Rome: Scripture’s Symbol of Compromise with the World

Egypt Was Bondage. Babylon Was Rebellion. Rome Has Always Been Compromise – and the Time Has Come to Cast It Off.

Throughout Scripture, God uses nations as living parables to teach His people. Egypt stands for bondage – the iron furnace of slavery from which He delivered Israel with a mighty hand (Deut. 4:20). Babylon stands for Luciferian rebellion – the proud tower-builders who defy heaven and are scattered in judgment (Gen. 11:1-9; Isa. 14:12-15). But Rome is something more insidious: it is the biblical symbol of compromise with the world – the seductive power that co-opts God’s people, dilutes their distinctives, and turns pure faith into a tool of empire.

I have written extensively on how Augustine reinterpreted and reinvented Christianity to make it palatable to Roman sensibilities – allegorizing and spiritualizing its doctrines so that the literal promises of a physical kingdom could be replaced by the spiritualized “kingdom” of the Roman state church.

Constantine was his great predecessor in this trend, using political power to marginalize premillennial hope and strip the faith of its Hebrew roots.

The Protestant Reformers, for all their courage, ultimately fell short of the great promise of the Reformation’s central rallying cry: “Back to the Sources” (Ad Fontes). This motto called Christians to return directly to the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures instead of relying on the Latin Vulgate and centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.

At its root, the “Back to the Sources” movement was profoundly Hebraic. It was driven by Christian Humanists who insisted on studying the Bible in its original languages, with figures like Johannes Reuchlin championing the serious study of Hebrew and even Jewish thought as essential for proper understanding.

For a brief but exciting period, it seemed the Reformation might fully restore the pre-Constantinian, Hebrew-rooted faith and practice of the apostolic church. Yet while the Reformers bravely rejected many of Rome’s external rituals and corruptions, they preserved far too much of Augustine’s Romanized theology — including his allegorical approach to prophecy, amillennial eschatology, and other elements that had distanced Christianity from its Hebrew foundations. They stopped short of restoring the full Hebrew cultural perspective of the early church.

That is why I founded the First Century Bible Church – to finish what the Reformers left undone, on the premise that we stand at the very end of the Gentile Age when the Elijah mandate of Malachi 4:6 becomes urgent: “He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a curse.”

This article summarizes my view that Rome has always embodied compromise with the world in precisely the same way Egypt embodied bondage and Babylon embodied rebellion. Let us examine the evidence from Scripture, history, and typology.

1. Scripture Itself Defines Rome as the Symbol of Compromise

The New Testament repeatedly portrays Rome as the archetypal worldly power that demands accommodation. In Revelation 17–18, the “great city” that sits on seven hills, rules the kings of the earth, and is drunk with the blood of the saints is explicitly called “Babylon” – the well-understood first-century code word for Rome (see also 1 Peter 5:13). Jesus Himself warned of this spirit of compromise when He told His disciples they would be hated by “all nations” and delivered up to councils and governors “for My name’s sake” (Matt. 24:9; 10:18). The Roman system was the ultimate fulfillment of that warning.

Rome’s hostility to the Jews and to Hebrew-rooted faith is written across the pages of history and prophecy. Rome-backed Herod slaughtered the Hasmonean royalty to secure his throne – executing the last legitimate heirs of the Maccabean line and thereby erasing the final vestiges of independent Jewish kingship. Under Roman client-kingship, John the Baptist – the last of the Old Testament prophets – was beheaded. In AD 70, Roman legions under Titus destroyed the Second Temple, partially fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy in the Olivet Discourse and repeating the pattern of desecration begun by Antiochus IV. For three centuries afterward, Rome persecuted the Christian church precisely because it remained a Hebrew-affiliated faith centered in Jerusalem.

All of that changed with Constantine. Once Christianity agreed to abandon its Hebrew roots, Rome was fully placated. The emperor convened councils that marginalized premillennialism (with its dangerous expectation of a literal Jewish kingdom) and promoted a spiritualized eschatology more congenial to imperial stability. Augustine then formalized this new religion as an extension of Roman imperialism. The result was Roman Catholicism – eventually even called the “Holy Roman Empire.” The compromise was complete: the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3) had been Romanized.

2. The Parallel with the Northern Kingdom and the Sin of Jeroboam

Roman Catholicism mirrors the Northern Kingdom of Israel in its departure from authentic faith. Just as Jeroboam I raised up priests from the common people, changed the holy days to obscure their connection to Jerusalem and the Torah, and introduced pagan elements such as golden calves – a package of changes Scripture repeatedly condemns as “the sin of Jeroboam” (1 Kings 12:26–33; 2 Kings 17:21–23) – so Rome created a top-down ecclesiastical hierarchy modeled on Roman imperialism rather than the decentralized, elder-led model of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Rome changed the biblical calendar to obscure Torah connections, and redefined “saints” to mirror the Roman pantheon of minor gods to which humans pray.

In both cases, God tolerated the deviation for a season because it served a larger prophetic purpose.

3. God’s Prophetic Purpose in the Northern Kingdom and in Roman Catholicism

When the Northern Kingdom (House of Israel, led by Ephraim) departed from authentic Judaism, God used that very departure to create the vehicle for fulfilling His promise to Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). By “divorcing” the House of Israel (Jer. 3:8; Hos. 1–2) and then dying on the cross to free her to remarry Him as the Bride of Christ, the Lord restored Israel in the form of Christianity.

Its single mission became the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). This is a proof-text of Two House theology: the entire Age of the Gentiles is defined by the mission to bring the world into salvation in Christ.

Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church – with all its Roman accretions – served a temporary purpose in God’s plan. Its role was, at least in part, to obscure the Hebrew roots of the faith precisely because those roots have been utterly intolerable to the nations. The astonishing persistence of anti-Semitism across centuries (especially in the Muslim world) testifies to this reality. By Romanizing Christianity, God clearly distinguished the restored House of Israel (Christianity’s mission to the nations) from the House of Judah, whose own mission – even in its partially blinded state – is, as Paul notes in Romans 3:1–2, to be the custodians of the oracles of God (the Torah) until the Second Advent and the Millennial Kingdom.

A telling sidebar: The Apostle Paul is the living embodiment of “the elect” – those Jews who transfer from the House of Judah to the House of Israel through Christ. Paul, of the tribe of Benjamin (still part of the southern kingdom), was miraculously healed of literal blindness on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:18). That healing of his physical eyes symbolizes the spiritual transfer: from the custodianship of Judah to the Gentile-reaching mission of restored Israel.

4. The Closing of the Gentile Age and the Elijah Mandate

Now the two “days” (2,000 years) of the Gentile Age draw to their close. The Malachi 4:6 Elijah prophecy is activated: the church’s Roman accretions will be broken and fall away. But not without a fierce struggle by those most committed to tradition rather than to biblical truth.

My First Century Bible Church exists for exactly this hour – to restore the Hebrew cultural perspective of the pre-Constantine church, to complete the Reformation’s unfinished work, and to prepare the Bride for the return of her Bridegroom. Egypt’s bondage is long broken. Babylon’s rebellion has been judged. The time has come to renounce Rome’s compromise once and for all.

The Hebrew roots of the faith are not optional extras; they are the very DNA of the restored House of Israel. Let us therefore cast off every Roman encumbrance and return to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) as we enter the final act of the age.

If this article resonates with you, I invite you to join us in the First Century Bible Church as we labor together in this Elijah restoration. The hour is late, but the promise is sure: “All Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26) when the two houses are reunited under Messiah.