Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Back to the Bible. Let it be our plea. God's Word alone, our authority, every word, every step in the name of Christ. Back to the Bible for the way of life. Welcome to this period of Bible study. We are so thankful for this occasion that we can spend just a few minutes in a consideration of God's Word. Today we're going to begin a new series of lessons in the Book of Revelation. And so if you have a Bible close at hand, I think it would be a benefit to you for you to have that open and ready to look at the text with us as we go. But hopefully we will be able to have some of the passages on the screen. If you're watching this on video and if you're listening on the radio or on the podcast, we will try to read the passages clearly and to make the very best sense of them that we can. We are calling this program Back to the Bible. And that's because it is our interest, our ultimate interest is to be faithful to God by listening to His Word. We believe that the only way that we can please God and know that we're doing so is to rely on what he has revealed to us in His Word. And so we've made it our commitment to go back to the Bible. I want to study the Book of Revelation because it is a book that is filled with lessons that Christians, followers of Jesus need. And it is a book that sometimes is a little bit scary to approach because it is written in a very, very different way than other books of the New Testament are written. And I think very often it is misunderstood because that different way it is written has called for or has brought about or has produced ways of reading that I think have misconstrued and misunderstood what the Scriptures are saying. And so I want to spend some time in the Book of Revelation because I think that not only can it be understood, but it should be understood by those who are committed to following Jesus. And so, of course, there will be challenges along the way, but we want to make the best sense we can out of the text and hopefully find the benefit that it is for us. If you have questions about something we say, about a point we make, about something that we draw out from the text that either you're not sure about or you're pretty sure that's not the way we should have understood that, then we would be happy to hear from you, and we want you to reach out to us. The best way to reach us would be through backtothebiblepodcast.com backtothebiblepodcast.Com and there you can find information about the program, other resources, previous episodes, and you can reach out to us with your questions and comments. So we invite you to reach out to us, whether it's questions about this or about other studies that we have. And we hope that we can provide good, faithful biblical answers. Our goal is to be faithful to God's Word and to be clear as we are explaining it. And if you see faults in either one of those things, we want you to reach out to us so that we can be more faithful and more clear as we try to teach God's word. So now let's turn our attention to the Book of Revelation. First, let me explain that there is an outline to the book that we're going to use to help us to structure our study. And if you're watching on video, you'll be able to see this put up on the screen. If not, just think along with me through the chapters of the book. Chapter one is an introduction to the book. First we have the John as he's writing, we have him make his greetings, and then we have an introduction to Jesus. Then in chapters two and three, we have letters to the seven churches of Asia. Now let me make this point, and we'll come back to this, that John in verse four of chapter one says he is writing to the seven churches of Asia. So I know that we would focus on chapters two and three and say that that's what's to the churches, but really the whole book is to the churches of Asia. And so what we're going to see is specific things said to them in chapters two and three. But we're going to see more things said to them in the letter as a whole. Then beginning in chapters four and five, we have a throne room scene. And that sets up what we're going to see develop in the book. First, we're going to begin with seven seals broken off of a scroll. And as the scroll is opened up, that is going to unfold into seven trumpets sounding. And as those seven trumpets sound, that's going to unfold into seven bowls, bowls of wrath, the that are going to be poured out. And so we've got seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. And we'll have to talk about all of that as we go along. And then in the interlude between the sixth and the seventh trumpet, there is going to be this description of those who are allied with Jesus the Lamb and those who are allied with Satan the beast or the dragon, or however he is described. And then we will have those bowls of wrath in chapters 15 and 16. And then we're going to have the description of the defeat of the enemies of God and the ultimate victory of God's people in chapters 21 and 22. Now, just for our study's sake, let me say that there are disagreements even among good Bible students, and people on either side of that may disagree with that description of them. But good Bible students who disagree on the writing time of the Book of Revelation, the most popular division there is an early date, which would have it sometime just before the year 70, and then a later date which would have it around about the year 96. Now, that doesn't just change the date, but it also changes the focus of the book. There is a spectrum of different ideas about that. There are some who suggest maybe written just after the year 70, but a lot of the folks who focus on it being a pre 70 book would talk about its focus on the Jewish nation. And people who would focus on it being a later book would focus on the Roman Empire, the Roman nation. So that is a challenge that good brethren disagree on. I am not a strong proponent, but I probably lean slightly towards an earlier date. But what I want to do as we read the Book of Revelation is I want to see something behind that. That is, I do not believe that it really matters whether or not we have an early or a late book to understand the point of the Book of Revelation. Now, it will matter for understanding certain images in their specific way in which they're being applied. But I don't think we will miss the principle behind the symbol and the application, regardless of the conclusion we draw. Because what I think is happening in the Book of Revelation is that we are being told about things that go on behind the scenes in the supernatural world that give explanation to what we can see with our own eyes. And I think that's an important place to start, is that the Book of Revelation is called the Book of Revelation because of the first words, the revelation of Jesus Christ. That word revelation is our word that translates the word apocalypse. Now, if I was to ask someone what they were going to think about when I said the word apocalypse, I think they would think of the end of the world. If something is apocalyptic or this is the apocalypse, I think people would think of this as some kind of massive destruction that is coming. And I think that's how some people have interpreted the Book of Revelation with regards to the end times or something like that. But the word apocalypse, the word is translated rightly as revelation. And I Think the sense of it really is kind of a pulling back of the curtain, that we get to see what's going on behind the scenes. Now, we will say more about this as we go, but I think what is happening in the Book of Revelation is that John is writing to these seven churches and he is giving them a message that will help them understand what they are seeing and what they are facing by showing them what's actually happening on the other side, what's actually happening in the spiritual realm, what's happening in the realm where all of these things are coming from. They see a kingdom rising and persecution, and they see the worldliness around them. They hear the false teachings. And what Revelation is doing, is it showing what's going on in this cosmic battle? And that's going to have important considerations for those local congregations. And we'll talk about that more as we go. Now, what I want you to see is that in the Book of Revelation there are challenging, difficult passages that on their own, would be very hard to make sense of, because the imagery that is used is at least in some way used in order to communicate a principle or an idea that I don't think you would get easily if you don't know what's happening in it. And I want to explain why I think that's happening. One thing that I want us to be able to do is to allow clearer passages to. To help us interpret more difficult passages. What that means is, is that as we read through our Old and New Testaments, we have some very clear teaching about who Jesus is. We have clear teaching about the establishment of his kingdom. We have clear teaching about His Second Coming. And what the Book of Revelation does is it adds depth to that, but it doesn't contradict that. So don't understand what I'm saying as well. We don't really need the Book of Revelation because we already have everything we need to know. No, we need the Book of Revelation because it's God's will revealed to us in a meaningful and unique way. But just because we need the Book of Revelation to add does not mean that what's going to happen in the Book of Revelation is going to alter, or maybe we should say contradict, what we understand from other passages of Scripture. I hope that makes sense. So what we want to do is we want to say, what do we know coming into the Book of Revelation about Christ, about Jesus? What do we know about his kingdom? What do we know about His Second Coming? What do we know about all of these things that will help us as we go. Now. The second thing is I want us to make sure that we are keeping passages in their context. That is important for understanding every verse in the whole Bible. You know, it is very easy to take passages out of context and misunderstand them and certainly to misapply them. And I think what happens sometimes in a book with symbols and imagery like in the Book of Revelation, people feel like they have the freedom to use those passages to justify or defend their position without considering in what context the verse is being used. So that'll be important as we go. We need to remember that, that this book was written to specific people. And again, we'll say more about this as we continue in our study. But I want you to notice that in John chapter four, John says to the seven churches that are in Asia, that is, there is some message that was given for them. I don't want to overstate this, but I want to state it in a reasonable way that there is a real sense in which the letters of the New Testament were not written to us, even though they absolutely were written for us. The book of Revelation was not written directly to us, but it was absolutely written for us. Now why does that matter? It matters because we have to be able to interpret the Book of Revelation in, in a way that would have made sense to the church at Ephesus and Laodicea and Smyrna and the other congregations there. If what we are reading in the Book of Revelation would not make sense to a first century disciple of Jesus in a meaningful and real way, then we have misunderstood the Book of Revelation because it was not written to a person living in the United States in 2026. It was written to the Ephesians and to the Smyrna's and to the Thyatiraans and to others. But we absolutely can make application because it is God's revealed will. And so while we need to understand it on their terms, we also need to be ready to make application for ourselves. I want to use an illustration from a normal, if I can call it that letter, the Book of First Corinthians. In First Corinthians, chapter one, Paul says that there were divisions among them. Some were following Peter, some were following Apollos, some were following Paul, some were saying they were of Christ. And Paul sees all that division. Now what if we read the Book of Corinthians, the letter to the Corinthians, and we said, well, there must be somebody here in this church, there must be somebody on this street who is devoted to Apollos, somebody devoted to Peter. Now, we would say we really don't have the divisions between Peter and Apollos and Paul in the same way that they did in the church at Corinth. Right. But what would we do? We would certainly learn that divisions are a dangerous thing. And whether they're committed to Peter and Paul and Apollos, or to Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, whoever they're devoted to, we would say we need to watch out for divisions and we need to be devoted to Christ. You see that the same thing is true in the Book of Revelation. When we look at some of this imagery and we draw some modern connection, we got to be very careful, because if we are saying that what the Book of Revelation was talking about was some event that would occur in 21st century America, we have probably missed what the imagery was given to the people who were at the church at Sardis or whatever it may have been, and we have then missed the application that we were supposed to make to ourselves. So that is a major problem, and we will consider that as we go, but we must consider it carefully. Now, let me also say that we are absolutely dealing with symbolic language. There are some people who would say, well, you can't read the Book of Revelation rightly because you're not committed to taking it literally. I am committed to taking it truthfully, and I am committed to taking it completely. But everyone who reads the Book of Revelation understands that we are dealing with symbols. So some people will look at some of the images there and they'll say, well, that's talking about helicopters, or that's talking about this nation or. Or that's talking about that nation. And I would say, I don't think it's talking about. And they'll go, well, you're not reading the book literally. Well, neither are you. When you call a locust an Apache helicopter, you see that? That is still a figure of speech. But here's the truth. Something can be a figure of speech and still be true. It doesn't only have to be literal to convey a real truth. For example, if I was to say that the local high school quarterback had a rocket for an arm, I don't think you would come to the town I live in and expect to see the local high school quarterback with a rocket literally on his arm. I think that you would say, wow, that kid can really throw the ball. He has a lot of power in that arm. Do you see how I can make a true statement that is not literal? Here's the thing. As we read the Book of Revelation, we have to embrace that the Book of Revelation is symbolic. So I want you to notice this at the end of chapter one, and we're going to study this in more detail as we go. But he says in verse 20, as for the mystery of the seven stars which you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. Do you see what's happening there already? First chapter, we have this picture of stars and lampstands. And what does John tell us? What does Jesus tell John? That John writes down for us seven stars. Those are seven angels, seven lampstands. Those are seven churches. Now, when you see the image, and I want to do that, I want to picture these images as clearly as we can in our minds. But when we see these images, what did John see? Did he see seven churches and. No, he saw seven lampstands. But what were they? They were churches. When he saw. Did he see seven angels? No, he saw seven stars. But they were a symbol. They were a symbol for angels of the churches, messengers to them. So what I want you to see here is that the book is absolutely symbolic. It is not always what we might think of as literal. It is very often figurative and illustrative. And so what we need to do is make sure that we are using the very best interpretation possible to see what those symbols mean. I think that our main problem. Maybe there's several main problems, maybe there's lots of problems when it comes to our understanding of the Book of Revelation. But let me suggest that one of them is that we don't know our Old Testaments very well. And maybe that doesn't apply to you personally. But I would say, as in general, as interpreters of the Book of Revelation, we don't know our Old Testament very well. So we come to the four horsemen in the Book of Revelation and specifically in chapter six, and we say, well, these four horsemen, these four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and we say all kinds of things about them. And I don't think we take the time to appreciate very often that those four horsemen have already been in the Bible. They're in the Book of Zechariah, and we learn a lot about them from the Book of Zechariah. And so what happens is we use this as a symbol and we say, well, that must mean this and this and this and this. And it's like, well, don't you think we should take a second and know what Zacharias said about these horsemen? Before we draw those conclusions. Absolutely. So, yes, these are symbols, and yes, we're going to have to do some interpreting. But what if there was a code? What if there was a body of work that had already used lots of these images in order to help us understand them? That doesn't mean we'll get all the clarity that we might like to have, but it'll go a long way. And I'm afraid that what happens is very often those who want to make a lot out of the Book of Revelation that I don't believe is there, what has happened is they've gone to the Book of Revelation and they've not read Ezekiel, and they've not read Daniel, and they've not read Zechariah first. They've not read them as foundational books. Another problem that we have with the Book of Revelation, especially for those of us who maybe have been a little timid as we've approached it, is that we don't know the book well enough. And so what happens is we can't make connections easily and we can't see points that are being made because we don't know the book well enough. And what I mean by that is, if I was to mention a chariot in Acts chapter eight, I think if I just said the word chariot in the Book of Acts, I think there would be a number of people who. Who would already know who I'm thinking of, what the conversation was about. I think there would be a lot of people that I'm talking to who would say, oh, yeah, the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip and came and preached Jesus to him and baptized him, and we just know that so well. But that's not the way it works when it comes to the Book of Revelation. Because if I say something about a horseman or if I say something about a particular bowl being poured out, I. I'm limited. The person I'm talking to is limited in maybe knowing all the places and all the connections. And as a result, we just can't tie everything together. So we want to work at that and at least have a good understanding of these chapter contents. But here's another thing. I think our major problem with the Book of Revelation is that we fail to look for the main point. And what I mean by that is where a section might have a lot of imagery and symbolism and pictures and descriptions, we get caught up in all of the little minutia of it, and we miss what the point is that Jesus is communicating through John. So we focus and we decide that we know what some symbol is talking about. And we know that this number must refer to this person. And we fail to see the message that is being communicated. And because of that, we've missed the point of the book. Whether we have the symbol right or not. We've missed the point because we've missed what is supposed to be communicated. And I think what we need to be seeing here is that the point that is being communicated is an encouragement to faithfulness to those who are reading it. And if we're not seeing that and we're not seeing what it's calling us to, then we need to be careful about our continuing to read it in that way. So I would say those are several of the dangers that we let obscure passages and we let preachers use obscure passages to make points that not sure that they can prove on plain passages. We don't keep passages in their context. Somebody finds a symbol and says, oh, that's what that means. We don't remember that it was written to specific people in the first century. And we assume that what John was writing about was the conflict between America and Iran in our time. And we don't say, how in the world would that have applied to the Laodiceans? We don't remember that we're dealing with symbolic language. At least we don't remember that in a way where they this is conveying a spiritual truth and not necessarily pointing to some literal reality that we would be able to pinpoint as a particular machine or event or person. We don't root it in the Old Testament. We don't look for the main point. And very often we're not familiar enough with the book. And that's what we want to work on as we study it together for a few weeks. Now, when we come to Revelation 1, I think we get a lot of help in interpreting the book from the book itself. So if you look at Revelation 1 beginning at verse 1, the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants or slaves the things which must soon happen. And he indicated this by sending it through his angel to his slave John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the witness of Jesus Christ even to all that he saw. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things which are written in it for the time is near. So whose revelation is this? Well, it calls it the revelation of Jesus Christ. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean it's telling us about Jesus or that it's coming from Jesus? Yes, it is his revelation. We see him more clearly, and we hear from him directly. Now, it was given to John and it was written to the seven churches as we see at the beginning of verse four. So John is writing this. He's writing it down as he's seeing it revealed. So what I want to do as we read the book, I want to. In our mind's eye, I want to see what John saw as this revelation was being made known to him. And then as he writes down what he was seeing. But look at the end of verse three, what was it that. What was the time for the fulfillment of this? Look at chapter one, verse one. These things which must soon happen. Do you see that? Verse three, for the time is near. All the way over at the end of the book in chapter 22, as we're coming to a close in chapter 22 and verse 7, the text says, behold, I am coming quickly. Verse 10, do not seal up the words of the prophecy, for the time is near. Verse 12, I am coming quickly. Verse 20, he says, Yes, I am coming quickly. Evidently, the events of this book were not something that were going to be delayed a long time. Now, what you can do is you can look at Daniel, chapter eight. And in Daniel, chapter eight, he's told to seal this up because it's going to be a long time. It's going to be 400 years. But they're told not to seal this up because something is coming quickly, something is near. Now you notice also that this is communicated through what John is seeing, verse two. He is seeing this in verse 11. And then he'll write it down and. And he'll send it to those seven churches. Let me say here again, we see the churches mentioned in verse 4. We'll see them mentioned again in verse 11. We'll see them mentioned in chapter 2. And what we have in all of those places is that they are written to local churches that existed at the time. And that should affect our reading of the this letter. Last thing that I want to say today in verse three, it says, blessed is the one who reads, hears, and keeps the things that are written. We need to be getting something out of the book of Revelation that calls us to obey. What does that mean? Well, there's going to be something that we are called to in the book of Revelation that not just symbols, not just interesting information, not just being able to figure out a timeline of events, but there is something we are called to keep, something we are called to obey and do. So let's look for that as we study this letter. Until next time we bid you a pleasant good day. Back to the Bible. Let it be our plea. God's word alone, our authority. Every word, every step in the name of Christ. Back to the Bible for the way of life.