Because of Nebuchadnezzar's faith in Daniel, and therefore in God, God let him repent and saved him. Nebuchadnezzar died in glory, as still King of Babylon, and did not live to see its destruction. God spared him because he repented, he apparently got rid of the Devil. But under the great king that followed Nebuchadnezzar--Belshazzar his [grand]son--Babylon fell to the Medo-Persians.
So apparently the Devil has been possessing the greatest kings of the earth down through the ages, some more than others. (Question: Well, how was his possessing the Caesars of Rome manifested?) By persecution. Just like God uses the Devil, He created him for that purpose no doubt, as His enemy and the enemy of His people, to try them and test them.
If there hadn't been an opponent, an opposing side, God's people would never have been tried and tested and given any opposition to have any kind of a battle to have to call on God to help them, and it's in this that God gets the glory. He allows Satan to lead the opposition and to try and test and persecute His people, but then they call on God and God always gets the victory and always defeats the Devil and always destroys his kingdom and his power and his empire and his capital and his kings, every single time! Every one of those great World Empires persecuted the people of God.
When the Caesars of Rome came along, one after the other, there were ten great persecutions of Christians under the Roman Empire during that thousand years--which began shortly before Christ was born, only 44 B.C. Christ was born in 4 B.C., which means the Roman Empire was born, you might say, just exactly 40 years before Jesus was born--and that's a very Biblical number God uses a lot.
God allowed the Caesars to arise and rule the world to bring, actually, peace on earth! At the time of Jesus' birth there was peace on Earth because one World power ruled the whole World and there were no wars and no battles. Rome ruled the world and there was no opposing power. This is why sometimes Rome is used as a type of the Antichrist Kingdom, because it will be the World government and there will be no opposing power, therefore no wars, until later.
But every time, God allows these powers to arise for various purposes. Rome established peace on Earth so that Jesus could be born at a time of peace, and the Gospel of the Kingdom could be spread abroad throughout the peace of the Roman Empire. He allowed Alexander and the Greeks to encourage the very beautiful, very expressive Greek language in which the New Testament was written, and their interest in religion and the supernatural and in philosophy and beauty and art.
God allowed it because it facilitated the spread of the Gospel under the New Testament Church. They could all speak the same language. Everybody spoke Greek and Latin during the days of the Early Church, and a lot of them spoke Hebrew too, as well as their local language. So the Greek language and interest in philosophy and religion and the supernatural helped to spread the Gospel, and they spread it mostly in Greek.
The Roman language, Latin, was the language of the government and the law and politics, and the Roman Empire enforced peace on Earth so that the Disciples, as Roman citizens some of them, could travel very easily from country to country with no passports, no visas, no problems. They were Roman citizens and they could travel all over the World without any governmental problems at all, and in a time of peace when it was very easy to do so.
So both the Greek and Roman empires actually facilitated the spreading of the Gospel in the long run, so God allowed them. but then the Devil would always go too far. Obviously God, in a way, used the Devil to inspire Alexander the great to conquer the World so quickly and spread the Greek language all over the World and its interest in the supernatural and religion and philosophy and so on, which later helped the spread of Christianity.
And obviously He then allowed the Roman Empire to overcome the Greeks to spread a Worldwide strong government that kept the peace. He just as good as said that the Roman Empire was of Him, officers of the law and so on. (Romans 13.) In fact he indicated by that that every great World power is of Him, is His creation, even if He allows the Devil to be its creator or king!
The Devil obviously was king of Tyre during the heyday of the Phoenicians' great merchant fleets and great merchant empire. Perhaps because it wasn't as strong politically--it was more or less commercial--it didn't actually rule the World. But in a way it influenced the whole World through its commerce and its riches and its wickedness. Then the Lord destroyed it.
He's always wanted to rule the world, and he's going to get his final chance in the Antichrist when he will really rule the whole World and with tremendous power! So he moved on to the Romans, but when they began to persecute the Christians too much, God destroyed Rome.
Since Rome there's really been no great grand world empire, until the later smaller empires like the Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, Italian Empire, British Empire--but they were all small and never really ruled all the World. They were constantly in conflict with each other, and not one of them was a World government like these previous ones.
But the one which did rule the world for nearly a thousand years after the fall of Rome was, guess what?--The Roman Catholic Church!--And you know how they persecuted the Christians, Protestants and so on from even the earliest days. So apparently he moved on into the Roman Catholic Church as its Popes. And any study of the Papacy will convince you that plenty of those Popes were possessed of the Devil and certainly not the Lord, the way they tortured Christians and massacred them, literally by the millions--killed about a million Christians in Bavaria alone!
So when they got too bad, the Lord saw to it that the power of the Roman Catholic Church was destroyed by the Reformation under Martin Luther and some of the great Reformers. It's still a great power, but it doesn't rule the World like it once did under the Popes in its heyday. So, what nation began about then? What Continent was discovered just before the Reformation and began to grow?
When was America discovered?--"1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue!"--Right at the end of the 1400s, beginning of the 1500s, America was discovered, then came the Reformation. Then came the colonization of America with eventually New York as its head, almost always as its head.
The U.S. then superceded all those former empires, fought and won battles with them--with the British, the Spanish, the French and so on--and America literally became the ruling power of the World! And certainly New York City is its capital, actually, and the wickedest city on Earth just about, and I'm sure Satan must rule it in some way!
I don't doubt that he possessed some of the presidents of the United States, some of them certainly acted like it!--And some were Freemasons, which John Todd claims is definitely a branch of Witchcraft with its ceremonies exactly like witchery in their churches or covens.
They're waiting to reveal him (the Antichrist), and The Bible even says "When he shall be revealed." (2thes.2.) It's going to be something rather sudden, when you suddenly reveal something. Either the World's going to suddenly wake up to who it is, or he's going to suddenly step on the World scene in some dramatic way to solve some great problem like the Mideast question or Jerusalem or the oil, etc.
He's apparently going to come very suddenly to the fore, very suddenly revealed--in which again he's imitating Christ--Christ's Second Coming when He's going to be suddenly revealed in the sky. That would certainly follow consistently his record of trying to imitate Christ and the Millennium with his false messiahship and his false millennium. So apparently he's going to have a sudden revelation.
He's going to cause the confusion and then take advantage of it and take over and solve it, just like he afflicts a lot of people and then through false religions he heals them by removing his affliction.
So he causes the world's great confusion--he's the author of it that prophecy says, he causes it--but then he apparently solves it and rules the World. So once again it will be the Devil incarnate, the Devil in person, the Devil in the body of a man, this time ruling the entire World as the Antichrist. So that certainly sounds like a very logical sequence of events.
Babylon was a political empire, Tyre was a commercial empire. That's an interesting point, because America is really a commercial empire, she's not ruled the World politically, but commercially.--The American Dollar, right? So it kind of could be symbolic that the Antichrist Kingdom is going to be a combination of both.
If the Devil was the king of two great world empires, one commercial and one political, why couldn't he also have been king of all the other great World Empires? Every one of them was anti-God and anti-Christ, from Egypt to the end!--All except the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and that's why God symbolized him as gold, and amongst the beasts as a lion, the king of all beasts.
So he was apparently the only one that was the closest to God's heart, in a way, but even he fell when he got lifted up in pride. So why couldn't the Devil have been also King of Egypt at Memphis, their great capital on the Nile with those immense monuments, pyramids, Sphinx and all the rest?
I wouldn't be surprised that he'd possess some of the world's great conquerors and great world leaders. Of course, why not? He wants to rule the World, why shouldn't he?--And not one of them was ever a great Christian. There were no truly great World leaders who were Christians.
Those who want to rule this world are not Christian; they're usually anti-christ and they do it cruelly with slaughter and armies and murder and by any means possible. How anybody could be in the dirty business of American politics and be a Christian, I don't understand! It's hard to believe.
So therefore why couldn't the Devil have moved on then to athens under Alexander the Great, and then to Rome under the Caesars, and then the Popes of the Catholic Church, and then the beginning of what has come the closest to being the next great World Empire--Babylon the Great, America, its final Empire before the Antichrist Kingdom.
And certainly the Bible definitely teaches that the Antichrist will be the Devil in person, the Devil in the flesh, to rule the World's last great World Government or kingdom. So apparently the Devil has been the king of all these great World Empires and their capitals, possessing their kings and running their governments, and always every one of them persecuted God's people, every single one!
There hasn't been a single great world empire that has not persecuted the people of God! So obviously these World Empires were ruled by the Devil who persecuted God's Kingdom and God's people right to the very end, from Pharaoh to the Antichrist!
Jesus is my King of kings!--Who's yours?
My name is James Arendt. I was raised in the Hegewisch neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, served in the USAF from 1970 to 1974, and became a full-time missionary for Christ living 40 years in Japan, 3.5 years in Russia, and a few months in other countries such as Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China where I also served the King of Kings, Jesus, as an Ambassador for His Kingdom. My full bio.
If you like this website, you can show your appreciation by sending me a gift toward my support. My wife Tess and I moved from the island of Guam USA in June 2023 to the city of Allen in the province of Northern Samar, one of the poorer provinces in the Philippines. My only work is maintaining my websites, Deep Truths, and James Japan which costs me $300 per year now. And Tess is ministering to the local people giving them regular Bible Studies in three groups, children, teenagers and adults.
My PayPal ID: james.arendt@jamesjpn.netYou may like my James Japan site as well because it covers subjects that are not covered in Deep Truths such as things like the Climate Change Hoax and the COVID-19 death-jabs.
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