Isaiah 2:2 “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days That the mountain of the Lord's house Shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; And all nations shall flow to it.”
For example, in the above passage of scripture the mountains mentioned refer to the Lord’s kingdom and the kingdoms of the earth, and the hills mentioned in this passage refer to the nations of the earth. And so, it would not do the passage an injustice to record it in the following manner, “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the kingdom of the Lord's house shall be established on top of the kingdoms, and shall be exalted above the nations; and all nations shall flow to it”. In that light, and the fact that the angel has told us that the seven mountains are also seven kings, we can confidently interpret the seven heads of the beast to represent seven kingdoms. And so, because we know that the angel was speaking about seven kingdoms, the information given to us by the angel makes it that much clearer for us to identify which kingdoms he was referring to. For the angel tells us that at the time that the apostle John was given the vision that five of those kingdoms had already ceased to exist, that the sixth kingdom was still in place, and that the seventh kingdom had not yet been manifested. So how do we establish which kingdoms the angel was referring to? There are three keys in this vision that help us to identify which kingdoms the angel was referring to. The first is Babylon. The second are the ten horns and the third is the beast himself. In this section, we are looking primarily at the vision of the end times as given to the apostle John. In the previous section, we looked primarily at the visions of the end times given to the prophet Daniel. Both Daniel’s and John’s visions of the end times are very closely linked. For both Daniel and John were given visions of the Anti-Christ. Both Daniel and John were also shown the ten kings that would arise in the last days. In Daniel’s visions, we have already seen that these ten kings and the Anti-Christ would arise from the geographic region of the ancient kingdom of Babylon. And as we study John’s vision, specifically relating to the seven heads of the beast or the seven kingdoms, we will see that the geographic region of the ancient kingdom of Babylon also features in his vision. And so, for us to more clearly understand which kingdoms the angel was referring to in John’s vision, we need to go back and look at the dream of the end times that God gave to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Babylonian empire and Daniel’s interpretation of that dream.
Michael E.B. Maher
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