THE
BOOK OF REVELATION
By:
Bertrand L. Comparet
Lesson
#7 Of A Series Of 14, Transcribed From Audio Tapes
Transcribed
By:
Clifton
A. Emahiser’s
Teaching
Ministries
Phone
(419) 435-2836
[Unless
in brackets, all of the message is by Bertrand L. Comparet.]
We are continuing our study of the Book of Revelation and we have covered the
first two of the three woes. You’ll remember that the Saracen invasion was the
first woe. Just previous to the Saracen invasion you had the breakup of the
western third of the
Then
the second woe was the Turkish invasion. The Turks took over what the Arabs had
conquered, and in addition they took all the rest of
With
that, you get through chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation. When you get into
chapter 10, there’s a sudden change in the subject. The Book of Revelation deals
with a number of great historical processes that were going on, more or less
overlapping, with the one exception of the ending of persecution of Christianity
by pagan
John
says: “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a
cloud, (Your King James Version says,
‘A rainbow was upon his head’, and in the Greek it says ‘the rainbow’, which
evidently is a bit more important.) And his face was as it were the sun, and his
feet as pillars of fire.” John had seen and talked with a number of angels, but
he characterizes this one as especially powerful and important. The details he
tells about him give a number of clues to indicate that this angel most probably
was Yahshua the Christ Himself. “He was clothed with a cloud.” That is not
generally a characteristic of angels as we see them in the Bible, but the
appearance of Yahweh Himself has been marked by that. You remember, when He
descended upon
In
Revelation 4, verses 1 to 3, where John receives a vision of the throne of
Yahweh in heaven, there was a rainbow around it. Again, when Ezekiel was given a
glimpse of the throne of Yahweh, Ezekiel 1, verse 28, he comments upon the
rainbow being seen there. Then John said “His face was as it were the sun.”
Well, at the transfiguration, you remember, Yahshua the Christ took two of the
disciples with him up onto a mountain and allowed His divine nature to become
more visible there, when Moses and Elijah came to talk with Him. It mentions
then that “His face shone brightly as the sun.” Again, in the first chapter of
Revelation, where John got his vision of Yahshua the Christ standing among the
seven lamp stands, he comments that “His face was as the sun in brightness, and
his feet like pillars of fire.”
As
seen by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 1, verses 26 and 27, he mentions he got his vision of
Yahweh as shining like fire. John, in Revelation 1, verse 15, mentioned how the
feet of Yahshua the Christ “shone with light”, and he mentions them as being
like “the glow of molten bronze.” You know how iron glows white-hot long before
it melts, and even bronze, which melts at a lower temperature, would be glowing
white-hot when molten. The importance of what this particular angel does is
again further confirmation that this was Yahshua the Christ Himself. Then
Revelation 10, verse 2, John says: “... he had in his hand a little book (and
your King James Version just says
‘open’, but the exact Greek is ‘a little book having been opened’, implying that
it was formerly closed and had been opened): and he set his right foot upon the
sea and his left foot on the earth.” Well, we’ve run into the opening of a book
or scroll, of course, earlier than this. In the 5th chapter of Revelation we
have Yahshua the Christ, the Lamb of Yahweh, being the only one found worthy to
open the scroll that was sealed shut with the seven seals. You’ll remember that
He didn’t tell the writing on that scroll. As each seal was opened there was an
historical event that took place which showed the significance of it. [See note #5 at end of lesson.]
Now,
it having been opened – and by the way, while your King James Version uses the term book,
the actual Greek here is biblíon, a
little scroll, which is the same as it was in the fifth chapter where you had
the scroll sealed with the seven seals. A book of pages bound together along one
edge would have been called a codex. That came into general use much later than
this. It was still a rarity, even in John’s time. Hence, he had this book, or
scroll, having been opened, and now he sets his right foot on the sea and his
left foot on the land. The Bible, of course, was strictly a closed book under
the Catholic “Church.” They were bitterly opposed to anyone but the priesthood
ever getting a glimpse into the Bible, and they greatly discouraged it on the
part of the priesthood, for that matter. The
The
opening of the Bible to the people was the direct cause of the Protestant
Reformation. Up to this time you had only one Christian “Church” in all of
western Europe – at least it called itself Christian – that was the Roman Catholic “Church.”
With murder, it stamped out any attempt to worship other than under those forms
in its own “churches.” You had the same thing, in substance, with the
The
university at
Note
the importance of a series of dates and the events that happened on them. In
1454, you had the invention of printing in
Hence,
the open book was available to be read by Yahweh’s people – and you notice, the
only places where this spread were the
Then,
in Revelation 10, verses 3 and 4, John goes on: “And [he] (that’s the angel) cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had
cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had
uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven
saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write
them not.”
Again,
this loud voice like the roaring of a lion is another confirmation that this was
the lion of the tribe of
Now
about those seven thunders which were not to be written down. There have been
two different interpretations of that and no conclusive evidence to support one
rather than the other, so you can take your choice. Some have said “thunder and
lightning normally accompany the presence of Yahweh.” In the Exodus, when Yahweh
came down on the top of
Remember,
most books on Revelation have been written by people who could see no evil in
anything but the Catholic “Church.” The
Thus
“he put his right foot upon the sea.” In 1588 you had the Spanish armada sent to
conquer England expressly because England was Protestant, and at the urgings of
the Pope, the king of Spain got this enormous fleet together to go and conquer
England – murder all the Protestants and compel the kingdom to become Catholic.
Well, what happened to it? The Spanish armada had a hundred and twenty-nine
ships – sixty five of them being huge ships of over seven hundred tons. They had
8,000 sailors and 19,000 soldiers aboard. The English had a total navy with
which to resist this of only 80 ships, and out of the 80 only 30 of them were
what they called “ships of the line”, big enough and with enough guns to really
take part in battle with some chance of accomplishing something. Well, the
English sailed out bravely enough – you remember Sir Francis Drake was in his
home town of
By
the time the Spanish started out again, a terrific storm had come up. The
Spanish fleet could not turn back to land on the southerly coast of
You
know, of course, how the Pope endeavored to stamp out Protestantism by land. He
commanded all the kings to use their armies to kill all the heretics, and he was
only able to get it done in the non-Israel lands, because the kings and nobility
of what later became
This
is a good example, here, of how much wishful thinking is substituted for
translation. Whatever the “church” hierarchy has determined to be its doctrine,
if the Bible doesn’t say it, that’s too bad for the Bible – alter the Bible till
it does say it. Some of the best modern translations that we’re accustomed to
rely upon most of the time make the same blunder. I looked up a few of them
here. Smith and Goodspeed, “... there should be no more delay...”; Rotherham,
who ordinarily is scrupulously accurate, “delay no longer shall there be”;
Ferrar Fenton, again ordinarily a stickler for accuracy, “... that time should
no longer intervene...”; Moffatt, that “...There shall be no more delay...”;
Weymouth, “... There shall be no further delay...”; and the recently published
New Jerusalem Bible, “The time of
waiting is over...” Some other writers have said of this same phrase, that it
could be translated, “there shall be one more time.” They ought to make up their
minds whether “time no more” or “one more time”, you would think. They have
argued, “well, ‘a time’, as a prophetic expression in the Bible, is 360 years,
so ‘one more time’, what would it indicate?” For example, from the Spanish
armada’s destruction, 1588, plus 360 more years would bring us to 1948, and by
1948 all the illusions that anybody had about World War II were dispelled. We
saw that all we had done was to break down European civilization to pave the way
for
The
actual Greek, word-for-word, and not even changing their word order phrasing it:
“because time not yet shall be.” Young’s
Literal Translation, putting it into the easier understood English word
order, is “that time shall not be yet.” That’s the actual, literal Greek. How
can you make anything out of the expression “the time shall not yet be”, that
“there shall be no more time”? In other words, your King James Bible is the least
trustworthy thing on the subject of religion that you can read because it always
has to be under suspicion. I don’t mean it’s always wrong, and you’ll notice
that I quote from it a great deal after first checking up to find whether this
is a place where it is right. But, it does have to be always under suspicion
because there are so many of these errors in it. So, the angel swore that the
time shall not yet be, and that fits in with the next verse, Revelation 10:7:
“But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to
sound, the mystery of Yahweh should be finished, as he hath declared to his
servants the prophets.” You remember, you had these seven angels, each given a
trumpet, and each in turn to sound a blast on his trumpet. We had been through
the first six of these angels and we saw that as each trumpet blast sounded, it
signaled an historical event which took place the way the Bible described it
here.
You
have this parenthetical thing thrown in here, in-between, before you get to the
seventh trumpet and before you get to the third of the three woes. When the
seventh trumpet sounds, it says the mystery of Yahweh would be finished. Now you
have to avoid getting too impatient to see all these things happen at once;
because remember, that every one of these things had not been instantaneous
events of one day. They had been processes which consumed, at the minimum,
decades, and generally centuries to complete. Since it is presumably consistent
with what had gone on before, you can expect this seventh trumpet to be a
process covering a considerable period of time. We won’t get to that until
after. There’s still another one of these parenthetical things thrown in here,
beside the one we are working on now. Then at Revelation 10, verses 8 to 10,
John goes on: “And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and
said, Go and take the little book
which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the
earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book.
And he said unto me, Take it, and eat
it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as
honey. And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it
was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was
bitter.”
You’re
constantly running into sermons and articles by various ministers (if they ever
get into the Book of Revelation at all) in which they show they haven’t the
slightest understanding of this symbolism. It’s for the very good reason that
the symbolism is practically never new. It had been introduced earlier in the
Bible, and they haven’t read the Bible, so when they come to the last use of
that symbolism in the Book of Revelation, they don’t know what it’s talking
about.
This
matter of taking this book, which obviously was the Bible, “to eat it and it
would be sweet as honey in his mouth.” You have several previous uses of that in
the Bible, and we’ll touch on two of them here now. You remember that, as is
always the case with organized, institutionalized religion, the worship in the
This
was brought out and read, and of course it produced consternation immediately
because of the way it so bitterly condemned the things they’d been doing and
said this was leading to the wrath of Yahweh as punishment for it. They took it
to the king and when he read it, he was just appalled. Remember now, he had the
responsibility for this nation, and he wondered, was it too late to avoid the
wrath of Yahweh? Therefore, he began a reform. He ordered the pagan idols and
altars and that sort of thing taken out of the
The
prophet Jeremiah, speaking of that incident – the finding of this scroll and the
recovery of what had been completely lost – spoke of the words of Yahweh saying
(Jeremiah 15, verse 16): “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word
was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O
Yahweh Elohim of hosts.” He was, his name yir-mem-yaw, Yah shall arise, and as you
know, Yah is a shortened form of Yahweh. Now he doesn’t mean, of course, that he
sat down and gnawed on some old dry parchment. He said, I ate them – when you
eat food, it’s assimilated into your body and becomes part of you – every cell
in your body gains and is nourished by a portion of that food you’ve eaten. He
was using that simile there – I studied your words until they became a part of
me. Well, you find a similar expression in the early part of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 2,
verse 8 to Ezekiel 3, verse 3. You remember, at the beginning of his ministry
Ezekiel was given a vision of Yahweh coming down to earth, and he was told: “But
thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that
rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And when I looked,
behold, an hand was sent unto me;
and, lo, a roll of a book was
therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations,
and mourning, and woe. Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou
findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of
Thus,
you’ve got the same symbolism used back here. This is filled within and without
with, as he says, lamentations and mournings and woe, and yet when he ate it,
Ezekiel says “It was in my mouth sweet as honey.” Of course, what was all this
but the process of purification, destroying out of
It’s
perfectly true that certain periods of persecution of the Christians were bad.
It’s also true that Protestants were burned alive in
All
through these centuries they had been murdering individuals and small groups of
people who had been protesting against the corruption of Roman Catholicism, but
the great battles of Roman Catholicism against Protestantism were all then in
the future. It’s been estimated that the number of people murdered by the
Catholic “Church” because they were Protestants, not because they were pagans
(they didn’t bother killing off pagans, they tried to convert them because
paganism and Catholicism were perfectly compatible), converting them was an easy
job. But how could you convert a Protestant when he saw the corruption of all
that you had for a religion? The estimates vary because no exact statistics were
kept, but it has been estimated that the Roman Catholic “Church” is responsible
for the murder of anywhere from forty to sixty million people. And this, you
see, is practically all future from that time, with the publication of the Bible
in the common languages of the people it had become known.
While
it was sweet in John’s mouth to taste, the fact that this Book was the Word of
Yahweh, by the time he got to digesting it he saw the awful persecutions that
still lay ahead, it made his belly bitter. Then at Revelation 10, verse 11, he
receives a new command: “And he (the angel) said unto me, Thou must prophesy
again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.” This, you see,
was commanding the Protestant reformation: “Here you have the book itself to
base it upon, now go out and prophesy before many nations and kings.” We really
can go a verse or two over into the next chapter, 11, before we reach a breaking
off point, because then we run into something that’s a big subject and needs a
lot more time to cover than we have available. And to be frank, I haven’t
finished my own studies on it. Therefore, we’ll just quote the first couple of
verses of Revelation, chapter 11. John said: “And there was given me a reed like
unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the
We
had just completed the transaction of the open Bible being put into circulation.
John was only representative of the many great Christian leaders who were to
carry on the work of the Reformation. They were (in spite of great risk to
themselves and martyrdom in many cases) to carry on the work of spreading
Yahweh’s Word. What is Yahweh’s Word to be spread for? To teach people to bring
in, as far as they can, the
Into
the outer room of the Temple proper, all of the priests on duty there could come
because it was their job to keep it cleaned up and to frequently change the
bread on the table of showbread, and to keep the so-called candlestick (lamp
stand it was), to keep it perpetually burning, always keeping it supplied with
oil and so on. The
A
little later, and thought to be built during the time of Solomon, there was an
outer court added. This was also a feature of Herod’s
[Your
humble transcriber highly suggests that the “Gentiles” (usually translated
“nations”) would be the pure racial members from the White Genesis 10 nations,
descended only from Ham, Shem and Japheth, and not the other races. C.A.E. See note #13 at end of
lesson.]
Josephus
gives some description of the Temple of Herod as it had stood slightly before
his time, and on the walls and at the gates that led from this courtyard into
the inner one there were signs in several different languages warning that the
penalty for any non-Israelite going into the inner court was death. So now John
is told “You go measure the temple and the altar and those that worship
therein.” This is only
Remember,
Yahshua the Christ Himself, when He was out among the Jews, spoke only in
parables which they couldn’t understand. He explained this to His disciples
afterward, as both Matthew and Mark record. He said “among them I speak only in
parables – lest they should understand and be converted and their sins be
forgiven them.” He is trying earnestly to avoid making a convert of the Jew.
Half an hour before my program on XEMO at night comes on, you have what is
called The Christian Jew Hour. I
never could believe in a Christian-Satanic hour – for a minute or second – as it
is a contradiction in terms. Typical of the Jew, who claims to be converted –
and he is always asking you: “What have you done for the Jews today?” Have you
left in your pocket still a few dimes that they haven’t yet stolen from you?
Thus, Yahshua the Christ Himself wanted to avoid converting them, because after
you’ve converted one of them, after you’ve got his past sins wiped out, what is
he? Isn’t the same nature that led him into his past sins going to lead him into
the same sort in the future? He (Yahshua) wanted to avoid that. Therefore, the
Bible, from beginning to end, is an
CRITICAL
NOTES ON LESSON #7
Comments
by William Finck initialed W.R.F.
Comments
by Clifton A. Emahiser in brackets in lesson text as “your
transcriber”
or
initialed C.A.E. in critical notes.
Note
#1:
Nothing has happened yet – even to this very day – that can be pointed to as a
judgment by Yahweh against Roman Catholicism. And the
Note
#2:
I can not accept that “the whole origin of Mohammedanism was a protest against
the total corruption of what had originally been Christianity.” Firstly, it is
apparent that no one was attempting to “Christianize” the Arabs in the first
place. Secondly, Mohammed came from a background which naturally despised
everything Christian, being at least in part, a Jew himself. Thirdly – and
Comparet had mentioned this himself – the Arab world was engaging in all kinds
of pagan idolatry, their own, plus the Egyptian, plus the Greco-Roman and so on.
This is natural to people of mixed heritages, and it was basically this mixed
pagan idolatry which was Mohammedanism’s first target. See Comparet’s own
remarks in Sermon #6, on pages 3-4, for his own discussion of this very thing.
W.R.F.
Note
#3:
Although an edict can be signed in a day, obviously the political circumstances
leading up to and allowing the signing of such an edict – and especially
Note
#4:
The King James Version says “A
rainbow” only because many of the manuscripts which comprise the Majority Text
are wanting the Article, though many others contain it. The better and older
manuscripts, the great uncials, contain the Article. W.R.F.
Note
#5:
The verb “to open” in Rev. 10:2 is an Aorist Participle and may be rendered
either “having been opened” or “being opened.” W.R.F.
Note
#6:
In the medieval “church”, where a parish even had a Bible, it belonged to the
bishop. There was even an early Bible version called the “Bishop’s Bible.”
Priests did not normally have access to a Bible. W.R.F.
Note
#7:
If at the time of the Reformation Greek was little-known in Europe (outside of
Turkish-controlled Greece), it is only because Latin had supplanted Greek as the
common language of scholars in the Middle Ages, but not in Ireland, where the
Keltic church monasteries maintained Greek copies not only of Scripture, but
also of many of the Classics. W.R.F.
Note
#8:
I would not draw the lines of Protestantism around the children of
Note
#9:
The redemption of the children of
Note
#10:
Here Comparet gives several well-known Bible versions’ renderings of the last
clause of Revelation 10:6, all of which are similar in meaning. Then he states
that “some other writers”, whom he leaves unidentified, “have said of this
phrase, that it could be translated, ‘there shall be one more time’,” and leaves
the reader with the impression that this rendering by these “other writers” is
of equal validity with the known writers he had quoted. Who are these “other
writers”, that we may compare their work and test its
validity?
In
truth, there is NO WAY that hoti chronos
ouketi estai could ever mean “there shall be one more time”, a rendering
which adds “one” to the text and ignores the negative ouk. Chronos, literally “time”, is also
“delay”, and just as properly here. The Greeks had a couple of verbs derived
from chronos which meant “to delay”
or “to waste time” (chronizô,
chronotribeô), and at chronos,
IV., Liddle and Scott have: “delay, loss,
of time.” Since in context, “time” makes no sense here, “delay” would be a
proper translation, and
Comment
by Clifton A. Emahiser: I have to admit that when I obtained Comparet’s 14 audio
tape series on the Book Of Revelation about a decade and a half ago, I too was
persuaded by Comparet that the passage in question meant “one more time.” I am
thankful to William Finck for advising me that the Greek simply does not support
that rendering, as at the time I was about to quote Comparet on that theme. On
the other hand, if we set aside the Greek and all other aspects concerning the
incident of the Spanish Armada, one must admit that it was a major mile-marker
in English history. When a prophetic “time” is used in Scripture, it alludes to
a period of 360 years. For instance, “a time, times and a half time” is
sometimes stated as 42 months or 1260 days meaning 1260 years. As many are
aware, the tribes of
A
prophetic “time” is applied to several different unrelated prophecies at
different periods. Therefore, there might be a possibility of a 360 year “time”
period from the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to 1948 A.D., but unrelated
to Rev. 10:6. But one might well ask, “What important event happened to
Note
#11:
It is not likely that cherubim were “angel figures”, which probably came into
the “church” via the winged Nike (the goddess of Victory) figures of the Greeks
and Romans. There is archaeological evidence that the cherub is a winged sphinx,
a creature originally depicted as having the head of a man, the wings of an
eagle, the hind quarters of a bull, and the fore body of a lion: the very four
symbols of
Note
#12:
That there was an outer court in the
Note
#13:
Note
#14:
The inscriptions at the gates to the inner court of Herod’s temple in
Note #15: The statements of Comparet’s which inform us “that [it] is a complete perversion of the Scriptures” that “we’ve got to go out and convert all these other people, especially the Jews”, while certainly correct, are a striking contrast to some of his remarks concerning “missionary work” in his earlier sermons of this series. See note #3 at Lesson #3, and note #11 at Lesson #6. W.R.F.