(Revelation) 07 the Fall of Babylon and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb — David Pawson

I'm afraid we're still in the big trouble. There is one more aspect of it that we need to look at. We're now at the climax of world history, at the great denouement. Tragically, again and again in these last few chapters, you find this statement, the world still did not repent.

And even more strongly, the world cursed God. You know the worst aircraft disaster on the ground. It happened in the Canary Islands some years ago. A jumbo jet was just taking off from the runway and a pilot who was in a hurry to get home pulled another jumbo jet straight into the path of the one just taking off, which sliced the top off the lower one and then both collapsed together and burst into flames.

There was a Christian in the bottom jumbo jet towards the rear. He described later how a ball of fire came down through the cabin incinerating people. They just became charred black remnants. Being a Christian, he sat quietly, but what struck him most was that most of the people ahead of him were cursing God as it happened.

In their final moments, they were cursing God for this inferno in which they were to die. But he quietly composed himself and used the prayer of Jesus into your hands I commit my spirit. Extraordinarily, there was an explosion under his seat and he found himself shooting up into the air.

Since the other jet had sliced off the top of the cabin, it was now open to the sky and he shot out of that hole. He scraped his hands on the jagged aluminium edges of the hole, but he went right out and slid down the fuselage onto the wing, slid off the wing onto the grass and left.

He was the one survivor from that plane. But he was prepared to die and quietly committed his spirit to God, but God's time was not yet up for him. But it struck him so much that in the disaster so many people were cursing God.

I was talking to a man in Heathrow Airport, London, whose job it is to deal with the black box recording that is examined after crashes to see what the last pilot's words were in the cockpit and so on, to see if that gives a clue as to why the crash occurred.

Actually, it's not a black box, it's bright orange so that they can see it in the wreckage, but everybody calls it the black box. I asked him a question. I said, is it true that sometimes you do something to that tape before it's played to the inquiry?

He said, what do you mean? I said, well I have heard that sometimes the last words of the pilot are cursing God, knowing that they're about to die. He said, well yes, when that happens we do remove that from the tape before it is played to the inquiry.

Alas, disasters either bring you nearer to God or turn you against God. Here we have in the book of Revelation confirmation that the big trouble leaves people refusing to repent and turn to God and actually cursing him.

Babylon and Jerusalem as the Two Cities of Human History

Now from now on, the book of Revelation is all about two women, two ladies who are very different from each other. All the individuals in the book of Revelation are male. The three females in the book of Revelation, for there are three, are all personifications.

They are not individuals, they represent someone or something else. And the two ladies who round off this whole saga of the future, one is a filthy prostitute and the other is a pure bride. A tale of two women covers the rest of the book of Revelation, but they each represent a city.

The two women represent Babylon and Jerusalem. The filthy prostitute represents the city of Babylon and the pure bride represents the new Jerusalem. Cities have a history and I want to give you quite a lot of information about cities first before we look at these two.

One is the city of man and the other is the city of God. These two are in opposition, have been all the way through history. Babylon and Jerusalem are totally different places. In the Bible generally, cities are bad places, they have a bad history.

Indeed, they are first mentioned in connection with Lamech, the first man to forge weapons of mass destruction, a descendant of Cain. So that's where cities began, on the wrong side of the family tree, not in the godly line but in the godless line.

They are bad places because they concentrate people and therefore they concentrate sinners and therefore they concentrate sin. Big cities have a peculiar habit of concentrating sin, that's why they become dangerous places.

For example, you find lust is concentrated in cities. That's where prostitutes, via their trade, over half the homosexuals in England live in London. The cities concentrate lust. They concentrate anger.

Violence, rioting takes place in the big cities. You never heard of a riot taking place in the countryside. Sin is concentrated in cities and the two particular sins that are concentrated in Babylon are pride and greed.

You will find more pride in the cities than anywhere else. Look at the architecture. The pride of man is reflected in architecture. The Twin Towers in New York represented human pride because the architect said, I designed this as a monument to human greatness, and they were.

So we have pride concentrated and not just in the architecture, but above all greed is concentrated in cities. That's where you go to make money. That's where you go to worship Mammon. People seeking their fortune don't go into the countryside, they make for the big city.

There is at this moment around the world a gigantic migration into cities. We now have Metropolis, the big city, but soon we shall have Megalopolis. Already people are talking about a Megalopolis around the Great Lakes here in North America, a continuous stream of urban development that is one gigantic city.

So we have this bad image of cities which on the whole are antagonistic to God. They're more godless than people living in the countryside, largely because they are more anonymous. You can hide in a city much more easily than you can in a rural area.

Babel, Nimrod, and the Human Ambition to Challenge God

Now the great city that challenged God in the Old Testament was Babylon. It began as the Tower of Babel or Babel by the great Euphrates River with a man Nimrod, a mighty hunter, a big man with ambitions, and he wanted to build the tallest building in the world.

That is still the ambition of many nations today as I'm going to show you. But he was the first to want a building that reached up into God's sphere but that man had built. So he built the Tower of Babel.

Since it was in Mesopotamia there was no stone available, no rock available, and he certainly didn't have steel so he couldn't build what we know as a skyscraper today. They only had bricks stuck together with bitumen and so they had to build a kind of stepped pyramid to get a tall tower.

So don't think of the Tower of Babel as a New York skyscraper but as a stepped pyramid. Well let me show you. Let's look at one. In fact, this may be the remains of the Tower of Babel for all we know.

All that remains of it is a large stepped pyramid built of brick, baked from the clay of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Let's look at a reconstruction of what that might have been like in the days when it was a mighty building.

Since the Mesopotamian basin is absolutely flat like your prairies here, you could see this from mile after mile. There it stood, a man-made mountain reaching up into God's sphere. God had to deal with that.

Actually, it was the first occasion on which he gave the gift of tongues. Did you ever see it that way? But that time he gave it to confuse people and separate them, gave them different languages. That's a whole other story, but it's fascinating that some with a new language which we now know as Chinese went east over the Himalaya Mountains and settled in what we now know as China.

In the Chinese characters of the Chinese language, you find everything from Genesis 1 to 7, 1 to 11, right up to the Tower of Babel. You can preach Genesis 1 to 11 from the characters of the Chinese language.

Isn't that amazing? For example, the Chinese for a boat or a ship is a picture of a vessel with eight mouths in it. Where did that come from? Noah's Ark. The word for temptation is a garden with two trees in it.

Where did that come from? So even the modern Chinese language has memories of Babel, but they have nothing in their characters from Genesis 11 onwards. That's what happened at Babel, people were confused, separated.

Babel, and we still use the word for babbling for confused speech which has no sense. That later became the city of Babylon. It grew and grew. You see, it was on the mighty river Euphrates. Cities have to be at some focus of easy transport, either the coast, a river mouth, or a river, or a major road, or later a railroad.

But a city can only grow if it's a centre of transport and trade. That's how cities grow. Here, Kansas City, over half the G .I .s of World War II passed through Union Station in Kansas City because it's a key transport focus.

Well now, that's how cities grow and Babylon grew. It's interesting to contrast it with Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not on a trade route. Jerusalem is not on a river. Jerusalem is not on an international road.

It's there because God put it there. There is no other reason for Jerusalem to be a capital of anywhere. But Babylon is a typical human capital built for money, for greed, for trade, and it grew into a mighty empire and became the Babylonian Empire.

And an Antichrist, not the Antichrist, but one of the many that have been in the world, was Nebuchadnezzar who ruled over this. I love the story of his conversion. He went mad for seven years and they locked him up in his own private zoo.

I mustn't get sidetracked, but Nebuchadnezzar is an amazing character that you ought to study. He was an Antichrist until the Lord took his sanity away and he ate grass like animals for seven years and his nails grew like eagles' claws and his hair grew like birds' feathers, all because he said, Mine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.

Those are his exact words. And he got one word wrong of course. He said, Mine are the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And God says, no they're not, they're mine. Then he came to his senses and for the rest of his life he worshipped the God of Israel, the Most High God.

It's an amazing story. But Babylon became the enemy of Jerusalem and it was through Babylon that Jerusalem was first destroyed and its temple brought to rubble. The city of man reduced the city of God to nothing.

That's been the tale ever since. Well now as we move on. Oh by the way, let's just show you that Babel has not finished. Here's a page from Time magazine not long ago, and here are the things that man is trying to build.

There's the Empire State Building which was for long the tallest building in New York, but now it's dwarfed, or it was. And now we've got up to the tallest towers in the world at the moment are the Twin Towers, the Petron Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

I've seen them, they are awe-inspiring. Two towers joined by a bridge halfway up. But I wanted to show you this. A British architect has now designed a tower that is eight hundred metres high. That's what, getting in for half a mile?

It's an incredible height. It's designed to be built in the sea, with most of it underwater. It will house fifty thousand people and everything they need will be in that tower. Restaurants, cinemas, entertainment, everything that a person needs for life is going to be in that tower.

And they're going to build it in an earthquake zone. The pride of man is now so confident that they can build that in an earthquake zone. On the principle, well it's a scientific principle, but they noticed in the last Japanese earthquake that the taller buildings survived and the shorter buildings fell.

And somebody asked, why? They found out that it was because when the ground is vibrating at a certain pitch, the shorter building can vibrate at the same pitch and begins to break up. Whereas the taller building moves at a slower pitch while the ground is going quickly and therefore will stand.

I don't know, but on the basis of that belief they're going to build this. They've yet to decide whether it's to be built in Taiwan or Japan, but the British architect has got it all worked out so that whoever builds it says, we are now the greatest.

We now have the tallest and the Sears Tower in Chicago will be dwarfed by this. Babel is still around, it's still in men's minds, building monuments to man's greatness and glory. Well now there have been many Babylons in history in a sense.

Babylon’s Fall in the Prophets and Its Echo in Revelation

Incidentally, the original Babylon fell and I think I should really read something about that. When the Israelites were taken off into Babylon when Jerusalem was destroyed, this is how they felt when they found themselves camping beside the rivers of Babylon.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplar trees we hung up our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy, and they said, sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill and my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. If I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.

O daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us, he who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks. Does that touch your heart? This is the cry of the people of God.

But both Isaiah and Jeremiah said, Babylon is doomed. Listen to this because it's peculiarly echoed in the book of Revelation, flee from Babylon, run for your lives, don't be destroyed because of her sins.

It is time for the Lord's vengeance, he will pay her what she deserves. Babylon was a gold cup in the Lord's hand, she made the whole earth drunk. The nations drank her wine, therefore they have now gone mad.

Babylon will suddenly fall and be broken. Wail over her, get balm for her pain. Perhaps she can be healed. We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed. Let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.

Let's go to Isaiah. Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians' pride, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah. She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations.

No Arab will pitch his tent there, no shepherd will rest his flocks there, but desert creatures will be there. Jackals will fill her houses and the owls will dwell there, and there the wild goats will leap about.

Hyenas will howl in her strongholds, jackals in her luxurious palaces. Her time is at hand and her days will not be prolonged. That's the final result of Babylon's attitude to Jerusalem and God's people.

It's quite dramatic, isn't it? We're going to hear echoes of that in the New Testament. Incidentally, Saddam Hussein is the first man to rebuild anything in the ancient city of Babylon. It has lain in ruins, indeed until a hundred years ago it was totally lost.

No one knew where it was, and then an English archaeologist found it again. And Saddam Hussein has rebuilt the Ishtar Gate and rebuilt the palace of Nebuchadnezzar which he uses as a summer palace, but still there are no residents there.

They only move in for his holidays. And he invited people to come and see something. He has a laser beam projector in the old palace of Nebuchadnezzar which shines onto the clouds when there's a cloudy sky and portrays a profile of Nebuchadnezzar and Saddam Hussein next to it.

And he proudly claims he has the shame-shaped nose, so must be the direct descendant. It is his ambition to be another Nebuchadnezzar. Not surprisingly, therefore, Jerusalem is his greatest enemy, but that's another story.

The Final Babylon as a Godless Global Capital

What is the Babylon mentioned in Revelation? It's not that old one rebuilt because this Babylon is on the coast somewhere and its ruin is seen by ships at sea, so it's not the rebuilding of the old Babylon.

There have been many Babylons, as I've said. But the vision that now is presented to John the Apostle—sorry, no it was that way—is a horrible vision. This is the scarlet woman, this prostitute, sitting on that red dragon, riding it.

The artist in London gave me that picture which he felt symbolized this Babylon that will exist at the end of history and the woman. She is drinking, but she's drinking blood. She's drinking the blood of the saints.

She's drunk on the blood of the saints. Clearly, many Christians will die in this Babylon wherever it is. So let's try and work through and think about this Babylon that is mentioned at the end of Revelation.

The first thing we need to notice is it is not a religious city. It is a godless city. Therefore, those who said it was the Pope are totally out of place. Rome was the first city to which the Bible applies the word Babylon.

Peter, writing his letter at the end, says this, The church who is in Babylon sends greetings. But of course, there was no church in Babylon then. It was lying ruined and empty. But he's writing from Rome, and Rome became a Babylon.

You see, the Tower of Babel and the ancient Babylon and Rome were all foreshadowings of the final Babylon. I've tried to tell you this week that the final events all cast their shadows before them, and Babel or Babylon was a foreshadowing of the final Babylon, the final city that opposes God.

But in Revelation, it is a city of pleasure, it is a city of money, it is a city of trade. It's a city where pleasure is traded for money, hence the picture of a prostitute as representing the city. Does that kind of give you a feel?

I believe that is another foreshadowing of Babylon. I was alarmed to read that it's now becoming a family holiday resort for people. Well, they tell me it's very nice away from the centre, but the centre horrifies me.

I'd never take my family to a place like that for a holiday. Or what about Germany? Frankfurt on Main in the middle of Germany is making a bid to become the financial centre of Europe. London still holds that crown, but Frankfurt on Main is boldly wanting that.

So I went to see the city to get a feel of it. They have built a vast new stock exchange to handle the stocks and shares of Europe. Outside the stock exchange, they have erected a huge golden calf. Would you believe it?

A bull calf from ancient Egypt, a huge golden calf. It's right there. Then I went into the huge new bank headquarters and I tell you, I thought I'd walked into hell. When I entered the huge new foyer, not quite as big as this room, there is a massive painting around the walls, a mural about three metres deep right round, and it's a picture of hell.

Every known sin is portrayed in this portrait and it's full of demons, horrible things, gloating over their victims. I remember one particularly. It showed a fat, bloated banker standing up to his knees in Deutschmarks and a grinning demon over his shoulder, a man whom Mammon had captured.

It's a horrible mural and I wanted to get away from it quickly so I went through to where there are cashiers and counters where you can have bank dealings. But in there I was even more horrified. There were figures standing before the counter.

They were bronze figures, all totally naked, of men and women in the last stages of degradation and decadence. There was a great, fat, naked man with piggy eyes and his belly. He hadn't seen his feet in years.

Next to him was clearly a prostitute full of disease, withering away. You have to stand in a queue with these bronze statues before you can get any money. I will briefly show you the kind of thing. There are the statues that you stand with to get your cash in this bank.

Here is part of the mural, but my camera went wrong and couldn't even pick up some of these pictures. Well, all this is foreshadowing the final Babel. It will be a place of perverted pleasure, of trade, of money, of everything that man wants concentrated in one final world trade centre, of which the Twin Towers in New York were a foreshadowing.

Now where it will be, I don't know. But it will be the world financial centre and the world pleasure centre rolled into one, the last big Babylon of all, the most godless place where mammon is worshipped.

It says that financial centre will dominate the world rulers. One of the great changes we've seen happen in recent decades is that the real power in our world is not with politicians but with big business, that the economic factors are controlling the situation.

Now with multinational corporations, do you know that all the business of the world is in less than three hundred gigantic business corporations now? It's all heading up to one control system of international wealth and commerce.

Again, the scenario in Revelation becomes only too credible as we see what happens. Now it's very interesting. God has pronounced the fall of Babylon, the end of Babylon, but he doesn't bring it about.

What happens is that the rulers controlled from Babylon rebel against this financial control and it is they who destroy Babylon, as Hitler destroyed the Jewish economy in Germany which was holding it up.

Politicians jealous for power become jealous of businessmen who have more control than they have, and that's what will finally happen to this city. It will be destroyed by those who are jealous of her power, who envy her power.

Though it does say, God puts it into their hearts that the way to be free of Babylon's control is to destroy Babylon. Therefore, it will be destroyed by people with political ambition to get rid of the financial control of the world.

So Babylon falls and the Bible says that the fires that destroyed it were visible to ships at sea and they saw Babylon fall. When I saw that on television, and I happened to be buying an air ticket when the crisis in New York began, and suddenly all the people who were serving customers huddled together in a frightened little group and I went to them and said, what's wrong?

They said, we've just heard there's been a serious air crash in America. I dashed home and switched on the television, so was actually watching it happen as many of you were. I don't think I've ever seen such a shocking broadcast.

To see it happen and to see those towers with their brilliant new design, a design that facilitated their collapse so quickly, it went down like a pack of cards. What a sight it was. But when I saw that particular scene on the television, for a moment I thought I was watching Babylon fall.

But then I realized that it could not be a fulfillment of Revelation's prediction because New York is not drunk with the blood of the saints and therefore it cannot be New York. I had letters and phone calls even from America asking me, was this the fulfillment?

Was Revelation coming true and was the next thing Jesus return? And I said, no, it is a very clear foreshadowing of the fall of Babylon, but it isn't it yet. We can very easily get too panicky or excited because a foreshadowing of the future has happened, but we must be careful not to say this is it until it really happens and we will know.

Revelation’s Three Instructions to Christians in Babylon

Well now, what does Revelation say to Christians about this final Babylon? Three things. First, it tells us that Babylon will be a very dangerous place for Christians to stay in because the one group of people who will be hated in this pleasure-loving, money-worshiping capital city, centre of the world's trade, will be the Christians.

They will be the only conscience in the city, the only people to raise a protest, the only people to stand for the things of God and they will be hated for it. So clearly there will be many martyrs in this city.

It says, she is drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus, to be in that final world trade centre and talk about Jesus will be to sign your death penalty. That's what the first thing Revelation says to Christians.

Secondly, Christians are told, get out of her, flee from her. Exactly the same words that Isaiah used are used here. Flee from Babylon, don't stay until she is judged for her sins or you'll die with her.

Get out. Of course, that's yet another indication that Christians have to get out themselves. They are not taken out, they are in it, but they need to get out. There will come a time, and maybe it's getting quite near, when Christians will have to disassociate themselves from the increasing secularity of business, of commerce.

Indeed, I talk to businessmen and many of them say, I don't know that I can continue in business. It is now getting so corrupt. Well, it's not just business that. I'm afraid even doctors and nurses and teachers are now telling me this kind of thing.

They wonder how much longer they can continue in an increasingly godless profession. So, Christians are told here in Revelation, come out of her my people so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues, for her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes.

So many Christians will die in Babylon, but others will remember the Word of the Lord and get out before it's too late and flee from such a gripping spider with its worldwide web. And then the third thing Christians are told is the most surprising.

When Babylon falls, Christians are told to sing Hallelujah. Now they will be the only people shouting Hallelujah on that day. I mean here is the collapse of world trade. It will close down the world stock exchange.

It will be the end of all your pension and your savings. Your stocks and shares will be not worth the paper they're written on. The whole financial web of the world will have gone. Hallelujah! My bank has closed, my account has gone, my savings have gone, my pension's gone.

Hallelujah! Now this is a very surprising development, isn't it? How many of you have heard a performance of Handel's Messiah? A lot of you. Well of course there's one chorus in that, the Hallelujah Chorus, and it's probably the best-known part of Handel's Oratorio.

You probably don't do this in America, but in England whenever the Hallelujah Chorus starts people stand up and sit down afterwards. Somebody's nodding back there so I know you know this. Do you know why?

It's a rather silly story really. The king, King George was the king at the first performance for Handel, wrote it for him. And when he reached the Hallelujah Chorus it was such a mighty musical item that King George was convinced it was the end of the show and got up to leave.

Now in England when royalty stands, everybody has to get up. So the whole audience stood up and somebody said to the king, this is not the end of it, it's just one of the choruses. So he stood to the end and then he sat down again and everybody sat down with the king for the rest of the oratorio.

And ever since it's become a tradition to stand for the Hallelujah Chorus. But what many people who love that chorus don't know is that it's taken from Revelation 19. All the words are taken, Hallelujah for the Lord God Omnipotent reigns.

That's Revelation 19. It's the celebration of the collapse of world economy. Sometimes when I'm at Handel's Messiah I want to get up when they start singing, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, and they get so excited.

I want to say, do you realise you're celebrating the end of your pensions, your savings, stocks and shares? I've never dared to do it yet but I'm not beyond that kind of thing. Maybe one day I'm going to do it and get a headline and at least people will then know where Handel got that from.

Hallelujah for the Lord God Omnipotent reigns. When you see Babylon fall you join the Hallelujah Chorus and it sounds like rushing mighty waters. It's a celebration that the grip of finance on our world and the grip of pleasure on our world is broken because then the other lady can come, the new Jerusalem like a bride adorned for her husband.

That's why Christians sing Hallelujah. It's not because of revenge, it's because the end of one thing is the beginning of another. How are we doing for time? One more hour? Oh right, then I must rush on.

Then let's go beyond. I'm finished with the big trouble. I thought I'd hear the Hallelujah Chorus. All right. Revelation is made up of two kinds of revelation, visions and voices. John is told to write down everything he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears.

For the last few chapters it's all been, I heard, I heard, I heard, I heard. I heard the angel shout, Babylon is fallen. I heard the sound of many voices singing Hallelujah, the Lord God Omnipotent reigns.

It's all hearing about Babylon. Then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, after an announcement that the time for a wedding has come, it changes to I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw. And now we are into the final visions that John had in the prison in Patmos.

We're back to seeing again, and altogether there are seven visions which he sees. Now it is unfortunate that your Bible and mine is divided into chapters. By the way, you can now get the New International Version without chapter and verse numbers.

A friend of mine who is a professor of law in Malibu University near Los Angeles has produced the New International Version without chapter and verse numbers and in chronological order so that you can now read the Word of God in the order in which God gave it, because your Bible and mine is not in chronological order at all.

The prophets are arranged in the Old Testament, the biggest first and the smallest last. The letters of Paul are arranged the biggest first and the smallest last, Romans and Philemon. This is not really the most helpful way to read a Bible, but to read it in the order in which it happened, the order in which God gave his Word, is profoundly helpful.

His name is Professor Lagard Smith, belongs to the Church of Christ, and he's a lovely Christian man. I only met him because I wrote a book called Leadership is Male, and he wrote a book saying almost exactly the same thing under another title at the same time.

He heard of my book and got in touch with me and we became friends. But there it is. The tragedy of chapter and verse numbers is partly that it divides what God put together and some of the chapter divisions are in just the wrong place.

The problem with the verse numbers is that it makes it too easy to quote a verse without quoting the context. Now for a thousand years, Christians had Bibles that had no chapter and verse numbers in, and boy did they know their Bibles.

What they did was they searched the scriptures, we're told. What modern Christians want to do is look them up, do you know what I mean? And somebody says to me, why do you never give chapter and verse numbers, David?

Well I say, because I want you to search the scriptures for what I say, not look them up, because you just look up a text in isolation. I showed you the other day that many people can quote John 3 .16 but they can't quote John 3 .15 or John 3 .17, and so they've lost the real context of that statement and therefore lost a great deal of its meaning.

But the chapter divisions are often in just the wrong place. Some of you are so busy copying all that down that you're not hearing what I'm saying. Copy that down as I get to it please. Well, the chapter divisions are often in just the wrong place.

Genesis 1 and 2 are divided in the wrong place. The worst case is the beautiful chapter Isaiah 53, the song of the suffering servant of God. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed. You know that lovely song, don't you? It's a song. Unfortunately, the first verse of the song is in chapter 52 and so it's never read with the rest of the song.

And yet the first verse of a song gives the tone and direction of it, and here we have the most outstanding example. These are the last series of seven things in the New Testament, in the book of Revelation, and yet hardly anybody notices them because they've been split between three chapters.

And since we tend to stop at chapter endings or start at chapter beginnings, I've never heard the seven visions read together. I read them last week to you together and that may have been the first time you ever heard that.

Seven times I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, and they not only belong together but they are consecutive, things that happen after each other. They are chronological. If only that had been realized centuries ago, there would be no arguments about the millennium.

Isn't that sad? You'd never have heard of amillennial people and premillennial and postmillennial. I'm going to talk about them this afternoon later. A friend of mine got off a plane in Belfast where they're very good sermon tasters.

They like to know your theology before they let you loose on their congregations. And my friend got off the plane and somebody said, are you amillennial, premillennial, or postmillennial? And he said, that is a preposterous question, which I thought was a pretty good answer to them.

But we'll talk about this this afternoon, but there'd be no argument if people had spotted that these seven visions are the final seven and belong together in the book of Revelation. But we'll see that more clearly this afternoon when I talk about it.

The Rider on the White Horse and the Return of Christ

Let's begin to look at some of the visions. The big trouble is over. An announcement has been made that the wedding is about to take place and the bride has made herself ready on earth in fine linen, the righteous deeds of the saints.

So everything is ready for the wedding except one thing, the bridegroom hasn't appeared, and that's rather important. So what do we see? As soon as in chapter 19 verse 11, there I've given you a head start.