different people involved in this; the most famous of these were Thomas Campbell, Alexander Campbell, and Barton W. Stone. This happened in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and other states. In fact, most all of these men were in different denominations before they left them to become Christians. I'll stress it again: they all did the same thing within just a few months of each other, not knowing others were doing the same thing. Eventually these men came to learn of each other's going back to the Bible, and the Bible alone, as the source of their authority, rejecting all of the added creeds of men, and restoring the many deletions removed over the centuries. This includes using the Greek text, the definitions of the era in which it was written, and once again placing proper grammar so things aren't inadvertantly taken out of context. They didn't create a new denomination. They didn't start a new church or religion. They just went back to first century Christianity, and brought it forward. Many years later, it has been proven that there were a small number of Christians who maintained the practice of first century Christianity despite persecution from catholicism and her daughters.

Notice this is exactly 1260 years after someone declared they took Christ's place as head of the church. The churches of Christ are the fulfillment of this prophecy. Catholicism and the protestant denominations are the fulfillment of another: "The Mother of Harlots" and her daughters (since protestantism is born from catholicism, and thus keeps many of her practices while changing a few), the Harlots themselves.

To date, there are now over 2,000,000 Christians (instead of the few hundred that previously existed at any one time during the persecution) out of the nearly 6,000,000,000 inhabitants of the earth (c.f., Matthew 7:13-14). We have a lot of work left to do. The field is ripe for the harvest.

I have done a further short article on the true identity of the papacy for last week's church bulletin. If you are interested, and have Microsoft Word, it may be viewed at:

http://www.geocities.com/preacherman_1962/Bulletins/Oracle1_10.doc

If you don't have Word, let me know. I will try to put it in another format. I hope this is the information for which you are seeking.

In His Service,
Marvin Howard
preacherman_1962@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/preacherman_1962