Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #9 of Revelation, chapter 13, and we are going to be reading Revelation 13:5:

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

We looked at this a little bit in our last study and we saw that Satan has always spoken blasphemies against God, as the word “blasphemy” means to “speak evil.”  Satan has fostered this same trait in the unsaved people of the world, as well as in the unsaved people in the churches and congregations. 

Now at the beginning of the Great Tribulation (and this is the case throughout this period), it has been given to the beast to speak “great things and blasphemies.”  He will speak evil against God and defame God and slanderously report against the right doctrines of the Word of God.  This is very evident in the world today and also in the churches.

Then it goes on to say in Revelation 13:5:

… and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

Once again, this was given to him because it is all the will of God.  It was God’s purpose to loose Satan and to give him a final period of rule for the twenty three years of the Great Tribulation period.  During that time he would rise to great heights of reigning over the unsaved people of the earth, like never before, and yet the time duration is also given.  It is not an unlimited time; let me read it again: “and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”  The “forty and two months” is a figure that represents a certain set period of time.  We know from other studies in the Bible that the actual duration of the Great Tribulation period was twenty three years.  It began May 21, 1988 and it concluded on May 21, 2011, an exact 23-year period, and an exact 8,400 days.  Here, God is speaking of it as “forty and two months.”  It is a set time.  It is not “great tribulation” without end.  It is not “great tribulation” that goes on and on, with no final conclusion.  The Great Tribulation is a “little season,” the Bible tells us.  Twenty three years, from our perspective, is a long time, but compared to other “times and seasons,” it is not long.  The church age was a period of 1,955 years and, by comparison, the Great Tribulation is not a long period of time.

So God give Satan, the beast, this final rule in order to accomplish the Lord’s own purposes in utilizing Satan as an instrument of judgment upon the churches and to multiply wickedness in the world to prepare the world and make it “ripe” for the final judgment.  Satan is very good at doing these kinds of things; he is very excellent at destroying and stirring up wickedness, but, in doing so, he is performing the Lord’s will to fulfill God’s end time program.  So the Lord gave him these “forty two months.”

We read in Revelation 11:2:

But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.

Here, notice that it does not say it is given unto the beast, but unto the Gentiles.  That is because Satan is typified by the king of Babylon and the Gentiles typify the nations, the unsaved people of the world.  It is given to the beast to continue for forty and two months and it is given to the nations to continue for forty and two months wherein they can tread under foot the court which is without and this points to the corporate church.  The corporate church is trodden upon and ridiculed and mocked and just utterly destroyed by this end time assault.  The “forty two months” is a figurative number to represent the duration of the Great Tribulation period.  We cannot tell what the actual time is from these verses, but we can know from other information as laid out in the Biblical calendar of history in the Bible.  We can know it is actually twenty three years.

Let us just turn to Daniel and read something important, as we are reading all these things about the beast and the power given to him.  It says in Daniel 8:23-24:

And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance…

(That king, typified by the king of Babylon, is a picture of Satan.)

… a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up. And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.

This is important for us to remember.  The beast’s power is mighty, as it says in our verse in Revelation 13:5: “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”  We can just see the evidence as the whole world has gone crazy and it is all a testimony to the power of the beast at the time of his loosing, as sin has increased to incredible degrees and the world has lost sight of common decency and morality in so many ways.  This is all testimony that God has done what He said He would do when we got to the end the church age.  He would loose Satan and he would rise up out of the bottomless pit, come against the camp of the saints and make war with them.   We have evidence of that, too.  We first look at the Bible and then we look at the churches and we see devastation as we look at that corporate body; it has no faithfulness any longer.  It is completely gone.  The churches are killed; the “two witnesses” are slain and the testimony of the witness of the Word in the congregations ended many years ago and now there is just a “shell,” and just the “name” of Christ there, but no Spirit of God within the churches. 

So there is this tremendous wickedness that has overtaken the earth.  It is stunning when we think back just a few decades ago how much change there has been.  God wants us to know why, so this is an important verse in Daniel 8:23: “And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power.”  This is the will of God and this should really comfort us and encourage us.  We are living at this time in a world that has been given up to sin and living at a time when the church age is over and living as individuals out in the world and living through the Great Tribulation and now living in the Day of Judgment.  It is certainly wearying and very tiresome and, spiritually, it is very troubling to the child of God to live through these days, but it is also comforting to know that things are not “out of control.”  Things are not under Satan’s power.  These things have happened not because of his power, but because of God’s power and it is all according to the wisdom of God; the plan of God is being fulfilled and worked out in precise detail. 

Just think that we can read 2Thessalonians, chapter 2, where it speaks of a falling away before the day of Christ and we know when that was.  We do not have to wonder when that will be or what that will be like.  We know, absolutely, that this has happened.  Or, we can read Romans, chapter 1, where God speaks of giving man up (not the churches, but mankind) to certain wicked sins, such as the sin of homosexuality, and we can know, absolutely, that is not something that will happen 100 years from now and what kind of society that will be.  All that speculation has been taken away and we know, without any question, that it is this present world, this present generation and this present society that Romans, chapter 1, was speaking of when it speaks of giving man over to sin and wickedness.  Or, we can read Matthew, chapter 24, where God warms of false Christs, false gospels and the abomination of desolation and we can know, absolutely, when this was.  I know that true believers do not wonder if that will be fulfilled “down the road” or if that will that come to pass in their sons’ lifetime?  Previous generations of believers would have thought that way, but we do not.  We know.  We can discuss in depth what it means that the abomination of desolation is standing in the holy place; we can tell you exactly what God means by “fleeing to the mountains” from Judah, and so on.  We can go into some depth in these matters because they have already come to pass.  This can only mean that these wearisome days and nights of going through all these things (and being cast down when it sometimes seemed so endless) will soon come to an end.  But when we can see the literal fulfillment of these things in 2Thessalonians 2 or Matthew 24 or Luke 21, it is near; when we can see that “immediately after that tribulation, the sun is darkened,” and we can know that we are living in those days “after that tribulation.”   Do you see the progression in chapters like Matthew 24 or Mark 13?  These are chapters where the Lord Jesus is answering the disciples’ question, “What shall be the sign of thy coming and of the end of the world?”  And we have moved well into those chapters and we have progressed in what the Lord Jesus Christ answered them regarding the indicators and signs the Bible gives.  You can look at “signs” as long as those signs are in the Bible, like the “sign of the prophet Jonas,” and you need to read the Bible to understand that sign.  And when we look to the Bible, all the signs are not only in place, but they either have already been fulfilled or they are presently being fulfilled.  It says in Luke 21:25:

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;

Here, it does not say the “sun is darkened” or that the “moon does not give her light” or that the “stars are falling,” but it simply says there are “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars.”  So what does that mean?  Again, a “sign” is a Biblical teaching wherein you can learn truth by going to the Bible.  In order to understand the “sun, moon and stars,” we turn to the Bible and we see that it relates to the Gospel lights being put out in the Day of Judgment.  We have learned that from the Bible and that, itself, is our “sign.”  It is a “sign” God is giving us and it is as if He is saying to us, “Do not be discouraged.  Do not be dismayed.  Continue on and lift up the feeble knees and make straight your paths.  Keep going on, trusting the Word of God and trusting the Lord Jesus Christ, patiently waiting.”  (Though He tarry, He will not tarry.) “You are right on course – just look around.  Look through my Word and then look into the world around you; look through my Word and then look into the churches around you.”

Has there ever been a world like this which has been given over to sin to the degree of this present world?  No – it is without precedent; the world has never been like this in all history.  Have there ever been churches like these that are given over to iniquity, false gods, high places and false teachings and doctrines?  No – there has never been a corporate church like this corporate church.  Does this agree with the nature of the world before God brought the flood?  Of course, that was just a small “world” with a handful of people, but God said, “The heart of man is only evil continually,” and then He brought the flood.  Just before God brought judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, there was tremendous wickedness in that city.  We are there and, in fact, we are beyond the judgment on the churches and we are in the midst of the judgment on the world, so we need to continue to trust the Lord and to trust His Word, the Bible, which has brought us to this point; it has guided us to the present time and we need to continue to follow what the Word says and allow it to guide our steps.

Going back to Revelation 13, let us read Revelation 13:6:

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

As we have already discussed, Satan has long been set against God and has spoken evilly against Him throughout the course of time.  At the time of the end, this is increased and there is a great increase in “blasphemy” and that word means “to speak evil against.”  So Satan blasphemes God and he encourages and stirs up those within his kingdom of darkness to do the same and, not only to blaspheme God, but to blaspheme his “name.”  What has the “name” of Christ?  The Christian church as the “name” of Christ and that was a major target of Satan and that is why he has come against it.  If it had been the name of Mohammed, or Buddha, or the name of another sect or religion, he would not target it and it would not be the object of his wrath.  But since it carries the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and that is where Christians are and that is where the Bible is, which carries the name of God.  So, Satan, in perverting the gospels of the churches, blasphemes God.  Satan infiltrated the churches and sowed tares among the wheat, to the point that he could have his emissaries, as “ministers of righteousness,” be in authority in the churches and be the ones doing the teaching of “lies” and he could turn the churches into something vile and ugly in the sight of the world; the world could then see the church’s hypocrisy and then the churches would become the object of the world’s wrath and the world begins to speak evil of the churches. 

By the way, this is one reason the child of God would never want to revile the churches.  We cam share what the Bible says when it says that the corporate church is under the wrath of God; we can share that they are in error on many points of doctrines; we can share that God’s spirit has left the churches and that God is judging the churches.  But we, ourselves, never want to target the churches and start reviling them and speaking evil of them.  That is what Satan would want, but we have to have a great deal of respect for the churches because they carry the name of Christ.  Even though Christ is no longer present there, it is called a Christian church and they maintain a relationship with the Bible, so we must respect that and never speak evil or revile the church, in that sense.  We never want to do that.

It is like when King Saul came after David and was trying to kill David.  David was a true believer, but Saul was not saved.  He was a king of Israel and, yet, he was not a true believer.  He persecuted David and continually sought to kill him.  Yet, when David had opportunity to do so, he did not dare stretch forth his hand against Saul because Saul was God’s anointed.  It did not matter that Saul was not a saved man or a true man, he still identified with God as God’s anointed and that is how it is with the corporate church.  They were once anointed by God and used by God to accomplish His purpose for almost 2,000 years and we need to respect that and not speak evil of the churches in any way.

Lord willing, when we get together in our next study, we will continue to look at verse 6 and then get into verse 7 of Revelation, chapter 13.