II Thess. 2:3-8: “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming.”
Paul describes a restrainer who hinders the rise of the antichrist, that this restrainer must be removed before the man of sin can be revealed. Note the following:
"Now the abandonment of Rome (Emperor Constantine left Rome in 326 A.D. in search of a suitable new capital, and dedicated Byzantium as the "Nova Roma" on May 11th, 330 A.D., renaming it Constantinople after himself.) was the liberation of the Pontiffs. Whatsoever claims to obedience the Emperors may have made, and whatsoever compliance the Pontiff may have yielded, the whole previous relation, anomalous, and annulled again and again by the vices and outrages of the Emperors, was finally dissolved by a higher power. The providence of God permitted a succession of irruptions, Gothic, Lombard, and Hungarian, to desolate Italy, and to efface from it every remnant of the Empire. The Pontiffs found themselves alone; the sole fountains of order, peace, law, and safety. And from the hour of this providential liberation, when, by a Divine intervention, the chains fell off from the hands of the successor of St. Peter, as once before from his own, no sovereign has ever reigned in Rome except the Vicar of Jesus Christ.. The moral import of this Divine action must be adequately appreciated. It cancelled, abolished, and extinguished finally and for ever the right of conquest, possession, occupation, and property claimed by the Emperors over Italy and Rome.
For three hundred years, then, the Church had over it, in Rome itself, a temporal power, to which it rendered obedience in all things that were lawful. In this it only obeyed the precept, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. But from the hour when Constantine, in the language of the Roman law, "Deo jubente," by the command of God, translated the seat of empire to Constantinople, from that moment there never reigned in Rome a temporal prince to whom the Bishops of Rome owed a permanent allegiance. From that hour God Himself liberated His Church. ... It waited until such time as God should break its bonds asunder, and should liberate it from subjection to civil powers, and enthrone it in the possession of a temporal sovereignty of its own. Therefore, in that day when the first Christian emperor withdrew himself into the far East, he abandoned Rome and Italy; and the "donation" of Constantine, as it is called, expresses not a fact, but a principle. Constantine signed no instrument of donation; but the manner of conceiving and of speaking, in those simple ages, so represented the providential fact of the donation of God. God gave to the Vicar of His Son the possession of the city in which thirty of his predecessors has sealed their testimony with their blood. The donation of Constantine consisted in the simple providential fact, that he departed from Rome to Constantinople, moved by an impulse from God himself. It would delay me too long to dwell upon the motives which God implanted in the first Christian emperor, to impel him to abandon his sovereignty in Rome. They were motives of a supernatural origin, and he was but obeying a supernatural impulse. The donation was of God, and not of man.
I say, then, that it was God's own act which liberated His Vicar upon earth from subjection to temporal power; and that for twelve hundred years the Bishops of Rome have reigned as temporal princes. They have possessed their own. No man has given to them their sovereign rights. They reign there as Christian princes by the providence of God. They are the first example of a Christian monarchy, the first seed of Christian Europe, the first roll of Christian princes. When France was yet distracted by conflicting races, when England was divided by the Heptarchy, when Germany was a forest, and when Spain was a desolation, the Vicar of Christ already reigned as a sovereign prince in Rome.
It is true, indeed, that in the three centuries between the conversion of Constantine [312 A.D.] and the period of St. Gregory the Great [590-604 A.D.], in those three centuries of turbulence and disorder, invasion and warfare, by which Italy and Rome was afflicted, the temporal power of the Supreme Pontiff was only in its beginning; but about the seventh century it was firmly established, and that which the Divine Providence had prepared from the beginning received its full manifestation; and no sooner was the material power which once reigned in Rome consecrated and sanctified by the investiture of the Vicar of Jesus Christ with the temporal sovereignty over the city where he dwelt, than he began to create throughout Europe the order of Christian civilization, Christian empires, Christian monarchies, which, confederated together, have maintained the peace and order of the world from that hour to this. What we call Christendom, that is to say, the great family of Christian nations, Christian races organised and knit together with their princes and their legislatures, by international law, mutual contracts, treaties, diplomacy, and the like, which bind them together in one compact body—what is this but the security of the world against disorder, turbulence, and lawlessness? And now for these twelve hundred years the peace, the perpetuity, and the fruitfulness of the Christian civilization of Europe, has been owing solely in its principle of this consecration of the power and the authority of the great Empire of Rome, taken up of old, perpetuated, preserved, and as I have said, by the salt which has been sprinkled from heaven and continued in the person of the Supreme Pontiff, and in that order of Christian civilization of which he has been the creator.
The conversion of the empire to Christianity, and then its removal, its banishment into the far East, freed the Vicar of Jesus Christ from temporal subjection; and then, by the action of the same Providence, he was clothed with the prerogatives of a true and proper local sovereignty over that state and territory and people so committed to his charge. From that hour, which I might say was fifteen hundred years ago, or, to speak within limit, I will say was twelve hundred, the Supreme Pontiff has been a true and proper sovereign, exercising the prerogatives of royalty committed to him by the will of God over the people to whom he is father in all things both spiritual and temporal."
--- Source: The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, by Henry Edward Manning, D.D. (appointed Archbishop of Westminster in 1865 and Cardinal in 1875), second edition with a preface, published in 1862 in London by Burns & Lambert, 17 &18 Portman Street. (Online at Google Books)
Take special note that Manning, who became a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, admits a twelve century rule by the Bishop of Rome, a twelve century period of temporal papal supremacy, that was well established by the seventh century.
" And now that the temporal power of the Roman Pontiffs belongs to the past, that the head of the Church must under heaven depend for its maintenance upon the generosity of his spiritual children throughout the world, that a usurper holds the throne from which the Pope ruled for a thousand years, while its rightful owner is a prisoner in his own city, it will be of interest from many points of view to review what Roman people and Rome were like before 1870 and what they are to-day."
"Long ages ago, when Rome through the neglect of the Western emperors was left to the mercy of barbarous hordes, Romans turned to one figure for aid and protection and asked him to rule them; and thus in this simple manner, the best title of all to kingly right, commenced the temporal sovereignty of the Popes. And meekly stepping to the throne of Caesar, the Vicar of Christ took up the sceptre to which the emperors and kings of Europe were to bow in reverence through so many ages, from sentiments of respect for the dignity of his office and because he was the only mediator whom they recognized in their almost interminable wars."
--Source: Two Romes, by James P. Conry, in The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Volume XXXVI (36), edited by James Andrew Corcoran, Patrick John Ryan, Edmond Francis Prendergast, 1911
" ... the right to her Temporal Sovereignty is an integral right of the Church as constituted by her Divine Founder. It has prevailed de facto for more than twelve hundred years, and has been possessed de jure by Divine Natural Law from the beginning of Christianity, ..."
--Source: The Victories of Rome and the Temporal Monarchy of the Church, 5th edition, By Kenelm Digby Best, London, 1906
"Rome has been a government under the Popes for some twelve hundred years."
---Source: Complete Works of the Most Rev. John Hughes, Archbishop of New York, 1866, Volume 2
" ... In books of all sizes, and from the pulpit of every church, we have been taught from our infancy, that the "beast, the man of sin, and the scarlet whore," mentioned in the Revelations, were names which God himself had given to the Pope; and we have all been taught to believe of the Catholic Church, that her worship was "idolatrous," and that her doctrines were "damnable."
Now let us put a plain question or two to ourselves, and to these our readers; and we shall quickly be able to form a
just estimate of the modesty, sincerity, and consistency of these revilers of the Catholic religion: ―they will not, because they cannot, deny, that this religion was the ONLY CHRISTIAN religion in the world for fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ. They may say, indeed, that for the first three hundred years there was no Pope seated at Rome. But, then, for twelve hundred years there had been; and, during that period, all the nations of Europe, and some part of America, had become Christian, and all acknowledged the Pope as their head in religious matters; and, in short, there was no other Christian Church known in the world, nor had any other ever been thought of. Can we believe, then, that Christ, who died to save sinners, who sent forth his gospel as the means of their salvation, would have suffered a false Christian religion, and no other than a false Christian religion, to be known amongst men all this while? Will these modest assailants of the faith of their and our ancestors assert to our faces, that, for twelve hundred years at least, there were no true Christians in the world? Will they tell us, that Christ, who promised to be with the teachers of his word to the end of the world, wholly left them, and gave up hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people to be led in darkness to their eternal perdition, by one whom his inspired followers had denominated the "man of sin, and the scarlet whore"? Will they, indeed, dare to tell us, that Christ gave up the world wholly to "Antichrist" for twelve hundred years?"
---Source: History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, Showing How That Event Has Impoverished and Degraded the Main Body of the People in Those Countries, by William Cobbett, published in 1832 in New York by John Doyle, 12 Liberty-street; and Thomas Doyle, Market-street, Providence R.I., pages 6 and 7.
Dan 7:25 "And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time." (1 "time" equals a year of days, and every day equals a year, thus this equates to 1260 days, which is interpreted into 1260 years.)
"The Pope has the power to change times, to abrogate laws, and to dispense with all things, even the precepts of Christ." "The Pope has the authority and often exercised it, to dispense with the command of Christ."
-Decretal, de Tranlatic Episcop. Cap. (The Pope can modify divine law.) Ferraris' Ecclesiastical Dictionary.
Revelation 17: "And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: 2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. 3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. 4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. 6 And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Yashua: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
15And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues..... 18And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth"
What is lawlessness but the abolition of the Law? What is sin, but the transgression of the Law? How can the "Man of Sin" be anymore sinful, then to usurp Christianity and trick its adherents into thinking YHWH's Covenant Law was "done away with"? what other organization or institution has so deceitfully spread this worldwide, by force and pain of torture or death? What other "great falling away from the truth" are people waiting for? Who could be more "Anti-Christ" then this organization, that taught the world to ignore the very Law and truth of the Prophets that Christ endorsed? What other organization do world leaders grovel to? What other organization has changed the times (calendar, Sabbath) and Laws of YHWH?
The Great Mother Harlot alone created these doctrines, that later trickled down to Her Protestant daughters, who still observe Her pagan holidays and hold sacred the false image and name of "Jesus" given to them by Mother Rome.
They brainwash their followers into allegiance to the Beast world empire under the guise of "patriotism" and loyalty to "God and Country".
------------------If you are following the tenants of Rome, you are NOT worshiping the god you THINK you are-------------------------
"COME OUT OF HER MY PEOPLE"---Revelation 18:4
WAKE UP
Catholic writers boast of over 1200 years of Papal Supremacy and Sovereignty. Do we really think that such an affront to YHWH was not foretold in scripture? Or is it that we just don't want to believe our eyes?
Next week I will began posting about this "Beast" world empire, that already exist.