Revelation 16:15

Behold I come as a thief. God's judgments come unexpectedly. This seems to be a parenthesis, and then verse sixteen goes on to say: "And he, (or they, meaning the frog-like spirits) gathered them (meaning the kings or nations before mentioned) together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Armageddon gets its name from Mt. Megiddo in Palestine. It is a place famous for battle and slaughter. It was where Deborah and Barak slaughtered the Canaanites, and where King Josiah fell in battle with the Egyptians. It would mean in those days what Waterloo means to us, and would be used in the same way. Its use here would indicate a place or scene of great slaughter. I take it that it is used here in that symbolical sense, but meant that Rome was coming to her Armageddon where she would go down in battle and slaughter.

The notion that Armageddon refers to some great cataclysm of the world's affairs in the future is hardly warranted. Any great disaster to a warring nation is an Armageddon. The Confederacy met its Armageddon at Gettysburg, and the Germans met their Armageddon at the Marne, and Rome was to meet her Armageddon.