VIAL 1 - A NOISOME GRIEVOUS SORE

"And I heard a great voice out of the Temple, saying to the Seven Angels, Go your ways and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the Mark of the Beast, and upon them which worshipped his image." (REVELATION 16:1-2)

THE STATE OF FRANCE IN 1789

Before examining the symbolism of the "noisome grievous sore", let us look at the state of France in the years leading up to the Revolution. Lardner's Encyclopaedia on the state of Europe, gives us this description: -

"A court, corrupt and profligate, beyond perhaps any which Europe had yet witnessed, had utterly degraded the minds of the upper classes…the middle orders were disgusted and galled by the privileges of the noblesse and their excessive pride and insolence; the scandalous lives of the clergy and the writings of the philosophers had shaken their reverence for religion; the abuses and oppressions of arbitrary and extravagant government were keenly felt."

To understand how such a situation had developed in France, we need to go back one hundred years to 1685 when Louis XIV, the Sun King, revoked the Edict of Nantes. This action virtually cut his reign into two sections and the intelligent student of French history will note the disappearance of the great men in France after this. In the years that follow 1685 we become conscious of a dull, dead level of subservience, and conformity to the desperate will of a king so haughty that he would go on to declare: -

"The State, I am the State."

Louis XIV trampled underfoot civil and religious liberty, strength, genius and the Gospel of Christ; freedom of thought and action were ruthlessly suppressed and the writer, Buckle, makes the apt comment that the king had: -

"survived the entire intellect of the French nation."

By his act, the great Protestant universities of Saumur, Montauban, Nimes and Sedan were suppressed and their professors fled to other lands, taking their learning with them. Bibles, hymnals and devotional books were burned, not merely under Louis XIV but as late as 1727 his successor, Louis XV, was ordering that those who had been compelled to convert to Roman Catholicism, surrender all their books within fifteen days to be publicly burned. Libraries were put out of action, and all across France great bonfires were lit in towns and cities in which tens of thousands of valuable books, including Bibles, were destroyed.

In the century that followed, the intellectual genius of France perished and the state sank into a form of national paralysis. There were no more great statesmen after Colbert, the great military victories of Conde and Tureanne predate 1685, and the campaigns, which followed, ended in disaster and disgrace for the very soldiers whom Louis had used to hunt down and slay the Huguenots.

A barrenness fell upon the literary world with the passing of Moliere, Racine, Corneille and La Fontaine. Literature, science and the arts almost died out. The industry and skill of the Huguenots which had contributed to the greatness of France, was taken to other lands as they fled the cruel persecutions heaped upon them by Louis.

Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church in France had grown immensely rich and powerful by the property seized from the Protestants and by Royal gifts and grants. The papal clergy held one fifth of the landed property of France in their hands on the eve of the Revolution, and they still held many of the people in the same state of serfdom as did the aristocracy. Even the Roman Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, on page 226 of his book on the French Revolution states: -

"The Bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their body to be loose livers, or in some cases openly presenting their friends to their mistresses as might be done by any lay noble around them."

This was the true state of France when the noisome sore, which had been festering for years, burst forth into Revolution.

THE SYMBOL OF THE NOISOME, GRIEVOUS SORE

The word used in the original Greek of the New Testament to describe the noisome, grievous sore which afflicted those who had the Mark of the Beast, actually means a boil or ulcer, a painful, infectious, suppurating tumour. It is of more than passing interest to note that for the final thirty years of the Eighteenth Century, a literal plague of smallpox afflicted the French Royal Family. Louis XV died from the disease, whilst Louis XVI caught the malady on ascending the throne, and it spread to and affected many other members of the Royal Family and the Court of Versailles.

 It is also very significant that the Papacy, the Beast System of prophecy, should have used the very same symbolic language to denounce the spreading of the Scriptures in the French language, some years earlier. Pope Clement XI in his Bull Unigentius condemned the Evangelical Propositions of Quesnil and the publishing and circulation of the New Testament in French. In that Bull, the Pope called upon the Bishops of France to use strong remedies to suppress the "increasing disease", by which he meant the free circulation of the Bible to the French people in their native tongue. He expresses his fears that what he calls a "contagion" would "break out into worse effects", and he actually commenced the Bull by declaring that he had learned of the French New Testament with "the most deep bitterness of our spirit."

Soon the Papacy would live to eat those very words of blasphemy. The French people, denied access to the Scriptures and the Gospel of Salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone, would turn to atheism and blasphemy. France, her monarchy and nobility, which had faithfully upheld the Papal Beast System for centuries, would suffer the bursting ulcer of bloody revolution, which would eventually engulf all of Roman Catholic Europe like a contagion which could not be controlled. In the natural realm, the breaking out of ulcers and boils implies internal impurities in the body of the victim. So, the horrific events which characterize the French Revolution were the outcome of centuries of the most loathsome, moral, social and religious corruption and impurity imaginable. The sore festered, came to a point, and burst.

OTHERS IDENTIFIED THE BOIL

Lest any reader think that we are stretching the symbolism of the Scriptures when we say that the bursting of the noisome sore or boil represents the French Revolution, the fact is that many historians of that period likened events then taking place to the outbreak of an ulcerous disease.
 

EDMUND BURKE denounced the Revolution as: -

"A malignant French distemper."

"An infectious plague requiring the most severe quarantine."

FITCHETT in the book "How England Saved Europe" tells us that the European powers regarded the French Revolution as: -

"A political pestilence which threatened all Europe and which must be stamped out at any cost."
 

SIR WALTER SCOTT in his "Life of Napoleon" described the state of French affairs during this period as: -

"The disclosure of wasting sores, useless and disgusting unless when shown to a surgeon for the purpose of a cure."
 

LAMBERT who was a French Dominican monk, and himself an eyewitness of the Revolution described it as:

"A horrible ulcer."

"The ulcer of infidelity."

"A sick man covered with ulcers."
 

NIEBUHR the great historian and at one time an ambassador to the Papal Church, says: -

"The Revolution of 1789 was the breaking out of a local disease peculiar to the Roman Catholic nations and governments of Southern Europe. The immense triumphs of the Revolution in Roman Catholic countries were owing to the despair created by an effete aristocracy and a hypocritical priesthood…This was peculiar to the countries where it was indigenous, France and the South of Europe."

SIMILARITY TO THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT

As already stated, there are similarities between the Vials of Judgement and the Plagues visited upon Pharaoh's Egypt. One of those Plagues was that of boils or blains and we read that the magicians of Egypt: -

"Could not stand before Moses because of the boils for the boils were upon the magicians and upon all the house of Pharaoh." (EXODUS 9:11)

This judgement came because Pharaoh and his idol priests and magicians would not heed the word of the Lord God, by Moses His messenger. Israel was exempt from the plague, and this is all the more significant when we realize that the Anglo-Saxon people are the re-gathered Israel of Bible Prophecy, the so-called Lost Tribes. Britain threw off the yoke of Papal bondage at the Reformation and embraced the open Bible and the pure Apostolic Gospel, in consequence of which our island home was spared the horrors of the Revolution, which, beginning in France, engulfed the rest of Europe. France, which rejected the Reformation, persecuted the Huguenots and upheld the Papacy, received the full fury of the boil, the plague of infidelity, revolution and bloodshed. Just as the Plagues of Egypt afflicted the priestly magicians, so the Roman Church and its hierarchy were to endure the full severity of the noisome, grievous sore.

SIMILARITY TO THE TRUMPET JUDGEMENTS

There is a very close similarity between the Trumpets of Judgement in Revelation chapters 8 and 9 and the Vials of God's Wrath in Revelation 16, both in their nature and their location. Just as the Trumpets heralded the doom of Imperial Rome, so the Vials foretell the downfall of Papal Rome. The First Trumpet Judgement was upon the earth at the hands of Alaric and the Goths and especially involved the Roman province of Gaul, modern France, and the North of Italy (see our book "Opening The Seals of The Apocalypse"). In like manner the First Vial Judgement was upon the earth, by the hands of the French Revolutionary forces. Now let us examine: -

THE TWO-FOLD NATURE OF THE NOISOME, GRIEVOUS SORE

The boil, ulcer or sore which burst forth into the French Revolution, can trace its roots to two evil, corrupting sources.

THE INFIDELITY OF VOLTAIRE

The late Mr. Hilaire Belloc M.P., himself a Roman Catholic, rightly stated in his book "The French Revolution" that: -

"It is impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given to the religious problem."

It was indeed the religious problem, which created the circumstances for Revolution. A people denied the Bible, turned to atheism. A nation from which the best and most industrious section of the population had either been slaughtered or driven into exile, was reduced to poverty and groaned under tyranny. The atheist Revolutionaries were to hold up to hatred and contempt the only form of Christianity permitted to exist in France, Roman Catholicism. Their cry was to be "Ecrasez l'infame" or "Crush the Wretch" as they sought the utter rejection and destruction of religion.

From 1758 - 1770 infidel, atheistic literature flooded into France. The circulation was enormous and was often printedon cheap paper and distributed in vast quantities among the lower classes. Amongst the writers of this material were such men as Rousseau, Didoret, D'Alembret, Condorcet, La Harpe, Boyle, Robinet, and the best known of all, Voltaire. This apostle of infidelity was born nine years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and his brilliant yet ungodly teachings were to rush like a torrent into the void created the expulsion from France of the Gospel and the Huguenots who proclaimed it. For fifty years Voltaire was regarded as the leading intellectual in Europe, gaining the friendship of many of the crowned heads of Europe and such was his baneful influence that it has not ceased to this very day.

Like many other initiates of the secret societies of his era, Voltaire was not an open atheist, but rather a deist. He did subscribe to a belief in one Supreme Being, but to Voltaire, Christ was no better than Buddha or Mohammed. He exposed the gross corruption and superstition of Roman Catholicism, but he failed to recognize truth and hence he put nothing in the place of that which he tore down. His concept of the Supreme Being quickly degenerated into the worship of the creature and his reason and intellect. The revolutionary leader Robespierre was later to declare: -

"If there be no God, we would invent one."

Those who followed Voltaire were not Deists, but for the most part Atheists. The infidel propaganda, which Voltaire poured forth for so many years, totally undermined all religion and moral standards, breeding a contempt for, and hostility to authority and thus paving the road to Revolution. Just as the poisons within the body build up for a long time before bursting out in a boil or sore, so there were many years during which the poison of atheism, infidelity, godlessness and immorality was building up in France, before the noisome sore burst in 1789.

It is of interest to note that Voltaire once boasted to his friends: -

"It took twelve ignorant fishermen to establish Christianity, I will show the world how one Frenchman can destroy it."

But within thirty years of his death, his home was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society and became a Bible storage building, whilst his infidel printing press was used to print an entire edition of the Bible.

ADAM WEISHAUPT AND THE ILLUMINATI

The second source of the noisome sore which gave rise to the French Revolution was an evil genius named Adam Weishaupt who is credited with the founding of modern Illuminism.

Weishaupt was born on 6th February 1748, in southern Germany, and is believed to have been of Jewish extraction. He was trained as a Jesuit and rose to occupy the chair of Canon Law at Ingolstadt University. In 1774 the Jesuit Order was suppressed by Pope Clement, because of its many crimes, and the complaints made against it by the monarchs of Europe, including the French King. However this fierce militaristic and highly secretive Order of Catholicism was not so easily disposed of. The Jesuits vowed to be avenged on the Pope and the French Monarchy and within a short space of time Clement died in suspicious circumstances, believed by many to have been a victim of poison.

On May 1st, 1776, Weishaupt officially brought into existence his secret revolutionary movement known as the Illuminati. Significantly, Communists and Socialists around the world still commemorate May 1st as Labour Day, and sadly this has now become a national public holiday, even in Britain. The choice of name for his movement was by no means novel. Illuminism was being mentioned in Spain as far back as 1492, and some have traced its origins back to the Knights Templar, and the Gnostic cults of the early centuries of the Christian era. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, was himself arrested by the Spanish authorities in 1527 and questioned regarding his activities as an "Enlightened One" or member of the Illuminati. Weishaupt was described by the Nineteenth Century French Socialist, Louis Blanc, as being: -

"One of the profoundest conspirators who has ever existed."

Weishaupt joined forces with a Cabalistic Jew from Egypt named Kolmer and soon a network of Illuminati groups existed all over France. Shortly before the French Revolution broke out, the Marquis de Luchet wrote that the Illuminati were: -

"A subterranean fire smouldering eternally and breaking forth periodically in violent and devastating explosions."

"This society aims at governing the world. Its object is universal domination."

Marat, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins and many other Revolutionary leaders, were all Illuminati and the bloodthirsty Jacobin Clubs, which played such a prominent part in the Reign of Terror, based their network on the Illuminati. One of Weishaupt's affectionate titles was "Patriarch of the Jacobins." Every fundamental principle of the Illuminati may be traced through the French Revolution down to present day International Communism. Karl Marx, the grandson of a Jewish Rabbi and the recognized father of Communism, edited his teachings from the writings of Weishaupt, and the first Communist Manifesto published in 1848, the so-called Year of Revolutions, embodies within it the guiding ideals and spirit of Illuminism.