A Study in Contrasts: Osteen vs. Keach

On June 6, 2014 Channel 2 News in Houston interviewed Mega-Church Pastor Joel Osteen in New York after having just returned from his Vatican Papal visit.

Meeting the Pope made Osteen feel “very honored and very humbled.”

Joel was awestruck as he had “seen the Pope give the Mass to 100,000 people that day.”

He went on to extol the Pope and his mercies: “He has such a heart to help people.”

The Pastor “loved the fact he’s made the Church more inclusive, not trying to make it smaller, but to try to make it large – to take everybody in. So that just resonates with me.”

The Pope asked Osteen and his entourage to pray for him.

“It was amazing you know, and even to go back into that part of the Vatican. There’s so much history there, the places they took us through. You feel that deep respect for God.”

Joel Osteen has much in common with today’s Futurists and Preterists. He, too, does not believe the Pope in the Papal office to be the very Antichrist, the Man of Sin, of whom Scripture warns.

Neither does he believe the Roman Church to be Mystery Babylon.

Consider this somber thought. If, in fact, the Pope in office is the Antichrist, the ruling head of Mystery Babylon, then Joel Osteen’s enthusiastic praise of the Pontiff reveals Osteen’s reprobation and unswerving doom according to the inerrant Word of God:

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

If any man have an ear, let him hear. (Rev. 13: 8-9)

Neither Osteen, Preterists or Futurists have ears to hear.

The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. (Rev. 17:8)

British Baptist Pastor Benjamin Keach (d. 1704) was cut from a far different cloth.

If the reader is unfamiliar with his name and works I strongly urge a perusal of this link:
http://www.reformedreader.org/rbb/keach/keachindex.htm

I will next cite quotations from his classic Preaching from the Types and Metaphors of the Bible, (originally published in London, 1855, under the title Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors):

The Church of Rome is Mystery Babylon

“Of this opinion were the ancient Waldenses, who felt the bloody power of Rome venting itself in most horrid and barbaric cruelties against them, and that for a long series of time, as appears by our most authentic, ancient and modern writers, who give a very ample account of the great persecution of Christians in all parts of the Christian world for many hundred years past, where they have had power.” (p. 863)

[Keach then spends several pages proving the validity of the assertion.]

The Pope is the Man of Sin who sits in the Temple of God, i.e. Church of God

“The head of this state Mystery Babylon is called the Man of Sin, by way of eminency, not only beyond the common rank of men, but beyond the highest sons of wickedness that went before him. And there is great truth in this; for if we consider the Pope in respect of pride, hypocrisy, idolatry and blood, he is the most unparalleled Man of Sin”…….”This head of the Babylonish state is said to ‘sit in the temple of God'….the Bishop of Rome before he showed himself to be that wicked one, the Man of Sin, did evidently sit in the Church or temple of God, and so fulfilled this prophecy in the very letter of it.” (pgs. 868-9)

The Man of Sin is also the Beast and Little Horn

“From the plain confession of the woman or whore herself who saith, ‘I sit a queen, I am no widow,’ [it proves] she hath a head or husband which is the beast, little horn or Man of Sin that Paul declared should rise after the removal of the then present [Roman Imperial] power which did let [restrain his revealing].” (pg. 879)

Conclusion: The Pope is the Man of Sin, the Antichrist

“If the Pope of Rome be not the Man of Sin, then Beelzebub is not a devil….That he exalts himself against God in polluting pure worship, and against kings by his usurped supremacy has already been proven. That he was hindered by the Roman Imperial power is the opinion and judgment of the learned; and also that he was the monstrous spawn of the great apostasy [falling away]. That he manages a great mystery of iniquity in which his grand counselor, the Devil, lends him politics to a double usurpation and encroachment upon soul and body; who pretends to miracles and false wonders, who acts like the Metropolitan cheat and imposter of Christendom, that his followers are strongly deluded, mere liars and hypocrites with seared consciences, forbidding honest marriage, but allowing canonical whoredom; that he forbids meats, but can dispense with the grossest debaucheries: all these, I say, with those other marks the Holy Spirit gives of him, are so legible upon the Pope, as if the very sunbeams had written them in capitals upon his brazen forehead. Therefore, we conclude that he, and only he, is the Antichrist, and the very Man of Sin.” (pg. 893)

The entire 30-page discourse can be accessed at:
https://archive.org/details/MN41603ucmf_0