A Little History
Throughout human history, God’s Word has been attacked, first by Satan, then by those who follow him. The first instance of this was the temptation of Eve and the Fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden as Satan in the form of a serpent asked Eve, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1). Ever since, God’s Word has been questioned, attacked, burned, ignored, counterfeited and changed.
Throughout the Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic false Church-State banned the Bible for the “laity” and burned copies of it translated into the languages of the common people. Then at the beginning of the 16th century, Erasmus “laid the egg that Luther hatched” when he published his New Testament Greek text based on the Byzantine texts, lately come out of the Eastern Orthodox church after the Muslims took Constantinople. This became known as the Textus Receptus, the Received Text, which was the basis for all the Reformation translations of the New Testament from Luther’s German to Tyndale’s English, the Genevan, and finally, the King James Version. It was this English Bible that went throughout the world carried by missionaries to the nations which proved to be a “mortal wound” to the Roman Catholic false Church-State. God’s Word was set free, and the true church of Jesus Christ was reformed and grew in a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the people of God, and the false church was exposed for what it truly was – Babylon the Great who persecutes the true saints of God.
Rome could not defeat the Word of God. Instead, she tried once again to persecute the saints of God. During the Middle Ages, the Dominicans headed the Inquisition, which tortured and murdered millions of faithful followers of Jesus Christ – men, women, and children, even organizing crusader armies to hunt them down and murder them. After the Reformation, it was the Jesuits who not only took the leadership of the Inquisition, but also were more devious, infiltrating Protestant groups by deception, in order to bring back the “heretics” to the pope of Rome, reestablishing Rome’s dominance in the world, and healing the “mortal wound.” This is demonstrated in the Jesuits’ futurist and preterist distractions on the identity of the Antichrist, whom all the Reformers, as well as the Dissenting church throughout the Dark Ages, knew to be the pope of Rome. Futurism eliminates the need to worry about a present Antichrist, he will come only in the Future and be revealed during the “Great Tribulation”; or Preterism relegates to the first century emperor Nero.Unfortunately, most non-Catholics (one cannot call them Protestants because they do not statnd for the Word of God) believe the Jesuits’ eschatology – mostly Futurism, but a few Preterism – instead of the Historicist eschatology of the Reformers and their descendants.[1]