John said in the Book of Revelation that the Beast “once was, now is not, and yet will come.”[1]
When John was given his prophecy, at the time of the Roman Empire, there was no empire in the region of Babylon that actually had dominion over Israel or the newly emerged Christians. Hence the Angel declared that the Beast “now is not,” meaning that the Beast by that time, in the 1st century, was not at the head of an empire in the Middle East. But it would appear at some point, which was confirmed only more than five hundred years later, in the 7th century, with the rise of the Islamic Empire.
As a matter of fact, although the Roman Empire has spread from the Atlantic Ocean to more than half of Europe, including part of the British Isles, to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and still along the coast of North Africa, it has never expanded further than about 200 or 300 km into the Middle East. There was only a period of less than two years in the last years of Emperor Trajan between 115 and 117 when the Romans fought the Parthians of the Mesopotamian and Persian regions and won a few clashes and lost other battles. But considering the rapid retreat of the Romans to Syrian borders to the west of the northern sector of the Euphrates River shortly thereafter, by order of the new Emperor Hadrian, it would not be honest to consider that the territories of ancient Babylon were actually ever part of the Roman Empire. In fact, they were not, because Rome never established its sovereignty or administrative jurisdiction on these Mesopotamian and Persian territories.
Meanwhile, the Parthian Empire never really had a direct influence on the nation of Israel and Jerusalem. If Parthia never ruled over Jerusalem, then the Parthian Empire did not have to be mentioned in Jewish and Christian prophecies and, therefore, was not.
In the 7th century we see the rise of Islam. It was then that the region of Babylon was in possession of a de facto empire, and an empire that would also invade Israel and seize Jerusalem. Moreover an empire which would make the persecution of Jews and Christians one of its main religious foundations. So the fourth and final empire of the Beast for this region of Babylon is the Islamic Empire. Islam was to extend from the borders with China to the western end, the Atlantic Ocean, with Babylon almost as a geodesic center, and would indeed be the greatest and most terrible of all these four empires of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.
Let us recall what Daniel prophesied about this fourth empire in chapter 2 of his book:
40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others.
In this verse 40, it is said that this fourth empire breaks and smashes everything. The classical theory of prophetic interpretation described this as being the Roman Empire. However, the Romans, as a rule, in their territorial expansions always promoted the progress of the conquered regions, and left a trail of civilization and social peace, as well as cultural improvement. The Romans always fostered trade and peaceful interaction among all the peoples who made up their empire. Even in the religious matter, the Romans respected the specific beliefs of each people within their imperial borders. They were so liberal in their religious attitudes that it was not uncommon for them to adopt the religious beliefs of the peoples they conquered. The pantheon of Roman gods had once been an adapted loan from the pantheon of the Greek gods.
Facing this natural religious liberalism and the fostering of civilizational progress among the peoples they conquered, there is no way to describe the Roman Empire as an iron empire that would crush and destroy all things. On the contrary, the Romans always dedicated themselves to building. This was their outstanding hallmark, and they always brought a civilizing order for their conquered territories. The Romans, without exception, have always brought progress to the peoples they conquered. It was the Romans that built the thousands of miles of roads which stretched across the empire, as well as numerous civilian government buildings and temples devoted to the various gods.
The contours of the Islamic Empire, however, are revealed in the shape of the destroying warrior hordes that rape and crush everything as they advance, laying waste to any legacy, any fragment of the identity of the conquered peoples, even forcing the subjugated peoples to convert to the religion-ideology of Muhammad. Has the reader ever wondered why, in Afghanistan in 2001, Islamic fundamentalists destroyed the magnificent Buddha statues, the largest in the world? And why do they still continue to destroy the archaeological collection of the Mesopotamian regions where human civilization began? These are acts of Islamic ideological purity and allegiance to Allah and his messenger Muhammad.
Those who know enough about the sacred writings of Islam and the history of Islam’s expansion know that in very few years the peoples of the regions who for six centuries were part of Christendom (Middle East, North Africa, Iberian Peninsula, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan) were slaughtered, robbed, raped, enslaved whenever they did not want to convert compulsorily to Islam. The dazzling advance of Islam was through terror. The expansion of this new so-called religion was by the sword. Muhammad himself said, “I was made victorious through terror.”[2]
Ten years after Muhammad began using the sword to impose his will (between 622 and 632 AD), the entire Arabian peninsula had become Islamic. Almost another thirty years later on (between 632 and 661 AD), Islam had already swept everything from Libya in North Africa to a little beyond Iran in Asia. And about another ninety years later (up to 750 AD), the Islamists arrived in the East at the Chinese border and in the western end of Europe at the gates of France, after having subjected almost all of the Iberian peninsula, with the entire Northern African coastal strip in their hands. And they were willing to overthrow the still-remaining Byzantine Christian Empire, which was then the possessor of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) offering some resistance to Islam’s hegemonic ambitions to dominate Europe and the whole known world by force.
In less than one hundred and thirty years, Islam had submerged perhaps three-quarters of the Christian world by the sword. The generations that followed in these regions would never know the Christian religion of their tragic ancestors who were either murdered, or coerced through torture, death threat, and rape to become Muslim. A new religious culture and socio-political ideology was imposed with fierce brainwashing on the children who were born. The saving God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been replaced by the god Allah, who had no children and promised salvation only to those that died and killed in jihad. Only Islamists who killed Christians, Jews and all sorts of “idolaters,” or who died in an attempt to kill or defend themselves, were guaranteed that they would go to paradise for this service to Allah.
Only participation in jihad, the armed struggle, guaranteed that the doors of paradise would open to the believer, so Allah’s messenger Muhammad had assured them.
Nations, cities, entire peoples were plundered and raped, removed from Christian culture, erased from all previous civilizational references, prevented from knowing the liberating truth that Jesus had brought for the salvation of mankind. Satan was finally able to bring forth the Beast that was not in John’s time, but which came from antiquity, from the Babylonian idolatry, always chasing the saints (the Jews) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and finally appeared five centuries later, as prophesied by Daniel and John.
[1] Revelation 17:8.
[2] Hadith Bukhari, 4:52.220.
Excerpt from the book "Apocalypse Now - Are We the 'End Time' Generation?"
Order your printed version or kindle version on https://www.amazon.com/dp/1795061316