In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and long-time supporter, David Koresh, to discuss the events of the Israel-Gazan War and its impact on the Christian-Zionist understanding of Revelation and the Book of Revelation.
00:00:00.000I don't quite know where to begin in this conversation. So we had a very good conversation a number of months ago, and this was all before the Israel-Gazan war began.
00:00:14.260So some of the things that were more theoretical or speculative or so on have almost become real and tangible now. But do you have any initial thoughts on what we're seeing? And then we can talk a little bit about Revelation. But do you have just more superficial thoughts or just about what we're going through right now?
00:00:40.500Yeah, great question. I'll just say real quick, I think it's really interesting how when I first began my account in late of 2021, and I said that things are going to get bad under the Biden administration, we're going to potentially see World War III beginning to brew and rumors of wars stirring up amongst the nations all before 2024.
00:01:07.140And it's now been about almost two years now since I was saying that kind of stuff. And I got a lot of flack, a lot of pushback for saying these. I got called a lot of names.
00:01:23.760But it is interesting. I don't know, like I said, if I'm 100% right about these things. But I think it is interesting how things do appear to be lining up exactly as suspected. And we can get into the details of that in a little bit if you want.
00:01:40.680Yeah. So let's talk about Revelation in general, and then Revelation in terms of Israel.
00:01:53.120So for people who aren't versed in this, and that would to some degree include myself, let's just talk about the book of Revelation itself, John the Revelator, who he was and might have been.
00:02:15.640And then also the reception of the book. I'm thinking here in terms of Augustine's view on it. Martin Luther's view on it was a bit ambivalent, or he didn't quite know what to make of it, in fact.
00:02:32.820But we can kind of talk about that and then talk about how the book of Revelation has had so much impact on the thinking of Christian Zionists, the Schofield Bible, the David Koresh, among others, and so on, and how this resonates today.
00:02:56.120But let's go back to the beginning. I mean, what is the book of Revelation?
00:03:02.820That is an excellent question. And when we talk about the book of Revelation, we have to acknowledge that there are many, numerous different interpretations of not only Revelation, but also Daniel.
00:03:14.680Daniel and Revelation go side by side, hand in hand. Daniel, Daniel's chapter 2 through 7 indicate the early stages and allude to Revelation 13.
00:03:30.980And I've just been really spending a lot of time really digging into these eschatological events and my interpretation of them.
00:03:42.260And it's interesting that, you know, people talk a lot about Revelation. Well, what does Revelation mean? So, you know, Revelation is the revelation of Christ.
00:03:52.260And it's all about Jacob's trouble. And it's about tribulation. And it's about separating the wheat from the chaff, right? The ones who, you know, trust in Christ alone, and the people who, you know, put their trust in man and princes to be only to be led into deception, which in this case, possibly the end times deception.
00:04:16.320But it's really important that, you know, like I said, there are many different interpretations.
00:04:22.960You have people who believe in preterism, who believe that Revelation occurred in 70 AD with the destruction of the temple and Nero Caesar being the beast.
00:04:33.080There's that interpretation, which I highly disagree with. And we could always get into that, whatever.
00:04:38.880And then we have, you know, more of a dispensationalist view, which is mainly prevalent among the evangelicals, the Christian Zionists, right?
00:04:50.700And a lot of people mistake me for a dispensationalist. I would not classify myself as a dispensationalist.
00:04:56.960I am a futurist. I am a pre-millennialist, meaning that I believe that – I don't believe in post-millennialism or amillennialism.
00:05:06.560I believe we are before the millennial reign, and that's another topic.
00:05:12.860But I'm not a dispensationalist. There are going to be many, and there are already many, many in the dispensationalist, Schofield, Christian Zionist sect that I believe will worship the Antichrist.
00:05:28.320And, you know, having your eschatology wrong is not, you know, heretical in itself, but can, you know, errors in our understanding of eschatology could very well lead to us actually following the Antichrist, which I believe many are doing and will do.
00:05:49.120Okay. Let's – there's a lot here. I actually – I really want to dive into, like, each of these things.
00:05:57.780So what do we know about John the Revelator? So he's not John the Baptist. He's not John the writer of the gospel. He's someone else.
00:06:11.260Okay. What do we know about him, and roughly when did he receive this revelation?
00:06:19.120Well, we know that he was exiled as a result of persecution done by the Christians under the Roman emperor at the time.
00:06:29.060I don't remember the name of the emperor, but he received visions from – and special revelation from God himself, and he wrote down what he saw in the vision.
00:06:43.540And revelation is essentially a scroll, right?
00:06:47.640It's a big scroll, and it's made – and to get to open the scrolls, we need to open seven seals.
00:06:53.980So you have seven seals on the scroll.
00:06:57.220When those – each time a seal is broken, a prophetic event occurs.
00:07:02.320And at the seventh seal, the scroll is opened, and then we have seven trumpets, and then we have seven bulls.
00:07:10.940And the trumpets, each one is sounded, and a prophetic event occurs, but it's not – it's a very devastating one.
00:07:20.000And God's wrath comes with the opening of the scroll, with the breaking of the seventh seal.
00:07:27.060So we have the seven seals broken, the scroll opens, and then it's God's wrath from then on.
00:07:31.560And I hold to a pre-wrath rapture view, and that's a whole other topic, but not a pre-tribulational view like the evangelicals have and the dispensationalists, which is a whole other thing.
00:07:49.700But yes, there's going to be a lot of things that I think right now we're seeing the stage being set for.
00:07:59.100I said two years ago, I think we're going to see things heighten up with Israel and with Palestine, and that's only going to set the stage for the world's peacemaker to come onto the world stage and be that peacemaker who's going to do what I believe they'll call the deal of the century.
00:08:22.180It'll be the deal of the century, and it's going to be some form of agreement.
00:08:28.820I have a theory – I'm not sure about it, but I have a theory that it'll involve – the peace treaty will somehow involve giving up some land to the Palestinians in exchange for the temple to be built on the temple mount where the Dome of the Rock sits.
00:08:46.960And I think that – I theorize that could be a very likely scenario in order to further the messianic prophecies for the Jews.
00:08:59.480Okay, I have a lot to say about this, but I want to bring us back because I really want to – I'm imagining that many people don't know much going into this.
00:09:10.660So I want to really establish a foundation for what all this is.
00:09:15.700So the book of Revelation was canonized under Constantine.
00:09:28.680Okay, and so what I've found looking into this more recently, I've actually been reading Bart Ehrman's book, which is called Armageddon, which is a reference to the Battle of Armageddon.
00:10:10.860And so one thing I learned from that is that Augustine in the City of God, he had, I guess, he set the stage for a post-millennialist conception of Revelation.
00:10:27.560And so he said that – and you can pick up on this – but he basically said that we're not looking forward to something.
00:10:38.020All of this has already happened, as you mentioned, with like the persecution under Nero, et cetera.
00:10:45.640And there was a kind of – it's like a spiritual rise of Christ, and it's not a literal return.
00:10:55.580He's reigning right now in the Catholic Church, in the Church in general, via the alternative Christ, the alt Christus, the Pope.
00:11:09.760And so, you know, yes, there is going to be some ultimate end time at some point, but we don't know when that is.
00:11:21.160And, you know, I think there's – I believe it was Paul who said this, you know, for the Lord, you know, a day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day, and no man truly knows, et cetera.
00:11:30.860So there's a – we should be humble vis-a-vis these revelations, but we shouldn't – in a way, I think Augustine was suggesting that people not try to read signs too much.
00:11:47.740And he was suggesting that, you know, Christ is reigning right now in the Catholic Church.
00:11:51.900But this – obviously, this has had an effect then, it has an effect now in the way that people read this book.
00:12:02.220As I mentioned, Martin Luther didn't quite know what to do with this, and he actually put Revelation in an appendix.
00:12:11.860You know, he focused on other things and prioritized other things in that regard.
00:12:16.600And then in terms of the dispensationalism, you know, I was reading this tweet by Keith Woods, which is one more of his, you know, Wikipedia entries or contributions there too, where he basically kind of laid down a story of dispensationalism.
00:12:39.080And he was saying, oh, this is a heretical, you know, view.
00:12:43.420And it's kind of like – I don't – as you said before, first off, it's not actually heretical.
00:12:49.080You can disagree about eschatology without being an actual heretic and losing your soul, one.
00:12:57.300So it's not – it's not strictly heretical.
00:12:59.460But also, this – calling things heretical seems to be this convenient snobbery where you're like, oh, well, you know, no true Christian would believe that or something.
00:13:23.480And it's actually been going on for a long time.
00:13:25.940I mean, like someone I mentioned on a recording, I believe it was with Uwe Boyo like nine months ago, but it was Joaquin de Fiore, who is an amazing Catholic monk.
00:13:41.020And so this is where 900 years ago, I mean, he had a concept of a dispensation in the sense that – and this would – you know, he could find correspondences in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
00:13:52.400You can find correspondence between the Bible and history, and that's how they thought was correspondence as opposed to, like, cause and effect logic or, you know, Akamite reasoning.
00:14:03.260But he basically saw an age of the Father that is relayed to us in the Old Testament, an age of the Son or grace that is – Jesus dies for our sins on the cross, so there's grace.
00:14:19.600And then he saw an age of the Spirit, which was treated as rather radical.
00:14:28.040And, you know, Joaquin de Fiore was a dutiful monk, of course, but he's also someone who had his work suppressed and, you know, marginalized.
00:14:38.000Because he's suggesting this coming of a new age.
00:14:42.760And he even thought that we might have seen an Antichrist with Frederick and all that kind of stuff.
00:14:46.980But there's a coming of a new age, of the age of the Spirit.
00:14:50.320And in a way, the world will become a monastery.
00:14:53.120And what he meant by that was that we'll all engage in charity and we'll all be captured by the Holy Spirit.
00:15:02.980And you could even suggest that there might not even be a need for a hierarchical Catholic church in that circumstance.
00:15:33.760Like, I think a lot of the left and liberals want to live in an age of the Spirit, you know, where one big monastery – or as Nietzsche would caustically say, one big hospital where we're all taking care of sick people.
00:15:47.660It's kind of – again, that's like Nietzsche's view of the matter.
00:15:50.520But so – and then dispensationalism, as it arose later on in the 18th and 19th century, they – I think they're – they might not be consciously or explicitly picky at Montfiore, but there's a lot of tendency towards this.
00:16:06.120There's, like, the age of innocence, which is in the Garden of Eden.
00:16:09.900And then there's the age of conscience, which is the age from Adam and Eve's expulsion up to Noah.
00:16:18.400And a man fails in the age of conscience.
00:16:22.440And then there's the age – I believe the next one is the age of law, which is Noah onward.
00:16:47.520And there's actually a very long tradition within Christian thinking for over 1,000 years that stresses dispensations.
00:16:56.800And, in fact, Augustine was almost, like, preemptively criticizing dispensationalism.
00:17:04.360So it's something that's just very – it's embedded in the heart of Christian thought for 2,000 years.
00:17:10.940And so to simply dismiss it as some, like, Vanjie thing or something I think is wrong.
00:17:17.680What do you think about what I just said?
00:17:19.220Going back to the idea of postmillennialism, the idea that Christ is raiding now not in a literal sense but in a spiritual sense.
00:17:29.300I used to be involved in a reformed church, a Presbyterian, reformed, very Calvinist in their thinking, very holding to these sort of postmillennial views.
00:17:44.660And one of the things that I really enjoyed about going there was actually on Sunday after service.
00:17:52.660We would all go downstairs and we would sit around these tables and eat.
00:17:57.460And before we would eat food, we would go over some Bible study.
00:18:04.620And one of my favorite things about going there was questioning a lot of these postmillennial ideas and really challenging the biblical validity of a lot of them.
00:18:36.580But one of the things that we have to do is challenge sort of the biblical validity of these claims.
00:18:43.100And it's a very flawed perspective biblically because there's a lot of issues with it.
00:18:50.760Like for example, during the millennial reign, Satan is bound for 1,000 years.
00:18:58.480Also, I find that a lot of the postmillennial thought comes with – not comes with, but a lot of it is – there's a lot of the time a misunderstanding of the Old Testament and a misunderstanding of the Old Testament prophecies.
00:19:20.760The messianic prophecies and what exactly entailed the millennial reign in sort of an Old Testament sense as well.
00:19:33.100And right now, what the Jews in Israel are waiting for is an Old Testament fulfillment.
00:19:39.180Now, obviously, there's also a very strong Talmudic sense, which is, you know, as well.
00:19:48.280But nevertheless, you know, they're waiting for a physical messiah to come.
00:19:54.740They're waiting for him to physically bring peace to all nations.
00:19:58.500They're waiting for him to physically protect them from their enemies and conquer their enemies.
00:20:05.300And they are looking to have a physical temple in Jerusalem.
00:20:12.980And he's a sinful messiah is one of the other things that I've heard in this.
00:20:18.140So there's the – you know, we have this notion of Jesus as a perfect man without sin.
00:20:23.300And David, as he's depicted in the Old Testament, is far from perfect.
00:20:31.720He's extremely lustful and petty even in his actions against other people.
00:20:42.740There is that kind of like two different messiahs that are offered, messiah ben David and the messiah ben Joseph.
00:20:50.060And, you know, you can even see that in the – say, to go back to the book of John, not the John the Revelator, but John the Gospel writer, of this Barabbas, of, you know, the Jews that they were offered, you know, who should you free?
00:21:07.400And should you free Jesus Barabbas or Jesus Christ, effectively?
00:21:11.900And they're both – they're kind of mirror images of one another, and they're almost like, I don't know, like a dark mirror image of one another, a doppelganger, in the sense that Jesus Barabbas is an insurrectionist.
00:21:31.360And he's obviously not David, but he's closer to being David than Jesus Christ is.
00:21:38.960And so the Jews choose this Christ, in effect.
00:21:44.460And then again, there's another kind of layer of irony where Jesus is, you know, according to John, Jesus is crucified as being the king of the Jews.
00:21:57.260And the Jews even say at one point, oh, we, you know, we want to change it from, you know, king of the Jews to he thought he was king of the Jews, or he tried to be king of the Jews, or something like that.
00:22:08.480To crucify him as such would almost be to accept that he actually was their Messiah, and they didn't want him.
00:22:15.560So they're kind of two different Messiah visions.
00:22:20.800And we actually mentioned this a few months ago when we talked, and I didn't realize the implications of this.
00:22:28.280But with someone like Cyrus, who, you know, releases the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and then ultimately rebuilds a new temple, the second temple to Yahweh.
00:22:42.680He actually, I always thought of him as almost like a, you know, useful idiot, a trump for Bibi Netanyahu.
00:22:51.620You know, it's like, we don't care who he is or what he thinks, but he's doing good things for Israel.
00:22:55.780But I think he's actually deeper than that, because he is the anointed one.
00:23:00.320So he is a type of Messiah, as it were.
00:23:06.640And so there are different concepts of the Messiah in the Bible.
00:23:13.440And I think Christians have a very, you know, they know who, and they think, obviously, Christians believe that the Messiah did appear on earth.
00:23:21.660But they have a particular conception of them.
00:23:25.920And there's actually different messiahs in the Bible.
00:23:32.040And I think the Jews, if they are awaiting Messiah, and I think some of the, many of them are.
00:23:36.580I don't, you know, I don't know about percentages, tons of secular atheist Jews in Israel, obviously.
00:23:44.640But many of them truly are, and they are an animating spirit in Israel.
00:23:49.320But they're waiting for someone very different.
00:23:53.260So anyway, what do you think about all these things that I'm throwing out there?
00:23:56.300Yeah, I was actually going to mention the Jesus Christ versus Jesus Barabbas.
00:24:02.420And, you know, Barabbas being the, you know, the rebel, being the insurrectionist is actually what he was classified as, which is interesting.
00:24:10.560And how, you know, they chose the political, you know, the one, you know, the political rebel.
00:24:17.100They chose him rather than, you know, Jesus Christ.
00:24:38.340I was actually present at the J6 rally.
00:24:41.440I wasn't inside the building or anything, but I was present at the march as a Trump supporter, me and my wife.
00:24:49.740And it was so crazy to see how that all just transpired.
00:24:55.940There was a sort of weird energy that just kind of crept in at a certain point.
00:25:00.980And my wife was pregnant at the time, and we decided to head on out of there because it just was – we were getting really weird vibes, if that makes sense.
00:25:19.840You know, there's something going on down there, and it was an interesting time.
00:25:24.800But yes, exactly to your point is – and what we're going to see, you know, what we see in the Bible very often is typologies.
00:25:34.380We see different types, and it's like the already but not yet, which is to say the partial fulfillment of it that is a shadow of a future full, complete fulfillment.
00:25:49.500And this is one of the biggest – my biggest arguments against the preterists, both partial and full preterists, which is that, you know, Nero Caesar and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD was a type of future fulfillment that would later be the actual, complete fulfillment of the end times.
00:26:15.040But, yeah, it's really fascinating to see, and I think that as all of these mounting issues grow on the world stage, you know, it's all the more fitting for, you know, someone, me thinking it's Trump.
00:26:34.680You know, to come back, like, you know, in triumph and glory and, you know, do the things that Israel is looking to be fulfilled.
00:26:47.480And, you know, that's what I think the first three and a half years of the tribulation period are is essentially the Antichrist going forth and fulfilling these messianic prophecies, trying to show that he is Christ, trying to show that he is the Messiah that the Jews have been waiting on.
00:27:07.820And a lot of Christians too, because a lot of Christians will believe that we are in the millennial brain of Christ, therefore, you know, you know, therefore this – everything that's happening is a good thing, and then we should follow and go along with it.
00:27:21.700So – and that's mainly who the deception is for.
00:27:24.580It's mainly for Christians and religious Jews in Israel.
00:27:29.160You know, it's called Jacob's Trouble.
00:27:33.780So – and then one final point against the preterism is, you know, the idea that we reign on earth, you know, in a spiritual sense – or sorry, that Christ reigns through us in a spiritual sense on earth.
00:27:51.980So again, a lot of this comes from a really deep misunderstanding of Old Testament messianic prophecies, of the, you know, the Davidic covenant.
00:28:04.620He's the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant, you know, by sitting physically on the throne of David and, you know, ruling from Jerusalem like David.
00:28:15.640Which is interesting because – I don't know if you remember that video of the rabbi.
00:28:20.140I think it was Lev Parnas and some rabbis or something like that.
00:28:23.980They were talking to Trump, and they said, you know, you have the same numbers as Messiah.
00:28:29.920It's like you're the savior of the whole world.
00:28:31.540And, you know, when he said that, he's actually sort of correct because Messiah Ben David in Hebrew Gramatria and – oh, sorry, Messiah son of David in Hebrew Gramatria and Donald J. Trump in Hebrew Gramatria both equal 424.
00:28:49.120And if you've seen my pin thread in it, I show this really stunning coincidence where Donald Trump becomes the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
00:29:05.460And as he walks up to the wall, the moment that his hand touches the wall, the time turns 424.
00:29:12.440And I think there is a lot of different clues that we could look at that really – I mean, very hard to deny, even if you wanted to try to deny a lot of this stuff.
00:29:36.400So I'm not a dispensationalist, as I said.
00:29:39.500I disagree with dispensationalists on a lot of different key points like the rapture and a lot of other things.
00:29:49.240But so dispensationalists, we hold some similarities in the idea that we believe in a future – in a future fulfillment of Bible prophecy, which, you know, is very common.
00:30:01.380And you don't have to be a dispensationalist to be a futurist.
00:30:06.680But, you know, they believe in a distinction between Israel and the church, as well do I, as I do as well.
00:30:14.400I don't hold to a covenant theology perspective.
00:30:18.100And, you know, the dispensationalists, they believe in premillennialism and just, you know, the future fulfillment of these prophecies that will happen, you know.
00:30:32.040And they believe in the rapture of the church before the tribulation, which I don't agree with.
00:30:36.800But that's sort of the short end of it.
00:30:54.660And so a simple way of thinking about it is, with Joaquin de Fiore, the notion of an age of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
00:31:05.220So he's corresponding history with the Trinity.
00:31:11.260And so, you know, and it makes a lot of sense.
00:31:14.700You know, if you look back at the Old Testament, it is, you know, patriarchal about fearing God, turning away from him and getting punished and then coming back, etc.
00:31:25.900And then the age of the Son is an age of grace.
00:31:29.100So all of that stuff, you know, the whole, like, book of judges of, you know, going this way and that, turning against Yahweh and then calling upon Yahweh and sacrificing your daughter as a result and all that kind of stuff.
00:31:53.120And Joaquin imagined an era after that, which, again, as I was suggesting, it's a radical idea because it would be almost like moving away even from grace and this notion of a global monastery as, you know, he imagined it.
00:32:10.360Something like a heaven on earth or an end of history, you know, someone like Fukuyama, who's this, an Asian guy who went to University of Chicago and studied under Harold Bloom and all that kind of stuff.
00:32:24.540Even someone with such a secular background is still influenced by this.
00:32:30.800And I think that is very, you know, very interesting.
00:32:36.340What are the seven, in dispensationalism as it is now, let me find the seven dispensations.
00:32:45.320Yeah, so there's the dispensation of conscience, which as I described, it goes up through Genesis 6.
00:32:52.440The dispensation of human government, or as I said, law.
00:33:56.280And Donnie, could you talk about the book of Revelation itself?
00:34:00.000Like, what is, give us the elevator pitch for Revelation?
00:34:05.780Like, what, what, what is the basic structure of the book of Revelation so that we can start to, you know, think about its correspondence with history?
00:34:16.200Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask to go, to, to be general, because I, I, I try not to go on tangents, but I, I end up doing, doing that anyway.
00:34:35.840So Revelation, like I said earlier, it's about the revelation of Christ.
00:34:39.740So in Romans 11, it goes into detail about how a veil has been put over the eyes of, you know, the sons of Abraham, the, the, you know, people of Israel.
00:34:52.060And, you know, it's not until the fullness of the Gentiles is realized that, you know, this veil will be lifted, but, you know, there has to be tribulation.
00:35:02.500There has to be, there has to be these things that happen.
00:35:06.680And it's about, you know, it's, it's about, again, a spiritual deception, a great delusion, and many people will fall victim, particularly Jewish people in Israel, Christians here.
00:35:20.800And essentially, you know, it's, it's, it's seven years is, is, you know, there's a seven year period.
00:35:30.160And it begins with a lot of people agree and disagree where, where in the timeline, the tribulation period begins.
00:35:39.060I would say that we are not in the tribulation period just yet.
00:35:42.040I would, I would say that we are just before the start of the tribulation period.
00:35:47.400And like I said earlier, the first three and a half years is the Antichrist, you know, fulfilling these prophecies so that, you know, he can claim at the midway mark that he is the Messiah.
00:36:01.440That, you know, that, that, that by doing the things that Christ is supposed to do during the millennial kingdom, like, you know, defeat the enemies of Israel, like bring peace to all nations, et cetera, et cetera.
00:36:14.980And, you know, the latter half, three and a half years of the tribulation period is roughly is God's wrath towards the end.
00:36:28.440But there is a period where, you know, the beast goes out of control and he's, you know, killing and he's persecuting the saints.