<p>16:13 <em>And I saw coming out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits, that looked like frogs</em>- The drying up of the Euphrates leads to unclean spirits like frogs going out to deceive the nations and gather them to Armageddon. No particularly convincing explanation of the figure of frogs has yet been come up with. The suggestion that it refers to the spirit of the French revolution is desperate; the passage clearly demands a latter day fulfilment, and it would be hard to demonstrate that liberty, equality and fraternity came from dragon, beast and false prophet. It would be impossible to argue that e.g. the spirit of liberty came from the dragon, equality from the beast, etc. The idea is surely that as a frog jumps, so the spirit or teaching / influence of these entities spreads in leaps and bounds. But the appropriacy of the symbol becomes apparent when we realize that the Euphrates is fed by tributaries which feed into the Euphrates through vast marshes. The marshes around the Euphrates are so vast that they have given rise to the description of the locals there as 'the marsh Arabs'. Saddam Hussein drained some of these marsh areas and cut off water to others in his attempt to persecute the very groups which later fought against him and radicalized into the Islamic State. In a literal sense, the hordes pouring forth against Israel are the result of the Euphrates being literally dried up. Wikipedia claims that &quot;According to the United Nations Environmental Program and the AMAR Charitable Foundation, between 84% and 90% of the marshes have been destroyed since the 1970s. In 1994, 60 percent of the wetlands were destroyed by Hussein's regime &ndash; drained to permit military access and greater political control of the native Marsh Arabs... After the 1991 Gulf War, Shia Muslims in southern Iraq rebelled against Saddam Hussein who in turned crushed the rebellion and further accelerated the draining of the Central and Hammar marshes in order to evict Shias that have taken refuge in the marshes&quot; <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris%E2%80%93Euphrates_river_system>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris%E2%80%93Euphrates_river_system</a> and <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes</a> accessed 12.08.2014.</p><p>These huge marshlands are full of frogs The drying up of the Euphrates would be bad news for the frogs, who will have to leap and bound further afield in desperation. And so the idea seems to be that the Angel dries up the Euphrates, the hordes burst forth over that border towards the earth / land promised to Abraham; and the teaching of <em>jihad</em> against Israel, anti-Semitism in its final term, is spread by leaps and bounds out of the Euphrates basin, leading people from throughout the region and indeed the whole world, to come up against Israel. We note that there are even jihadist fighters from as far away as Australia fighting for the Islamists at the moment. Joel 3:9 speaks of huge multitudes of people being 'awoken' and going up to Jerusalem. The postmodern daze in which many people now live has created a desire for reality, for action, for escape from the virtual world into something truly exciting and passionate. And this is why well-heeled young white Australians are getting caught up in Islamic extremism and heading off to fight for them. Young unemployed males are now seeing the opportunity to play their violent online games in reality... they are awaking from the postmodernist haze of indifference. But sadly to the wrong reality. This awakening is likely to continue and become ever more attractive, likely fuelled by the media's hatred of Israel and desire to portray her as a situation needing radical resolution.</p><p>&ldquo;The beast&rdquo; has &quot;the false prophet&quot; with him as a kind of associated act (Rev. 19:20; 20:10), the scarlet beast has a whore riding it, the sea beast has a horn which becomes its representative, the earth beast has an image of the beast. These associated acts indicate that each of these entities has an individual controlling them- and this is the antichrist figure. The dragon is described as having &ldquo;his angels&rdquo; with him during the fight against Michael and His Angels- which suggests he is to be seen as representative of a person. We note that the dragon was used in the Old Testament not as a symbol of Egypt, but specifically as a symbol of the individual Pharaoh of Egypt (Ez. 29:3); and likewise the dragon is used as the symbol of Nebuchadnezzar personally (Jer. 51:34).</p><p>&quot;The false prophet&quot; is given no introduction; he is introduced just as is the beast (see on 11:7). This may be because we have here in Revelation a kaleidoscope of images, according to the genre of apocalyptic. It is tempting to apply this term to the false prophet Mohammad. But perhaps there will arise an individual who claims to be a Divinely inspired Islamic prophet, the Mahdi. The dragon is still around, giving ideological support even if he has been politically destroyed in chapter 12, thrown out of political heaven as it were. And &quot;the beast&quot; suggests that the sea and earth beasts of chapter 13 are effectively one. The unclean spirits coming from their mouths are their teachings, beckoning people worldwide to come to the land promised to Abraham and fight against God's people. In the uprise of the Islamic State we saw for the first time this kind of thing happening on a global level. Babylon is the hold of these unclean spirits (18:2). Yet in the Gospels, to say a man had an unclean spirit or demon was to say he was mad. There will be a spirit of madness, extreme fanaticism, emanating from these three sources of propaganda.</p>