The Revelation 17:2| Episode # 1135

February 20, 2026

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

The Revelation 17:2

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.

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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.

This pagan religion said that there's one person who is,

if not God,

next to God.

The Egyptians believe Pharaoh was God.

After Julius Caesar.

The Romans believed Caesar was God.

Alexander the Great,

he believed he was God.

Nimrod believed he was God.

Nebuchadnezzar,

well, he kind of learned that he wasn't God.

He's a picture of the backslidden Christian or the carnal Christian.

Nebuchadnezzar, I believe, actually was a believer. It's quite clear that he was because he says things about God that you would only say if you believed that he was God.

Like to be God too,

okay? Which makes him the carnal Christian.

He saw his hand and he praised him for him. And then he listened to folks and they said, oh, but you're God.

Listen, anybody who tells you you're God, this kind of ties in with the sermon last Sunday, right?

You're not God,

okay? And if you're wondering when Jesus comes back,

whether or not you'll know it, I want you to know you'll know it,

okay?

You'll know for sure it's him. He'll be coming. It'll take a little while for him to get here.

Oftentimes people take this teaching and they start trying to witch hunt things,

right?

I'm gonna get all the paganism out.

No, you're not.

You're not.

It's just like saying, I'm gonna stop sinning tomorrow.

My heart's gonna be totally turned toward God tomorrow. No, it's not.

No, it's not. Let somebody cut you off.

Going down the road,

your heart will stray quickly from the path you were supposed to be on.

Am I right?

Let somebody treat you ugly at work and all of a sudden your heart will turn toward the darkness,

huh?

Yeah. The guy in front of you won't stop at the speed bump. He'll just pull in with his Tire on the side and bump over it because he's driving a truck,

and a truck can handle that.

I've seen it happen.

I've seen it happen.

Happens regularly in front of me.

Your heart turns toward evil. It really does.

Okay,

so what am I to learn about this?

Well,

what I want you to learn about it is this,

that God's sovereign and he's in control.

And this paganism is the lie from Satan that's always been.

And we know the truth, and we have actually set up things under that truth and proven the truth to be real.

Do you realize before the United States existed,

90 to 99% of the world was in poverty?

Do you realize that less than 30% of the world lives in abject poverty now?

Did you know that?

Why? Because freedom from the tyranny of the enemy,

even though people don't understand it that way,

freedom to chase after God, to be free, to be alive,

to have the fruit of your work opens you up to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so when I studied this and I was a young man,

I went on witch hunts,

crusades, against all the paganism that I saw around me.

And I realized that I was a lone crusader and I was having no impact.

So I gave up the crusade.

Now, there are certain things that I don't do, and I just straight up don't do them because I know what they mean,

okay?

I don't celebrate anything in late October. Just letting you know,

okay?

I don't have a tree.

That's Jeremiah, chapter 10.

Ain't no eggs or bunny rabbits.

But that's because I know what they are,

all right?

I don't go around telling people you can't have them.

I've figured out that the conviction of the Holy Spirit is the only way people change.

The work of the Holy Spirit in a person's life is the only thing that changes them. Chad doesn't change them with his preaching. Doesn't matter how eloquent I may be or knowled may be, or understanding I may be, I do not change you by my words.

Only the word of the living God changes you when it's revealed to you by the Holy Spirit.

That being said,

I can't pass by this because it is a major passage in the book of the Revelation where God unveils that there's been this cult religion that has controlled the world since,

well, since Genesis.

And efforts to stop that are always being fought.

You would think that freedom.

You would think that a right to life and not killing people,

you would think a Right.

To live, to. To benefit from the work of your life would be a revolutionary idea that would change the world.

By the way, the reason we don't have the state running the churches is because we have a separation of church and state.

Not the state being separated. I mean, the church being separated from the state,

but the state not controlling the church.

Do you know where that comes from?

That right there? We just studied.

Our founding fathers, realized this world cult religion controls everything.

And how do they control it? They control the families and the people by running the state and the religion as if they're the same thing.

Now,

what are we to do about it?

Well, what you're to do about it is don't commit achan sin.

Okay?

Don't take Jesus and dress him up the way you want him dressed,

which ultimately is going to be your Babylonian garment, and hide him under your house and act like everything's okay because you're not going to have the promised land. If you do that,

you're not going to have it.

You're going to. You're going to die in the midst of God's best.

Don't hide Jesus under false religion.

That's why every Sunday morning and every time we meet, we talk about this.

We talk about this.

Do you know all of this like I know all of this?

Probably not.

Does that mean you can walk? You can't walk as close to God as me?

No, it don't mean none of that. You might even do it way better.

Paul said he hoped that at the end he run the race well enough that he wouldn't lose his reward after he'd done all the things he'd do for God. He wouldn't mess it up.

Why?

Because your walk with God is personal and it's intimate,

and it's based off of this right here.

It's based off of this.

That's why this is what matters.

I hope y' all know that I could read. Y' all do know I could bring a iPad in here with the verses I want. I could have it all set up kind of like I did with this right here, you know, so I wouldn't miss anything.

All right.

Do you know why I bring this in here?

Because I want you to know I'm using this.

Most of the time. I have whatever I'm preaching from pretty much memorized.

Not the sermon, but the passage.

The sermon presents itself by the spirit. Amen.

But the passage doesn't change.

And if you know God's word,

then you have the foundation that's unchanging and you need this.

You need this real bad.

And that's why I encourage you to learn it and to know it and to read it and to listen people teach it and to study it yourself and to sing songs that have it in it and, and to talk about it and to discuss it and order your life by it,

okay?

And sometimes you'll do that,

and one Sunday in the spring,

you'll break out your Easter eggs and they'll disgust you.

They'll disgust you a little bit.

I know you're sitting there going, but I, I. What about my grandkids? They can't go hunt Easter eggs.

Sure they can. It's not at my house.

That's, that's that.

There's some things I just ain't going to have nothing to do with.

Just letting you know I'm just not.

I've talked to the demonic on two separate occasions.

I know they're real.

I know they exist,

okay?

I know that the.

The Prince of the Power of the Air still in charge,

and he's still at work.

And so as far as I've been revealed,

I'm responsible for.

Okay?

And the same is true for you.

If the Holy Spirit convicts you on something, you ought to do what the Holy Spirit says.

The Holy Spirit hadn't convicted you.

Kathleen likes the Cadbury eggs. They're not Easter eggs. They're Cadbury eggs, okay?

These are chess,

all right?

They only come out once a year. I don't know if y' all know that or not.

They're good.

They are good. I like them.

I wish they weren't Ishtar eggs.

Just wish they weren't.

Maybe they could make them like, you know, something else. A square, you know, just a square Cadbury egg. Break them. Yeah, break them up. Some never know anyway,

so even I can't totally keep it right,

huh?

But I do want you to know that the worship of false religion is devastating,

okay?

And you're going to deal with a lot of people who, under the yoke of that religion,

okay,

they are in all its many forms.

Your job is to be light to them,

not to tell them.

Listen, we're not Jehovah's Witnesses, okay?

All right?

We believe in this,

in the original text,

translated into English,

okay?

Not translated the way you want it to say, which is what the Jehovah's Witness Bible is.

You know, it's translated by a couple of hundred people, don't you? Did y' all know that none of them knew Greek or Hebrew?

I don't know how they translated it.

No, I can't read Hebrew. Hebrew chicken scratch backwards. Which is terrible. I'm dyslexic. There's no way I could read that.

Okay, I know what Hebrew words are. I know a lot of the Hebrew words, but I can't read it. No way. That's not even possible. I mean,

that is a nightmare for a dyslexic person to get to be 23 years old and go to seminary. And they go, would you like to take Hebrew? What does it look like?

Well,

it's this right here. And you're looking at it going,

there's no way I could ever figure that out.

And then they go, oh, you're reading it backwards. You gotta start on the right and read it to the left. And I'm going, no,

no,

no, I ain't doing that. No.

Okay. And by the way, I don't, I don't read. I don't read Greek in the original Greek Alphabet because I still, in my mind switch things up so bad. I can't do it.

I. When I'm reading something in the Greek, I'm actually read the it in the. It in the English,

like, version of it anyway.

So there you are.

All right.

It's a lot of information.

And maybe it's probably good that we were a little bit smaller crowd because I do know that that's.

It's upsetting to people when I start really getting into this.

I mean, there's plenty of people in this room that do Fat Tuesday.

That do,

you know, lint that do. When I was, huh, Ash Wednesday.

They do. And by the way, there's a big T they put on you. And that doesn't represent the cross of Jesus. That represents Tammuz.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yes.

The tea they put on your head with the ashes represents. It's part of the pagan ritual. It represents Tammuz.

By the way, when I was a boy,

none of the major denominations did anything with that.

They didn't do Lent, they didn't do Ash Wednesday, they didn't do Fat Tuesday, they didn't do any of that. None of them did it.

Now, the only church that I know of,

denomination that doesn't do it,

other than the small, you know, some Pentecostal and smaller denomination. The only denomination that I know of that doesn't do it is the Baptist.

They're the last Hoda. And about a third of them do some part of it, by the way.

Okay,

okay.

So I'm just saying to you, I find it interesting that everybody knew what it was When I was a boy, 50 years ago,

and now nobody knows what it is.

Okay?

Huh.

Well, the Bible teaches us to have communion, to take communion.

Yeah, I know. And by the way, here's the thing about that. That's a good question. Because if you grew up Catholic and you're taking communion as a little person, you're going, well, did I mess up?

No, you didn't mess up. By the way,

the Bible teaches us to suffer the little children to come to us. Oftentimes what we try to do is impede a child from seeking after God by saying, you can't do that because you're not ready.

Okay? Who's to say whether you're ready or not? John the Baptist was ready in the womb.

Okay,

all right, so who, how do you know? And, and if I tell a child, well, you can't take the bread or the cup because you're not ready for it.

I don't exactly know what you're trying to tell them,

okay? Because I know that the bread and the cup are not a sacrament.

Are you following me? We don't believe in sacraments.

Okay? All right.

And so if I tell a 4 year old who says they want to go take the body and the blood of Jesus,

no, you're not ready because you hadn't been baptized or you hadn't gone through a class or whatever that reason is, am I inhibiting that child from their seeking after God?

Yeah,

that's right. If not, not. Listen, if you said, if you said there's this five year olds coming forward, you know, because I put out a plea, anybody who wants to be baptized today, come and be baptized.

Some, a little five year old comes down and the parents go,

well, he wants to be baptized. And they go, well, he doesn't know what it means. Well, listen to me, you don't know what it means,

okay?

And by the way, the one who's going to be dunking him, he don't know what it means.

Now, I know more than he does and I know more than you do,

but I don't know more than what it actually means.

I have no idea.

I can't conceive of what it meant for my Lord to hang on that tree.

I have no idea what that means.

So I'm not in charge of that.

I'm not, I'm not. I, I'm not greater than that.

Are you with me? I do know that my Lord said, suffer the little children to come to me. He didn't say unless they're under four.

Okay?

Because if I let them come at 4, they might come at 6. If I let them come at 6, they might come at 80. If I let them come at 8, they might come at 12.

If I let them come at 12, they might come at 18.

If I let them come at 18, they might be powerful in the kingdom of God.

And understanding that's important.

Don't go on witch hunts.

I'm going to teach AI tomorrow.

It's not about a witch hunt,

okay?

It's not about that. It's a. It is a clear picture of. If you involve yourself in.

In taking the things that God has clearly presented to you and told you to deal with as his devoted things, which is Jesus himself, and you treat them as if they're commonplace,

you will not the Promised Land,

you will die.

Okay?

And there's a lot of Christians that are on the other side of the Red Sea,

and there's a lot of Christians who still at the foot of the mountain and won't go up and meet with God and die in the wilderness. And there's a lot of Christians who wouldn't go into the Promised Land and then turned back and died in the wilderness.

And there's a lot of Christians that go into the Promised Land and then try to make Jesus into their own image and they die in the Promised Land.

So I'm just telling you that there's a whole way, a lot of ways to mess this up.

And the main way to mess it up is to not believe in the authority of God's word and not listen to the Holy Spirit.

That's how you mess it up.

If you'll trust His Word and you'll trust His Spirit, you will never truly mess it up.

You with me?

You won't mess it up. You may not get it right, but you won't mess it up,

okay? You won't.

You'll be all right.

Don't do what you clearly know God told you not to do.

Make sure you do what God told you to do,

okay?

And even when you mess that up, he's going to remind you a bunch,

okay?

But every time he reminds you, it's going to be a little harsher the next time,

okay?

Till finally he's just going to go. Okay,

well, let's either stay or go.

And there's a lot of people that die staying. Ananias and Sapphira were believers,

but they lied to the Holy Spirit and they died that day.

Where's that preacher? Acts,

one of the first ten chapters of Acts.

Huh?

New Testament. Yeah, New Testament.

Notice. We go New Testament and Old Testament. We believe in both of them.

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.