The Revelation of Jesus Christ
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are permitted by God to exercise power, until, because of their failure, they will crumble and go to pieces. "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth." The stars represent the leaders of the people. You will recall the refer ence to the seven stars, in the first chapter of Revelation. There they represent the messengers of the church. In the twelfth chapter of Daniel. we are told that "they that turn many to righteousness ... shall shine ... as the stars for ever and ever.". In the day when the sixth seal is opened, the stars will be hurled from their places. In that day, when the church has been translated, there will be many a Protestant and many a Romanist leader who will be likened unto the stars of the ecclesiastical heavens; but when the time of upheaval come~, those stars will fall. Those leaders will be turned out of their places of leadership. In the French Revolution we have an example of condi tions similar to those which will prevail at the time the Anti christ takes his throne. The circumstances surrounding the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte are a very good illustra tion of those happenings which are set forth in symbolical form in the sixth chapter of Revelation, beginning with the twelfth verse, which portrays the opening of the sixth seal. When France was turned into a chaotic state, the ungodly religious leaders were cast out. The streets of Paris ran like a river with human blood, and it looked as though govern ment, human and divine, had ceased. When things were at their worst there arose a little man, born in Corsica, who was just the one needed for an hour like that. Napoleon Bonaparte welded the country together, and brought out of chaos the greatest European empire tha.t has been seen since the days of the Roman Empire. He was "the man of the hour." So it will be when the happenings described under the sixth seal take place. There will be a "man of the hour" who will step in and bring out of the chaotic condition which exists a ten-toed kingdom. Those nations that were part of the Roman Empire, as it originally existed, will be part of his kingdom. He will have under his leadership men like Lenin, Trotsky, Mussolini, and Hitler. And that man will be the Antichrist.
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