Kingdom Come

While contemporary society thinks in terms of the West vs the East, in Biblical times the geopolitics were arranged north and south of the Mediterranean.

At the time of Christ’s first coming the King of the North was the Roman Caesar.

• 100 BC Gaius (first name) Julius (father’s family) Caesar (clan) born into a patrician family
• 58-51 BC – conquers Gaul
• 84 BC – appointed high priest of most high god Jupiter / Greek Zeus
• 63 BC – elected Pontifex Maximus / high priest of Rome’s state religion. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire n 1453 and the death of the final Roman emperor Constantine XI, this role and title was transferred to the Papa / Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. 
• 49 BC – crosses the Rubicon River with his army to start his victorious civil war as imperator / victorious general.
• 47 BC – declared dictator for 10 years per Roman law intended to ensure stability during crisis.
• 44 BC – declared dictator for life after waging world war from Britain to Egypt for 14 years.

Caesar’s next goal to be declared a god-incarnate was moving forward nicely when interrupted by his assassination, but had already accomplished:

• putting his image on Roman coinage – the first for a living Roman,
• having his statues erected in public temples as the High Priest / Vicar / Representative in the flesh of the national god,
• Renaming his birth month, originally Quintilis / Fifth month in ancient Roman calendar after his divine lineage Julus, son of Aeneas Prince of Troy, and also renaming other months in the names of the gods Janus / January, Mars / March, Aphrodite / April, Maia / May to make himself equal to those gods.

Identifying himself with the Roman Mars God of War marks Caesar – and his successor Kings of the North with the biblical Ashur / Assyrian God of War, Rod of Judgment. And history certainly bears this out.

Gaius Julius Caesar’s will making his great-nephew – Gaius Octavius Thurinus his formally adopted heir involved, as even today, that Octavius change his family and clan names to that of his adoptive father, i.e. Gaius (just happened to be a common name) Julius Caesar. This has the effect of extending the life, power and authority of the original father, as in “I and the father are one.” (John 10:30) 

Caesar II was certainly understood to continue his adoptive father’s plan, by claiming to have taken on the spirit of their ancestor god, becoming known as divi Iuli filius (son of the divine Julius), easing into simply divi filius (son of the god).

In an unprecedented move in Republican Rome, he used this relationship to be worshiped as a living deity by the title of Augustus, meaning Divine, not waiting until death to be deified like Caesar I. This action instituted the imperial cult by which all Caesars were deified and granted many titles, all of which attributed aspects of divine power.

• Divi Filius, meaning ‘Son of the Divine,’ or ‘Son of God,’ was his favorite title.  This title appears on almost every coin minted by Augustus.
• Dominus in Latin, or Kyrios in Greek, which means ‘Lord.’
• Soter, meaning ‘Savior,’ a title conveying that by his victories in battle he had saved the empire from internal political instability, financial ruin, and external threats by foreign powers.
• Princeps, an oxymoron meaning ‘first among equals’, was maintained for the facade of republican government.

From a biblical perspective, all of these named attributes are appropriated titles of The Promised Seed / Prophesied Savior / Christ.

Augustus chose his stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero as his heir in the usual way by adopting him with the name change of Tiberius Julius Caesar.

When Tiberias ascended to the throne in 14 AD as the living incarnation of divus Augustus his identity once again merited a new name / title / entitlement of Tiberius Caesar Augustus.

And every Caesar since is not taking a title but identifying himself as the heir to the original Caesar as the incarnation of the national god’s spirit through which the god accomplished his will – the evil spirit equivalent of Holy Spirit possession.

For the last 2,000 years aspirants to the Roman throne have claimed adoption into the “Caesar” family in any language such as Kaiser / Czar / Tsar – as claimant / heir to YHVH’s rival ruler of the last World Empire, i.e. the aspiring Antichrist in the rise and fall of the leading nationalities within the Roman Empire.

By 476 Rome had become an outlier in the predominantly Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople. When the barbarian German warlord Odoacer conquered the city, he and his heirs did not deny the title to the ruler in Constantinople, but did aspire to assume equal status as co-regent of the western half of the empire. There was precedent in Republican Rome which was headed by two consuls.

In 800, having through military means reassembled what had been fragmented over the last four centuries into minor kingdoms, Charlemagne, king of the Franks / French, restored the Western Roman Empire’s control over borderlands lost to invading Norsemen, and in reward crowned himself Roman Emperor in attendance by the Pope at Rome in 800. He demonstrated his international powers when he established diplomatic ties with the Islamic Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, joining forces against their common enemies, the Christian emperors in Eastern Europe and the Islamic Umayyad caliphs in Spain / Western Europe. 

In 1453 the loss of Constantinople to the Moslems gave the Russian ruler the opportunity to assume the title of Caesar / Tsar and transfer the seat of government of the Roman Empire to Moscow as the Third Rome as the Orthodox  / True King of the North with the divine right and empowerment to rule as God’s representative as an autocrat. 

The Tsar’s competing heir to the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine throne, Andreas Palaiologos, failing to win support from any Western European king for a crusade to win back “his” throne at Constantinople, bequeathed his rights at his death in 1502 to the greatest powerhouse at that time, the Spaniards elevating King Ferdinand, married to Queen Isabella / Jezebel, into a legal Emperor of Rome. However, he never used the title. In their case, actions spoke louder than words, as they had already expanded their dominion into the New World by funding Christopher Columbus’ voyages. (Map shows Spanish Empire in red and Portuguese in blue during union of their empires 1581-1640.)

When the Spanish monarchy passed by inheritance to the House of Habsburg, one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of Western civilization, they continuously occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 until their extinction in the male line in 1740, reincorporated through the female Habsburg line joined in marriage to a male from Lorraine as the Habsburg-Lorraines from 1765 until its dissolution in 1806 by Napoleon’s empire.

In 1806 Napoleon Bonaparte, while modestly calling himself Emperor of France, identified himself as Emperor of Rome by having himself crowned with a replica of Charlemagne’s Roman Emperor crown and a Roman laurel wreath. He also conferred on his son the title King of Rome, which is, like the official designation of the heir to the throne of England ,”Prince of Wales,” the official designation of the heir to the Emperor of the Roman Empire.

After Napoleon was frozen out of his bid to incorporate the Russian sector of the Roman empire, he also lost the western half to the British at the Battle of Waterloo by virtue of the British having by then won an even greater Revolution.

Beginning in the 18th century, England’s skyrocketing rise to wealth and power was made possible in part through locally discovered oil, jumpstarting the Industrial Revolution, considered the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants. By the mid-18th century, Britain was the world’s leading commercial nation, controlling a global trading empire with colonies in North America and the Caribbean and military and political hegemony on the Indian subcontinent.

By 1913 the British Empire had become the foremost global power and was by far the largest empire in history, controlling 23% of the world’s population and covering 24% of the Earth’s total land area.

In1871 25 Germany states, each with its own nobility formed the Germany empire, AKA the Second Reich, (Charlemagne’s being the First). Wilhelm I, King of the largest state, Prussia, was granted the title of German Emperor / Deutscher Kaiser, with Berlin as its capital. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire became an industrial, technological, and scientific giant, building the longest railway network of Europe and the world’s strongest army, and a navy second only to Britain‘s Royal Navy. One-third of all Nobel Prizes went to German inventors and researchers.

In 1879, the German Empire consolidated the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, followed by the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882. Claiming much of the leftover territory that was not yet conquered by Europeans in the Scramble for Africa, it built the third-largest colonial empire at the time, after the British and the French. By 1913, Germany, the third-largest economy in the world, embarked on Weltpolitik (“world politics”) – conquering weak nations instead of forming alliances with strong ones.