The following comes from the e-newsletter of the Berean Beacon, the ministry of former Roman Catholic priest Richard Bennett:
This weekend as droves of modern Evangelicals and Catholics together flood the box offices to watch Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, we need to be aware of what is happening on a biblical scale.
Starting less than 200 years after Christ and 1300 years before the great Reformation, Christians foresaw the “most horrible evils” that would emerge after the fall of what they knew as the Roman Empire – and feared the resurrection of a revived Roman Empire in the not too distant future. (See Tertullian in “The Early Authentic Church and the Deception of Roman Catholicism”.)
The conviction of Bible believers from this time to the days of Charles Spurgeon was that the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Office of the Papacy, was uncovered and exposed as the Antichrist.
Courageous Christians of the past, such as John Wycliffe, John Huss, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William Tyndale, John Bunyan, John Knox, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon and Dr. Ian Paisley all identified the Papacy as the Antichrist.
Please visit the section on our website titled the Pope and the Papacy for an in-depth study on this topic. We include numerous articles, video’s and mp3 files for easy downloading and sharing.
Hidden in plain sight
Were the believers of old wrong? Did the Antichrist just disappear? Was someone fabricating a story to cover up the truth?
Indeed, such a fabrication began centuries ago during the great Reformation. The Jesuits under the Roman Catholic Church sought to undo the gains for the Gospel achieved in the Protestant Reformation. (See J.A. Wylie’s “History of the Jesuits”).
Included in the armory of Jesuit deception was a deliberate campaign to detach the minds of people from the Pope as the Antichrist. The movement set out to hide the true identity of the Roman Catholic Church which was so clearly observed in her regalia of bright scarlet and purple. The goal was obvious: conceal the Antichrist in their midst and project another image of a future antichrist, a man, who could never be accurately identified.
The authors of this futuristic antichrist were none other than Jesuit priest, Francisco Ribera (1537-1591), Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), and Manuel Lacunza (1731–1801). Their teachings eventually began to bare fruit after being adopted by famous evangelicals John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) and Cyrus I. (C.I.) Scofield (1843-1921).
These men developed a system of Biblical interpretation that thrust the modern evangelical church into an untethered walk into the abyss. They crafted a set of spectacles that have forever clouded the vision of so many. In their dispensation of time, the walls of discernment have crumbled. Now the city lays ensnarled in the “The Roots of Apostasy”.