(Revelation) 01 Introduction — David Pawson

The Controversial Reception of Revelation

We're starting an exciting three days of looking into this book of Revelation. As far as this book is concerned, I find there are two kinds of Christians in the world. There are some Christians you can't get into the book of Revelation and there are other Christians you can't get out of it.

I think you know what I mean. Some people have a fear of this book and others have a fascination almost to the point of obsession with it. In fact, opinion about this book has been very varied from the very beginning.

It was the last book admitted to the New Testament. There was so much argument about it, wondering whether it should be included, so it was the last to get in. There have been many negative criticisms of this book even by Christian scholars.

I just noted a few of them down. This book will either find you mad or leave you mad. What a comment to make. Another scholar said there are as many riddles in it as there are words. Another called it a farrago of baseless fantasy.

Well unfortunately, the Protestant Reformers shared this negative opinion and Protestant churches have suffered for the last four hundred years as a result from sheer ignorance of this book. Martin Luther said, it is neither apostolic nor prophetic.

He said, everyone thinks of this book whatever his spirit suggests. There are many nobler books than this. My spirit cannot acquiesce in this book. And so Luther never preached on it, sadly. John Calvin was the other great Reformer and he commented, wrote commentaries on every book in the New Testament except one, the book of Revelation, and he chose to ignore it.

The third, less well known, was Ulrich Zwingli and he simply said, it is not a book of the Bible so we can reject its testimonies. The technical explanation for all that, for those who are interested, was the influence of the Greek philosopher Aristotle through a man called Thomas Aquinas on all the Reformers.

Just another example of how Greek influence has been the biggest danger to Christianity for two thousand years. I'm writing a book called Degreasing the Church to try and expose what has been happening.

The separation of sacred and secular is Greek. The separation of physical and spiritual is Greek. It's not Hebrew, it's not Christian, and this has been the influence on the Protestant Reformers. But thank God there are many positive comments about this book.

One said it's the only masterpiece of art in the whole New Testament. Another said it's beautiful beyond description. Well human opinion, I've shown you, has varied enormously. Some people love the book and others won't touch it.

Satan's Opposition to Revelation

I want to look second at Satan's opinion of this book. I know what he thinks of this book from hard experience. He hates it. There are two parts of the Bible that Satan hates more than any other, the first few pages and the last few pages.

Because the first few pages explain how he got hold of the human race and made this world his kingdom. He doesn't want you to know how he operates. But as Paul says, we are not ignorant of his devices.

We know how he gets hold of people just by studying what happened in the Garden of Eden. But he hates even more the last few pages of the Bible which describe how he is going to lose the kingdom of this earth, how his doom is written, his days are numbered.

And I can prove that. Thirty-five years ago or more I made my first Bible studies of the book of Revelation and one of those was on Revelation 20 which describes how Satan will be thrown out of this world, locked up, sealed so that he can deceive the nations no longer.

And on that tape I spoke for seven minutes about Satan's doom. As you've heard, my tapes go out in considerable numbers, but there is one tape every few weeks we get it sent back. It's number 596. It's the tape on Revelation 20.

And though it was sent out from Anchor Recordings who deal with my tapes in England and elsewhere, though it was sent out in perfect condition, by the time it reached the people who ordered it, the seven minutes was damaged.

And that happened again just a few weeks ago. It's been happening for thirty-five years. One family in a town called Brighton in England ordered that tape or the whole series, but they got to that tape and when they played it for that seven minutes while I was trying to describe Satan's downfall they could not hear what I was saying.

There was a loud foreign voice shouting and they could just make out my voice in the background, but they couldn't make out what I was saying because of this superimposed other language on the tape. Sometimes it is wiped clean.

I was talking to some pastors and mentioned this about three months back. And a pastor came to me afterwards. He said, that explains something. He said, I had a man in my study who was demon-possessed and I was fighting to release him from the bondage.

And he suddenly saw two Bibles on my desk and he ran to them and he picked them up and he tore a page out of each Bible and threw it down. He said, after he'd gone and I went to look at the Bibles, I found he had torn out Revelation 20 in each case.

Just a fortnight later I was teaching the book of Revelation in Southend, another seaside town in Britain. I got to Revelation 20 and I began to describe how Satan will one day be thrown out of the earth and can no longer deceive us.

I noticed the man who was operating the tape recorder, as our brother is operating it over there, became agitated and was rushing about. Afterwards I went to him and I said, why did you get agitated? He said, when you started speaking about Satan, the tape suddenly went backwards through the machine.

He said, it has never done that before. He said, it took me minutes to get it stopped and to get it going forwards again. So he said, I'm sorry but I've lost that bit you said about Satan. Now I'm telling you this because we're dealing with serious things here.

We're not just studying Revelation out of curiosity. Satan hates this book and he will hate it when we get to that chapter because his days are numbered. What is God's opinion of the book of Revelation?

God's Blessing and Warning in Revelation

Now there's an interesting question. This is the only book out of sixty-six books in your Bible to which he has attached sanctions. At the beginning in the first chapter he has attached a unique blessing to this book which is attached to no other book.

And at the end of it there is a curse attached to this book and to no other. The blessing I read to you, blessed is he who reads this prophecy. The word reads there means to read aloud. May I urge you, if it's not difficult for you, when you do your private Bible reading always read the Bible aloud.

You will get far more out of it because you will have to put meaning into it, into your voice. It will make more sense to you. Blessed is he who reads aloud this prophecy and takes it to heart. That means letting the message get very deep into your being so that it becomes part of your motivation, part of your living.

What a blessing to attach, and God has attached it to no other book. But the curse he has put at the end is a horrible one. It's a curse on anybody who tampers with this book, anybody who adds anything to it that it doesn't say, or anybody who takes something away from it that is there.

Quite simply, a person who does that loses their salvation. They have no place in the new city of Jerusalem. So here is a unique book in the Bible to which God has attached a blessing and a special curse.

It must be a very important book to God to do such a thing. Well now, let's turn to the book itself from the opinions about it, the book as a whole. I want you first to see its place in the Bible. Well you know its place, it's at the end.

Revelation as the Bible's Climactic History

But why is it there? What function does it fulfill coming right at the end of your Bible? Without this book, the whole story of the world and the story of the people of God would be incomplete. This rounds off both stories and it ends the story in a wonderfully satisfactory way.

I did tell you this last week when I said the Bible is a romance. It's the story of a father looking for a bride for his son, and therefore like every good romance it finishes with the wedding, the marriage, and the bride and the groom live happily together ever after.

But the Bible is not only a romance, it is a history. But it is different from every other history book for the simple reason that it starts earlier and it finishes later than any other history book could.

Because history is written from records by those who were present when it happened, and therefore historians cannot write about the beginning of our universe. They were not there to record it or observe it, and yet the Bible begins at the very beginning of our universe.

And no historian can write about the future of our world because that hasn't been observed or recorded yet. But the Bible ends with the end of our universe and the beginning of another one. Only God was there at the beginning to observe, and only God knows the end from the beginning.

And that is why this is God's history book and therefore bigger than any other history book. I wonder if I could show you that in a little diagram, if I can lay my hands on it. I had to rush away before the meeting to change some of these overheads.

But I'll get it. We're here. I hope you can see these clearly at the back, but I'm going to explain it so you don't really need to see it clearly. Human history books are all written within that small oval circle there.

Human history is only part of the story. It can't be more than that for the simple reason that it can only cover the past up till now, and it can only cover what's happening here on earth. And all history books are written within that little circle.

They cannot tell us what is happening up in heaven, and they cannot tell us what is happening in the future. And so they describe the past up till now of what has happened on earth. But history is his story, not ours.

And with God's history you get the whole story. You get the story of what has happened in the past up till now, and you get the story of what will happen in the future then. You get the story of what's happening down here on earth, and you get the story of what's been happening up there in heaven.

And that is why the book of Revelation constantly switches from earth to heaven, because what happens up there affects down here. There are battles up there that are reflected in wars down here and directly relate to them.

In chapter twelve of Revelation we'll see that Satan is thrown out of heaven forever, he will never have access again, and he comes to earth frustrated and furious. And the result? The book of Revelation tells you.

Those big troubles at the end of the world are the result of Satan being thrown out of heaven. So heaven and earth are constantly interacting, but human historians are totally blind to that. But God tells us the whole story.

Furthermore, if you want to understand the past you need to know where it's heading in the future, and when you see the end you can see the point of the beginning and everything that happens in between.

So the Bible is a book of history written by God. Let's just imagine, for example, that the Bible didn't have the book of Revelation. Do you know what it would end with? A little book you've probably not studied carefully, the little book of Jude, and it's a dreadful little book.

It's written by the brother of Jesus. His real name was Judas, but for obvious reasons he changed it to Jude. Jude, the brother of Jesus, wrote to a second-generation church that was falling apart, a church that was being corrupted from the inside.

A church cannot be destroyed from the outside. No matter what persecution comes against a church, it will grow. The church is always destroyed from the inside. Jude had to write a very different letter from the one he intended to a church that was breaking up from the inside.

They were being corrupted in their creed, what they believed, in their conduct, how they behaved, in their character, what they were like, and in their conversation and what they talked about. And these four corruptions were destroying the church from the inside.

It's a typical story of a second-generation church and what can happen to those who didn't start the church with enthusiasm and zeal, who weren't able to pass on to the next generation that enthusiasm for the Lord.

Now would you like the New Testament to end on a sad and sorry note like that? What hope is there if churches in the second generation from Christ were already breaking up from the inside? Thank God for the book of Revelation.

Without it, the Bible would be much the loser. Now when people read the book of Revelation, the first part of it is reasonably understandable. It consists of seven letters to seven churches. Well of course, we're familiar with the concept of a New Testament section being a letter to a church.

Paul was always writing letters to churches and we have them as part of scripture. And there are seven letters to seven churches that form the first three chapters. However, these are letters of Jesus.

And I'm amazed that people pay far more attention to the letters of Paul or even John, but don't make themselves familiar with the letters of Jesus himself. They're the only letters he wrote that we have.

They're short letters, but my, when you study them. I took a film crew out to western Turkey a couple of years back. We went in March and when we arrived the weather was dreadful wind, rain, cold. And there we were with a film crew to film all the seven places in Asia to which Jesus wrote letters.

But you know, after that initial shock, we had clear blue sky and sunshine for seven days while we filmed. And then the bad weather came back. And I stayed on to minister in the Church of Christ in Smyrna.

And when we get to the letter to Smyrna, you'll be astonished how relevant it still is. That little church, every member has been in prison for Jesus. Men with guns and knives burst into their services which are held in an underground cellar.

But to minister to those saints was a sheer privilege. It's one of the few churches that Jesus had no criticism of, only support and sympathy. We'll see more of that tomorrow morning. Well, those first few chapters are reasonably straightforward.

The Structure of Revelation's Visions

And then as you read on, you come into chapters four and five which describe an astonishing scene in heaven. And it's full of music and full of song and full of praise. And chorus after chorus and hymn after hymn has been based on those two chapters because it's just praising God and we just join in with the praise of God.

However many or few there may be at your service of worship, always tell people there are thousands because we join with the angels and archangels when we worship. We're not alone. So whenever anybody asks me how many were at the meeting, I say thousands and thousands, myriads of people.

Don't forget that. And incidentally, angels study your hairdo. You'll read 1 Corinthians 11. Well, there is this chapter, these two chapters of praising God in heaven which have inspired Christian worship, so we're happy with those chapters.

It's when we get to chapter six that we begin to feel a bit uncomfortable. And right through to chapter nineteen there are some pretty horrible things happening and we don't like it one bit. We understand some of it and some of it seems terribly puzzling.

Scarlet women riding dragons, beasts coming out of the sea, what's all that about? Though some of the things, bloodshed, epidemics, locust swarms, we understand. But people feel very uncomfortable in that middle bit.

I want to show you that it's an essential part of the picture and vital for you to know, though probably from last three evenings you know already. Then finally, we come out of the darkness and the sun shines again and the clouds roll away and we see the new heaven and the new earth like a bride adorned for her husband.

And it's so often read at funerals and it's so lovely that we love that bit and we feel more at home at the end again and somehow it relieves our anxieties. But it's all one book, one revelation of Jesus Christ and we need to see it as a whole.

Don't pick out the bits you like and leave the rest. See it as whole, just as a diamond. To see its real beauty it should be put against a black velvet cloth. So the beauty of the Lord's ultimate destiny for us needs to be seen against the darkness of the destiny of this world, if we're really going to appreciate its beauty.

I quote another scholar who said, John must have been suffering from either indigestion at the best or insanity at the worst. What a comment for a Bible scholar to make. He'd obviously missed the point altogether.

Revelation for Ordinary Believers

Now I want to make two introductory remarks. And by the way, tonight is simply introduction, we're not going to get into the book tonight. But tomorrow morning, first thing, we'll get right into it and I tell you there are some exciting things right at the beginning, some of which you will never have heard.

So let's make two introductory statements now. Number one, this book was written for ordinary people. It is the scholars and professors who've messed it up. Quite simply, intellectuals mess things up.

In fact, I've discovered, I've lived and been teaching long enough and spoken in universities long enough to know that you can fool intellectuals much more quickly than ordinary people. By dressing it up in the right philosophical language, you can convince intellectuals almost of anything.

One of the verses I love in Scripture in the Gospels is, and the common people heard Jesus gladly. And that is not only a tribute to Jesus, though it is a tribute to him, because they said he speaks as someone who knows what he's talking about.

He speaks with authority, not like our preachers who get it all out of books. But it's a tribute to common people. You can't fool common people. Perhaps that's why we don't see too many of them in church.

You can't fool them. They'll vote with their feet. They will say the emperor has no clothes. To back this up, I quote two Bible scholars. Here's one, it is one of the misfortunes of our expertise-oriented culture that when anything seems difficult it is sent off to the university to be figured out.

I like that comment. That's Eugene Patterson in his book on Revelation. And here's another written in 1884, we boldly affirm that the study of this book of Revelation would present absolutely no possibility of error if the inconceivable, often ridiculous, prejudice of theologians in all ages had not so trammeled it and made it bristle with difficulties that most readers shrink from it in alarm.

Apart from these preconceptions, the Revelation would be the most simple, most transparent book that prophet ever penned. That was a great saint in 1884. Did you get the message? Don't read too many books about Revelation.

You'll finish up in confusion. The scholars have got so many different schools of interpretation that you'll wonder if anybody could ever understand it. This book was written for seven little churches in which many of the members were slaves, and yet Jesus expected them to understand it.

Let me tell you a story. I can't guarantee that it's true. It may be a preacher's story. Do you know what I mean by that? There was a preacher's little boy said to his daddy once, Daddy, was that story true or was you just preaching?

And we know the feeling, don't we? There are apocryphal stories that are so useful to preachers that they get handed on and handed round and used in the pulpit. But this is the story I heard and it took place in America in a theological seminary, Freudian slip.

There were students there who were having lectures on the apocalyptic literature in the Bible. A professor was giving apocalyptic lectures and he took them through a bit of Daniel, a bit of Ezekiel, and of course the book of Revelation.

And the students finished up in despair. So as soon as the lecture was over they ran for the sports hall and had a game of basketball to get it all out of their system. While they played, they noticed that the janitor, a black man, was sitting at the side of the court waiting to lock up when they'd finished and they noticed that he was reading the Bible.

So they went over to him after they'd finished the game and said, Good to see you reading the Bible. Sure love it. What part are you reading? The book of Revelation. You don't understand that, do you?

Of course I do. Well tell us, what's the message? He said, Simple, Jesus wins. Now there is a bit more to the book of Revelation than that, but that simple man had got the message. This was written for ordinary people, not for scholars, not for professors.

It was written for people who were about to suffer big trouble and it was to help them. I have smuggled Bibles into China and it's so exciting to find the believers in China, though they suffer, coming out victorious.

And the book of Revelation is their favourite book. And maybe that's why we in the West make such a meal of it, because we're not suffering. It was written as a manual for martyrdom. It was written to prepare people to be willing to die for Jesus.

And since that is a situation we don't even contemplate in the comfort of our Western world, the book of Revelation becomes simply a kind of intellectual puzzle. We love making schedules about the future so we can work out what time it is on God's clock.

That's not why it was written. It was written for ordinary people. There is, however, one qualification we must add. It was written for ordinary people in Asia in the first century, and so somehow we must get back into their mind, back into their thinking, and then come back into our century and apply it.

But it's always best to start with them. The second introductory remark I want to make is this. It was not only written for ordinary people, it was written for a practical purpose. I've already said its main purpose is not to satisfy our curiosity about the future so that we become a kind of people with secret knowledge, with inside information about the future, a kind of almanac, a detailed forecast about the end of history.

It was not primarily written for that. There are certainly many predictions in it, fifty-six altogether. In fact, over two-thirds of the verses in Revelation have a prediction in them. That is a record in the New Testament.

So it is a book about the future. However, the Lord only reveals the future to help us to get ready for it. It has an extremely practical purpose and it is to fill people with hope so that they will be motivated to holiness.

Those are the two purposes, hope and holiness. Holiness is always the result of having the right hope of the future. Not so much telling us what is coming, but telling us how to be ready so that we can live in the present in the light of the future.

There are plenty of people who live in the past, antique dealers, historians, archaeologists. They love to live in the past, spend their whole lives looking back into it. Most people today prefer to live in the present for the now.

Keep up with the fashion, get the latest. It's called existentialism. But Christians are people who live for the future. We live now to get ready for then. In fact, the whole nature of the kingdom of God is such that it is a future kingdom that has burst into the present.

It has been inaugurated by Jesus, but it will not be consummated or universally established until he gets back. But we're living for the future. We're motivated by the future. We're not living for the now and we're not living for the back then.

We're the people of tomorrow. Now the particular purpose of the book of Revelation is not directly stated at either the beginning or the end as some other books are. It's right in the middle. And here is the verse which I've already quoted to you last week.

But I quote it again. I believe it's the key that opens the whole book. Before I give it to you, let me tell you that I believe the key that unlocks every book in the Bible is the answer to a very simple question.

The question is, why was this book written? And there are sixty-six books in the Bible and sixty-six different answers. And until you find out why a book was written, you will not get the message of that book.

Every verse in the Bible is to be taken in context, and I don't just mean the paragraph or the chapter, I mean the book in which it is written. For the Bible is not a book, it's a library of many different kinds of book written for many different purposes.

The four Gospels were written for four different purposes. And until you know why Matthew wrote and why Mark and Luke and John wrote, you will not understand the message of those Gospels. They were writing for particular people in a particular purpose.

Endurance, Holiness, and Faithfulness

So what is the particular purpose of Revelation? Here is the verse. You'll find it in chapter 14. I don't usually give chapter and verse numbers because God didn't give us them. And you need to know your Bible without them.

Shall I prove that to you? How many of you could tell me what John 3 .16 says? Put your hands up if you could. I won't challenge you, I won't ask you. Put your hands up if you could, right? How many can tell me what John 3 .15 says?

One, two. John 3 .17? One, two. A few more, maybe a dozen. Do you see what I'm telling you? You think you understand John 3 .16 without John 3 .15 and 17. You're taking a text out of context and making it a pretext.

Okay, let's forget that. Let's get back to Revelation. Why was Revelation written? Here's the verse right in the middle. This calls for endurance on the part of the saints who obey God's commandments and remain faithful to Jesus.

And that's what the whole book is about. It's calling Christians to endure trouble, pain, suffering, to keep God's commandments whatever pressures are on, to disobey and to remain faithful to Jesus. That's why it's written.

Verse twelve if you really want to know. I'd rather you read the whole book to find it. And incidentally, please will you read the book before tomorrow, at least the first few chapters because you will get much more from my teaching.

I'm not going to be reading any more of it to you. We don't have time. I shall be assuming that you're reading it at home privately. You can read while you eat your meal. But try and keep ahead of me so that you've got it fresh in your mind as I try to open it up to you.

The emphasis throughout is on suffering saints to the point of martyrdom. John himself is in prison in a place called Patmos. It's a little island about eight miles long and four miles wide. It's a horrible place, or it was in his day.

It was the kind of Robbins Island or what's the island off San Francisco, Alcatraz. That's what it was. And it was a quarry where the prisoners were in chains and were made to chip away at the granite to shape blocks that were used for building.

It was a hard place. And it was an island that was a prison for only one kind of criminal, those who were regarded as traitors to the Roman Empire. It was for political prisoners. And John the Apostle, would you believe it, the only apostle who was not assassinated, all the other eleven were killed violently.

But John lived to old age and even Jesus himself hinted that that would happen. One reason might just be that he'd given John his mother to look after, but there were other reasons too. And John was a political prisoner.

What crime had he committed against the Roman Empire? He says, I was in prison for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus. So he has a right to send this book to churches that are going to face suffering.

He is already going through it himself. Now other Christians will soon do so, and that's why I must give you a little history. Forgive me for giving a history lesson. Julius Caesar was the first Roman Emperor and he was such an admired hero that people treated him as an idol and even a god.

And they said, he must be God to do the things that he's done, to conquer as he's conquered. And Julius Caesar was not offended by that, he was rather pleased. He was followed by a man called Augustus who took it one stage further.

He actually said, I am a god. And he ordered temples to be built all over the Roman Empire so that he could be worshipped as God. And the first temple to Augustus was built in Asia, in the very place where these seven churches were.

And emperor worship became the major religion. And that was carried further by each succeeding emperor until the end of the first century AD. Around the year 90, Domitian, a dreadful man, was now the Roman Emperor.

And he commanded that once a year every member of the Roman Empire had to stand before a bust of Caesar, a statue of Domitian, and they had to raise a hand and say three words, Caesar is Lord. That's all, once a year.

And then they had to take some incense and throw it on an altar fire and the smoke would ascend as a prayer to the emperor. And you had to do that on pain of death. And Domitian gave a unique name to the day on which everybody had to do that.

He called it the Lord's Day. And John the Apostle says, I was in the Spirit in prison on the Lord's Day. And every Christian reading that thinks it means Sunday. Sunday was never called the Lord's Day in the New Testament.

They called Sunday the first day of the week. And it is a very unusual phrase. It's not two nouns put together as it is in your English version, Lord and day, the day of the Lord. The word Lord is an adjective.

It's the lordy day or the lordly day, which is precisely the title Domitian gave that annual worship of the emperor day. And that's why it's called the Lord's Day. If it was simply a Sunday, John would have said, I was in the Spirit in prison on a Lord's Day.

But he said, no, I was there on the Lord's Day. And here he is cut off from the circuit of seven churches that he ministered to in his old age. He used to walk around a ring road and all those seven churches were on that ring road.

And now he's in prison and he can't reach them and it's the Lord's Day. And he realizes that this is going to be the greatest test of Christian loyalty so far in the history of the church. People are going to be killed if they will not say those three words.

There are some moving records of Christians who refuse to say them on the grounds that their creed, their simple three-word creed in the early church inspired by the Spirit was, Jesus is Lord. And they would not say that of anyone else.

One was a young mother and they arrested her and her baby and they put her in one cell and her baby in the cell next door and the baby was crying for her milk. And they said to the mother, as soon as you say, Caesar is Lord, you can feed your baby.

And the baby cried and cried and gradually the cries became quieter and finally died away altogether. And that mother refused to say three words in order to breastfeed her own baby. I wonder how many women in churches in America today would pass that test.

They were so furious with her they took her out and they made a fire and they put an iron sheet on the fire till it was red-hot and then they fried her alive on the sheet of red-hot iron because she wouldn't say three words.

Already in one of the seven churches, one of the members has been martyred. Jesus mentions that in the letter to that church. His name was Antipas. That's rather a strange coincidence, how ironic, because it means against everybody.

Antipas means against all, and against all pressure Antipas had already paid for his faith with his life. So this is the background to the book of Revelation. And John's heart is with the seven little churches, realizing the enormous pressure that there's now going to be on those churches, the trouble that is coming to them.

Are they ready for that? And as he no doubt was thinking of them and praying for them on this terrible day, he heard a voice behind him, write everything down that you see. That's the beginning, and that's how the book of Revelation came to be.

The word martyr in Greek originally simply meant witness, someone who gave testimony in a law court. But it changed its meaning very early in the church's history because those who were faithful to give testimony paid for it with their lives.

And the word martyr changed from meaning simply someone who spoke a testimony to someone who was willing to die for their faith. And that's how we've used the Greek word martyr ever since. Big trouble ahead.

Overcoming Suffering and Looking Toward Glory

Now two things are calls from the Lord Jesus to his church. One, I've already mentioned, to endure, to see it through, to stick it, to remain faithful to Jesus whatever the cost or consequence. But he also called for another response to the trouble, and again I've mentioned it to you already last week.

The word overcome is a key word throughout this book, not just to endure under all this pressure but to come out on top of it. And in one of the letters Jesus says, you are to overcome as I overcame. I got on top of trouble and you must too.