Transcript: One world religion. Does the Bible actually teach that there will be a time when the whole world will have one religion? No, it doesn’t. It teaches is a time when all people will come under one religious, economic, political authority. That’s explained in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation. It’s the idea that everyone will be required to submit to the Beast and receive his mark. Submitting to the beast means worshipping the Beast. Receiving his mark allows you economic freedom. So it’s both temporal and spiritual. And for that reason, many Bible teachers and pastors teach this idea of a One World religion, that everybody on Earth will eventually come under one religious belief, one system, one set of doctrines, One idea of God.
But that’s not actually taught in the Scripture. In fact, that whole idea leads to all kinds of problems. And many people say, well, that will never happen because the Muslims are never going to submit to Catholicism. Catholicism is never going to submit to Islam. Islam was never going to submit to Hinduism, Hinduism is never going to submit to Christianity and that sort of thing. And so it makes this idea of this one world religion rising up a near impossibility. In fact, you won’t even find the phrase one world religion in the Bible. Yet there is an idea taught in the Bible of everyone on Earth coming together under this one central authority called the Beast.
And I think the best understanding we can arrive at may be had by looking at the one world religion of Caesarean Rome. This is fascinating because pagan Rome had a one world religion. That is, everyone within the Empire was part of a one world religion. That one world religion was founded on something called the Pantheon. Nobody even knows how many gods were in the Pantheon. But as the Roman armies conquered country after country, they would first learn the religion of that particular country. They would develop an understanding of the people’s beliefs, and they would not insist that they abandon those beliefs and worship some existing god in the Pantheon, but rather, they would assimilate new gods into the Pantheon.
And the Pantheon grew and grew. But there was one essential tenant that was required a conquered country, and its people were required to submit to the Caesar. Caesar was the god man. He claimed to be divine, and Caesar was the ultimate authority on Earth, both temporal and spiritual. So as long as you agreed to submit to the Caesar, in that way, your god could be installed into the Pantheon and you were free to worship your God in whatever way you had been. But it was about authority and submission to Caesar, the god man. And so throughout the entire Roman Empire, every religion, every god was accepted. Didn’t matter whether you were a Celt practising human sacrifice that was okay, or you were a Hun or a Vandal or Hindu. They didn’t care. Every god in every system became part of the pantheon. And so you worshipped your God, but first submitted to Caesar the god-man. The problem arose when Christ came, died on the cross and rose again. The true Christians would not accept Caesar’s terms.
