ok, So who is the beast and false prophet after these things?
The beast and the kings of the earth waged war against the Lamb by their persecution of the Christian saints per Mt 25:40. The beast’s war on God and his people may have been quite a bit more deliberate and literal. Titus, the little horn of Dan 7, is the mouth of the beast (Rev 13:5-6, Dan 7:8, 25) as Aaron was the mouth of Moses (Exo 4:16). According to Rev 13:6 the beast opens “his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place.” Titus, the little horn, is also called the false prophet to the beast in Rev 19:20: “But the beast was captured, and with him
the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf.” Titus, the son of the beast Vespasian, is the mouth of the beast of Rev 13:5-6, the little horn of Dan 7 and the false prophet of Rev 19:20. Titus LITERALLY spoke blasphemies against God and his dwelling place.
The beast will
“make war against the rider on the horse and his army.” Essentially the same thing is predicted in Revelation 13:6-7. In these verses, Titus, the mouth of the beast, is said to “make war against the saints and to conquer them” during the Jewish War and slander those who live in heaven. Rev 19:19 and Rev 13:6-7 appear to be fulfilled in Titus’ desire to destroy the Christian and Jewish religions by destroying the Temple. Sulpicius Severus says the following in
Chronica 2:30.7:
But others, on the contrary, disagreed–including Titus himself. They argued that the destruction of the Temple was a number one priority in order to destroy completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians: For although these religions are conflicting, they nevertheless developed from the same origins. The Christians arose from the Jews: With the root removed, the branch is easily killed.
Above one can see that Titus made “war against the rider on the horse and his army” by trying to destroy the religion of the Jews and Christians. This, however, is not the only way in which Titus declared war on God. According to Gittin 56b of the
Babylonian Talmud, Titus LITERALLY and EXPLICITLY challenged God to war after he thought that he had killed God at the destruction of the Temple:
This was the wicked Titus who blasphemed and insulted Heaven. What did he do? He took a harlot by the hand and entered the Holy of Holies and spread out a scroll of the Law and committed a sin on it. He then took a sword and slashed the curtain. Miraculously blood spurted out, and he thought that he had slain God himself . . .”
Shortly thereafter, Gittin 56b of the
Babylonian Talmud also records Titus declare war on “the rider on the horse,” the God of Israel, by saying, “If he [the rider on the horse, the God of Israel] is really mighty, let him come up on the dry land and fight with me.” Rome persecuted the people of Israel during and shortly after the Jewish War. Rome also persecuted Christians, the soon-to-be inhabitants of heaven, just prior to this war during the Neronic persecution. In this declaration of war against God one can see how the mouth of the beast, the False Prophet Titus, explicitly declares the beast’s intention through its war with Israel and persecution of Christians “to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.”
But the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.
The two people mentioned in this verse are the two Roman generals of the Jewish War, Vespasian and Titus. The beast mentioned in this verse is Vespasian. The false prophet is Titus. Titus is called the false prophet because of what he did to fulfill Rev 13:11-18. On the 9th of Av of A.D. 70, the Romans worshiped the ensigns in the temple in Jerusalem. When the Romans worshiped these ensigns; one of which was the
Imago, a metallic image of Caesar; Titus presided over the worship of the ensigns as he was granted the title Caesar at his father’s coronation and thus would have also likely had his own image engraved on the ensign called the
numina legionum beside that of his father’s. Because Titus was both general and Caesar it was expected that he would preside over the false worship of his father, the emperor, and Rome in the Temple in Jerusalem, Titus is called the false prophet in this verse as stipulated by Deu 13:1-5:
If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him. That prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the Lord your God.
Titus is called the false prophet because he presided over the worship of foreign gods in the Temple while providing a sign that these gods were real gods while YHWH was a false god. This sign was the fire from heaven mentioned in Rev 13:13. This fire from heaven was fulfilled in the fact that the Roman army launched firebrands into Jerusalem during the siege of the city as they had done earlier in the war. This fire from heaven was also a symbol of one of the legions which aided in the siege of Jerusalem,
Legio XII
Fulminata, the 12th Lightning Bolt Legion in addition to being a symbol of Rome itself. The symbol of Rome was Aquila, the eagle that carried Zeus’ lightning bolt. Aquila was the main ensign Titus’ army carried into battle.
When after displaying this sign of fire from heaven, Titus showed the Jews that these Roman gods that they worshiped on the ensigns were the true gods, not YHWH who allowed His Temple to be destroyed in addition to allowing foreign gods to be worshiped there. Then after providing this sign, Titus ordered all the Jews left in the city to be killed: “So he [Titus] ordered this proclamation to be made to them, that they [the Jews of Jerusalem] should no more come out to him as deserters, nor hope for any further security; for that he would henceforth spare nobody, but fight them with his whole army.” (Wars 6.6.3) Thus Titus acted as a dark reflection of the prophet Elijah who after calling down fire from heaven also ordered everyone who would not worship his god, YHWH, to be killed (1 Kings 18:38-40). It is also because of this similarity with the prophet Elijah that Titus is called the false prophet in this verse.
Rev 19:20 says that with this sign of Roman victory, the false prophet “had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image.” Josephus says that many of the Jews of Jerusalem who were trapped in the city during the siege of A.D. 70 hoped that the Romans would come and deliver them from the Zealots who threatened their lives during the siege. Given the fact that the Romans had seized the Temple, those Jews who had received the mark of the beast and were thus loyal to Rome thought that they were soon going to be saved from their zealot persecutors. The following verse accurately predicts that they were deluded. As explained in the commentary on Rev 13 when Titus seized the Temple, he ordered his troops to indiscriminately kill everyone they encountered in the city. Thus the Romans went on a killing spree killing everyone in Jerusalem without discriminating between those who were Roman rebels and those Jews who were loyal to Rome who had received the mark of the beast and were trapped in the city at the start of the war. Those Jews who had received the mark of the beast and were thus loyal to Rome were also killed alongside the zealot rebels and everyone else in Jerusalem. Look at how the beast was cast alive into the lake of fire.
This lake of fire is mentioned again in Rev 20:10:
“And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Here we see that the devil, beast and false prophet are thrown into the same lake of fire where they are each tormented for the age of ages. Regardless one’s view of the millennium, this “age of ages” refers to an era—presumably a lengthy one–
after A.D. 70. This means that the beast, false prophet and Satan are tormented in the lake of fire
after A.D. 70 which means that this lake of fire cannot refer to the burning of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 or at least there is more to this lake of fire than
just the burning of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Abyss is a dual metaphor for foreign nations and the realm of the dead concurrently throughout Rev and much of the rest of the Bible. If Rome is the Abyss then when the beast and false prophet are cast into the Abyss in v. 20 this would appear to denote Vespasian’s and Titus’ ultimate return to Rome, the Abyss, in A.D. 70. The beast and false prophet are cast “alive” into the Abyss (Rev 19:20).
