“It’s amazing how we are now reading so much of what Herbert W. Armstrong preached from the mainstream media. It’s just pouring out. One would hope something would start to penetrate the minds of our siblings before the Tribulation.”

So e-mailed an old friend to me over the weekend. By “siblings,” he was referring to those who, like us, listened to and read Herbert Armstrong’s prophecies in years past, sometimes for decades.

Just read the headlines over the past week:

“Germans Push EU to the Brink”

“Angela Merkel to David Cameron: Support Us or We Leave UK Behind”

“Berlin Prepares for Possible Greek Exit From Eurozone”

“Germany: Ruling Party Wants More Control of ECB”

“European Crisis Fertile Ground for Nationalist Parties”

“Germany Must Decide If It Wants the Eurozone to Survive or Perish”

“Merkel’s Christian Democrats May Adopt Euro Exit Clause in Party Platform”

“Eurozone Turmoil: Enter the Technocrats”

What we are watching occur in Europe now, day by day, is the literal fulfillment of the Bible prophecy that this northern power, currently called the European Union, will fracture into 10 dominant entities, ruled by 10 “kings,” who yield their political power to one overarching leader, under the spiritual influence of a religion that the prophecies call “Babylon.”

But the real question for those many once enlightened on the reality of these prophecies for our day is, will this current drama in Europe finally wake up the skeptics?

Well, the fact that God has to exert His correction on the rebellious nations of Israel sevenfold before many repent of their rebellion against their Maker would indicate that the answer in most cases is probably no, not yet (Leviticus 26:18).

To those minds truly free of bias, opened to receive the divine revelation of the Creator’s great plan for the universal family of mankind, this blindness of their “peers” is truly amazing. Yet that is the reality. When a human mind is slammed shut against seeing the obvious, there’s no greater blindness.

So it really is only those minds that are eager to find ultimate solutions to the great questions of the day that will heed the Trumpet’s message at present. The sad fact is that most of the “peers” with whom my friend and I once associated, and with whom we once excitedly discussed the coming fulfillment of the Bible prophecies that are daily being fulfilled today before our eyes, will have to wait to wake up to their reality when they find themselves subject to the enslavement of the rising great northern power (Revelation 18:3). That too is most powerfully prophetic.

To the rest, the remnant who remember (Malachi 4:4), we say, Watch Europe this week!

In particular, watch Germany!

This week Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats hold their annual conference. It is not going to be pretty. The divisions within Merkel’s own party, let alone her wobbly coalition government, are potent.

It is thus in an extremely divided and divisive political climate in Berlin that Christian Democratic Union (cdu) members will be asked to vote on the question as to whether or not to allow eurozone members to exit the EU monetary union, the currency area that binds 17 of the EU’s member states to a common currency, the euro.

The EU has already morphed into a two-tier enterprise, with the weaker economies now forced to bow to the strong (read Germany) just to survive—witness Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, with the prospect of Spain and even perhaps France next. The next stage in the EU elites’ imperialist project is to separate a third tier of vassal states to be economically and then politically enslaved to the whim of the elites in Berlin/Brussels.

Bible prophecy speaks of this rising northern power as eventually separating into three tiers—a middle tier of 10 predominant nations, submitting to the rule of an overarching dominant top tier based in Rome and Berlin, with a third tier at the base of the combine enslaved to the 10. What we see happening right now is the fracturing of the current 27-nation EU bloc into these three tiers (see Revelation 13, 17).

The EU was created as a technocracy, its agenda pursued not by representatives elected by universal suffrage, but rather by unelected technocrats based at its headquarters in Brussels. Those technocrats were most essentially appointed to the mushrooming EU bureaucracy to ensure that the imperialist vision of Franco-German elites was brought to its ultimate Holy Roman fruition.

It is thus not by mere accident that such technocrats have recently been appointed to head the most powerful bank in the world, the European Central Bank, and to lead interim governments in Greece and Italy.

The die is cast.

The transition of the EU into its final form will be overseen by unelected technocrats having their strings pulled by Holy Roman imperialist German elites.

The spiritual influence of Rome in the fulfillment of this imperialist vision (Revelation 17:13, 18) has come, to this point, not so much from the city of that name as from technocrats of deeply committed Roman Catholic faith embedded within EU headquarters in Brussels. We have followed that trend closely. For decades they have worked tenaciously to bind the EU member states together via a multiplicity of rules and regulations guaranteed to enforce the conditions of a number of treaties signed by the heads of EU member states.

The European Union is an entity built by treaty, without any say by its continental electorate in the process.

In fact, the common electorate of Europe, the people themselves, has had no say whatever in either the acceptance or rejection of its main body of regulations enshrined by default in EU law, which the EU calls the acquis communautaire. The sheer size of that document, said to currently exceed 100,000 pages, is beyond the capability of any person to absorb.

That is the way of EU elites. It’s the classic mushroom syndrome of “keep them in the dark and feed them manure.” So much for democracy in the EU.

The EU project was imperialist from its beginnings, being the vision of Nazi elites cemented in the minds of key German industrialists, scientists, bureaucrats and military men during the closing stages of World War ii.

The impetus behind the tenacious, ongoing pursuit of that vision initially came from those imbued with the Nazi spirit employed in Germany’s first postwar administration under the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer. In turn, those elites educated a second generation in the imperialist strategic concept of those same Nazi-era elites. It has been largely that generation of committed Roman Catholic imperialist socialists, educated in the continuing vision that emanated from the Red House meeting, which has driven the revival of Germany to its present position as the dominant nation, by far, in Europe.

But the technocrats will not be the ultimate leaders of the prophesied 10-nation combine. They are but the lackeys of Berlin/Brussels maneuvered into place by the elites to oversee the division of the EU into its three-tier format. Ultimately, “ten kings” (Revelation 17:12), probably of Roman Catholic royal dynastic descent, will be the heads of government of those 10 leading nations.

“… Daniel 7, and Revelation 13 and 17, is referring to the new United States of Europe that is now forming, out of the European Common Market, before your very eyes! Revelation 17:12 makes plain the detail that it shall be a union of ten kings or kingdoms that (Revelation 17:8) shall resurrect the old Roman Empire” (Mystery of the Ages).

It is not by sheer coincidence that many of the current pretenders to European royal thrones have returned to the Continent since the unification of Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Watch the cdu conference in Berlin this week. If the largest political party in Germany’s current ruling coalition, the party of Chancellor Merkel, votes in favor of ousting economically weak member states from the eurozone, the die will be cast for the acceleration of three-tier Europe—the prophesied 10-nation combine, ruled by the Berlin/Rome nexus, with the majority of European nations, from the Baltic to the Aegean seas, enslaved by this final and seventh resurrection of the old Holy Roman Empire.

To the enlightened, the events happening today in Europe are tremendously exciting, for they build a great feeling of anticipation. The anticipation of the cataclysmic collapse of the whole Babylonish system that has dominated the world since old Nimrod and his mother-wife Semiramis first established it within a short time after the great Flood.

It’s an exciting, most realistic and tangible anticipation of the replacement of that failed system, forever, by the only perfect form of government in the universe—the government of its Maker, Creator of humankind! The government of God!