This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comDonnie Darkened joins Mark and Richard to discuss the Book of Revelation, the End Times, Israel and Palestine, Dispensationalism, Joachim of Florence, and more.
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| I 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. | |
| So 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? | |
| Yeah, 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. | |
| And 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 this. | |
| I got called a lot of names. | |
| 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. | |
| Yeah, so let's talk about Revelation in general and then Revelation in terms of Israel. | |
| So, 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, and 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. | |
| But 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. | |
| But let's go back to the beginning. | |
| What is the Book of Revelation? | |
| That 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. | |
| Daniel and Revelation go side by side, hand in hand. | |
| Daniel, Daniel chapter 2 through 7 indicate the early stages and allude to Revelation 13. And I've just been really... | |
| Spending a lot of time really digging into these eschatological events and my interpretation of them. | |
| And 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. | |
| And it's all about Jacob's trouble. | |
| And it's about tribulation. | |
| And it's about separating the wheat from the chaff. | |
| The ones who trust in Christ alone and the people who put their trust in man and princes only to be led into deception, which in this case, possibly the end times deception. | |
| But it's really important that, like I said, there are many different interpretations. | |
| You 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. | |
| There's that interpretation, which I highly disagree with. | |
| And we could always get into that whenever. | |
| And then we have, you know, more of a dispensationalist view, which is mainly prevalent among the evangelicals, the Christian Zionists, right? | |
| And a lot of people mistake me for a dispensationalist. | |
| I would not classify myself as a dispensationalist. | |
| I am a futurist. | |
| I am a premillennialist. | |
| Meaning that I believe that – I don't believe in post-millennialism or amillennialism. | |
| I believe we are before the millennial reign, and that's another topic. | |
| But 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. | |
| Having your eschatology wrong is not heretical in itself, but 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. | |
| Okay, there's a lot here. | |
| I really want to dive into each of these things. | |
| 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. | |
| Yeah, John of Patmos. | |
| Okay. | |
| What do we know about him, and roughly when did he receive this revelation? | |
| Well, we know that he was... | |
| Exiled as a result of persecution done by the Christians under the Roman emperor at the time. | |
| I don't remember the name of the emperor. | |
| But he received visions and special revelation from God himself. | |
| And he wrote down what he saw in the vision. | |
| And revelation is essentially a scroll, right? | |
| It's a big scroll, and it's made. | |
| To get to open the scrolls, we need to open seven seals. | |
| So you have seven seals on the scroll. | |
| Each time a seal is broken, a prophetic event occurs. | |
| And at the seventh seal, the scroll is opened. | |
| And then we have seven trumpets, and then we have seven bowls. | |
| And the trumpets, each one is sounded, and a... | |
| Prophetic event occurs, but it's a very devastating one. | |
| God's wrath comes with the opening of the scroll, with the breaking of the seventh seal. | |
| So we have the seven seals broken, the scroll opens, and then it's God's wrath from then on. | |
| And 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. | |
| But yes, there's going to be a lot of things that I think right now we're seeing the stage being set for. | |
| I 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. | |
| It'll be the deal of the century, and it's going to be some form of agreement. | |
| I have a theory. | |
| I'm not sure about it, but I have a theory that... | |
| 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. | |
| And I think that, you know, I theorize that could be a very likely scenario in order to further the Messianic prophecies for the Jews. | |
| Okay, I have a lot to say about this, but I want to... | |
| I want to bring us back because I'm imagining that many people don't know much going into this. | |
| So I want to really establish a foundation for what all this is. | |
| So the book of Revelation was canonized under Constantine. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| I believe around that era. | |
| I don't know for sure. | |
| What I 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. | |
| And it's typical Bart Ehrman. | |
| It's very cursory and no fair. | |
| You know, it's helpful, a book in this regard. | |
| And Bart Amarok did study at, what is it, Moody Bible College in Chicago. | |
| So this is a dispensationalist university. | |
| And so he is steeped in this stuff. | |
| And 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. | |
| And so he said that, and you can pick up on this, but he basically said that we're not looking forward to something. | |
| All of this has already happened, as you mentioned, with the persecution under Nero, etc. | |
| And there was a kind of, it's like a spiritual rise of Christ and it's not a literal return. | |
| And thus Christ actually is reigning. | |
| He's reigning right now in the Catholic Church, in the church in general, via the alternative Christ, the alt Christus. | |
| And so, you know, yes, there is going to be some ultimate end time at some point, but we don't know when that is. | |
| And, you know, I think there's, I believe it was Paul who said this, you know, for, for, for the Lord, you know, a day is a thousand years. | |
| We should be humble vis-a-vis these revelations. | |
| In a way, I think Augustine was suggesting that people not Try to read signs too much. | |
| And he was suggesting that Christ is reigning right now in the Catholic Church. | |
| But obviously this has had an effect then, has an effect now, in the way that people read this book. | |
| As I mentioned, Martin Luther didn't quite know what to do with this, and he actually put Revelation in an appendix. | |
| Interesting. | |
| He focused on other things and prioritized other things in that regard. | |
| And then in terms of the dispensationalism, I was reading this tweet by Keith Woods, which is one more of his Wikipedia entries or contributions there too, where he basically laid down a story of Dispensationalism. | |
| And he was saying, oh, this is a heretical view. | |
| And it's kind of like, as you said before, first off, it's not actually heretical. | |
| You can disagree about eschatology without being an actual heretic and losing your soul. | |
| One, so it's not strictly heretical. | |
| But also, this... | |
| Calling things heretical seems to be this convenient snobbery where you're like, oh, well, no true Christian would believe that or something. | |
| And it's like, well, they do. | |
| Dispensationalism is the dominant form among Protestants at the very least. | |
| It affects many other denominations. | |
| It affects the whole church. | |
| And it's actually been going on for a long time. | |
| 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. | |
| And 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, the New Testament, he 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 Akamite reasoning. | |
| But 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. | |
| And then he saw an age of the Spirit, which was treated as rather radical. | |
| And Joaquin de Fiore was a dutiful monk, of course, but he's also someone who had his work suppressed and marginalized because he's suggesting this coming of a new age. | |
| And he even thought that we might have seen an Antichrist with Frederick and all that kind of stuff. | |
| But there's a coming of a new age, the age of the spirit. | |
| And in a way, the world will become a monastery. | |
| And what he meant by that was that... | |
| We'll all engage in charity and we'll all be captured by the Holy Spirit. | |
| And you could even suggest that there might not even be a need for a hierarchical Catholic Church in that circumstance. | |
| We'll, in effect, all be Christians. | |
| And it's a powerful message. | |
| And I actually think Fiore foresaw a great deal of I think a lot of the left and liberals want to live in an age of the spirit, | |
| where one big monastery, or as Nietzsche would caustically say, one big hospital where we're all taking care of sick people. | |
| Again, that's Nietzsche's view of the matter. | |
| And then dispensationalism, as it arose later on in the 18th and 19th century, I think they might not be consciously or explicitly picky at Montfiore, but there's a lot of tendency towards this. | |
| There's the age of innocence, which is in the Garden of Eden. | |
| And then there's the age of conscience, which is... | |
| Adam and Eve's expulsion up to Noah, and a man fails in the age of conscience. | |
| I believe the next one is the age of law, which is Noah onward, and then the age of... | |
| I forgot. | |
| At one point, it's grace. | |
| That's Jesus' return. | |
| You might know more about this. | |
| I guess my point here is that dispensationalism isn't some wacky thing That John Hagee came up with. | |
| It's coming from somewhere. | |
| And there's actually a very long tradition within Christian thinking for over a thousand years that stresses dispensations. | |
| And in fact, Augustine was almost preemptively criticizing dispensationalism. | |
| So it's something that's embedded in the heart of Christian thought for 2000 years. | |
| And so to simply dismiss it as some Vanjie thing or something, I think is wrong. | |
| Going back to the idea of post-millennialism, the idea that Christ is raiding now, not in a literal sense, but in a spiritual sense, I used to be... | |
| Involved in a Reformed Church, Presbyterian, Reformed, very Calvinist in their thinking, very, you know, holding to these sort of postmillennial views. | |
| And, you know, one of the things that I really enjoyed about going there... | |
| Was actually on Sunday after service, we would all go downstairs and we would sit around these tables and before we would eat food, we would go over some Bible study. | |
| We would ask questions to each other. | |
| And one of my favorite things about going there was questioning a lot of these post-millennial ideas and really challenging the biblical validity of a lot of them. | |
| And a lot of them sound... | |
| I mean, you know, the idea of, you know, us the saints reigning on earth with Christ spiritually, you know, not necessarily physically. | |
| I mean, it sounds like a very, you know, very good concept. | |
| You know, it sounds great. | |
| But, you know, one of the things that we have to do is challenge sort of the biblical validity of these claims. | |
| It's a very flawed perspective biblically because there's a lot of issues with it. | |
| For example, during the millennial reign, Satan is bound for 1,000 years. | |
| Also, I find that a lot of the post-millennial 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, the Messianic prophecies, and what exactly entailed the millennial reign in sort of an Old Testament sense as well. | |
| And right now, what the Jews in Israel are waiting for is an Old Testament fulfillment. | |
| Now, obviously, there's also a very strong Talmudic sense, which is, you know, as well. | |
| But nevertheless, you know, they're waiting for a physical messiah to come. | |
| They're waiting for him to physically bring peace to all nations. | |
| They're waiting for him to physically protect them from their enemies and conquer their enemies. | |
| And they are looking to... | |
| Have a physical temple in Jerusalem. | |
| And he's a sinful Messiah is one of the other things that I've heard in this. | |
| So there's the, you know, we have this notion of Jesus as a perfect man without sin. | |
| And David, as he's depicted in the Old Testament, is far from perfect. | |
| He's extremely lustful and petty, even, in his actions against other people. | |
| He could not control his libido. | |
| There is that kind of, like, two different messiahs that are offered, Messiah ben David and the Messiah ben Joseph. | |
| And, 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 the Jews that they were offered, who should you free? | |
| Should you free Jesus Barabbas or Jesus Christ, effectively? | |
| 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... | |
| He's an insurrectionist. | |
| He's a criminal. | |
| He's openly revolting against Rome. | |
| And he's obviously not David, but he's closer to being David than Jesus Christ is. | |
| And so the Jews choose this Christ, in effect. | |
| And then again, there's another layer of irony where Jesus is, according to John, Jesus is crucified as being the King of the Jews. | |
| And the Jews even say at one point, "Oh, we want to change it from 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. | |
| To crucify him as such would almost be to accept that he So they're kind of two different messiah visions. | |
| We actually mentioned this a few months ago when we talked, and I didn't realize the implications of this, but with someone like Cyrus, who releases the Jews from the Babylonian captivity and then ultimately rebuilds a new temple, the second temple to Yahweh, I always thought of him as almost like a useful idiot. | |
| A trump for Bibi Netanyahu. | |
| It's like, we don't care who he is or what he thinks, but he's doing good things for Israel. | |
| But I think he's actually deeper than that because he is the anointed one. | |
| So he is a type of Messiah, as it were. | |
| And so there are different concepts of the Messiah in the Bible. | |
| And I think Christians have a very... | |
| You know, they know who, and they think, obviously, Christians believe that the Messiah did appear on earth. | |
| But they have a particular conception of them. | |
| And there's actually different Messiahs in the Bible. | |
| And I think the Jews, if they are awaiting Messiah, and I think many of them are. | |
| I don't know about percentages. | |
| Tons of secular atheist Jews in Israel, obviously. | |
| But many of them truly are, and they are an animating spirit in Israel. | |
| But they're waiting for someone very different. | |
| Sonia, what do you think about all these things that I'm throwing out there? | |
| Yeah, I was actually going to mention the Jesus Christ versus Jesus Barabbas, and Barabbas being the rebel, being the insurrectionist is actually what he was classified as, which is interesting. | |
| And how they chose the political rebel. | |
| They chose him rather than Jesus Christ. | |
| Yeah, the J6-er. | |
| It's the Trump, all the Trump tards. | |
| I mean, I'm sorry, I'll just take it to its logical conclusion. | |
| Yeah, you know, Ashley Babbitt is, I mean, I know this is kind of ridiculous, but there's a weird parallel going on there. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Believe it or not, believe it or not, I was actually there. | |
| I was actually present at the J6 rally. | |
| I wasn't inside the building or anything, but I was present at the march as a Trump supporter, me and my wife. | |
| And it was so, it was so. | |
| Crazy to see how that all just transpired. | |
| There was a sort of weird energy that just kind of crept in at a certain point. | |
| And my wife was pregnant at the time, and we decided to head on out of there because we were getting really weird vibes, if that makes sense. | |
| That makes a lot of sense. | |
| Yeah, and then my family's calling me, my mom's calling me. | |
| Are you okay? | |
| There's something going on down there. | |
| And it was an interesting time. | |
| But yes, exactly to your point. | |
| And what we're going to see, what we see in the Bible very often is typologies. | |
| We 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. | |
| And 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. | |
| But, yeah, it's really fascinating to see, and I think that as all of these mounting issues grow on the world stage, it's all the more fitting for someone, me thinking it's Trump, to come back in triumph and glory and do the things that Israel... | |
| Is looking to be fulfilled. | |
| And 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. | |
| And a lot of Christians, too, because a lot of Christians will believe that we are in the millennial brain of Christ. | |
| Therefore... | |
| Therefore, everything that's happening is a good thing, and then we should follow and go along with it. | |
| And that's mainly who the deception is for. | |
| It's mainly for Christians and religious Jews in Israel. | |
| It's called Jacob's Trouble. | |
| Who is Jacob? | |
| Jacob is Israel. | |
| And then one final point against the preterism is the idea that... | |
| The idea that we reign on earth in a spiritual sense, or sorry, that Christ reigns through us in a spiritual sense on earth. | |
| Again, a lot of this comes from a really deep misunderstanding of Old Testament messianic prophecies, of the Davidic covenant. | |
| Jesus is the son of David. | |
| He's the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant by sitting physically on the throne of David. | |
| I think it was Lev Parnas and some rabbis or something like that. | |
| They were talking to Trump and they said, you know, you have the same numbers as Messiah. | |
| You know, it's like a miracle. | |
| It's like you're the savior of the whole world. | |
| And, you know, when he said that, he's actually sort of correct because Messiah ben David in Hebrew gematria. | |
| And, oh sorry, Messiah Son of David in Hebrew Gramatria and Donald J. Trump in Hebrew Gramatria both equal 424. | |
| And if you've seen my pinned 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. | |
| And as he walks up to the wall, the moment that his hand touches the wall, the time turns 424. | |
| And I think there's a lot of different clues that we can look at that really, I mean, very hard to deny. | |
| Even if you wanted to try to deny a lot of this stuff, I find it very difficult to do that. | |
| Could you guys explain what dispensationalism is exactly? | |
| Yes. | |
| So I'm not a dispensationalist, as I said. | |
| I disagree with dispensationalists on a lot of different key points like the rapture and a lot of other things. | |
| So dispensationalists, we hold some similarities in the idea that we believe in a future fulfillment of Bible prophecy, which is very common. | |
| And you don't have to be a dispensationalist to be a futurist. | |
| But they believe in a distinction between Israel and the church, as well do I, as I do as well. | |
| I don't hold to a covenant theology perspective. | |
| And the dispensationalists, they believe in premillennialism and just the future fulfillment of these prophecies. | |
| That will happen. | |
| And they believe in the rapture of the church before the tribulation, which I don't agree with. | |
| But that's sort of the short end of it. | |
| How does it relate to Zionism? | |
| That's the context which I always hear coming up. | |
| Well, there are two different things. | |
| Let me explain it even more basically. | |
| So sensationalism is just that. | |
| It is a dispensation. | |
| And 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. | |
| So he's corresponding history with the Trinity. | |
| And it makes a lot of sense. | |
| If you look back at the Old Testament, it is patriarchal about... | |
| Fearing God, turning away from Him and getting punished and then coming back, etc. | |
| And then the age of the sun is an age of grace. | |
| So all of that stuff, the whole book of Judges of going this way and that, turning against Yahweh, then calling upon Yahweh and sacrificing your daughter as a result and all that kind of stuff, that's over. | |
| And there's been an age of the sun and grace where... | |
| Jesus has committed the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. | |
| And we are now in a new era. | |
| And Joachim 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 he imagined it. | |
| Something like a heaven on earth or an end of history. | |
| Someone like Fukuyama, who's an Asian guy who went to the University of Chicago and studied under Harold Bloom and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Even someone with such a secular background is still influenced by this. | |
| I think that is very interesting. | |
| In dispensationalism as it is now, let me find the seven Yeah, so the dispensation of conscience, which as I described, it goes up through Genesis 6. The dispensation of human government, or as I said, law. | |
| This is the age of Noah. | |
| The dispensation of promise. | |
| This is basically the dispensation of human government last till the call of Abraham. | |
| So the dispensation of promise is basically the promised land. | |
| So it is God's... | |
| Covenant with Abraham and his promise of Canaan and his promise that Abraham will be the forefather of all. | |
| Then the dispensation of law. | |
| And so this is the beginning of Exodus. | |
| The dispensation of grace started at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and continues to this day. | |
| And then the final, the Millennium Kingdom of Christ. | |
| So I'm just reading from CompellingTruth.org. | |
| The Millennium Kingdom begins with the defeat of Satan and ushers in 1,000 years of peace where Christ will reign on earth. | |
| So why don't we do this? | |
| Let's back up a little bit. | |
| And Donnie, could you talk about the book of Revelation itself? | |
| Give us the elevator pitch for... | |
| What is the basic structure of the book of Revelation so that we can start to think about its correspondence with history? | |
| Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask to be general. | |
| I try not to go on tangents, but I end up doing that anyway. | |
| Well, that's okay. | |
| I'll try to keep us on track. | |
| I'll try to keep us on track. | |
| Please bring me back if I start going into somewhere else. | |
| Revelation, like I said earlier, it's about the revelation of Christ. | |
| In Romans 11, it goes into detail about how a veil has been put over the eyes of the sons of Abraham, the people of Israel. | |
| And, 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. | |
| There has to be these things that happen. | |
| And it's about, you know, it's about, again, a spiritual deception, a great delusion, and many people will fall victim, particularly Jewish people in Israel, Christians here. | |
| And essentially, you know, it's seven years is, you know, there's a seven-year period, and it begins with a lot of people agree and disagree where in the timeline the tribulation period begins. | |
| I would say that we are not in the tribulation period just yet. | |
| I would say that we are just before the start of the tribulation period. | |
| And like I said earlier... | |
| The first three and a half years is the Antichrist fulfilling these prophecies so that he can claim at the midway mark that he is the Messiah. | |
| By doing the things that Christ is supposed to do during the Millennial Kingdom, like defeat the enemies of Israel, bring peace to all nations, etc., etc. | |
| And the latter half... | |
| Three and a half years of the tribulation period is, roughly, is God's wrath towards the end. | |
| But 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. |