The Eighth King

(Re 17:11) And the wild beast that was but is not, it is also itself an eighth king, but springs from the seven, and it goes off into destruction.

Where the eighth king comes from

The wild beast has seven heads, and each head is a sovereign world power. So when Revelation calls the beast an eighth king, you'd expect another head to show up. It doesn't. The eighth king "springs from the seven," which means it grows out of them and carries the character of every one. Revelation shows how it happens: one of the heads is slaughtered to death, and then its death-stroke gets healed (Revelation 13:3). Another passage describes that same moment as the beast that "was, but is not, and yet is about to ascend out of the abyss" (Revelation 17:8). And the head that heals is the eighth king.

Scripture says nothing about the revived power changing inside. Only its role changes. The studies on this site name the United States as the dominant head of the beast right now. When that head takes its mortal wound and recovers, the same power comes back as the eighth king, and the whole earth follows it with admiration.

Why the United Nations is not the eighth king

Every head of the beast has been a nation, with its own people, borders, language and currency. The United Nations has none of that. It's an international body, and forcing it into the role of eighth king breaks the pattern the text itself set up. It also makes a mess of the dates, because you end up with an eighth king that exists from 1920, stops existing in 1939, and rises again in 1945, before the seventh head had even finished forming. The United Nations belongs somewhere else in the picture: it is the image made to the beast.

What the eighth king does

Once it ascends, the eighth king stays until Jehovah destroys it. It makes war with the two witnesses and kills them (Revelation 11:7), and the ten kings give their power and authority to it (Revelation 17:12, 13). It receives an image, breathes life into that image, and through it enforces the mark of the beast on all mankind. In the end it and its kings gather to Armageddon, and it goes off into destruction.