Yesterday, Robert Jeffress introduced Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit with a fiery endorsement, giving us an opportunity to reflect on Jeffress' history of anti-Mormon rhetoric. But the Mormon faith isn't the only one that faces Jeffress' ire. Last year on his show Pathway To Victory, Jeffress said that Satan is behind the Roman Catholic Church.
At The Response prayer rally, we called out Perry for partnering with John Hagee, who has called the Roman Catholic Church the "The Great Whore" of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. Similarly, Jeffress calls the Catholic church a result of "the Babylonian mystery religion" found in the Book of Revelation, and says the Catholic Church represents "the genius of Satan."
Jeffress: This is the Babylonian mystery religion that spread like a cult throughout the entire world. The high priests of that fake religion, that false religion, the high priests of that religion would wear crowns that resemble the heads of fish, that was in order to worship the fish god Dagon, and on those crowns were written the words, 'Keeper of the Bridge,' the bridge between Satan and man. That phrase 'Keeper of the Bridge,' the Roman equivalent of it is Pontifex Maximus. It was a title that was first carried by the Caesars and then the Emperors and finally by the Bishop of the Rome, Pontifex Maximus, the Keeper of the Bridge.
You can see where we're going with this. It is that Babylonian mystery religion that infected the early church, one of the churches it infected was the church of Pergamos, which is one of the recipients of the Book of Revelation. And the early church was corrupted by this Babylonian mystery religion, and today the Roman Catholic Church is the result of that corruption.
Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn't come from God's Word, it comes from that cult-like, pagan religion. Now you say, 'pastor how can you say such a thing? That is such an indictment of the Catholic Church. After all the Catholic Church talks about God and the Bible and Jesus and the Blood of Christ and Salvation.'
Isn't that the genius of Satan? If you want to counterfeit a dollar bill, you don't do it with purple paper and red ink, you're not going to fool anybody with that. But if you want to counterfeit money, what you do is make it look closely related to the real thing as possible.
And that's what Satan does with counterfeit religion. He uses, he steals, he appropriates all of the symbols of true biblical Christianity, and he changes it just enough in order to cause people to miss eternal life.
