1. Isn't this true: We live in a world where 9-1-1 has become the most popular phone number around?
   1. People are living in a state of panic, which is why they dial 9-1-1 for everything!
      1. Here in the United States 9-1-1 are the three digits you can dial anywhere in the country to get immediate emergency service.
      2. Though the numbers aren't the same, nearly every nation on earth has this emergency dailing system.
         1. Illus: When I was in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, the emergency numbers on my hotel telephone were 92 (police), 93 (fire) and 94 (medical).
         2. Illus: In Europe--England--Japan---get 911 numbers from translators and list here and on screen.
   2. Illus: The Los Angeles Times recently reported on what's been happening with the 911 system in that county now that the law requires them to treat every call as an emergency.
      1. Prior to 1987 police dispatchers were allowed to decide whether or not the phone call constituted a genuine emergency or crisis.
      2. If they felt it was NOT an emergency, they would classify the call as a "no send."
      3. But after a lawsuit over a tragic mistake in 1987, the LA law requires all calls to be treated as emergencies.
      4. The LA Times ran a list of "no sends" that the emergency crews recently had to respond to because of the law:
         1. 18-year-old male can't get rest at home, wants ride to hospital.
         2. Man in blue cowboy hat and yellow pants has swollen feet.
         3. 61-year-old woman is worried because her stomach is not growling.
         4. Person answered "No" to question, "Are you conscious?" (The question actually is more intriguing than the answer!)
         5. "This guy is inside Humphrey Medical Center [a large hospital in LA]" reports the dispatcher. "Says the people inside are not helping him fast enough, so he called 911." (A rather original idea for the next time the nurse takes too long to answer your call button in the hospital!)
      5. Unbelievable emergency calls!
   3. And yet it makes you wonder--have we come to the 9-1-1 hour of human history--that time just before Jesus Christ returns to this earth--that predicted time when it seems the entire planet will be dialing 911 in desperate panic over and over again!
      1. Any thinking man or woman senses deep within the mind that in fact we have come to that hour of history!
      2. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a religious fanatic to conclude that this is the 911 hour of humanity!
   4. The irrefutable fact of life around this planet these days is that we all live on a planet terrorized by the enemy of the universe.
      1. For that reason during the NeXt Millennium Seminar we have turned to the dusty Apocalypse to find there the divine expose of Lucifer's final and desperate strategy to sweep this entire planet into his black bastion.
      2. Tonight join me in considering for a moment history's final 911 call before the return of the King, Christ Jesus.
      3. What is so unsettling is the realization that what you're about to read is already in alignment.
      4. All that remains is for someone to dial the numbers.
2. Examine with me the prophecy of the three frogs!
   1. Open your Bible to its last book, the Apocalypse, and read these startling cryptic words in Revelation 16:13, 14 (p 1185).
      1. Three foulish, froggish spirits, one crawling out of each of the mouths of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet.
      2. And, as Revelation 16:15 notes ("See, I am coming like a thief!"), all of it just before the return of Christ.
      3. What under heaven is going on now!
   2. One thing is for certain: In this three-fold end-time union, we have a new trinity--a new dark triumvirate.
      1. And who should be at all surprised? For we remember that Lucifer, the fallen angelic rebel, who here again is symbolized by a dragon, has always hungered to be like God.
      2. Failing to usurp the divine throne in heaven and getting himself expelled, did you think for a moment that he would forget his dream here on earth?
      3. Not on your life, or his! Remember his threat in Isaiah 14? "I will make myself like the Most High" (Isaiah 14:12).
      4. So I, too, shall have my trinity: the dragon, the beast and the false prophet.
      5. Thus, with his own fallen mind Lucifer snares two other end-time powers to join with himself into a trinity, a demonic trinity.
   3. And who are these other two powers?
      1. The beast that John writes of is no stranger to us in the NeXt Millennium Seminar--remember the first beast power of Revelation 13's first ten verses?
      2. The internal evidence is irrefutable, as we established earlier, that this beast power is a religio-political power that exercises mighty dominance during the history of the Christian Church all through the Dark and Middle Ages.
      3. Over twelve hundred years of a domination that is suddenly and mysteriously ended when in the apocalyptic scenario this religio-political power becomes wounded, taken captive, and nearly disappears from history.
      4. But then, just as mysteriously, its mortal wound is healed, and this beast power reclaims geo-religio-political dominance on the earth.
      5. There is only one power throughout the history of Christendom that can possibly match this apocalyptic description: the Roman papacy.
      6. But again I must add the critical caveat and disclaimer. John is describing a power and not a person, an institution and not an individual, a system and not a soul.
      7. Illus: A few years ago I had the privilege of baptizing a Roman Catholic businessman, who like millions of other Catholics has lived as a sincere Christian follower of God.
      8. There is not a single human being that matches this apocalyptic description, but there is an institution that does.
      9. Fifty million martyrs during the dark and Middle Ages are a mute testimony to a powerful institution that will not tolerate very long consciences that choose to disregard her authority.
      10. And she is on the rise again with breath-taking rapidity.
      11. Illus: Consider the dispatch from London's Sunday Telegraph:

          Europe's new emperor? With European 'federalism' on the agenda of both Western and Eastern governments, speculations are abroad as to who may become the political leader of the united European Community. A profile in the 'Sunday Comment' of The Sunday Telegraph on John Paul II is suggesting that he is the best choice in the new Holy European Empire. The article speaks of the increasing role of the Roman Catholic political power since the fall of Napoleon and even since the counter Reformation. The moral authority of the papacy becomes the apparent winner of the day. 'If European federalism triumphs, the EC will indeed be an empire. It will lack an emperor; but it will have the Pope. It is difficult not to think that Wojtyla realizes this,' The Sunday Telegraph suggests. (Light magazine)

   4. But there are three powers in this new end-time trinity. The dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. The dragon and the beast we know, but who is this false prophet?
      1. We have not encountered him yet in the Apocalypse.
      2. However, a quick check reveals beyond question who this power is.
      3. Notice how Revelation 19:20 (p 1188) speaks of this new trinity's destruction at the return of Christ--read.
      4. Signs in the presence of the first beast?
      5. That rings an apocalyptic bell, for did we not read such a description in chapter 13, too? Revelation 13:13,14 (p 1183).
      6. Put the two texts together, it is clear that the false prophet is but another appellation for the second beast of chapter 13.
      7. And who is the second beast?
      8. Again, as our previous chapters have noted, it is that power that sprang up in human history at the very time the first beast was wounded in 1798, when its pope was taken captive by Napoleon.
      9. According to that prophecy, this second power born in the late 1700's far away from the crossroads of Europe would one day enjoy sole, global superpower status.
      10. Born in the late 1700's, far away from Europe, and a global superpower in the end--there is only one power on earth that matches this apocalyptic description. And that is the United States of America.
   5. And it must be noted again that the apocalyptic sign is vitally significant that both powers would achieve their global dominance at the same time; i.e., they will peak together at the end of time.
      1. And according to the prophecy, the second power will become the key player in leading the entire earth to worship the first beast power.
      2. Illus: Enter now the investigative research of Carl Berstein, the famed reporter who first broke the story of the Watergate cover-up during the Nixon administration.
      3. Berstein has recently published the book, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, that carefully details what the incredible story he first broke in TIME magazine back in 1992.
      4. In its cover story and title is the sobering vindication of this apocalyptic prophecy: "Holy Alliance" the bold title proclaims. Subtitle: "How Reagan and the Pope conspired to assist Poland's Solidarity movement and hasten the demise of Communism: An Investigative Report."
      5. For the first time the nation and world have learned, through Berstein's investigative reporting, that in a private meeting in the Vatican Library on Monday, June 7, 1982, "Reagan and the Pope agreed to undertake a clandestine campaign to hasten the dissolution of the Communist empire" (p. 28).
      6. Their strategy was to work through the cooperative efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Roman Catholic Church, behind the front of the Solidarity labor union.
      7. They intended to drive a dagger into the belly of the Bear, and through the collapse of communism in Poland achieve the demise of communism in the world.
      8. Both leaders knew that communism stood between them and their global domination.
      9. And so they joined forces.
      10. Illus: Listen to how Richard Allen, then Reagan's first National Security Adviser, described this new union: "'This was one of the great secret alliances of all time.'" (p. 28)
      11. Oh no, Mr. Allen, it was no secret at all.
      12. Nineteen hundred years earlier God sent an apocalyptic prophecy that predicted these two self-same powers would form an end-time "holy alliance"--the very title the TIME editors chose for their investigative report.
      13. Allen further described the bond of unity the pope and the president shared, "'a unity of spiritual view and a unity of vision on the Soviet empire: that right or correctness would ultimately prevail in the divine plan'" (p. 30).
      14. Prevailing in the divine plan? It would better be put, prevailing in the divine prophecy!
      15. A holy alliance that collaborated the shattering of history's headlines. "Step by reluctant step, the Soviets and the communist government of Poland bowed to the moral, economic and political pressure imposed by the Pope and the President" (p. 35).
      16. Did you catch that? The moral and economic and political pressure imposed by these two global superpowers . . . why it is as if someone were reading off the cue sheets of Revelation 13!
      17. "Holy Alliance," the prestigious international news weekly calls it!
      18. And who can be surprised? What we are witnessing today in that uncovered secret is the breath-taking unfolding of what Jesus through John declared would be a sign of the impending end.
3. But in the end, chapter 16 declares, there will be a three-fold union, not simply a two-fold holy alliance. And so enter now the third partner, the nether world, the gray and black regions of the demonic dragon.
   1. New Age? No, a very, very Old Age, an age-old deception called spiritism or spiritualism.
      1. The pagan cultures of history have been riddled with demonic infiltration.
      2. But alas, the Christian culture of an end-time world will likewise become possessed.
      3. And it is through the third partner that the kings of the world, the great cultures of humankind, will at last be united.
   2. Illus: I received a very informative paper from an economics professor, Charles Stokes, after I began writing a book on this apocalyptic prophecy.
      1. He reminded me that the eastern half of this globe must figure into the Apocalypse somewhere.
      2. America and Rome are not the only playing fields for the dragon's last stand.
      3. Eastern religions must emerge in the apocalyptic plot somewhere.
      4. And of course, he is right.
   3. And here is the somewhere--the New-Age Old-Age somewhere of eastern mysticism, animism, and spiritism.
      1. Here is where in the apocalyptic scenario there is a tri-fold union.
      2. And in the end paganism and Christianity are both taken captive by the dragon of demonism.
      3. Reread Revelation 16:13,14 (1185).
   4. Christianity taken captive by demonism? Impossible! you say. Consider the mounting evidence carefully.
   5. Illus: First consider this piece of history.
      1. In the early years of western civilization, the high priest of a pagan cultus adopted a title that became a symbol of his contact with the nether world.
      2. It was a simple title and it simply meant: "The Greatest Bridge Builder."
      3. In Latin "greatest" is maximus, and "bridge" is pons or pontis and "builder" comes from factio, which means "I make."
      4. The Greatest Bridge Builder, or in Latin, Pontifex Maximus.
      5. In 375 A.D., the Christian emperor, Gratian, refused the pagan vestments and pagan title that Roman emperors had worn as head of the pagan cultus of the empire.
      6. But when Gratian refused the title, the bishop of Rome decided to choose it as a symbol of his own ecclesiastical dignity and status.
      7. So it is that a title born of the nether world, The Greatest Bridge Builder, is still claimed by the Bishop of Rome, Pontifex Maximus.
      8. And very much a bridge-builder has this apocalyptic power proven to be!
   6. Illus: Come with me to a crowded village chapel. It's 5:40 p.m. in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia.
      1. What you're about to witness has been taking place daily since June 24, 1981.
      2. All eyes are focused on the two young women kneeling in the choir loft, eyes transfixed on a blank wall, lips moving in silent prayer.
      3. Finally they arise and emerge, "with a new message from Our Lady of Medjugorje urging a deeper devotion to her Son and closer attention to peace, prayers and penance" (US News and World Report)
      4. What has just transpired? What is it that has drawn eleven million pilgrims (many from the United States, Canada, and Australia) to this obscure village in Yugoslavia?
      5. It is what is now being called a "Marian Apparition."
      6. The two women believe that Mary, the mother of Christ, appears to them every day at that time in that place, with a message for the world.
      7. Father Guiseppe Besutti, professor at Rome's Pontifical Marianum School, says the church cannot afford to simply ignore the apparitions. After all, he says, "The church itself is founded on an apparition--that of Christ resurrected" (Ibid).
      8. The Vatican itself acknowledges a "surprising increase" in recent years of claims of presumed apparitions, visions and messages associated with Mary.
      9. French theologian, Rene Laurentin, widely recognized as an expert in Marian phenomena, counts more than two hundred such events since 1930 (interestingly enough, beginning with the year after the healing of the wound of Catholicism in 1929).
   7. What's going on? Lubbock, Texas; Ambridge, Pennsylvania; Lourdes, France; Fatima, Portugal; Guadalupe, Mexico.
      1. Illus: Over the years I've been keeping a growing file of these apparitions-- go through news clippings in file.
      2. But then, should we be surprised, when Lucifer's primeval lie to Eve in the Garden was, "You will not die" (Genesis 3:4)?
      3. You don't die--he hissed--when you die: you go to heaven or to hell or to purgatory; but you don't go to sleep like the Bible teaches.
      4. It has been Lucifer's lie from the very pristine beginning.
      5. The immortality of the human soul, for which there is not a contextual shred of evidence in the entire Scriptures.
      6. It simply is a lie.
      7. And Lucifer knows it.
   8. Then what is going on? "These are spirits of demons, performing signs" (Revelation 16:14) is what we just read.
      1. There is a power on earth that is indeed the greatest bridge builder of all time between the dark nether world and the Christian Church.
      2. And it is neither coincidental nor accidental that the world today is experiencing a massive barrage of Marian apparitions, the ghost-like appearances of the Mother of Jesus who keeps sending messages to this planet.
      3. But in the light of these media headlines we must consider from whence come the messages, if the Bible is true when it teaches that when you die you enter the sleep of death and await the resurrection.
      4. If Mary is awaiting the resurrection, from whence come these messages?
      5. Could they come from one whose dark passion has been from the beginning to sweep the entire planet in his fated bastion?
   9. Enter now TIME magazine's cover story several years ago, "Mary: Handmaid or Feminist?" Read a few lines from this cover story and ponder their implication for a moment:

      When he was made a bishop in 1958, John Paul emblazoned a golden M on his coat of arms and chose as his Latin motto "Totus Tuus" (All Yours)--referring to Mary, not Christ. Once he put on St. Peter's ring, John Paul made Mary's unifying power a centerpiece of his papal arsenal. He has visited countless Marian shrines during his globe trotting, and invokes the Madonna's aid in nearly every discourse and prayer that he delivers. He firmly believes that her personal intercession spared his life when he was shot at St. Peter's Square in Rome in 1981; the assassination attempt occurred on May 13, the exact anniversary of the first Fatima apparition [a 1917 "appearance" of Mary to three Portuguese children, the notoriety of which still draws a steady 4.5 million pilgrims a year from around the world to Fatima--I have stood in that sprawling, sloping plaza and watched the devoted on their hands and knees supplicating the Virgin Mother--and again, I do not for a moment question their utter sincerity--even though the Holy Scriptures are clear that Mary sleeps in the grave awaiting the triumphant return and resurrection by her Son Jesus].

      Moreover, John Paul is firmly convinced, as are many others, that Mary brought an end to communism throughout Europe. His faith is rooted in the famed prophecies of Mary at Fatima in 1917. According to Sister Lucia, one of the children who claimed to see her, the Virgin predicted the rise of Soviet totalitarianism before it happened. In a subsequent vision, she directed the Pope and his bishops to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart in order to bring communism to an end.

      According to Lucia, papal attempts to carry out that consecration failed in 1942, '52 and '82. John Paul finally carried out Mary's directive correctly in 1984--and the very next year Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power inaugurated the Soviet collapse. Says Father Robert Fox of the Fatima Family Shrine in Alexandria, S. Dak. [sic]: "The world will recognize in due time that the defeat of communism came at the intercession of the mother of Jesus."

      1. Add to that Malachi Martin's firm contention that while he was convalescing after the assassination attempt, John Paul II experienced "nothing less than a personal communication from Heaven."
      2. "It was in this mode of prayer and this mood of total trust in Mary that John Paul had what has been, as far as is publicly known, his only supernatural vision of things to come. There is no gainsaying that he did have that vision" (The Keys of This Blood, pp. 48, 627).
4. Spirits and apparitions in the heart of Rome. Is it any different in the heart of the United States?
   1. Just ask Hollywood, which has been in the lucrative business now for years of producing dozens and dozens of after-life movies, from "Field of Dreams" to "Ghost"--which alone grossed a half a billion dollars globally in a single year.
      1. One reviewer calls it Hollywood's new fascination with "necrophilic romance."
      2. Lovers who don't really die, they just hang around in thin air!
      3. Funny, funny, and oh, how captivating!
      4. Brilliant, really, if you're the dragon who has dispatched your demonic spirits to deceive the entire world into your falsehood that when you die, you don't really die.
   2. Illus: Listen to Larry Gordon, chief executive of the movie production company Largo Entertainment: "We all want to believe that death isn't so bad". (Time)
      1. Which is precisely what the Serpent hissed in Eden!
      2. As one reviewer put it: "The Grim Reaper and the fires of hell have been slickly supplanted by a blissful feel-good death in the form of reincarnation. Dying is depicted as a transitory state, at worst a move to a new neighborhood" (Ibid).
   3. And yes, I fear that United States Protestantism is being led down the same primrose pathway.
      1. For part of my doctoral studies I attended a seminary on the west coast.
      2. I was invited one evening to sit in on a seminary class called "Signs and Wonders."
      3. The instructor was a popular charismatic pastor and preacher.
      4. The thrust of the class was to encourage supernatural wonders in the parishes of the pastors taking the class, and thus facilitate growth and ministry in those parishes.
      5. When the class ended late that evening, the pastor-professor began to exercise his supernatural gift and began to call out ailments and illnesses that he saw in his mind's eye.
      6. And as he did so, the class began to pray for individuals who raised their hands and said, "Yes, I'm the one with that back pain," or "Yes, I do have a stomach problem," or "Yes, I'm the one you were just shown and I do have that very disease."
      7. Signs and wonders indeed!
      8. It's a billion-dollar television industry now for evangelical Christianity in this land.
      9. Pat Robertson can, in front of the TV cameras, pray a hurricane away from the Carolina coast.
      10. Ernest Angely can heal before your very eyes.
      11. And while skeptical news analysts can attempt to expose fraud or sleight of hand, the fact remains that through the tidal wave of charismatic pentecostalism in this nation today, Americans are being swept into a desperate counterfeit of miracles and tongues and other such supernatural manifestations that like the Marian apparitions are subtly, quietly setting them up for the overpowering final delusion that Lucifer has reserved for this planet.
   4. Protestantism, Catholicism, and spiritism?
      1. Even months ago who would have ever believed it possible for such a silent and secret confederacy?
      2. And yet the very press that reports our daily headlines now chronicles a mysterious global onslaught of apparitions.
      3. The occult, with its slick Madison Avenue New Age front, has already possessed the entertainment industry (television and theater) including the once revered Walt Disney film productions.
      4. Illus: (A quick review of Disney's most recent films will startle you with its unabashed preoccupation with the supernatural and the occult.)
      5. And what about the wildly acclaimed and syndicated horoscope columns in the major newspapers of this nation that apparently even made a believer out one of the former presidents of the United States, whose official itinerary was carefully plotted by an astrologer's consultation with planets and stars!
      6. And what shall be said of Lucifer's subliminal battering of the minds of this nation through the supermarket psychics whose sensational predictions taunt every grocery shopper in this nation?
   5. Are we being set up?
   6. Inescapable is the conclusion that somebody has masterminded a dark strategy to snare an entire civilization, Christian and pagan, Western and Eastern, First World and Third World, educated and illiterate, rich and poor.
      1. A brilliant but dark strategy, a new trinity for a final desperate coalition.
      2. The Apocalypse declares that evidence of such is a unmistakable sign of the impending end.
      3. Has the night come when the three froggish powers of Revelation 16 have stretched their hands across the great gulf of history and have been joined together for the final showdown of the gods, the last coalition on earth?
   7. The more pressing question tonight is, Is there a strategy for survival?
      1. A pulsating piece of the Apocalypse that declares: The end is much nearer than we first thought.
      2. Does it frighten you, scare you?
      3. It doesn't have to, because I found out how to survive the fury of this demonic end-run.
      4. Illus: John saw the survivors and heard their secret in Revelation 7:13, 14 (p 1179).
      5. Who are these survivors?
      6. They will be a people who have learned to daily, fervently dial the 9-1- 1 of the Christ of Calvary.
      7. In fact, so intense is their desire to live for Him that they are described as washing their lives in His life-giving blood.
   8. Has not the time come at last for that very intensity in your life and mine?
      1. To saturate our days and our lives in the crimson of a living, dynamic friendship with the Lord of Calvary, the Lamb of heaven.
      2. The very One Who taught us how to pray, "Our Father, who is in heaven . . . deliver us from evil."
      3. He taught us the quiet and trusting prayer that in God's friendship we have been given all the deliverance we shall ever need.
      4. And no demonic trinity shall ever be able to snatch us from Him Who is our eternity!
   9. Illus: Consider finally the story Llewellyn Wilcox tells in his book, Now Is the Hour.
      1. It is the story of a father and his little girl who have fled into their private air-raid shelter in England during the height of the war.
      2. With the blitzkrieg overhead, it was apparent that the two of them must spend the night in that underground cubicle.
      3. Above them were death and destruction and panic reigned, and the little girl was scared.
      4. Father tucked her into one of the small cots in that shelter, then turned out the light, and lay down on the cot against the other wall.
      5. But the girl couldn't sleep.
      6. The rumble overhead, the strangeness of an underground room she had never been in before, and the black shadows filled her with dreadful fears.
      7. Her mommy was gone.
      8. And she knew that above her in the night many were dying.
      9. There in the darkness she felt desperately lonely.
      10. She didn't cry, but before long she couldn't stand it any longer and she whispered across the room, "Daddy, are you there?"
      11. "Yes, dear, I'm here; now go to sleep," was his quiet response.
      12. She tried to, but she just couldn't.
      13. And before long that tiny voice spoke again, "Daddy, are you still there?
      14. Quick was his answer, "Yes, darling, I'm here. Don't be afraid, just go to sleep. It's all right."
      15. And for some time there was only silence, each lost in his or her own thoughts.
      16. But finally, when the stillness and darkness were no longer endurable, the voice of the little one, craving reassurance, spoke the third time. "Daddy," she called out, "please tell me just one thing more: Is your face turned this way?"
      17. And through the dark quickly there came the voice of her father in reply, "Yes, darling, Daddy is right here, and his face is turned your way."
      18. In an instant the girl fell asleep, in the perfect trust of a little child.
   10. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear." (Psalm 46:1)
   11. Good news for the imminent showdown of the gods--because the face of our Father is turned our way.
   12. And when the face of your Father is the face of a Friend, why fear the future at all?
   13. Which is why a forever friendship with God is the most sensible choice you'll ever make!

Further Study:

Discover Guide - The Secret Of Answered Prayer     (Lecture Study Guide from Discover Bible School)

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