Book of Revelation - Ch. 1, Vs. 1-3 (02/04/2018)

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Not “Revelations”

If not me, then all of you. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass. And he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John, who bear record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein, for the time is at hand. We're going to begin with a quick prayer. Come on in.

Let us pray. Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us this time and this place to come and study your Holy Word. Thank you for providing for us the Bible, the only ultimate, true, and perfect thing that exists physically in the world today.

Thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us in our study of that Word. Thank you for giving us your Son, who provided for us salvation and eternal life. And thank you for protection, protection from things of this world, and protection from the evil one.

In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay, starting right out, the revelation of Jesus Christ. I have to be really careful when I say that because in my youth, I read that always as revelations.

And when I read that phrase, I want to say revelations. And there are many revelations in this book. But the name of this book is not revelations. It's revelation. It's not simply a series of visions, seals, trumpets.

They're all there. All of those things are present. But this is the revelation of Jesus Christ. We've had glimpses of Jesus before in the Scripture. In Genesis, we saw Jesus as the Creator. And in John.

We've had Emmanuel, God with us. We've had Jesus in His humanity when He was born in Bethlehem as a baby in a manger. We've had Jesus in His humility, a man on a cross. We've had Jesus as Savior referred to in the Scriptures.

Jesus, the risen Lord. But none of those glimpses is what this book is about. This time, Jesus is revealed as God in His glory. This time, Jesus is revealed as Judge and King. The word revelation, apocalypsis, means uncovering, an unveiling, or a disclosure.

The Gospels and much of the Scripture, in fact, Jesus said all of the Scripture is written of Him, are also about Jesus. But they present Him in His first coming in humility. The book of Revelation presents Him in His second coming in exaltation.

Every vision and description of Jesus in Revelation is one of majesty, of power, and of glory. In fact, this is the unveiling of the Messiah that the Jewish scholars thought they would see. They expected a king.

They didn't expect a baby in a manger. They had such a strong expectation that it blinded them to the Messiah that they should have seen. We read of Anna, who recognized the Messiah. We read of Simeon, who recognized the Messiah, held Him in his arms and said, Now, I can go, because I have seen the Messiah.

But the scholars didn't see Him. Even the scholars that said, If you go to Bethlehem, about eight miles away, they told the wise men, you'll find Him, because the Bible said that's where you would find Him.

Not a one of them was motivated enough to pick up and go eight to ten miles. Now, I know you were walking, and I know it was uphill, at least one way. But you would think, you would think if the Messiah had come, they would have gone.

Wouldn't you? How many of you, if you knew the Messiah was born in, was lying now as a baby in Frost, not Frost, that's too far away, in Rice, Texas, would start walking to go see Him? How many of you would do that?

I think every one of us would do it. And if we had children, I think we'd pack them up with us and go take them with us. I would certainly go, but they didn't. They expected a king, and that expectation was so strong that it blinded them to the Messiah they should have seen.

What Messiah? The suffering servant, prophesied in Isaiah. Turn to Isaiah 53 for just a second. Isaiah 53. And you'll get a description of the Messiah they did not see, a Messiah they did not look for.

They were so strong in their belief that they could not even recognize that this is talking about a man, not a country. They thought that Isaiah was talking about the nation of Israel. They didn't think he was talking about a man.

Let's look at what it says. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall go up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of the dry ground. He hath no form of comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

They didn't want to walk to rice to see the Messiah. He is despised and rejected of men. He is a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and cured our sorrows. Yet we esteem him stricken and spitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

This is a verse I had memorized in R .A. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.

He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers as dumb, so he opened not his mouth. That's the Messiah they should have been looking for. The servant sent to bear their sorrows, their pains, their sins.

They didn't see that, because they weren't looking for it. They were looking for a king. Well, what revelation reveals, or unveils, is Jesus in his glory. The truths about Jesus and his final victory that the rest of the scriptures merely infer become clearly visible in this revelation.

I highlighted this because I want you to hold it in your mind. It is the unveiling of Jesus to us that makes this book of such value to us and such a target for demonic forces. There are great forces at work every time anyone picks up the book of Revelation to say, disharmony, chaos, don't talk about that, you'll make somebody mad.

And so we shy away from it. Now, I don't feel uncomfortable here. We have had, over the last couple of weeks of introduction, points of, I don't want to say contention, I want to say points where we have not yet come to the same understanding.

And we may never come exactly to the same understanding of everything. But this I do know. If we study fairly what the book says, and we study it with an open heart, and we study it in the presence of our fellow believers, the lines that we take will not be vertical.

They'll be tilted. And we'll come closer and closer and closer together. Whether we ever get to that point of total agreement, I doubt that that happens in fact. I know it doesn't happen in this life.

I'm not sure that it even happens in the next life. But I know this. We'll come closer and closer and closer to agreement. And that's the truth about the study of any scripture. If you don't allow chaos to interfere.

Revelation as Unveiling, Not Mere Visions

Okay. Revelation does show us the Antichrist. It does show us God's judgment. It does show us calamity on earth. It does show us Mystery Babylon. All in vivid detail. But most of all, it is a revelation of Jesus Christ to us.

If we understand everything else in the book, and we miss Jesus, we've missed the point of the book. Here's what Charles Spurgeon said. I like reading Charles Spurgeon because he writes in such beautiful words.

Words that I wish I could reproduce. So sometimes I just copy them. But I always try to tell you that's what I'm doing. The great fault of many professors is that Christ is to them a character on paper.

Certainly more than a myth. But yet a person of them past. An historic personage who lived many years ago. And did most admirable deeds. By the which we are saved. But who is far from being a living, present, and bright reality.

That was his assessment of the scholars of his day. And as bad as that assessment was, as bad as those scholars were at that time, they're even worse now. Higher criticism was in its infancy. Most biblical scholars still held to lower criticism.

Well, I'm going to tell you what criticism, biblical criticism is. I'm going to define it for you. This is not my definition. This is a definition I pulled out of the computer. The treatment of biblical text as natural rather than supernatural artifacts.

The Bible is a natural thing, not a supernatural thing. It grew out of rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. By the 19th century, it was divided into higher criticism. Higher criticism. The study of the composition and history of biblical text.

And lower criticism. The close examination of the text to establish the original or correct readings. Those terms are no longer used for the most part. But you can see from the pejorative nature of the names, the direction scholarship was heading.

If you were interested in what the Bible really said, that was considered lower criticism. Higher criticism is the study of the composition and the history of biblical text. That's what the seminaries are teaching now.

They are analyzing the Bible and they're saying, well, there's parts of the Bible that are true and there's parts of the Bible that are not true. And this should be better done and that should be better done.

And this is what it means and this is what it doesn't mean. Rather than looking to the Bible to see what the Bible says it means. Okay. I'm going to catch my breath. You make any comment you want to make.

If anybody wants to make one. Okay. So we're comfortable at least to this point. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass, which he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.

Shortly is a translation of two Greek words. One on, which means with or by. And the other, which means speed or quickness. This is the Greek word from which we get our word tachometer. So for us, a better understanding might be rapidly or quickly rather than soon.

Now, how did he send it? He said, okay, he sent it by his angel. Absolutely by his angel. And I'm not going to quibble over whether that angel was Jesus himself or just an angel sent by Jesus. It could have meant either one because angel just means a messenger.

But we won't quibble about that. What I want to know is, in what form did he send it by this angel to John? Okay. Part of it was visions. Well, let's look at the next word in the signified. See the word signified?

What does that mean? Well, it means to be made known by means of signs. The book of Revelation is written in a code. But every code is found somewhere else in the Bible. The book of Revelation contains 404 verses.

And they make allusions or references to the Old Testament 800 times. More than twice a verse. Just to the Old Testament alone. One of the blessings that we will receive as a result of this study is the tour we will have to take through the Bible.

If you do Revelation, you study Revelation, and you study Revelation fair, by the time you get through, you will have read the Bible. You'll have to. Because he's going to refer to things in Genesis and things in John and things in Jude and things in...

Wherever you go, wherever he is, he's going to refer you back to something else. Now, the question is, why in signs? Why do you think he sent it in signs? The Jewish people were used to having looked for signs.

I can't say that right. They were familiar with signs and using signs to represent things. They required a sign. The Jews require a sign in the Greek's wisdom. Signs. Some think that in signs, in order that those in authority in the Roman Empire would not be able to understand.

But maybe it's for an even broader, wider reason than that. Do you remember the answer that Jesus gave to the disciples when they asked him why he taught in parables? Now, Brother David, this was going through my mind yesterday when you did your presentation on a parable, on a picture.

And I can't think of the last one. I don't know if it begins with a P. I think it may be a purpose. Principle. That's better. A purpose or a principle. That was one of the moments I was tuning out for the reason I told you I was tuning out yesterday.

But anyhow, this was on my mind too. So do you recall the reason he gave the disciples? Look to Matthew 13, Chapter 10. Now this is not the answer that Brother David gave in his talk yesterday. He gave the other answer, and there are two very good answers.

One, a parable can be formed into a picture which can be remembered. And he referred to the sermon last Sunday by Myron and how he started with a Scripture verse and he painted a picture of a mountain for us, at least a verbal picture.

And he presented to us eventually a value, but the principle of don't be satisfied where you are. Go from the place where you are satisfied, where you're comfortable, to where God wants you to be, and it'll be a better place.

But you've got to go through a valley to get there. And it was a beautiful sermon. And I remember much more of that sermon than I would have remembered had he not painted this picture for me and this valley for me and that picture for me.

And then now I'm over here on this picture, looking at that picture, and I'm looking around, and he says, uh-uh, there's a better place over there, but you've got to go through another valley. And I remember him saying, his son told him, it'll be easier this time than last time.

And he said, why? Because thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. No, that's not what he said. He said, uh, mercy, surely goodness and mercy, goodness and mercy will go with me. And you can recover all of that.

I actually recovered it. Somebody said the word goodness, I think, or mercy won, and that brought everything flooding back. But when you get the little pictures, you can bring everything back. It's a wonderful learning, wonderful teaching device.

But that's only one of the reasons that he talked in parables, not just so he could present a picture that they could understand and remember. But look what he says here in Revelation 13 .10. Matthew 13 .10, thank you, ma 'am.

Matthew 13 .10, And the disciples came and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? And he answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.

But to them it is not given. One reason, I had to change that. I had to put one in there, Brother David, yesterday. One reason that Jesus taught in signs was so that only his disciples, the elect, could understand.

Mrs. Mitchell, I ignored you a while ago, but I want to bring it back to you. That's exactly what you were saying. I just wanted to wait until we got through all of this to say, That's what I believe too.

Maybe, yes, sir. Well, that was not me at all. You've got to remember who does the clicking. It wasn't me. That was the Holy Spirit. If you got anything, that was from Him. Or from the Scripture, not from me.

So what I thought was, Maybe that's the reason Revelation is taught in signs. So that only the elect could understand. Well, Daniel has a similar comment, and we talked about this one yesterday too. I felt like my whole lesson was previewed yesterday.

Had you guys come with us to the Saturday morning, first Monday, first Saturday morning of the month, Bible study, you would have gotten this preview already. Daniel has a similar comment in Daniel 12, verse 9.

It's the angel, this time, speaking to Daniel. And he says, Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Many shall be purified and made white and tried, but the wicked should do wickedly.

And none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall understand. You can read that, the wicked, the non-elect. The wise, the elect. Okay. So, why in signs? So that the elect can understand it.

Sent to who? Well, first to Jesus. And we spent two weeks dealing with an unveiling of Jesus to Jesus with the kind of the focus question being, can Jesus learn anything? We're not going to go back and do that again.

But there are things, but there are things that are revealed to Jesus that he did not know before they were revealed to him. The timing and place of his coming was one thing. That's what we dealt with.

First to Jesus. Then to John. And from John, if we read, hear, and keep to us. I debated whether to put this in or not. And I'm going to just kind of highlight it and I'll bring it up later if we need it which I know we will.

Four Ways People Interpret Revelation

The book's imagery and symbolism have produced four main interpretive approaches. They are preterist, historical, allegorical, and futuristic. I'll give you a quick glance. The preterist interprets Revelation as a description of first events in the Roman Empire.

There's a lot of people who believe that. R .C. Sproul believed that until last week. Oh, that's nasty. But I'm sure that he would have said he didn't believe that everything happened then because he would have understood that it's impossible to see all of the events in Revelation as already fulfilled.

For example, the second coming of Jesus certainly didn't happen in the first century. It hasn't happened yet. The historical approach looks at the Revelation as a panoramic view of church history from the apostolic age to the present.

And they see the barbaric invasions of Rome. They see the rise of the Roman Catholic Church. They see various popes. They see the emergence of Islam. They see the French Revolution. They see the rise of Adolf Hitler.

They see whatever they want to see. This method robs Revelation of any meaning to those to whom it's written. It's produced many different and often conflicting interpretations of actual historical events.

Then we have the idealist approach. It interprets Revelation as a timeless depiction of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. In this view, it's not historical. It's not predictive. It's a collection of allegories.

It flies in the face of what John is instructed to do when he says in Revelation 1 .19 Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter. It didn't talk about these are just stories that are designed to tell the truth.

Are they stories that are designed to tell the truth? Yes. And then we have the futurist that assumed the events at the last part of Revelation are in the future. And literally and symbolically depict actual people.

So what do you think is correct? Certainly, each contains some truth. The book of Revelation did speak to John's time. It does say something about church history. And it does have meaning in our personal lives.

However, while there are elements of truth in all four, there's certainly a place to look at things that are happening in the future, even in our future. Most of what Revelation is about are things that happen in our future.

Read, Hear, and Keep the Prophecy

Okay. I'm going to re-read the first verse and then go on. The Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto him to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.

So what did John do? He did what he was told to do. He wrote it down. He wrote down the things which thou hast seen and the things which are and the things which shall be hereafter. And he sent it and signified it by his angel unto his servant John who bare record of the word of God and of the testimony of Jesus Christ and of all things that he saw.

And now we come to the first promise in the book of Revelation. Verse 3. Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written therein for the time is at hand.

The first time I did this I asked what time? The time to be blessed. There are three words here in this verse that I'd like to look at and one I want to focus on. Read hear and keep. Two of them I think are pretty obvious.

We know what it means when it says read it. We know what it means when it says hear it. But what does it mean when it says keep it? That's right. To keep it exactly like it is. In the majority of the churches today keep I think is misunderstood.

I looked at several commentaries and not one of them brought this up. So I did a word study on keep. It means to rail. It means to attend to carefully to take care of. And then there's subsets. A. To guard.

B. To keep in the state in which it is. C. To observe. And D. To undergo something. To reserve or to undergo something. Well, I wanted to focus on B. To keep it in the state that it is. Maybe that means let the text say what it says.

Don't try to make it say what you want it to say. Because after all it is the Word of God. It is the one perfect thing that exists in the physical world today. It's not something we can improve on. What we can do is improve our understanding of it.

We can't make it better because it's perfect. It's perfect because it was written by Penman of God. And God promised us that He would keep it in the perfect state. Now here's the issue. Brother David has done a series of sermons on just this.

How do you know what version of the Bible presents the truth? Well, you've got to go back and compare what you're reading. There's so many versions out there. You see, I would have thought the devil would have removed the Bible by removing it.

But he didn't remove it that way. That's why he's smarter than me. He removed it by giving me 4 ,000 different choices all of which say subtly different things and if I'm wrong on any of them he's got me on the right trail or on his trail.

So what do we do? We've got to go back and compare versions and we've got to compare what we think about those versions to what historical people in the past have thought about it. I'm going to get to this, I think, in just a second.

Yes, I wanted to scroll down and make sure I did. In 2 Peter 1 verse 16. Yes. Oh, I'm sorry. That was not an attempt to embarrass you. But now this one is, Mr. Paul. I know you're making fun of me. Or maybe it's Jenny.

I feel like I got called Paul out because he's been yelled at. He spent all day yesterday being yelled at. Improperly. Yes, sir. Absolutely. And that's what we're failing to do, isn't it? We've not done a good enough job of that and therefore there's all different versions out there and there's a problem.

I am not going to say that the King James Version is the perfect version because there are errors in the King James Version as there are in all of them. But if you do comparison it is the very one, the very best one that we have available to us.

And we can, by comparing various places within itself, we can resolve all of the issues. The issues are only apparent issues if you just read that one verse and don't go look at other places. So it's there and it's there and the Lord promised He would keep it for us.

And He did. He keeps all of His promises. 2 Peter 1 verse 16. Peter is talking about his experience on the mountain of transfiguration where he was called out by God and said, no, don't build a tabernacle to this one and that one just to Jesus.

Now, I don't know about too many things but I know this is about memory. Things that are shocking to you, you remember. We talked about this sometime in the past. If you've ever driven a car and you've been in a car wreck, you can probably tell me the color of the car that you ran into.

Or if you ran into a tree, you can probably tell me what kind of tree it was. Because that was an important event. I think that if I were Peter and I had been rebuked by God out of Heaven, that would be clear and clean on my mind.

And that's what he's saying in this passage. For we have not followed cunningly devised fables. When we made known unto you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For he received from God the Father honor and glory. When there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And the voice which came from Heaven we heard when we were with him in the holy mountain.

Now going through Peter's mind now is, and he called me out and told me, no Peter, not these, this one. And I remember that. And then he says, then I said, that's a wonderful assurance that Peter gave us.

But we have a greater assurance. Peter tells us the greater assurance than that, greater than being spoken to in the presence of fellow disciples by God himself out of the cloud, out of the glory, we have a more sure word of prophecy.

Where unto you do well that you take heed as unto the light that shineth in a dark place until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your heart, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.

Now John, what that means is it doesn't matter what I think. Because it's not mine to interpret the scripture and have my own private interpretation. It's not good enough for me to have an interpretation and say, John, you ought to pick this up because this is the right one.

There is no private interpretation for the prophecy came not in the old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And that's why it's the one remaining physical object that is perfect.

When we let the Bible say what it says and do not try to make it say what we want it to say, maybe that's when we receive the promised blessing. And I want to confess to you a very hard thing for me and I'm sure it is for all of you too, is to not try to make the Bible say what we wish it said or what we even think it says.

But we continue to study until we know what it is actually saying to us. Maybe that's when we receive the blessing. Now, we are at 1054. And I do a kind of tentative line here. I want to stop here. And I'm going to just allow a free discussion.

I took too much of the time. Didn't let you have enough and that's why we got through early. Yes, sir. Say that again. Yes, and happened during the first century. Okay, now you got an issue of where do you draw your line when you say semi?

Would you say barely preterist? Or would you say almost entirely preterist but not quite? R .C. Sproul would have been one that would have said most of what happened happened in the first century. But there are things left undone.

So he'd say, I'm not a fool, belong all the way to the 100 positive end a preterist. But I believe that most of it happened within the first century. And I picked up R .C. Sproul and some of you don't know me as well as others do.

R .C. Sproul is like one of my three mentors. Not personal mentors but people who I respect and study. John MacArthur, R .C. Sproul, David Mitchell are the people that I consider my mentors. And it was interesting to me the first time I went through this and I found out that you've got two positions represented by two of my top three personages.

R .C. Sproul which is almost entirely preterist and John MacArthur which is almost entirely futurist. Worlds apart. Worlds apart only on a few issues but that was one. They have almost merged in their thinking.

They were almost together in what they thought and yet they were worlds apart on this one item. But they didn't let and don't let the differences between themselves on one issue poison the world for them.

That's what Satan hopes. Satan hopes that when there is a disagreement on one point we can poison the water and there will be chaos and disharmony on all points. That's his goal. And our goal is to see that doesn't happen.

Yes sir.

Absolutely. That's correct.

Well let me take a second. Let me take a second because we do have this second and tell you the first issue that's going to be in the next lesson when he says John to the seven churches. My question is going to be why those seven?

Now the seven he picked doesn't include Jerusalem. It does not include Antioch. It does not include the Church of Rome. Now at that time those would have been, if I were picking churches I would have picked one of those or maybe all three of them.

I wouldn't have picked Smyrna and Philadelphia and Laodicea and well I might have picked Ephesus. I might have picked the Church of Ephesus. Thyatira. So they are laid out in a way that they map out the history of the entire church.

So maybe you're a historian. Maybe you think that the Bible, that Revelation maps out the history of the churches. Well it kind of does that. And there are things that have already happened. It kind of does that.

And there's allegories that teach truth. Maybe it does that. It does all of those. But that's not what it's designed for. It's designed to tell us about Jesus. And that's the issue. And that's where we are led astray and we go off in a tangent and we become angry with one another.

We can't even talk to one another. And I'm not saying here. I am not saying here. I have never felt a bit of anger directed toward me even when we are in a disagreement. But you guys are a wonderful group and Brother David is a wonderful pastor.

And I didn't include Brother David as my third mentor. And he doesn't have the exact same position as either of the other two. So my three main mentors have three different positions on the end times.

So that should drive us apart, right? Satan says yes. Jesus says no. I I left that out on purpose. No, really. I totally understand and I thought it was an opportunity for me to pontify a little bit more.

I can't help it. That's my teacher nature. I apologize to you for it. Brother John King, would you lead us in a prayer? Amen.