Last week I talked about three
things specifically. Number one, I talked about humility.
I'm just going to give us a quick refresher. I talked about the
humility that's required to learn the Word of God, knowing that
it is only through the Holy Spirit that we understand it to begin
with. Humility as we grow in our knowledge that we're not
puffed up, that we're humble to know that if it were not for
the grace of God, we would not understand these things. Also
the humility to be able to discern and be at peace with others and
be patient with others who may or may not understand things.
I also talked about the fact that we need to be humble and
the reality that we are going to have our worldviews collide
when we start to read this letter. And when we go through the process
of outlining this letter starting next week and get into some of
the meat and potatoes of the themes of this letter, it is
going to conflict with what we all know and all believe to some
degree. We are going to learn that there
is not going to be a rebuilding of the temple. We are going to
learn that there is no such thing as animal sacrifices in the future.
We are going to learn that there is no 144 specific thousand Jews
that are going to be saved. We understand some of these things,
and I'm just giving you those as sort of like a little snippet,
because it's going to conflict with what you believe. And what
we all believe is a mix of truth, and a mix of lies, and a mix
of misconfusion, and a mix of misunderstanding, and a mix of
just flat people teaching us junk to sell us books. And so,
when we get into it, it's going to be a blessing for us, but
I wanted to remind us what we learned last week in humility.
Second, I taught about John. As a matter of fact, I spoke
about the Apostle John at great length. I talked about his writing,
his intimacy with the God-man, and his ministry on this earth
as the one who was the closest, the one whom Jesus loved according
to the text. I know that's debatable, but
not in this church. Anyway... There's some humility
in that. That's a joke. So we learned
about John as a person. Why? Because if we do not know
the author, we do not know the message. We do not know the intent.
We do not understand it. And finally, I talked about the
idea of glory and what the the occasion, the reasoning for John
writing this letter, of course he was commanded to by Jesus
Christ, but the purpose of it in that sense was that John's
recipients who were underneath this harsh Roman imperial cultism
would understand that the victory is theirs in Christ Jesus and
that all of the suffering they experience is a time of rejoicing,
not a time of fear. And so that the way we know we've
been taught incorrectly about the book of Revelation is because
most people fear what they think it means. For a Christian to
fear what the Word of God teaches in this letter is beside me. because it's like everything
going wrong and the knight in shining armor come up and go,
I got you. Whey! That's the reality of what
we ought to feel when we read this letter. That's what it's
for, that's the purpose of it. Tonight, I'm going to get very
technical with facts and figures and dates and different philosophical
ideas that may or may not be interesting to you. I'm going
to talk about the situation these people were in, and the character
of the letter, and I'm going to teach a good bit the latter
quarter of tonight about apocalyptic literature. And so if you've
got something to write with, that would be great, and if you
don't, We'll have to go through it one more time. So there's
a lot of information here. As we saw last week, John is
the author of this book. The Apostle was in the inner
three of Jesus. He was in the inner three of
James, John, and Peter. And John is the one whom Jesus
loved. He is intimate with Jesus Christ
in a way that no one else has ever been, or in the earthly
sense, ever will be. And we see the humility of John
in that he does not even name himself in his writing. Because
as you know, if you saw, I don't know, I saw a brother that I'm
familiar with run into Charles Spurgeon's great-granddaughter.
And in that conversation, he surmised very quickly she was
an unbeliever, so he began to present the gospel to her and
then pray that the Lord would give her understanding and salvation. And you think that's neat. Because,
I mean, Charles Spurgeon's great-granddaughter, man, that's a person to know,
you know? We care about that kind of stuff.
We care about the nepotistic relationships inside people who
we consider famous. We'd rather drive five hours
to go see a pastor that we see on TV than to come five minutes
to sit into a room with nobodies. to learn the Word of God. And
that's an idolatrous heart. John understood that if he put
his name to these things and everybody knew that everywhere
there was Jesus there was John, they just by the mere fact that
he was related in that sense to the ministry of Jesus Christ
would adore his writing and make much of it. So John writes these
things and tradition holds that it is the same John who wrote
Revelation. It's the same John who wrote
the three epistles. The date of this writing, though
it is is debated in some circles. The date of this writing is anywhere
between 93 and 96 A.D. So you can imagine, here's Jesus
around 33 to 38 A.D. being crucified, raised from
the dead, and ascended into heaven. And these disciples now within,
what, 60 years, 50 years? John was an old man at this time,
probably in his late 80s, early 90s. And here he is now, maybe
not even that old, but he was older in life at the Isle of
Patmos. He was exiled. Instead of being
killed, he was exiled to an island prison, sort of like Alcatraz,
if you will. And he, at this isle, wrote this
letter. The purpose as we went through
last week, I think I went through that really rapidly at the very
end last week, is that these Christians, because of their
suffering, were fearful that they were going to lose. They
were fearful they were going to lose their life. They were
fearful that maybe what they had heard and what they had put
their faith in had failed. They were fearful. Of course,
because of the date that we hold to, you can imagine what had
been going on at the time, twenty-something years later, after the fall of
Rome in 70 A.D. I mean, imagine this. The entire
center infrastructure of the nation of Israel was gone. Never
to be resurrected. Ever. Still to this day, it's
not resurrected. The governing authority of Israel is the temple. and there is no temple. So there
is no such thing as a nation of Israel. Now there's an Israeli
government, but that's completely different. It has nothing to
do with biblical mandate or promise. And we'll look at that in the
weeks to come when we start to get into some of those things.
But when we remember these people had seen the fall of Rome. These
people had seen Israel turn upside down on its head, and what they
thought was a powerful thing now all of a sudden was a nothing.
Now Rome not only hated Israel, but had demolished it and hated
Christians and were trying to demolish it, Christianity. And
so John had the responsibility, according to the Word of God,
to send this letter to the circuits of churches in Asia Minor. Now
we say there were seven churches. Seven is the number of completion.
It's the number of the Sabbath. It's the number of the Day of
the Lord. It is the time where when we see in Semitic, when
I say Semitic, it means Jewish. When we see in Semitic writing
and Semitic literature, seven is a number of perfection. So
if something claims to be perfect, it would say, I'm number seven.
If something says that they're better than perfect, plus one.
You ever heard someone say infinity plus one? And you'll notice too,
just a little plug here, the Antichrist takes on the number
of eight. himself. Now Jesus gives him the number
of six, which is the number of man, and he does it so in triplicate. In Semitic writing, anything
triplicate is an absolute emphasis. And so if the number of Satan
is the number of man, which man is indicative of evil and depravity,
then the number of the Antichrist in that context is man, man,
man. But the number of the Antichrist that he takes is eight. He says,
I'm perfect, plus one. Isn't that the heart of Satan?
So, we know that John had to write these letters, this letter
to these churches. We don't necessarily believe
it was just seven of them, because we have it. We just believe that
seven in the context of these churches in Asia Minor, I mean,
we don't see the church of Galatia there, we don't see the church
of Corinth, we don't see all these churches that still existed
in this day. Did they get skipped? No. But the context therein,
as we begin to look at it, will show that the fullness of this
letter was intended to go to the full circuit of churches,
and that by sending it to these seven, it would guarantee its
dissemination through other provinces of Asia Minor. Asia, as a province,
enthusiastically embraced the cult of Rome. And what is the
cult of Rome? What is imperial cultism? Imperial
cultism is that the Roman Empire went from being democratic to
imperialistic. Democratic is what we have. Matter
of fact, our established government is a Roman government. It actually
is very Romanist in that we have a Senate and a Congress and a
head like a president. But somewhere along the line,
and I can't think of all the dates right now and it's not
that important, the emperor decided he was divine. And that divine
instance then in the emperor's mind made it imperialism, which
just like the Chinese imperial families and other things, there
was a line of secession run through a specific bloodline, and that
bloodline could not be thwarted because the gods themselves had
placed Caesar on the throne of Imperial Rome. And if we know
anything about the first century, we understand that Rome owned
and ruled everything. Much like Great Britain ruled
everything in the 1930s and 40s. And so, we need to remember that
the whole province of Asia accepted this cult of Rome. And not just
accept it, like we just tolerate it. They loved it. They loved
it. They embraced it in such a way that the emperor, if we
looked at chapter 2, where Jesus is talking about the seven churches
and he talks about the church of Pergamum, and he says Pergamum,
What did he say there? That's where Satan has his throne.
In Pergamum there was a temple of Augustus. And here in this
area they worshipped, they worshipped the emperor. They laid their
faces on the ground to worship the emperor as if he were their
creator. The idea of the word Lord, if we see it in Romans
chapter 10, the idea of Lord was the title given to the emperor
which established him as God. So for Jesus Christ to be Lord,
and you know that in the context of Romans chapter 10 when we
see Paul saying to the Romans that
if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe
in our hearts that God raised Him for the dead, we shall be
saved. What's this salvation that he's
speaking of? Well of course we understand the eternal salvation,
but more specifically, these Romans could dare not, it was
a capital crime, to confess anyone but Caesar is Lord. And so there
were centurions sent out into the days of that first century
where they would go in from village to village to village, and they
would carry in the scepters of imperialistic Rome, and they
would say, Caesar is Lord. Hail Caesar! Caesar is Lord!
And anybody that didn't chant that got their head chopped off.
Well, imagine the Christians as they come to these people,
and they say, No, Caesar is not Lord. Jesus, whom you have crucified,
is Lord. They die. So the idea of being
saved in that respect is indeed a really misunderstood thing,
but we also do know that a confession of Christ as Lord is a result
of salvation, not the fruit, not the causation of salvation. Another thing to understand about
these people that received this letter, the conflict between
the churches of Jesus Christ and the emperor, as I've already
said, was not just something that they tolerated and it wasn't
just something that was a problem. You know, these people are giving
us a problem. They don't love the emperor. It was so passionately disturbing
to imperialistic Rome that they went in not just randomly, they
specifically hunted down Christians and systematically hoarded them
together so that they could prove, not only to themselves, but to
the world, that Christians would not submit or surrender to the
imperial divine attributes of Caesar. So that when someone
says, Jesus Christ is Lord, meant to deny the authority of Rome,
to deny the legions of Rome, to deny the Caesar of Rome, and
it meant to be unfaithful to Rome. which you were a traitor,
and you died. When you were a traitor, not
only did you die, but your entire family died, and your property
was subject to confiscation, and everything you owned then,
if it lived, became property of Rome, and if it was a human
being, became a slave, if they allowed it to live. Now imagine
a family of six or seven, and a couple of cousins and brothers
and sisters all living together and coming to the knowledge of
Christ. And so you could very well say there could be 30, 40
people standing in a particular village. And here come the legions
of the Roman Emperor. And they walk into the city and
they call everyone out to declare Caesar as Lord. And the Christians
stand there shuddering, holding their infants to their breasts,
cowering with their children, two and three years old, behind
them. And they say, you say that Caesar is Lord. They do not.
They say Jesus Christ is Lord. And yet they take them by the
hand and they destroy their family one by one. They kill their children
in front of them and they put them in jail. These are the circumstances
that the first church dealt with every day. A reminder as we closed
out our time in 1 Thessalonians this past Sunday with 30 sermons,
not 40. I was looking for those other
10 frantically. Do you know what I said that Sunday morning? I
said, 40 weeks ago. And so when I got to putting
all the videos, I'm like, man, I'm missing 10 videos. Anyway,
30 weeks. That's the type of persecution
that was happening. And for John to write this stuff,
being a faithful Christian meant to be unfaithful to Rome, and
so they needed encouragement. What's some of the background
there? The character of the letter. So there's a historical background,
an occasion, something to think about as we contemplate what
it must have been like to receive this letter, what must have been
going on in the minds of these people, what it must have been
on their conversations around dinner. It wasn't, hey, honey,
how you doing? How's your ballgame? How's your math? Hey, let me
see what you're knitting over there. I mean, it wasn't anything
like that. It was probably dedicated prayer and dedicated study to
the apostles' teaching, much like it was in the first church
in Acts chapter 2 in Jerusalem. And so when they got through,
there was probably a contingency plan. I know if most men have
a contingency plan, if we hear the herald of the legions, this
is what we're going to do. We're going to stuff the babies
in here, we're going to hide the kids in here, we're going to go out,
let them chop my head off, and y'all sneak out the back door. But
it wasn't that easy. I mean, consider it. What would
happen as they every day constantly waited, fearful, what would happen
to our lives, to our family? What is going to become of us?
Jesus was raised to life. We saw Him. We've seen power.
We know that we are the children of God, for the Spirit of God
testifies to our spirit that we are His children. And if children
heirs, but what's happening now? Who will give us hope? Where
are the apostles? They're all dead. John's the
only one left. He's locked up. And the letter
shows up. That's hope, y'all. That chills
me. We take advantage of the, we
take for granted the idea that letters and communication, I
mean, heck, if we're not careful, we're communicating without knowing
it. We're walking by a store and we check in. Our FaceTime
could be on and we could be broadcasting this message all over on Periscope
or something like that. People could be watching, millions
of people could watch it at one time all over the place. Communication
we take for granted. There was no way of communicating
there except somebody had to, under the fear of death, get
these letters copied and copied and sent out by messenger. And
you think Rome was hating Christians? You know what they hated more?
Christian messengers. People who would hold these letters
dear to their breast and run into city and run into harm's
way, hiding, writing by night, trying to get this truth. So
when this letter showed up to these people, there was hope.
For the Word of God came to them, and they then understood very
clearly what was being taught. It says so in the introduction
of that, who hear and heed and keep what is written, for the
time is near. Blessed are those who hear. Blessed
are those who understand. Blessed are those who keep. And
so what was it about this letter then that has made it so blindly
difficult for us now? How is it that they understood
it? Because they understood the genre. They understood what type
of writing it was. And they saw it, and they were
able to embrace it, and they were able to understand it. Haiku. Do you know what a haiku is?
Haiku is a Chinese poem, and it can have 5, 7, 5, 5, 5, 5,
3, 7, 3. It can have all sorts of different types of phrasing,
and meter, and syllables. I've seen haikus that are really
long, But ultimately their numerical construction and their meaning
go hand in hand. A haiku can't just be made up
on the spot. It has to be tongue-in-cheek. It has to be equipped in such
a way that every syllable fits in the pattern of that particular
style and every word is something you hang on. I remember taking
literature in the undergrad years and I was just amazed by that
stuff. I thought I'd take a stab at
it. They have a little booklet of haikus that are awful, they're
awful, they're stupid. One day the things will show
up and they're like, James is such a dummy, but it doesn't
matter. It was fun. Other types of poetry, imagery,
allegory, metaphors, things of that nature. We understand when
we read a poem. We understand what simile is
when we see the words like and as. The stars were like a fire
in the heavens, burning, blinding. Soaring. Oh wow, that's neat. We don't think that stars are
just soaring around like big balls of fire or shooting flames
in people's eyes and blinding them. We don't think that, but
we understand. When we see something that says
that it was like a sea of glass or a crystal sea, it wasn't a
body of water filled with crystal. It was like that in appearance. It was like a beast coming out
of the sea with seven heads, and on those seven heads, seven
crowns, and on one of those heads, a harlot. You see this? This is the imagery of certain
parts of the writing of this letter. And I've never met anybody
who's ever taught me, even the drunk people that I know, they've
never said, That devil's coming out of the ocean, seven heads
with a woman riding his back. I knew women were trouble. I
mean, you know, you knew they were going... Nobody's ever literally
taken that as an established, explicit revelation of the devil. Nobody. I've never heard it.
But yet we are confused by that which is in the same paragraph
that has the same type of writing, the same type of language, but
because we can imagine one part but not the other, we take what
we like and we leave the rest behind. After this class is over,
we'll learn how to read this stuff in a way of actually understanding
it collectively. So what type of writing then
is Revelation? The name says it. revealed things. The word for that in the Greek,
if you take your Greek New Testament, no matter what version it is,
whether it's the satanic Alexandrian text, that's a joke, or the Byzantine
text, or whatever, whatever version that you think you want to do
if you wanted to read the Greek, you would see apocalypse there.
What's the translation in English? Revelation. But see, we think
even the word apocalypse means something horrible. Oh, it's
the apocalypse! What are we learning? What are
we about to understand? That's what it means! But because
of how people have butchered the reading of Revelation for
so long, for so many generations, we even think the word apocalypse,
you go to the definition, you go online and look it up, it'll
say a catastrophic world event bringing out the end of the world.
No, it means to show you something that you'll understand, comprehend,
embrace, and enjoy. There it is. So, revelation by
name is a revelation. It's an understanding and a revealing
of something that needed to be done, that needed to be employed
for these people to have joy. Apocalyptic literature is different
than prophecy. And let me give you the understanding
in this. Apocalyptic literature contains several distinct features.
And one of them is that it's universal. Apocalyptic is universal. You've got Revelation, which
is a lot different than Ezra. You got Revelation that's a lot
different than Daniel. Though I believe there are some similarities,
but there are more differences and stark contrasts with Daniel
and Revelation. And you know what? You take a
class in seminary, you can't take one or the other. You take
a class together. It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Daniel,
Revelation. Daniel, Revelation. Daniel, Revelation. I want cheese
grits and dog food. I mean, come on, guys. It's not
that bad off. What is happening here? What
is this apocalyptic thing? It's a universal, not specific.
Prophecy specifically deals with, you tell these people, Isaiah,
this. And then you tell them, these
people are going to come over here, I, God speaking, am going to
bring the Babylonians in as my rod of correction. That's prophecy. Apocalyptic writing is not prophetic,
though it has some prophecy in it. It's not prophecy because
it's universal. It's not directed. You don't
see names and dates and people. You don't see specific details
of specific countries. You see universal language so
that everybody understands. You might say, well, he's talking
about Babylon. Folks, Babylon ain't coming back. What is Babylon? Anybody who's not the kingdom
of Christ. So that's the universality of apocalyptic language. What's
Babylon? Anybody who's not in Christ.
There's only one nation being judged forever and the smoke
of their torment goes up forever and ever and ever. That's what
it says in the latter verses of chapter 15 or 18 or somewhere
around there. So what does that mean? Babylon
is the only nation going to be judged? No. All nations will
be judged. All governments are Babylon.
All people are Babylon except those who are the bride of Christ.
That's the universality of it. Apocalyptic literature is universal.
It also is very dualistic. What's that mean? Well, think
about this. It's cosmic, it's chronological,
it's ethical. Apocalyptic writing understands
history as sort of like a stage. It's sort of like a fight between
good and evil. Here's this good side, here's
this bad side, and in Revelation we see seven recapitulations
of the bad and the good fighting it out. We see the fall of Satan
in eternity past. We see the birth of Jesus to
come against the hordes of wickedness. We see the death of Jesus where
the devil fights back and kills Him. We see the resurrection
of Jesus where God's the victor once again. We see the ascension
of Jesus. Now we see the devil causing
all kind of havoc. We see the world falling apart.
We see the broad way that everybody's receiving. And all of a sudden
we see like a Bark in the sky, man. Instantaneous version of
what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians chapter 3 and 4. We see that
in the twinkling of an eye, God comes back. Christ comes back.
And He's not coming back as a mealy lamb. He's going to look like
the lamb that has been slain and raised to life. And He's
got tattoos on His legs and tattoos on His arms. That stuff under
His eyeballs. You know, all kind of stuff.
and he's not carrying a shawl and a water bucket, he's carrying
a sword. And it comes out of his mouth
with fire. And the fiery sword out of his
mouth is his Word, the Word of the living God. And with the
sword of his mouth, he clears the world of wickedness. He brings
destruction on all nations, all governments, everything that
is not under his rule and under his protection by his grace. dies. Boom! This is the Jesus
of Revelation. That's another note. I got a
state of the task. So this dualistic mindset, this
bad versus good is played out here. This is what's played out
in the book of Revelation, in this letter here. Those who serve
God, and the number that they have, and the sign that they
have, and the name that they have, a man is known by what
he does. A man is known by his father.
A man is known by his hands. His hands are identified by the
fact of what he does. So, the mark of the beast is
the hand of the man who works for the devil. Jesus told the
Pharisees that. He said, Abraham. He said, if Abraham had been
your father, you would believe in Me, because before Abraham
was, I am. Abraham is not your father, the
devil is your father. Jesus in that same sense, in
a literal way, said what He told John in a figurative way, or
in a metaphorical way, the name of the Antichrist is on your
forehead. You bear His number. You bear the number of wickedness
because of the way you think. You bear His name and your number
and the mark of His beast on your hands because you do that
which is wicked. Well, you can't buy or sell or
trade if you don't have the mark of the beast. Exactly. Bankruptcy
is the outcome of that Christian couple who refused to bake a
cake for a homosexual couple. They're gone. They lost their
house. They lost their business. They
lost everything because they said, we don't feel comfortable
baking a cake for your wedding because we're Christians and
we don't agree with your way of life. And they took them to
federal court and they won! The mark of the beast? Yeah,
we'll just cater to whatever the world wants. The mark of
the Lord? I will lose it all for the sake
of glory. Dualism. distinct feature of
apocalyptic literature is eschatological preoccupations. What's that mean?
Eschatos means final things. Ological is the study of those,
so eschatological is the study of last days. End times. Next week we're going to talk
just about end times, and the next week we're going to look
at the four primary views of end times. And you're going to
realize that your pastor doesn't fit in any of them after we get
through this class. I don't know what I am. I haven't
found out what the label is, but when I get it, I'm going
to tattoo it right there on my chin. So are you a pre-ah-mill-ah-day-brr-brr-brr? I'm this. Pronounce it. There's a preoccupation here
in the writing of Revelation with last things. Why? Because
these people were in their last days. You understand? There's a man that passed away
just recently who found out he had cancer three or four months
ago, Keith. He was buried today. He was in his fifties. He was
fine and felt fine six months ago and went to the doctor for
some reason, I guess. Oh, you've got cancer, stage
four, you're dead, died. Thirteen, fourteen weeks later.
And what do you do? This man, when he found that
out, was in his last days. So everything. And I was thinking
about that earlier. Another friend of mine who's
a brother in the Lord that works at the car dealership here, Rob
Barber, he told me a month and a half
ago in my ear over at the restaurant, he said, would you please pray
for me? I said, what's going on? He says, I don't know. The
doctors don't know what's going on, but I've been feeling sick in my stomach
and I don't know. And I'm scared, brother. I'm scared. And they've
told him he's got four or five months to live. in his forties. My brother's thinking about last
things. I thought to myself, if the doctor told me tomorrow
that I've got a few months to live, I'm going to be thinking
about last things. We're going to live differently.
We're going to think differently. We're going to act differently. What if I had a month to live,
what would the last month of my life look like? It would be
one heck of a ride, I can tell you that. Because there'll be
a lot of people who don't want to hear what I have to say. They're
going to hear it. And when I think about that,
I think, well, why wait? Because the Bible says, leave
at peace, as long as it is up to you. If I'm going to tear it
all up and die, y'all can deal with it. No, I'm playing. But
this eschatological preoccupations, apocalyptic writing is interested
in final things, a study of the last days. And part of this preoccupation
with last things is because they know that God is in control of
history. God is in control. He's sovereign. Remember, sovereignty
is an exercise of a supremacy. God is supreme. All history sits
with Him, rests with Him, comes from Him. He's the King over
it all. And so, as a Christian, last things are like, yes! Last
days are like, yes! I'm going to die, mourn as though
I have hope, and then get over it and move on. I can't wait
to live as Christ that dies far better. Another specific or distinct
feature of apocalyptic literature is that there are visions accompanied
the writing. The idea of visions is the action
of something being revealed. Now keep in mind that John's
visions were not like most visions of other world religions. Be
very careful not to think when you hear that Mohammed had visions,
that he had visions like John had. Or if you think that Joseph
Smith had visions, that he had visions like John had. This is
not the same. John was carried in the Spirit. with his full consciousness,
his full faculties, aware of all things, being shown these
things in the metaphysical past and future, so that he would
write them down. So God revealed these things
to him through vision, specifically, articulately, explicitly, and
John in his wording, John in his language, John in his vernacular
wrote them down. The difference is, most places,
like, most people like, Muhammad, wow, that ain't good. Most people
like Muhammad would go into a, what you call it, trance, don't put it back up
there, that thing broke, an epileptic seizure, and would wake up and
his wife had written it down. Joseph Smith would have this
vision, this idea that something was going on, and he said he
met with Jesus, and he saw Him, and he did this, and he did that,
and everything else sort of came together, and Jesus told him
where to go dig up these plates, and he went and found these plates
that nobody had ever seen, and he went and found this, and he
went and found that, and one thing led to another. And there
we have Mormonism. John was not taken up in such
a way that he wasn't aware of what was happening. He wasn't
spoken to by God in a way through a vision that was out of place
for the history of Christianity. The history of even the revelation
of God through the Old Testament. It was perfectly done in the
context of God's character. But apocalyptic writing talks
about visions. These activities were made known
to the author. Materials by means of visions,
sometimes they were very bizarre and sometimes they were very
eccentric, like the beast and the harlot and all of these things. It doesn't really make sense.
But what we don't want to do is to take these things and start
to use them as symbols. I'm going to sound contradictory
in a minute, but what we don't want to do is we don't want to
look and say, oh man, that vision down there in the Old Testament
by that, you know, that old fellow, he was seeing Apache helicopters.
No, he wasn't. Maybe, you know, he was looking,
he saw Adolf Hitler. That's what he saw. No, he didn't. Was Adolf Hitler Antichrist?
Absolutely. Mussolini? Absolutely. probably many of
the US presidents that we've had. What is the Antichrist? John says anyone who does not
believe is Antichrist. Many are coming into the world. What was gonna be the final one?
There's a bunch of them. If Christ were to come back right
now, just by raw statistic of the data that's been done in
the United States, less than two and a half percent of this
country even professes to be Christian. So everybody who's
not a believer in those codes, and that number is anti-Christ. So we don't look at some of these
visions and try to figure out what the symbol means, what the
code means. And sadly, there's no hidden
mathematical formula, sorry, Trey, in the writing of Scripture
between the lines and on the margins so we can get the Da
Vinci code out of there and figure it all out. As a matter of fact,
the Bible teaches that if anyone says that they know the day,
they're a liar. They're a false prophet. In the
days of the prophets, they should have been stoned. Today we ought
to stone them, but we can't. We don't stone. That's not what
the New Testament brought to us. That's not what the Gospel
brought to us. We're to pray for them. We're to pray that
God would save them. We're to pray, and thankfully
we can't be stoned because there's been many times I should have
been. And so I'm thankful for the grace of God. Two more things. Though we don't look at Revelation
and visions and try to make symbols out of them, there are use of
symbols. And as a matter of fact, most
of these symbols are found in some very obscure language that
is deliberately written, very Jewish in its context, sometimes
veiling the author's message, but the readers Understand it. Let me give you
a few examples so you can understand what I'm saying. Beasts represent
people in Scripture. Beasts. What kind of people? Bad people. I mean, we say, oh,
he's a beast. No, a beast is only good when
you're on the football field or in the gym. Oh, he's a beast.
I mean, you know, or MMA. And then you're both beasts.
Who's bad? It don't matter. Huh? Laying floor. Beast! My knees are torn up. Anyway,
why do you have to remind me of that? Now they're hurting.
Ah, laying floor. So, in that, there are some representations
and symbols in that regard. Humans are represented as astrological
symbols and signs. What? Right to the seven what? churches to the seven stars of
the seven churches of the seven lampstands. He didn't say churches. Seven stars of the seven lampstands. Now has Jesus lost His mind?
Has Jesus gone up and decided He's going to write to some stars
hanging out in a candelabra shop? No. So there is some symbolism
there. What's the symbolism of a star?
Well, as you'll see, it means It means, these kids are crazy,
it means a pastor. What's the lamp stand? The church. The other thing that we see in
symbolism and codes is there are numbers. There are certain
concepts and numbers. The number seven, as I've already
mentioned, a number of completion and finality, a number of perfection.
The number twelve represents God's people, always represents
God's people. The number six as a number of
incompletion or a number of sin, the number of man. Any derivative
or product or sum of these numbers also work in the same way. Finally,
I want you to understand that apocalyptic literature contains
the distinct feature of pseudonyms. Pseudonyms. What's that mean?
That means a lot of times, apocalyptic writing is written in the name
of a famous prophet or a character in the past, but in the Bible
that's not the case. John wrote it. John distributed
it. And he actually tells people
in this writing, the servant John. But it is, keep in mind
too, The Bible's not the only place this type of literature
exists. You're like, wait a minute, what's that got to do with it?
Well, the Bible's not the only place. I've already talked about
the imperial cult of Rome, but let me deal with just a couple
of short things in closing as it relates to apocalyptic writing.
It'll help us. There's a few points. One, the
literature that we're dealing with is apocalyptic. And everybody within the Christendom
understood that until such a time when, and I'm going to use some
terms you might understand or not, dispensationalism came about,
Zionism came about, and all this other isms came about because
they're profitable. They're profitable financially,
they're profitable glory-wise, they glorify the person. I mean,
if I'm able to get up here and tell you all sorts of scary things
that I understand that you can't, You'll glory me. You'll honor
me. You'll esteem me. I'll receive
glory from you as somebody who is a little bit better than everybody
else. And these types of people, I mean, imagine. You ever heard
of a prophecy conference? First one I ever went to was
at Eastside Baptist Church in the 90's. It was a prophecy conference
and they had this man come in and he lived in a four million
dollar Winnebago and I don't know if it was that much, but
it was a lot of money. It was like three bedrooms in that thing.
12 wheels on it. And he came up there and he had
like a table full of books about when Israel was going to do and
when the last days were going to come and all this kind of
stuff. And he got up and for five nights he preached on Revelation,
he preached on the beast, he preached on the Antichrist, he
preached on the Great Tribulation, three and a half years. If you're
not saved by then, all hell's going to break loose and you're
going to suffer for three and a half years. They're going to
cut your eyes out, feed them to your animals, I mean all sorts
of stuff. And when he's saying, who wants to suffer that? Nobody
raised their hand. If you don't want to suffer that,
you better come on down. The price is right. And I mean,
oh boy, they got him in there. Everybody got saved because they
were scared to death. Well, guess what? Salvation is
not fear. Paul experienced a tribulation
when his head was cut from his body. And he received the crown of
life. It's what he'd been wanting anyway. He was not sweating it. John the Baptist, they brought
his head out on a pillow and paraded around the throne room.
And they mocked him and laughed at him. He wasn't scared to die. Salvation
doesn't come through fear. C.S. Lewis says to understand
Revelation, stage it as a play. Stage it as a play. Look at it
unfold and see it in your own day. It's been quoted to say, apocalyptic
thought is the mother of all theology. Some people hold that
Christianity grew out of an apocalyptic mindset, specifically a Semitic
mindset. The Bible contains primarily
two representatives of apocalyptic literature. Daniel, as I've already
talked about, and Revelation, and portions of the books of
Ezekiel, Zechariah, all of the Gospels, Jude, 2 Peter, Thessalonians. I mean, we could go on. There's
portions of apocalyptic genre in the midst of some of these
other things. It's like having a country song
and then there's a rap in the middle. You ever seen that? You
know, or like back in the day when Marvin Gaye, he'd be singing
and he'd have the monologue. Yeah, baby. I mean, you know,
stuff like that. I mean, it doesn't fit. Why we
got a monologue in here? This is a song. I don't know
why there's apocalyptic stuff stuck in something, but it's
there. Outside the Bible, there's apocalyptic
literature in almost every culture. There's apocalyptic literature
found all over the place. There's even apocryphal, what's
that mean? Non-apostolic writing related
to or about Christianity that's not scripture that we see apocalyptic
writing in. For example, the four books of
Enoch. Did you know there were four? Interesting. Anyway, the Testaments
of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Assumption, or what some people
know as the Testament of Moses, where we see the idea of maybe
the Archangel Gabriel fought with Lucifer over the body of
Moses. The two books of Ezra. Esdras,
some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have different, because the Dead
Sea Scrolls didn't just contain the Bible. It contained a lot
of writings of antiquity. We see some apocalyptic writing
there. And so, with all of that, we need to recognize that just
because it's something that took place, it's something that we
see, it's something that we can hold and we can use. Friends,
it's not written like this anymore. Nobody writes in this genre anymore. Mainly because nobody's getting
anything. There's nothing to be gotten. When it comes from
Christianity, when it comes from God, there's nothing more to
get. It's all here. It's it. The very close of John's
Apocalypse says anybody who adds or takes away to the writing
of this book, all the plagues contained therein will become
upon them. You die the second death. And you'll understand
what that means as we get further into it. The source of apocalyptic
writing is really unknown. We don't know who started it.
There's not an author, what do you call it, there's not a group
of individuals who band together and create this little writer's
guild of apocalyptic writing. We don't know. People can argue
and say they do, these PhDs in literature, oh yes, it started
here, it started here, and then they try to put Christianity
in that mold. They just wanted to follow suit. Well, that's
not what we see in the Word of God. It may come from prophecy,
it may come from wisdom literature, it may come from other places.
Believe it or not, Jewish people are highly superstitious. I mean,
if you start reading the Mishnah and you start reading some of
the other writings of Judaism, I mean, they think work to this
very day, Orthodox Jews, man, everything, there's a whole,
let me just put it this way, there is an entire subset of
the economy that caters to Orthodox Judaism today. laptops that start
themselves, laptops that work through voice recognition, that
work your HVAC and your lights. You know why? Because it's a
sin to push a light switch for Jews. It's a sin to light their
stove, but if they can do it automatically, they can cook. I mean, you know, Friday morning
they put everything on the stove and get it all ready, I guess,
clapper. There's a lot of things like
that that we need to be careful of. We think it's absurd in our
culture, but friends, I would suggest to us that what most
of us believe about in times is nothing but superstition.
It's nothing but superstition that does not give any hope to
anybody. Now, people would say, well, you mean you're going to
dismiss All of the history of scholars. What history? What history? When did this start
becoming scholarly? When did it even get on the scene?
Late 1800s. Nobody had ever heard of dispensationalism. Nobody had ever heard of a three
and a half year tribulation. Nobody had ever heard of a rapture.
Nobody ever used the word. Nobody ever talked about it.
Nobody ever done any of it. All the things that you and I
grew up thinking about when it came to Revelation, nobody had
ever heard of them until some men got together and thought
of it and decided it sounded right. We've been wondering what
that meant our whole lives. That's pretty good. I like that.
And now there are over 14 different views on the Millennium. There are nine basic views that
I can think of off the top of my head concerning the second
coming of Christ. And a lot of people would suppose,
this is the last thing I'm going to show you, a lot of people
suppose, well, the rapture comes and the church is taken out of
the harm's way, better be saved before then. You're going to
be whipped on for three and a half years. When you get to heaven,
man, you're really going to earn it. He's just going to come back,
take his church, and he's going to come back again. So it's the
third coming of Christ. And then we've got to wait around
for a thousand years before we get rid of all the bad folks.
I've been alive, I've been my 43rd year of life, I couldn't
stomach another 957 years. Please, for the love of all things
holy, don't put me through that. I don't want that. If it were there, I'd be okay
with it. But the Bible has taught me that
my hope is in Christ and the resurrection, and when He comes
back, it's over. And so all this other stuff that
I was taught, it fights against that hope. I don't want to sit
in a box somewhere in the darkness waiting on Jesus to return either
if I die tonight. I want to see His face. And though
I may not have a body, I one day will. And how do we know
anyway? We don't. We don't know what
we'll be like in heaven, but we'll be ultimately satisfied
with whatever it is. And so for that, we're prepared. Next week, I really encourage
you to read through the letter, the whole thing, before next
Tuesday. And I will, by the Lord's grace,
and if Amazon ever gets in stock that printer toner will have
printed outlines of just what the weeks are going to entail.
I also have a bibliography of things that will be good for
you to read, and for those of you who'd like to take this thing
as a credited class for Grace Seminary, then you can follow
the instructions and do the required reading and writing. And if you
can't write, then you can record it. Whatever you want to do,
we'll work with you on that. But we will outline the text
next week, and then we will start tearing it apart, and we'll start
looking at the major themes. And it's going to be hard for
me, and some days I might waste an entire ten minutes, because
I get a little preachy on some of this stuff, because it's just
difficult not to. But I ask you to pray for me in two ways. One is I'd have the stamina to
stay with the meat and potatoes of this because it gets laborious
to work through this stuff and then to feed it to you when I'd
rather be preaching. Okay? So it's tiresome for me. It's like, oh, I have to fight
against it. Secondly, pray that I stay humble. Remember I shared
the story last week. And you think, well, I'm past
all that by the Lord's grace. But friends, when I say stay
humble, I'm talking about that one or two second jab that I
like to throw in every now and then. That's not humility. It's
not humility. And in this very room, I have
hurt the feelings of two people in the last three years because
of those little two second jabs that I've sort of made nonchalant
things that were very important to people. And in doing so, it
took me months to fix it. I'd rather not take seconds to
tear something that takes months to fix. It's like when you get
mad, if you chuck your cell phone out the window, you go, ah, now
I gotta go get another one. But you walk around with that
shattered thing all day, or it gets chopped up in the lawnmower
because you're trying to listen to your tunes while you're cutting
the grass. Just be smart. So I ask you prayers for that,
that I would not say or interject things that may be polarizing
or insignificant, because it's not important. You getting a
chuckle because you agree with me might really hurt somebody
else. You see what I'm saying? So pray for me that way as we
study this, because it is something that I do suffer with. I no longer
use the word moron, idiot, stupid. I don't use those words anymore,
but when I taught this thing 11 years ago, three of the videos
were not even worth using, and the guy that was doing my audio
just stopped. He said, because every time,
you'd be right in the middle of some of the most important things I've
ever heard in my life, and then you'd say something, and you'd
say, what idiot would believe that? I mean, you know? And it
was so, stop saying that! Because I was an idiot that used
to believe that, and I'm still an idiot. How many of this stuff,
how much of this stuff we're gonna learn over the next 14
weeks is 100% accurate? Don't know. I pray that it is.
That's why I want to teach you guys how to read it with the
right eyes, rather than just tell you what I think it means.
Because if we all read it, we probably get a little bit difference.
We might think differently on certain things, but ultimately
by the Spirit of God and using the Scripture to interpret itself,
we'll come to the same conclusion. Maybe not the same details, but
we'll come to the same conclusion. And the ultimate question in
closing is this, I've said in closing four times now, is what difference
does it make? All the difference in the world,
we do what we do tonight so that we may become more intimate worshipers
in spirit and in truth, and that our body may be intimate more
and more and more around the Word of God, and that we may
also have a reason for the hope that we have in Christ Jesus,
as we see in Peter. See, that was the thing. Always
be prepared to give a reason for the hope that you have in
Christ. Because He is the Holy One. He
is the victor. He is the one. The point there
is not going out and being an evangelist and an apologist.
The point is, as these Jews were dying in Peter's day, and people
were going, why are you not distraught? Because Christ is the Holy One
of God. So let's pray. We thank You,
Father, for Your grace and Your mercy and Your kindness in us
and to us and through us. We pray that as we continue to
study these things, Lord, that we would be overwhelmed with
Your glory and overwhelmed with Your majesty. Lord, that we would
become more like Christ every moment, that we would be excited
about this time every Tuesday, that we would take it home, that
we would take it to work, to our beds, that we would take
it everywhere we go and begin to have more of a passion for
Your Word, a zeal to share this exciting stuff with others accurately,
effectively, spiritually. So Lord, I thank You, Lord, for
the grace, for the hope, for the power that we do not have
to fear anything, no matter how hard it looks. November 8th,
we have no fear. November 9th, we have no fear.
Today, we have no fear. We have no fear. No matter what
takes power, or what takes control, or what ISIS does, or what Russia
does, or what our neighbors do, we are not in fear. Though we
may doubt, though we may cower, we ultimately will stand victorious. So keep us in that hope. Hold
us close through the power of Your Word, in Your Spirit, and
through the powerful work of Jesus Christ. In His name, amen.