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Dr. Manny Arango
Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango, and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church. Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without your eye having to stress over ads or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works. It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience. So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you, trying to grow the church. And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full for the glory of Jesus. Let's go. Got another big chunk today. Hey, if you've done the reading, I'm so proud of you. If you're on a streak, I'm super, super proud of you. Let's dive into Revelation, chapters 12 through 16. It is day 79 on the Arma Bible reading plan, and that means if you did the reading today, you just did 79 days down, 286 days to go. So I'm proud of you. Hey, if you haven't done the reading today, just pause this episode. Mute this. Pause this. Go do the reading. Trust me, what I'm gonna say really makes the most sense if you've actually done the reading. So let's dive in. Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you context clues, then nerdy nuggets. Then we'll get into our timeless truth context clue. Okay? John is writing this letter or this apocalyptic book from Ephesus. Okay? Now, if you're standing in the city center of Ephesus, looking out at the harbor, there's something in that you would have seen being erected during John's lifetime. And this was the largest gymnasium in the ancient world, okay? In the city of Ephesus, now, there's this word called Advent. Now, a lot of Christians think that Advent is like an inherently Christian term, but it's not Catholic. Okay? Every Caesar had an advent, okay? And an advent was simply their arrival. Okay? Their arrival into a city. This is neither here nor there, but, okay, your Advent is your first coming, like your first arrival, your first coming to a city, and your parousia is your second coming. So these are secular words. These are not inherently Christian words. These are secular words that Christians then appropriate. So, like, this has nothing to do with revelation, but I love this. All right, now let's say a lot of times an emperor would make an advent to a city that, like, had an earthquake. We know from history that Thessalonica actually had a couple of Advents because they're prone to getting earthquakes. And on the first advent or the first arrival of the emperor to your city, he would survey the damage a lot. Like, I don't know if anybody remembers, like, Hurricane Katrina, George Bush, like, was. Was actually quite criticized for not going to New Orleans and. And making, you know, some. Some appearances at the sites of the devastation. Any who, at the end of the Advent, that emperor would then give a large sum of money to the city to, like, you know, reconstruct, to. To build back their city. But everyone knew that an Advent would be followed by a parousia second coming. And what would happen during the second coming is that the emperor would want to see what the residents of the city did with the gift that he gave them. So he would want to inspect whether or not they actually used the resources for the building of their city. So the idea of a second coming is that in the first coming, the king or the leader, the ruler, gives and disseminates gifts. We experience the generosity of the leader because we're going to be held responsible for the gift that we've been given. And we're going to have to answer or give an account for what we've done with those resources in the second coming. Now, of course, the Gospel writers are going to take this imagery, they're going to take this symbolism, they're going to take these ideas, and they are going to apply this to Jesus. Okay? So that doesn't have much to do with Revelation, but I just thought it was too good to not tell you guys. Okay, so Domitian had 22 advents. That's a lot of advents. All right? He had 22 advents. He had 22 arrivals. And one of the biggest advents is when he showed up to Ephesus for the grand opening of this gymnasium. Now, this gymnasium was huge, massive. And for a structure this size, it should have taken 100 years to build this thing. Okay, it should have taken 100 years, a whole century to construct this massive gymnasium. But Domitian was kind of known for, like, you know, building projects. It takes my man four years to build something that should take 100 years to build. And so historians refer to Domitian as the beast. So if you're standing at the city center of Ephesus and you're looking out to the harbor of Ephesus, you would have saw Domitian's gymnasium being built insanely fast. And a lot of people would have referred to it as the beast rising out of the sea. Ah, you get it. Now let me read Revelation, chapter 13 to you says this, and I saw a beast rising out of the sea. Okay? The original audience would have immediately understood, okay, exactly what John was talking about. He's making reference to the Roman Emperor, the Roman Empire at large, this particular Roman Emperor, like this singular Roman Emperor who is persecuting God's people. And everyone would have referred to this gymnasium as the beast rising out of the sea. You can imagine it should take 100 years to build something. It takes four years. And almost think about it like a literal time lapse. Like you're watching this thing come up out of the sea. If you're looking out of the harbor from the city center, it literally looks like it's coming out of the sea. Now, Domitian was paying for that gymnasium out of, you know, his own pocket. So, like, federal money. But the province of Asia wanted to make sure that they honored Domitian as well. And so, equally fast as the gymnasium, they were building the Flavian Temple. And the Flavian Temple is actually the place where you would have received a stamp in order to buy and sell. Now, the stamp would have been proof that you gave a pinch of incense to the emperor. Okay? So it meant it was kind of like a confirmation that you had taken part in Emperor worship. And if you hadn't taken part in Emperor worship, you couldn't buy or sell anything in the Agora. Okay? So this is the mark of the Beast that's being talked about. Now, how does the Flavian temple get described? It gets described as a smaller beast in the book of Revelation. Okay, you see how these symbols and these images actually are referring to real things. Let's keep going. In chapter 13, verse 11, it says, Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast. Remember the Flavian temple. The job of the Flavian temple is to give you a mark so that it's confirming that you worshiped the emperor. Okay, so we're getting a lot of symbolic language for, like, buildings. These are buildings. Now, these buildings also represent the power and the dominion and the violence and the force of the emperor and the empire known as Domitian and Rome. Okay, so that helps us with chapter 13. Okay, let's. This is a quote by Pliny. He says that the beast of the sea, that Domitian was the beast of the sea whose teeth drip with the blood of good Romans. Now I want to take you to Revelation, chapter 13:12. We're going to talk about the mark of the beast a little bit. We'll get back to the mark of the beast in our timeless truth for the day. But I want to give you a nerdy nugget, okay? So I gave you a lot of context clues for interpreting this stuff. Actually, before we move on to a nerdy nugget, I'm going to give you one more piece of context. One of the big things that we're going to get in this whole section, chapters 12 through 16, we're going to get signs and bowls. Okay? In our last chunk from yesterday, we got seals and trumpets. Today we're going to get signs and bowls. So let me actually just give you a list of the seven signs. Revelation, chapter 12, verse 1 and 2 is a woman clothed with the sun moon under her feet, twelve stars on her head. Number two is an enormous red dragon with seven heads and seven crowns and ten horns. Sign number three is Revelation 13:1, 10, a beast from the sea. The fourth sign is Revelation 13:11 through 18, a beast from the land. Fifth sign is Revelation 14, verses 1 through 13. The Lamb enthroned with 144,003 angels in the eternal gospel. And then sixth is Revelation, chapter 14, verse 14:20. To the Son of man with a sickle and his angels ready to harvest. And then seventh, the seventh sign is Revelation, chapter 15, verse 1. Seven angels and the seven bowls. So the seventh sign starts the next round, which we've actually seen already with trumpets and trumpets in the seals. Right. The. The last of one kind of starts the first of the next. Okay. They kind of overlap in that way. Bible nerds, I have an announcement. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, releases May of 2025 in pre orders are officially open. When I began to learn Genesis in its proper context, I learned that the creation account is not primarily about God creating something out of nothing, but rather God bringing divine order to the chaos of the cosmos. That one nugget was a game changer for me because I've been preaching to all the kids in my youth group that peace was a solution for their anxiety. But really God's solution to chaos is never peace, but rather order. Peace isn't something that you stumble into, is something that you intentionally step into and that starts with aligning your life with God's order. I think that this book is a game changer. It's nerdy, it's practical, it provides a very contextual understanding of the book of Genesis. And if you grab a copy, you'll learn why there's a huge dragon on the COVID Head to the link in the show notes to pre order, or head to crushingchaos.com to see the really dope trailer that we made for this book. I think it's time for you to crush the chaos in your life. And that starts with grabbing a copy of this book. Now back to the podcast. The reason why I wanted to give you all seven signs is because unlike the bowls and the trumpets and the seals, it's not super, super, super clear when there's another sign, but there are seven of them, and now you have all seven. Okay, that's all of our context clues for this chunk of Revelation. Okay, the next thing that we have is revelation, chapter 13, verse 12. So let's go there. Revelation, chapter 13, verse 12. It says this. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worse with the first beast whose mortal wound had been healed. Okay, so there's this mortal wound that's talked about, and you can see it in chapter 13, verse 3. One of its heads seemed to have been. Seemed to have received a death blow, but its mortal womb had been healed in amazement. The whole earth followed the beast. Okay, so there's this mortal wound that gets talked about. Now there's two options contextually for what this mortal wound is. So that's our Nerdy nugget for the day. Here's, I'll give you both options. I don't know either way which, which option it is. Okay, so option number one is, is that this is a reference to Vespasian, okay? He's the Emperor for 10 years from 69 AD till 79 AD and he actually had a mortal wound like on his head. And inhabitants of Rome, citizens of Rome actually thought that he was going to die and then he did not, and he was miraculously healed. So this could be talking about Vespasian. Okay, here's the other option is that once Nero dies, okay, in 68 A.D. there are three Caesars who, I mean are, are just like, don't last long. Okay, so after Nero you've got Emperor Galba, who is the emperor from 68 to 69, and then we've got Otho, Emperor Otho, who's the emperor from January of 69 to April of 69. Okay, so four months. And then we've got Aulus Vitellius, who's the next Caesar From July of 69 AD till December of, of that same year. And so in a year, less than a two year period, you got three emperors. And a lot of the known world at that point thought that was the end of the Roman Empire, that the death of Nero was a mortal wound to the empire of Rome. But to everyone's shock, the Roman Empire was far from being dead or from being gone. And so those are the two popular ways that that gets interpreted. Either way, guess what? The beasts and the beast represents the Roman Empire, which immediately leads us into our timeless truth. One of the things that I really, really enjoy about reading Romans responsibly. Sorry, reading Revelation responsibly. I don't know why. I just thought about Scott McKnight's book reading Romans backwards, very different than reading Romans responsibly. One of the things that I really like about reading Romans. Oh my gosh, I did it again about reading Revelation responsibly. One of the things I really like about reading Revelation responsibly is that Michael Gorman, the author, really forces us to ask the question, do American Christians live in an empire? Is America an empire? And how do we engage with said empire if America is an empire? Because the Bible has some not good things to say about, about empire building and about empires and about the business and the militarism of, of empiring, okay. And how the inhabitants of an empire really have a lot to gain based on the militaristic conquest of that empire. And I think we just have to. Even if we don't come to any conclusions, we have to acknowledge that John is forcing Christians to ask the question that we're gonna now ask in our timeless truth. I want you to grab these three passages of scripture. The first is Revelation 7:3, Revelation 9, 4, and then Revelation 13:17. I'll read Revelation 7:3 and 9:4. It says this. Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of God. Then I heard the number of those who were sealed, 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel. Okay, so we have a seal, and it's on the foreheads, and we have a number. Okay, and then Revelation 9:4 says this. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. Okay, so the people of God are sealed. And how does that juxtapose with Revelation 13:17? It says this. So they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of its name. So the seal that God has for believers is juxtaposed to the mark that the beast puts on unbelievers. And I think the timeless truth for all of us is to ask ourselves this question. Do we want to be sealed by God or marked by the beast? Do I want to receive a seal from God which says, hey, like I. I seal you for eternal life, or do I want to be marked by the beast, which allows me to prosper here in this life? Okay, so am I going to pick. What does it gain the. A man to gain the world? What does it profit a man to gain the world, but lose your soul? I actually think that's the question that Revelation is asking us, but it's asking us that via images and symbols. So our timeless truth as. As Americans, as those of us who live within this empire called America. And if you don't believe we're an empire, just think about how many military bases we have around the world. Think about mobilization. How about you do this. Ask this question. How many countries does America sell weapons to? How. How many lives have been shed just by American weapons? Not even our military, just our weapons. Just, just, just. Just assault rifles and AKs and. And nuclear or. And. And bombs and rocket launchers. And you go ahead. You go down a rabbit trail when it comes to arms dealers, American arms dealers and arms dealing and who we actually sell weapons to, and. And how much money America makes, keeps generates based on the unfair treatment of people around the world. And just ask those questions, do that research for yourself and then you can figure out, okay, is American empire, do I live in a modern day empire? And I think for any Christian who lives in an empire, whether persecuted or not persecuted, we have to ask some of the questions that John is forcing the readers, the original audience of Revelation, to ask. And I think it will behoove us to ask those questions and to be honest and to dialogue with other believers and with ourselves. So, Dr. Almost Truth for the day, do you want to be sealed by God for eternity, or do you want to compromise and receive the mark so that you can operate in the economics of the empire today, or do you refuse to operate in the economics of the empire today so that you can build for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust don't destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal? All right, guys, that was day 79. Tomorrow we got day 80. We're going to continue our third trek through revelation tomorrow, and I'm super excited about it. I'll see you right here for day 80. If you got a streak going, don't break it. I'm so, so, so proud of you and I love you guys. I'll see you right here tomorrow. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.