Hartland Summer Conference 2021: Revelation's Cosmic Conflict

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Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Karl Tsatalbasidis

The Mark of the Beast Vs. the Seal of God: Is It Just a Conflict Over Days?

It is indeed a privilege to be here with you.

And I don't know about you, but as I've had a chance to listen to these meetings over the past few days, this has indeed been quite a feast as we have been here day after day listening to the word of God.

Now, I'm glad that the way things turned out that the message that I'm going to be sharing is kind of at the end because everything I've been hearing has been a very helpful prerequisite, especially the focus on the faith of Jesus and how essential that is.

And so if you haven't had a chance to listen to some of the messages that came before then, I would encourage you to do that.

And I'm going to be taking a very narrow focus here this morning, the Mark of the Beast versus the Seal of God.

I would just invite you to bow your heads as I kneel in prayer, just asking the Lord 1 more time to speak to us.

Heavenly Father, Lord, we are indeed living in turbulent times.

We pray that your Holy Spirit will be present now.

May he illuminate and guide our minds and give us wisdom concerning this question.

Thank you for hearing and answering our prayers in Jesus' name, amen.

You've heard some of the testimonies of the students as they've been going out, knocking on doors, getting some Bible studies.

And I can remember giving many Bible studies in which people were very, very interested and they were just lapping everything up.

You study 1 topic after another, whether it's the signs of the times, or whether it's the grace of God, or the Bible as the only truth, eventually you're going to get to the study of the Sabbath.

And so as you begin to study the Sabbath, you lay out the truths found in the Bible and the Old Testament, and then you're going to the New Testament.

And sooner or later, the response you usually get is, I can't see that this really makes a difference.

As you go through some of the rest of the commandments, we should honor our mother and our father.

And that makes sense because if you don't honor the ones who brought you into this world, then you're kind of conditioning yourself not to honor your teachers and the police and so forth and so on.

Well, killing, I don't really need to explain a whole lot about that.

Not committing adultery, yeah, that causes terrible side effects.

You know, stealing, bearing false witness, coveting.

People can kind of process that and say, you know, all those things make a difference, but how does the day you worship on really make that much of a difference?

And so it's with this question in mind that we're proceeding here this morning.

So what kind of difference does this really make?

Well, as I thought about this, the theme of our conference is cosmic conflict, Revelation's cosmic conflict.

And as you take a cursory glance at the book of Revelation, you discover that God has placed an opposition to Satan in many, many different ways.

And that the beast, who has the mark, is really a counterfeiting power.

For instance, you can look on the left side and you have God there.

In Revelation 1, verse 1 and 6, verse 2, God gives Jesus authority and power.

But in Revelation 13, verse 2, the beast gets his power, seat, and great authority from the dragon.

In Psalm 113 verse 5 and Isaiah 40 verse 18, they ask the question, who is like unto the Lord?

Then in Revelation 13 verse 4, they ask who is like unto the beast.

In Revelation chapter 2 verse 8, Christ died and lives.

Then in Revelation 13 verse 14, the beast receives the stroke of death and yet lives.

In Revelation chapter 1 verse 4, as John is introducing this great book, he refers to God as He which is, which was, and which is to come.

And then in Revelation chapter 17 verse 18, it describes the beast who was and is not and yet is coming out of the abyss.

So you can see here that the beast is a counterfeiting power and in this you get a picture of the great controversy.

As we move on you find that God has a seal and then the beast has a mark and then God's seal goes in the forehead whereas the beast's mark goes in the forehead or in the hand and it contains the name of God the seal does and with the beast it contains the name of the beast well the Lamb has a wife and then Satan also is married to the harlot of Babylon and then you have the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, God's Church, and then you have the unholy city, Babylon, Satan's Church.

So you have all these counterfeiting elements basically bringing to our attention that the context in which we should understand this question about the mark of the beast and the seal of God is a context of the great controversy and the context is who do we owe ultimately our allegiance to?

Well, how do we actually demonstrate through Scripture that the mark is placed in opposition to the seal?

Well, there are a couple of main ways that we can do this.

When you take a look at the commandments of God, you can compare them to what is written in Revelation chapter 13 regarding the things concerning the beast.

For instance, when you look at the first commandment, it says, thou shalt have no other gods before me.

So in other words, God is the only 1 that is worthy of our worship.

But then in Revelation 13, verse 8, it says all the world wondered after the beast.

So they actually worshiped the beast in opposition.

The second commandment, thou shall not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything in heaven above the earth beneath the waters under the earth and it goes on.

So there is a prohibition against the worship of idols.

Well in Revelation chapter 13 verse 14 it says they make an image to the beast.

And in the third commandment, it talks about revering God's name.

Well, in Revelation 13, verse 17, it says they receive the number of the beast's name.

Well, when you get to the fourth commandment, it talks about remembering the Sabbath day, and this is God's special sign.

You can find this in Exodus chapter 31, verse 13 to 18, and that's placed in opposition to the mark of the beast.

There's another way that we can look at this, that we can show the relationship between the mark and the sign or the seal of God.

You can compare 2 very important chapters.

And as I continue to go through this presentation, I'm kind of assuming a lot.

I'm assuming that we have already looked at all the characteristics that make up the beast, and we are assuming a lot about the things of God.

I need to do that or else this study would take more and more and more and more and more time.

When you read Daniel chapter 7, it says that the great wind strove upon the seas and then these 4 beasts came up out of the sea.

It talks about the first 1 was like a lion, and the second 1 was like a bear that had raised itself up on 1 side and 3 ribs in its mouth.

And then the third 1 was like a leopard, and it had 4 heads and 4 wings of a fowl.

And then it would reign for a time, times and the dividing of time in Daniel 7, verse 25.

It would speak great words against the Most High.

It would wear out the saints of the Most High and think to change times and laws.

When you compare Daniel 7 with Revelation 13, Revelation 13 is kind of like a conglomeration.

It's like you took all the beasts of Daniel 7 and you put them in a blender and then out came this beast in Revelation chapter 13.

So interestingly enough, the beast rises up out of the sea, and it has the mouth of a lion, comparable to Daniel chapter 7 verse 4, has the feet of a bear, comparable to Daniel chapter 7 verse 5 with the bear, and then the body of a leopard.

So the most important, I should say the most substantial part of the Beast of Revelation 13 is The leopard, and the leopard represents Greece.

So the lion represents Babylon, the bear, Medo-Persia, the leopard represents Greece, and we're gonna talk about the significance of that as we move on.

We know this beast refers to the papacy, and this is not a Seventh-day Adventist interpretation, but 1 which the reformers had held and many Protestants have held.

But the biggest part of that is the leopard, and that's because Greek philosophy and Greek philosophical thinking is the very structure of Catholicism, and without it, Catholicism would simply implode, and we'll speak a little bit more about that.

Now it reigns for 42 months comparable to time times in the dividing of time.

It would speak great things and blasphemies just like the little horn would in Daniel chapter 7.

It would make war with the saints and overcome them just like the little horn did, and it would do this for the same amount of time, and then instead of thinking to change times and laws, that's placed in connection with the mark of the beast.

Now it says it would think or intend to change times and laws.

I'm reading from Edwin de Kock's book, Christ and Antichrist in Prophecy and History, here, page 239, where he states, the abbreviated 10 commandments of the Roman Church introduced directly or by implication no fewer than 15 changes.

I wish I had time to go through all those, but that's really not part of the entire message for today.

As I'm continuing to read from DeKalk on page 239, he states, in Kenan and Gehrman, only 8 of its original 94 words were retained.

The more recent traditional catechetical formula is even worse.

Of Exodus 20, verse 9 to 11, the longest commandment in the Decalogue, it has kept only 5 words, remember to keep holy the, and I'll complete it in just a minute, and obliterated everything else about the biblical Sabbath.

Substituting, remember to keep holy the Lord's day is a total alteration.

All the same, the Lord who made heaven and earth insists that we must rest on the seventh day of the week.

The reason he gives for instituting the Sabbath is that then he rested, rejoicing over his workmanship, and wants us all to commemorate some very important facts.

These are that he is the creator, the owner, and therefore the rightful legislator for this planet.

Again that comes from Edward de Kock's book Christ and Antichrist in Prophecy and History.

Now What we need to understand is that for the Roman Catholic Church, Sunday is not just a day for them.

I will be summarizing the Pope's encyclical.

This is Pope John Paul II who wrote his encyclical Dies Domini in 1998 and that stands for the Lord's Day or the Day of the Lord again taken from that encyclical that he wrote in 1998.

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The Mark of the Beast Vs. the Seal of God: Is It Just a Conflict Over Days?

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