Jim Bakker Show - Who Are The Four Horsemen - Derek & Sharon Gilbert
Aired: 2020-12-11
Duration: 04:53


=== Apollo's Crown (04:53) ===

[00:00:00]  Who are the four horsemen then?
[00:00:04]  Well, good question, Laurie.
[00:00:06]  Well, we know the fourth one is Santatus, and he's got Hades with him.
[00:00:09]  So the first rider.
[00:00:10]  Well, the first rider, the rider on the white horse, has often been identified as Jesus because later in Revelation 19 he appears on a white horse.
[00:00:18]  But when we look at the weapon and the accoutrement, eight years of French in high school and college, that's all I remember.
[00:00:28]  And we see that this cannot possibly be Jesus.
[00:00:33]  The first rider, Revelation 6, verses 1 and 2, we see the rider has a bow and a crown, and he came out conquering and to conquer.
[00:00:41]  Well, the bow is not the weapon that Jesus carries in Revelation 19.
[00:00:45]  He carries a sword.
[00:00:46]  So first of all, there's that.
[00:00:48]  Now, what entity in the ancient world carried a bow?
[00:00:52]  The most prominent among the Greek gods, and he's got a counterpart among the Canaanite gods and the Babylonian gods, is Apollo, known to the Canaanites as Resheph and to the Babylonians as Nergal.
[00:01:06]  He was a plague god who spread plague with his arrows.
[00:01:10]  And we got an email this morning from a friend who watches us on Unraveling Revelation.
[00:01:14]  He said, you know that the word for arrow and dart in Hebrew and Greek are interchangeable.
[00:01:23]  And could that possibly mean like a hypodermic needle?
[00:01:26]  Well, the word itself that's translated as arrow talks on actually refers to the flight path.
[00:01:36]  So I don't think a needle is going to be flying.
[00:01:39]  No, that's true.
[00:01:41]  The more important thing about Apollo is the crown this entity is wearing.
[00:01:46]  We'd mentioned the diadem worn by, or the diadems worn by the Leviathan, the Antichrist, the beast, and of Satan.
[00:01:56]  This crown, however, the English word doesn't do it justice.
[00:01:58]  It's called Stephanos.
[00:02:00]  It's a crown of victory, not a crown of royalty.
[00:02:03]  It's a crown of laurel leaves given to victors in the Olympic Games.
[00:02:08]  It later became the symbol of the Roman emperors.
[00:02:11]  But what's interesting is that according to Greek religion, we call it mythology, but it was their religion.
[00:02:17]  They believed that it was created by the god Apollo.
[00:02:20]  Apollo had chased after a river nymph who wanted to get away from him, so she prayed to her father, who was a river god, to change her into a tree.
[00:02:31]  He turned her into a laurel, and Apollo said he would always keep her close by.
[00:02:34]  I created this laurel crown, and so that became a symbol of victory.
[00:02:39]  And again, the Roman emperors adopted it as their symbol.
[00:02:42]  You see statues of Caesar Augustus or Julius Caesar, and they'll have the laurel leaf crown.
[00:02:48]  But that is a, again, that is very different from the diademos, the diadem.
[00:02:52]  And we see in Revelation 19, Jesus wears many diadems, not just seven or ten, many.
[00:03:00]  And here you've got this character, the rider on the white horse, wearing just the one.
[00:03:05]  So what does it mean conquering and to conquer?
[00:03:08]  Apollo was known as a god of oracles, a god of art.
[00:03:12]  He was a player on the lyre.
[00:03:15]  He was sort of the ideal of Greek and Roman youth, a beardless god who was, well, who was lusted after by both women and men.
[00:03:26]  Yes, exactly.
[00:03:28]  But when you look at Western civilization, and I'm talking now about the United States of America, Western Europe, much of the foundation of our civilization is based on Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, law, art.
[00:03:45]  And we argue in the book that that is the conqueror, that that is how Apollo, this first rider, conquered.
[00:03:52]  Look at our government buildings and the architecture of our government buildings, the Supreme Court, the Capitol building, many of our state capitals based on Greek and Roman architecture, which essentially means it was derived from Greek and Roman pagan temples.
[00:04:10]  Here in Missouri, our state capitol is topped by a statue of the goddess Ceres, the grain goddess.
[00:04:15]  There was a big, our local state senator actually tried to get a bill passed to keep the statue off the Capitol.
[00:04:24]  It had been taken down for refurbishing this year, 2020.
[00:04:27]  And of course, the media out of Kansas City, Springfield, St. Louis just mocked him as a backward Bible-thumping rube from the sticks.
[00:04:37]  But think about it.
[00:04:39]  Here in this supposedly Christian country, why do we have so much pagan statuary on top of our government buildings?
[00:04:45]  Why do our government buildings all look like pagan statues, pagan temples?
[00:04:49]  The Statue of Liberty is actually a pagan statue.