Hello and welcome to Z3 News.
I'm James Bailey and today is Wednesday, May 27, 2020.
Today I want to continue the discussion from yesterday in which I was sharing how
Christians began to get hold of the Scriptures back in the days of John
Wycliffe in the 1300s, and John Hus in the 1400s, and then Martin Luther in the
1500s, as they began to get hold of the Scriptures and believe them and stand firm
on them and confessing them, and began to understand that the Roman Catholic Church
was contradicting the Scriptures in many areas, and they began to call them out on
it.
And as they did, they began to push back the darkness.
And as I studied that topic, I was amazed to find that there was unanimous
consensus.
All the Christian leaders that I looked up, and there were many others besides the
ones I shared yesterday, but they were all of one accord and one mind and all saying
the same thing, and that is that the Roman Catholic Pope is of the spirit of Satan
and of the spirit of Antichrist.
And they were not trying to be politically correct at all, they just told it like it
was, and as they did, they pushed back the darkness, and Protestantism advanced
rapidly throughout the world.
But today, I want to share how the Roman Catholic Church fought back against the
Protestants.
And after being exposed by these Christians, Rome had to take a different
strategy going forward, because before that, they were able to just rely on brute
force alone to extend their influence throughout the world, as they were
requiring all heretics to come into submission to the Pope.
And a heretic to them was just anybody who was not submitted to the Pope,
so it didn't matter if you were a Muslim, or a pagan, or Jewish, or a Christian.
If you weren't submitted to the Pope, you're a heretic.
And so they launched the Crusades and the Inquisitions to extend their influence,
and they enjoyed great success with that at the cost of many lives of these
heretics.
But when the Christians arose and exposed them, it was a real problem because they
were exposing them as being fraud.
I mean, they went right for the jugular vein in showing that Rome's claims to
spiritual authority were unfounded.
So that was a big problem for them.
I mean, that was shining the spotlight on the darkness.
And they didn't really have an answer for that.
They couldn't explain from the Scriptures.
And it presented another problem for them in that the strategy that they had used to
grow their empire, grow their influence around the world, that strategy only
reinforced what the Protestant leaders were accusing them of, of being very
un-Christian in their behavior, and in their practices, and in their
beliefs.
And really, I find it remarkable that Rome didn't just pack it up at that point.
I mean, the gig was up.
It seemed like, what do you got left?
You've been parading yourself around, calling yourself Father, the Vicar of
Christ, claiming to be the authority on earth for the voice of God, but yet now
you've been exposed that you don't even know what the Scriptures say.
And no wonder people were flocking to Protestantism in droves.
No wonder people were publicly proclaiming the Pope is of Satan and Antichrist,
because he was.
So it's really, you know, as I studied this topic, I was like, how in the world
did they pull this off?
I mean, how did they go from this position of literally having no answer?
They could not explain the Scriptures.
They were caught red-handed and exposed for the whole world to see.
How is it that the gig is not up?
You know, that we just move on and you guys take off your silly robes and set
aside your silly titles and, you know, go get a job or something.
But instead, what we see happened was in a relatively short time span, they
completely turned the tables and they got back on top.
And it's really a remarkable story.
It's like, how in the world?
And as I was digging into these events, and I'm talking specifically from about
1517, the time of the start of the Reformation, to 1815.
So you're talking approximately 300-year period.
And during that time, you know, start of the period, Rome is on top of the
world, ruling by brute force.
Then they get pushed back, and then they turn the tables, and by the time you get
to the year 1815, there they are, back on top of the world.
But when you get to 1815, they have a new friend, the Rothschilds.
And with their new buddy, they are in a position to totally dominate the world
from that point forward.
I mean, it took time.
It didn't happen overnight.
But by 1815, they had put themselves in position to rule the world from then on.
And I was fascinated by that, and how that all happened.
I wanted to see it for myself.
I've heard people make claims, but I wanted to dig into it, and I did.
And it took a lot of digging, but I was finally able to connect the dots so
conclusively, and so excited when I was able to do that.
And I will be sharing those details in upcoming programs.
But even after I saw how Rome connected with the Rothschilds, and how that all
came about, I still had a question in my mind.
Because ultimately, it comes down to an issue of submission.
You know, Rome requires submission.
If you're not submitted to Rome, you're a heretic, right?
So everybody that is part of this Roman kingdom must be in submission to the will
of the Pope, the will of Rome.
And that's the part that I was struggling with, is like, well, why would the
Rothschilds need to submit to Rome?
That doesn't make sense, especially, you know, with all the money they have.
They can just thumb their nose at them, right?
But then I realized, I was praying about it one morning, and this is the way it
works with me a lot of times when I'm praying, is I just start getting an
understanding.
And it's not like I can say, I hear a voice, or there's a specific word given.
It's just understanding starts coming to me.
I know it's just God communicating to me, because He'll give me the understanding
that I need for a specific thing that I'm dealing with at that exact time.
And it unlocks the answer, you know?
It's such a huge help.
And once I got that, it all started, I was like, oh, wow, wow, wow.
And I started understanding that Rome has always had a second strategy.
They're not just about brute force.
There is a second strategy, and it is found from the beginning to the end.
And actually, when I say the beginning, I'm talking about the beginning,
not just the beginning of Rome, but the beginning of creation.
And so, what I'm talking about now is bigger than Rome.
We're talking about Satan's kingdom.
And this is just the way Satan's kingdom has always operated and will continue to
operate until the end.
All along the way, he's had two fronts to his attack.
And the one is brute force, but the other is deception.
And I got so excited when I saw this connection, because I found it from the
beginning to the end.
It has always been this way, and it's always going to be this way until the end.
And so, if you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden, we see deception.
You know, God had told Adam and Eve they could not eat from the Tree of Knowledge,
and the knowledge of good and evil.
And he had warned Adam that the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.
But then the serpent comes, and he says to the woman, you will not surely die.
For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will
be like God, knowing good and evil.
And so, that encounter in the Garden was the first time we see this other strategy,
this deception strategy used.
And the bait that he gave her was, you will be like God.
And so, the trade-off was, I'll give you knowledge.
I'll give you forbidden knowledge.
I'll give you forbidden understanding and wisdom, and it will make you like God.
And so, that's the enticement.
And so, that same storyline has repeated throughout history, and continues all the
way to the end.
And I saw it illustrated in the Roman virgin goddess of warfare and wisdom,
whose name was Minerva.
The Greeks called her Athena.
But as you can see in this little figure of her, she's decked out for warfare.
She has on her helmet, her shield, her sword, her spear, her breastplate,
her shin guards.
So, she's ready for war, but yet she's accompanied by the owl.
And the owl represents that forbidden knowledge, that forbidden wisdom,
that corrupted knowledge and wisdom.
And what it is, see, she's the virgin goddess.
So, she represents virtue.
And the way she has the virtue is through those two strategies.
And what it's saying is that by her might and her force, and by her corrupted
knowledge, she achieves virtue.
She actually becomes like God.
In other words, it's a way to make yourself like God without having to
actually humble yourself before God and come to Him on the terms that He set.
We can just make ourself like God.
We can basically just exalt ourselves to the highest place by doing it our way.
But the more I thought about this two-fold strategy, the more I started seeing it in
things that I studied in the past, but just hadn't connected them together.
For example, this illustration shows the Pope's coat of arms.
And you can see there's two keys there, the gold key and the silver key.
And these keys is what gives him, is what he claims gives him the authority
to unlock two realms.
The one being the temporal realm and the other being the spiritual realm.
And the temporal realm represents all the governments of the world.
And this is his claim that he has authority to rule over all the governments
of the world.
And doing so requires the use of force to bring those other peoples into submission
to him.
And so that key gives him the right to do so.
The other key gives him the right to bring us into submission with spiritual power.
In other words, the right to infiltrate our head and our heart for the purpose of
deceiving us into submitting to his authority.
So we've bought into some lies that he's given us, but he believes he has that
right to rule over us in those two realms.
And then I remembered too that in the book of Revelation chapter 13, we're given a
description of two beasts.
And the first beast makes war against the saints.
And so there you have the strategy of brute force.
But the second beast deceives the whole world by the signs that he performs.
And he raises up this one who bears a resemblance to the beast, all for the
purpose of deceiving.
So again, there's that two-fold strategy.
And so now let's go back and look at the condition that Rome was in at the time
that the Protestants began boldly exposing them for what they were.
Rome had an answer.
They already had an answer en route.
And it was this strategy of the owl.
And I was just amazed by what I saw because this strategy, it was called
Renaissance Humanism.
That's what it was called.
But it was released right on time as if, almost like they knew the timing of this
Protestant Reformation that it was coming, that they had to get this in place.
And so it was about a hundred years before the time of Martin Luther that Rome had
what they called the Great Revival of classical letters.
So it's not the kind of revival that Christians are used to when we talk about
revival.
But it was a revival of classical letters.
So I guess that's how they do revival.
But it was a time where they would go back to the writings of authors from ancient
Rome and ancient Greece.
And the whole idea was that if you would dedicate yourself to education and study
of these ancient classic writings, that you would attain such knowledge and
such understanding and such wisdom that you would actually acquire a high level of
virtue.
So this Renaissance Humanism rose up just in time for the Protestant Reformation.
And it's pretty remarkable.
And not only that, but it rose up through the Catholic Church.
I mean, it was literally the popes and high officials within the Catholic Church
that were leading the promotion of this revival of the classical letters.
And there was a series of popes, especially during the 1400s and into the
early 1500s.
And it was all throughout Italy.
And it just dovetailed right into what was called the Age of Enlightenment.
And it was also known as the Age of Reason.
And so this was Rome's answer to the Protestant Reformation.
And on the surface, it doesn't sound like a fair match.
It sounds like the Protestants should have made short work of it and just won the
victory.
But not so fast, because these humanistic ideas really appealed to people because it
gave them a way to elevate their life to a high level.
At least they believed that they could, without having to truly humble themselves
before God.
And it really caught on.
It had great appeal to people because we all want to do it our way.
We want to think that we can do it.
We don't want to have to put our trust in anyone else, including God, to believe
that He's going to do it when we could just do it ourselves.
We'd rather be in control, you know.
And we have this natural aversion to being out of control.
You know, to truly surrender our life into God's hands.
You know, we make ourselves so vulnerable, and we don't like being in that position.
But yet, God wants us to trust Him and to not put our trust in our own
understanding.
And so, these ideas that Rome promoted, they came right through the Vatican,
right through the papacy, and spread throughout the countries of the world.
I mean, it's really remarkable to me that this two-pronged strategy both came right
through Rome.
And just like they had great success with their first strategy of brute force,
they also had great success with this one.
And the real key to turning the tables for Rome in their favor was a man named
Ignatius Loyola.
And he was born at that same time that these humanistic ideas were taking root.
He was born in 1491, and he was like the embodiment of those ideas.
Kind of in the same way that Jesus was the embodiment of the Word of God.
The Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us.
This man was like just the opposite.
He was the embodiment of, I'm going to do it my way.
But he became the founder of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus.
And so, in tomorrow's program, I'm going to be sharing more about
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits and the key role that they played in turning the
situation around so that Rome was able to get right back up on top again.
And so, I'm going to stop there.
So, thanks for joining me today, and I hope to be back again soon with
another program.
Until then, so long.