The Revelation 17:1 Continued| Episode # 1134

February 19, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 17:1 Continued

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

If this podcast ministered to you, please subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Reviews help us reach more people and spread the wisdom of God. 

Please follow us:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopealivewithgod/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hopealiveministry/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LakeComChurch/ -Lake Community Church

Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.

His word to you and allow you.

To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.

When the Tower of Babel fail and when God confused their languages,

it became a temple for a God.

Okay?

And that God's name was Bellas or baal. B E L,

later to be called B A A L or the BAAL God.

Okay? And his offspring were called demigods or bail gods.

Have y' all ever heard the BAAL gods?

The Bible says,

don't have anything to do with them.

Don't worship them, kill them, don't destroy them. Have nothing to do with them.

Now, bail,

this is important.

The religion of Bible that was started, which is the beginning of all pagan idolatry,

was started by.

By Nimrod's wife,

and her name is Samaramis.

Okay,

all right. She has other names,

but she was supposedly Nimrod was the one true God to be worshiped,

and his wife was the female goddess.

And they had a son,

and their son's name was baal.

Okay, now this religion, I want you to hear me. This. This pagan.

This pagan occult religion that was started there.

I'm going to give you those names. In Babylon,

the mother was called Samaramis,

and the sun was called Tammuz or baal. Tammuz in Assyria and Nineveh, which is farther up in the valley,

all the way up to Assyria, where. Where. Where the Babylonian Nineveh is.

I can't remember the name of the town.

It was a city that we conquered when we fought the Second Gulf War. It's called.

Mosul. It's Mosul. Nineveh is Mosul. Today is the old Nineveh. Okay, very good. Thank you, Brian. All right.

I.

In those places, the female goddess was called Astarte or Ishtar,

the word we get Easter from.

Her son in Nineveh was called BAAL period.

In Egypt,

she was Isis,

and her son was Osiris or Horus in Greece,

Aphrodite and Her son was Eros, or Eros,

and then in Rome, finally, Venus.

And her son was Cupid.

Did y' all know that?

All right,

listen,

this is. This is the story,

because, remember,

Satan not only sees things and understands things,

but whenever God speaks, Satan's trying to figure out God's plan. Because he is not all knowing. He does not know the future.

He only knows what God has revealed.

So this is the story,

okay?

Astarte was conceived not by her husband, Nimrod,

but by a being from the supreme God,

miraculously conceived.

And she had a son,

and his name was baal,

and he was also a God,

okay? Or a demigod.

And he was a part of the study of the constellations.

And he was gored by.

I can't remember what the bulls called,

but the bull with the horns,

huh?

No,

the constellation that they.

Taurus. Taurus. He was gored by Taurus and he died,

okay?

And they mourned him for 40 days.

And during that time period,

they fasted something for 40 days.

And the day that he was killed,

the day before that, they had a great celebration,

okay?

And in that celebration, they had parades and all kinds of things that went along. All kinds of pagan partying,

okay?

If you want to go to New Orleans, you can see it. Okay?

All right? And. And that began their fast for 40 days.

And then at the end of the 40 days,

Baal was raised from the dead,

okay? And they worshiped Baal because God raised him from the dead. Or the supreme God called Zeus or Isis or Osiris or.

I can't give you the other names.

And that pagan religion was passed on. And this is how it's passed on.

The Babylonians,

it was their religion.

They were conquered by the Persians,

okay?

The Persians usurped their religion. In fact, one of the things the Persians did that the Romans did really, really well was they would take your religion and inculcate it into their culture.

Now, after the Persians became the great empire, by the way,

go back to my study through the Book of Daniel.

Daniel actually predicts all these empires in order.

There was a man,

a great man, who conquered the Persians.

Does anybody know what his name was?

Alexander the Great.

If you study Alexander the Great, one of the main problems his men had with him was he began to take on the religion of the Babylonians and started dressing like the Babylonians because he was the king of heaven.

Once he defeated the Babylonian king,

which means he took on their religion and made it a part of the Greek culture,

okay?

When.

When Alexander the Great died his empire was split into four parts.

Quickly, the eastern part of the empire died.

So then you were left with the part of the empire that was Greece itself,

Mesopotamia, I mean, Macedonia, which is in the northern part of the. The Greek peninsula.

You had the Ptolemaic Empire, which was in the south. And I can't remember what the name of the empire was.

That was a part of the.

What we call Turkey today.

Okay. All right.

That religion was inculcated into the Greek culture.

And who inculcated the Greeks into their culture?

The Romans.

So ultimately,

that religion got passed all the way from the Tower of Babel all the way to the Roman Empire.

That's why you have it, have all these gods and all these stories.

They get passed down.

Now, I'm going to tell you this because I need to tell you this.

In Nineveh,

which was the Assyrians and the Syrians of the Babylonians fought each other in Nineveh.

Ishtar or Easter had a.

Had a symbol.

That was her symbol.

Does anybody know what that was?

No, it's the bunny rabbit.

Yeah. Because she was the goddess of fertility.

But when her son was resurrected, they celebrated by painting eggs and giving them to each other.

Now, the reason I'm telling you this is because tomorrow morning I'm going to talk about the.

The reason why they were defeated at AI,

okay?

The real reason they were defeated at AI. Why taking the devoted things. If you've not been listening to the morning Bible study we're in. We're in Joshua, chapter seven.

The reason when they went to fight that little village called AAAI after they'd taken the giant stronghold of Jericho and were routed and 36 of their men, which is probably not a whole lot less than the whole number of men in the town they were fighting.

Once they got routed,

they found out that Achan had. Had stole something. Some of the devoted things,

okay?

And what he'd stole because they went into his tent and he'd buried it under his tent.

He'd stolen the devoted silver and gold from Babylon.

And I want you to hear me.

It was wrapped in a Babylonian garment.

In a Babylonian garment.

And the Bible's clear about it.

So the things that were devoted in Jericho, and I've already talked about that in the morning Bible study for the last two days,

are a picture of Christ,

okay? Because a devoted thing was something devoted to destruction,

okay?

And it's a picture of Jesus being the devoted thing that was meant for destruction. Meaning it was. And Sunday morning I'm going to talk about Isaiah 53,

where it's God's good pleasure to crush him.

He was. He was. He was set apart from the foundation. Bible says that Jesus was slain from the foundation of time, which means it was God's plan to kill Jesus on the cross from the foundation of time.

All right?

This pagan religion has continued on.

You do things that have to do with this pagan religion all the time.

Well, I'm not just talking about Easter and Christmas,

by the way, calling it Easter is kind of terrible, wouldn't you think?

That's why we call it Resurrection Sunday,

okay?

Because to call it, you go, well, that's in the Bible. No, it's not.

The King James version translated it Easter. Because if they hadn't remember, they'd have lost their head.

Okay?

The Roman Church called it Easter.

It's not called Easter in Scripture.

It's called the Sunday or the first day,

okay?

BAAL Tammuz. By the way, if you worship BAAL Tammuz, which people did in all these cultures,

the way you let somebody know,

and this is going to hurt some people's feelings,

the way you let somebody know that you were a worshiper of BAAL Tammuz, is you'd make a sign to them when you saw them.

Yeah,

yeah.

And if you'll notice, this cult is based around a mother conceiving,

immaculately conceiving a child.

Right?

How did Satan know that?

How did Satan know that was going to take place?

Well, he actually believes God's word because when God says something, he knows that's the way it is.

See, Satan's not messed up like you, where you sometimes go, did God really say that? In fact, Satan's really good at that with you.

Am I right?

The first question he ever asked a human being was,

did God really say that?

That's what he said to them in the garden.

Eve said, of all the trees in the garden, we can eat, but this tree we cannot eat. And Satan said,

did God really say that?

So you understand that Satan knows how things are going to be.

He makes you think that you don't know how things are going to be.

If you say, well, is any of this in the Bible? Let me take you to a couple of passages.

Jeremiah 44, 15, 19.

Then all the men which knew their wives had burned incense to other gods,

and all the women that stood by a great multitude,

even all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt in Pathros answered Jeremiah,

saying,

as for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord,

we will not hearken it unto thee.

But we will certainly do whatever thing goeth forth out of our mouth to burn incense to the Queen of Heaven.

By the way, that's what Astarte called herself, the Queen of Heaven,

to pour out drink offerings to her.

And when we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings under her, did we make her cakes to worship her.

That's. That's this religion that's talked about.

Ezekiel 8, 13 through 14 says this. He saith unto me, turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations that they do.

Now he's talking about great abominations that others do.

He says, then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house, which was toward the north.

And behold,

there sat a woman weeping for Tammuz.

That's where they told the tore the hole in the wall to look through. That's right.

This religion has been in place since Genesis chapter 10.

And it has been propagated not only by empires, but it has been propagated by religions.

Okay?

The.

The person who led worship for this religion was called the Great High Priest.

In Latin, that is called the Pontiffs. Maximus the Great High Priest. Then, when the successor of Constantine, Constantine became what he called a Christian.

He made Christianity the religion of Rome,

but they still had this paganism.

He assumed the role of head of the Church, meaning that the.

That the.

The Caesar,

the dictator of Rome,

took on the role as the head of the Church.

And what did he call himself?

The Pontiffs Maximus.

When the emperor ceased to rule and the religious leader of Rome took control,

they called him the Pontiff.

All right?

Now, there was a bishop in Rome, just like there was a bishop in Alexandria, just like there was a bishop in Jerusalem that. But the Bishop of Rome began to call himself the Pope or the leader of the Church, which comes from the word pontiff.

In fact, you'll hear him call him the Pontiff today.

All from Babylon,

every bit of it.

There's no such thing as a worship of a female deity.

In scripture,

Mary was the handmaid of God.

But quite clearly in scripture, she's depicted as flawed.

Because what does she do when Jesus starts his ministry?

She says he's crazy and goes and tries to get him.

That means she's wrong.

She's not the Queen of Heaven,

by the way.

All over the world, she's called the Queen of Heaven,

which is the same thing Astarte was called,

the same thing Ishtar was called.

This is written by a author of a book called the Story of Civilization is written in 1950.

Okay?

This guy did not believe in God,

okay?

And his. His preset presupposition is this a false religion is worth worse than none at all,

okay?

You're better off not believing in God than believing in a false religion.

Paganism survived this. I'm quoting him in the form of. This is a. This is a historian.

His name was the book of books called. His name's Will Durant.

And. And the book's called the Story of Civilization.

It's written in 1950.

He says paganism survived, meaning this world cult religion survived in the form of ancient rites and customs condoned and accepted and transformed by an often indulgent church.

An intimate and trustful worship of saints replaced the cult of pagan gods.

Statues of Isis and Horus were renamed Mary and Jesus.

The Roman Lupercalia and the feast of Purification of Isis became the feast of the Nativity.

The Saturnalia were replaced by Chris. Christmas and the Christmas celebration and the ancient festival of the dead was replaced by the All Souls Day, which we now call Halloween.

Incense lights, flowers, processions, vestments, hymns which had pleased the people in older cults were domesticated and cleansed in the ritual of the church.

Soon people and priests would use the sign of the cross as a magic incantation to expel or drive away demons captive. Rome captured her conqueror.

The world conceived Christianity.

Now what he's saying is, is that the modern Christianity that he saw was actually a result of this paganism.

And he says that a false religion is worse than no religion at all.

Because what he says is, is that it's just all that old paganism.

But it's not.

Why? Because I have books written 3, 500 years ago that point to the truth.

And so when we carry those things, and by the way, we do it too. I'm not.

I've always said the Catholic Church is, is. Is not the problem.

The Roman Catholic church has had 18, 50 years.

Well,

take that back 16 or 50 years to get real corrupt,

okay?

Our denominations hadn't had but, you know, a couple hundred years and look where they're at. Some of them are worse off than the Catholics.

Am I right?

Let me read it to you again.

I will show you unto the judgments of the great that sitteth on two of the three major religion, major institutions that God created, which is the church,

the state and the family.

The church and the state began to be ruled by what?

One person.

And if you study European history or you study North African history, or you study Muslim history in the Middle East. You'll find that the religious leader and the political leader are always the same person.

And they couch their religion in such a way as to keep control by the authority of the state.

So there was a nation that was conceived in liberty and dedicated the proposition that all men were created equal.

They were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,

okay? Among them were life,

freedom and the pursuit of.

I want you to hear me.

It was originally the pursuit of property.

Now you go, you go. Why did they change it? Well, because they had one property, that one property, because it messed up the other two,

okay? So they changed it to the pursuit of happiness. But I want you to hear me. That is the. That that opened the door for the. For the. For the godless communists to step in,

okay?

The culture and the society that stopped slavery around the world, which was the west,

primarily England and ultimately the United States,

are now the ones who are called the racist.

We're the ones that stopped it where it has been stopped. But by the way, it's not been stopped in Central Africa. It's not been stopped in the. In the Arab and Muslim states.

Muslims still own slaves.

You have a right to your property. And why is that? Because you have the right to. To possess the work of your hand and the efforts of your life.

And the original in the Enlightenment understanding was, is that God had endowed us with certain unalienable rights, meaning rights that can't be taken or separated from a human being. The right to live,

the right to be free,

and the right to enjoy the produce of your life,

the fruits of your labor.

As you go today. I pray that the Lord will bless.

You and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.