By the same author, (co-edited with Gerry McCullough):
Ireland – now the good news!
The best of ‘Bread’ – personal testimonies and church/fellowship profiles from around Ireland
Edited by Raymond & Gerry McCullough
ISBN-10: 0952578506
ISBN-13: 978-0952578505
Cover design: Raymond McCullough
Cover photo: © Reuters – used by permission
The Whore
... and her Mother
Raymond McCullough
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The Whore
... and her Mother
9/11, Babylon and the Return of the King
Raymond McCullough
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Copyright © Raymond McCullough, 2011
The right of Raymond McCullough to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
ISBN 13: 978-0 9525785 2 9
ISBN 10: 0 9525785 2 2
First published 2011
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THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV®
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™
Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Precious Oil
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10a Listooder Road, Crossgar,
Downpatrick, Northern Ireland BT30 9JE
Thanks to my wife, Gerry, for editing and general encouragement; to Pádraic Fitzpatrick (and one anonymous other) for proof-reading the manuscript; and to Alan & Jeanetta Harper for their encouragement to finish the book!
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 Mega-Babylon – past or present?
2 A present day world system?
3 ID of Mega-Babylon revealed
4 Why trust these Hebrew prophets?
5 The 2nd Exodus
6 Why judge Mega-Babylon?
7 Get out! Flee! Run for your life!!
8 The 6-hour war
9 Riding a ten-horned beast
10 NEWSFLASH: America is gone!
11 The man is revealed
12 The mark of the beast
13 The Great Tribulation
14 The mother of all battles
15 The Return of the King
16 The ‘heart of stone’ removed
17 The 1,000 year reign of Messiah
18 Time for a timeline
19 The greatest prophet of all
20 The church must change!
21 What do we do now?
Bibliography
Appendix A
Appendix B
About the author:
Preface
I suppose, as with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most people can remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news of the 9/11 attacks.
I certainly remember exactly what I was doing – I’d spent a couple of hours earlier, out in the bay with my little grandson, fishing from my dinghy, and we had just arrived at the nearby boatyard to continue work on rebuilding my wooden boat.
I was working on the roof of the boat in the sunshine when another boat owner told me to turn on the news. Thinking that it was something related to Northern Ireland politics, I turned on the radio – to discover the awful truth.
Shortly after I began to follow the story came the news that the south tower of the World Trade Center had completely collapsed. Later they reported that the north tower had also collapsed.
Back at home, and at the house of friends later that evening, we watched over and over the television footage of those terrible events. I found it difficult to believe that what we were being shown was not a movie, but a real life happening. Real people had died – in thousands!
We watched real human beings who had been alive and well earlier that day, leaping from an impossible height to certain death. One minute they were busy at their normal jobs at the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, or beginning a plane journey; the next minute their lives were over!
How could this happen? Why would God allow it to happen? Yes, I believe in God. I think many in New York and Washington that day also found a sudden renewal of their faith! But what had just happened reminded me of a difficult time in my own life, and that of my family, just a few years before.
During a particularly tense time in Northern Ireland there was a lot of suppressed anger ready to overflow, and my home came under attack several times. Teenagers and young adults would gather at the side of our house and begin to shout abuse. Suddenly there was the sound of bricks and stones crashing through our kitchen window. It felt as if Satan himself had entered our house!
My wife and I and our two young daughters knelt together and prayed in our living room. We had to acknowledge that, even though we could not understand it, God had, for some inexplicable reason, allowed this to happen to us. We did not complain to Him and ask why – we simply accepted that He had allowed this and asked for His protection in future and Hi
s guidance for us.
After the events of 9/11, I suppose I expected George W. Bush, the US president, and a self-confessed evangelical Christian, perhaps to call a national day of repentance, prayer and fasting, asking for future protection and guidance for America – for surely God had allowed this disaster to happen for some purpose?
In the end only one plane was thwarted, and the brave passengers sacrificed their own lives in order to prevent the attack on the White House and the President. However, I saw no sign of any national repentance. I saw a President saddened, but determined to hold the moral high ground and – defiant towards the perpetrators – declaring war on the terrorists.
There is no doubt that what the 9/11 perpetrators did was an evil act, but that does not answer the question as to why the world’s most powerful nation was powerless to prevent such an attack? Why did the security forces of the most powerful nation on earth not detect at least some of the teams about to wreak such havoc on American citizens?
I can only repeat that, for His own reasons, God allowed this to happen. Why did God NOT bless America, (or at least avert the curse), when so many Americans have asked Him to do so?
If that is the case, then it would seem to me to be very important to find out why He did not prevent it. Could it actually have been an act of mercy allowed as a warning of possible greater future judgement?
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to enquire of the old Hebrew prophets, who foretold many other events of worldwide importance and particularly in relation to what they referred to as the ‘End Times’.
Is there anything in their writings to refer to such events?
Can we trust what they have written?
If so, what else do they foretell?
Should we pay any attention to their words?
Bear with me, then, for these questions are exactly what I hope to answer within these pages.
Back to Contents
Introduction
This book is aimed at Christians (nominal, traditional, Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical); Jews (religious and non-religious); Moslems (Sunni or Shia); anyone – from any religion, or none – who has a certain belief, (or even suspicion, perhaps), that there is a benign intelligence out there, Who rules over the affairs of this universe and Who ultimately cares about the future of the people who inhabit it.
I believe in such a God, the Creator of all that we can see, or know. I believe He is a personal God and that He loves what He has created, especially man, whom He created in His own image.
I believe, and hope to convince you also, that this God is all powerful, can see the end from the beginning, and has a purpose and a plan in all that we can see happening in the world around us.
Furthermore, I believe that He has used the Hebrew prophets to give us advance warning of all that He plans to bring about in this world.
The prophecies found in the Hebrew Tanakh, (Old Testament, or Tawrat, in Arabic), and also in the New Testament, (Heb: Brit Chadash, Arabic: Injil), provide us with a lot of insight into the future of the nations. They also explain the reasons for what is happening now, and what will come to be.
These prophecies refer to a mystery end-time empire that will dominate all the other nations on earth, both economically and militarily. They describe this empire as opposed to the people of God, destroying the earth and guilty of much innocent bloodshed.
These prophecies predict the sudden downfall and complete destruction of this empire and the escape of the survivors as refugees back to their own lands, including the land of Israel.
They predict the appearance of another military empire – which will replace the first – set up by the remaining most powerful nations and led by one man, often referred to as ‘The Beast’, who will rule the world with an iron fist and oppose the God of heaven.
He will lead the nations into a disastrous final battle against the city and people of Jerusalem – assembling their armies on a plain near the hill of Har Megiddo, (also known as, Armageddon), in northern Israel.
But can we put any trust in these old Hebrew prophets? Can we examine some of their prophecies that may have been fulfilled already, that may possibly provide a firmer basis for us to trust their other predictions? I believe that we can and, if you will bear with me for a while, I hope to show you that these men were indeed ‘inspired by God’ and that their words can be trusted to this day.
I happen to come from a Christian background, on the island of Ireland where, over the past thirty years or so, many have lost their lives in what has appeared to be a dispute between two different branches of the Christian faith.
At the age of eighteen I first had contact with those of the ‘other sort’, as we would say – in other words, Roman Catholics! I found them to be different from what I had been led to expect, and it has taught me to question and re-evaluate what I have inherited, and what I have been taught to believe.
In the past, many evil things have been carried out upon other faiths in the name of one religion or another. Unfortunately, Christianity has not been an exception in this respect. In fact, many of the worst atrocities carried out – the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, anti-Jewish pogroms, Native American and aboriginal Australian genocides, the Nazi Holocaust (Shoah) – unfortunately, were carried out in the name of Christianity, upon Jews, Moslems and many native tribes.
To all of those people who have suffered in the past in the name of ‘Christianity’, I would humbly ask for your forgiveness. The people who carried out these acts may possibly have been sincere – but they were sincerely WRONG! There was no justification for these acts in the pages of the bible, or anywhere else.
Most of them were not living a true Christianity at all (i.e. based upon sound biblical teaching). But even if their motivation was something else – self-righteousness, greed, racism, hatred, fear – what they did was still done in the name of Christianity and for that those who ARE true Christians today need to take some responsibility and be willing to repent and to ask forgiveness. I certainly do, and I would encourage other believers also to do the same.
My own background is in writing and broadcasting, and before that, in construction and computing. I tend to approach things from a construction perspective. I like to know how things fit together, how they relate to one another – the origins of words, language, phrases, etc.
I hope to apply this analytical approach in the following chapters. The biblical phrase is, ‘rightly dividing the word of truth’. I hope a certain logic comes across. Whether you are convinced by it, or not, is up to you the individual.
The Quran states that Christians and Jews are both ‘people of the book’. We share a history of respect for the Tanakh, (Tawrat, Old Testament), and New Testament, (Brit Chadash, Injil), and therefore for the prophecies of the ancient Hebrew prophets. But how many of us have actually read, or studied, their words?
I am not expecting that you will automatically ‘swallow’ everything stated in these pages. All I ask is that you become a genuine ‘seeker after the truth’. I would request you to seriously examine every component, check out every connection and every conclusion drawn here.
By all means, get hold of the original text, (or computer/online version) – preferably in more than one translation, and look up each reference for yourself. Follow up the references to news and research documents, using the bibliography at the end of the book. If you will not check out the evidence, you will only have yourself to blame, if it turns out that what I am presenting to you is the truth.
The Tanakh contains blessings upon all of the children of Abraham – the sons of Ishmael, (Ismail), as well as the sons of Isaac, (Yitzhak), plus Abraham’s six other sons. Both these sons are of great concern to the God of Abraham. He wants to bless both Ishmael and Isaac.
The Hebrew bible has been preserved through the Masoretic method of copying text, which has proved to be extremely accurate. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed by a Bedouin Arab boy in 1947, they were found to contain a c
omplete copy of the Book of Isaiah, which is now on display in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The Dead Sea Scrolls compare almost exactly with the present-day Tanakh – only a couple of Yods (commas) of difference – which has been handed down for two thousand years by the Masoretic method. Therefore we can have confidence in this text.
Likewise, the New Testament, (Brit Chadash, Injil), is one of the most accurate documents we have in existence today. The Alpha Course videos, (popular in many Christian denominations today), contain a lot of background on the New Testament documents. There are over 5,000 individual parchments relating to these books. This is far in excess of the evidence we have for Caesar’s wars in Gaul, or other events which we accept as ‘historical fact’.
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