161. HE RULES THE WORLD (Revelation 1:4-6)

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That's a kingdom that is expanding like leaven in a lump, Matthew 13, 33.

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It is a kingdom that's crashing into the nations like a stone that crashes into the foot of the statue in Daniel 2, 35.

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And it is a kingdom that will never be destroyed, Daniel 7, 14, and never be shaken,

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Hebrews 12. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 161, He Rules the World. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

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I'm your host, Pastor Kendall Lankford, and we are back with another dose of salty, kick -in -the -pants truth from scripture.

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And in case you're new here, I wanted to tell you why this show exists. This show exists because we live in a time where weak, pathetic men have proliferated pulpits, where soft and careful cowards have multiplied, where men with no spine have donned the mantle of leadership and in their sugary, sweet tones and words and their hyper effeminate tongue, they have made the church fat, sick, and nearly dead.

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And because of this, it's my belief that we need now more than ever raw, unfiltered biblical truth.

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We need men who are not afraid to speak the unvarnished truth of scripture. We need men who are not ashamed to confront the cultural idols of our day, who are willing to disagree with the prevailing social narrative and who are clear -headed enough to give it to the church, to the people of God, straight from the scriptures with no goofy

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Christianese chasers. For instance, on this show, you are not going to hear any

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Jesus is my boyfriend ballads. You're not gonna hear me talk about liver shivers and Holy Spirit -like genie -in -a -bottle sort of incantations.

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And you're certainly not gonna see, you're not gonna see a man whose genes are tighter than his commitment to sola scriptura.

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This show is biblical and this show is raw on purpose. I speak strongly and I speak with intentionality and I back up everything that I'm saying from God's word because I believe that God's people today need to be prodded towards righteousness and all of the enemies of God put swiftly under our

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Lord and Savior's feet. And this show focuses a ton of our energy and effort on eschatology, which is the study of the end times because what you believe about the end times is actually gonna shape how you behave in our time.

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For instance, if you live like you're going to lose in the end, then you're going to behave like a loser in the middle.

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You're gonna give up early. You're gonna throw in the towel and you're gonna wave the white flag when things get hard and you're gonna stop short of everything that God has called you to because just upon the horizon is the next antichrist, is the next defeat, is the next mark of the beast and so on and so forth.

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But if you believe that you are going to win and that through Christ, the church is gonna triumph and if I can prove that to you from scripture that we are going to advance the dominion of Jesus and that he's gonna have dominion all over the earth as the water covers the sea, that we are not destined to be lovable losers in this world but that we are destined to bring the gospel of Christ into all of life, well, if I can convince you of that, then every moment of your life is now infused with meaning because you're gonna realize that you have a part in the spread of his dominion, that your efforts are contributing to his victory and if I can get you to see that, then it will change your life.

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So we spent a lot of time on this show recovering a biblical eschatology.

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We've been doing that on purpose because I believe that it is super important. Now with that, last time we were together,

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I wasn't able to be with you last week because I had a very busy week but last time we were together, we opened up the book of Revelation and we considered how the book of Revelation is a unique blessing to anyone who will read it.

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It is the only book in the Bible that promises unique blessings for anyone who opens up its pages and reads it.

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Far from this book being a waste of time or the cemetery for your Bible reading plan and you know exactly what

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I mean when I'm saying that. Like for instance, you start off strong in Genesis and you devour that book in a week and then

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Exodus is rocking until you get to like chapter 21 then you mostly skim the back half of Exodus, you outright skip

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Leviticus like kale chips at a kid's birthday party and then Revelation, well, if you make it that far, the wheels usually fall off of the proverbial car as it gets pummeled with white hailstones, flames, locust,

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Apache helicopters and nanobots and everything else. Or you see it like this, that the actual book of Revelation is glorious, that it actually is a blessing.

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In fact, it's the only book in the Bible, like I said, that promises that you will be blessed if you read it. Is it any wonder that the world, the flesh and the devil have been spending 2000 years trying to keep you away from this book because it's the only book that says you'll be blessed if you read it?

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That's why. I'm so glad that we're considering these things together and we're going through this series on the book of Revelation and that leads us to our text today, which is

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Revelation one, four through six. As we're gonna be continuing on in our study, we're gonna be considering why this book promises that it's such a deep and a glorious blessing and that is because it promises us a high and very glorious king.

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And that is what we're gonna be talking about today, how Jesus Christ became king.

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Not in the future, not in some indeterminate point at the end of the world. No, we're gonna see today how

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God became king of the world 2000 years ago and how for 2000 years, Jesus has been ruling over the kingdoms of men, how he is the ruler of the kings, how that happened in the first century, how that's being delivered down to us through the centuries and how you and I can find our part in the kingship and in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

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So with that, buckle up because we are about to get started.

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The book of Revelation chapter one, verse four says this, John to the seven churches that are in Asia, grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.

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And from the seven spirits who are before his throne and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of earth, to him who loves us and released us from our sins by his blood and he has made us to be a kingdom of priests to his

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God and father. To him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever.

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Amen. And that leads us to part one, a royal context.

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Now, David Chilton once warned us this, he said, toothless, impotent

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Christianity is a goldmine for statism. But he goes on to say, but the early church, they weren't toothless.

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They taught the biblical doctrine of Christ's Lordship, that he is Lord of all, that he's ruler of the kings of the earth.

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That's what Chilton said. And while it's true that a modern form of this kind of toothless

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Christianity has laid out the red carpet for every single globo homo status today, while the early church did not do that.

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When Jesus died and rose from the grave and appeared to more than 500 witnesses and poured out his spirit upon all of those who were standing there at Pentecost.

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When the spirit of God descended upon all of those who were in Jerusalem at the time, and then even kept falling on church after church after church all throughout the

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Roman world. The earliest believers recognized that something seismic had happened.

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They realized that the system of Judaism no longer had any teeth. It was like great grandma trying to gum her mashed potatoes.

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And that God had vacated the temple once and for all to make his permanent dwelling place now within the hearts of men.

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And because of that, they spent every waking moment telling people to abandon the sinking ship of Judaism, to abandon mosaic formalism, to abandon the temple and the feast and the priest and all of that, and to cling to the life raft that is

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Jesus Christ before it was too late. Far from being toothless, this kind of Christianity had teeth and it had a spine.

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And that is what our first century ancestors were willing to do.

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They were willing to stand up and to die for the cause of Christ. Not because they welcomed death that there's some kind of kinky weirdo sadist from San Francisco, no.

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But because if Christ's resurrection was true, if his kingship and dominion were true, then all of their countrymen were going to die and were gonna be eternally damned and flung into the flames of the lake of fire and brimstone.

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And in their mind, it was better to die trying to wake up their brothers and sisters to the power of the gospel than to live a comfortable, cushy

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Starbucks latte life while their comrades and their countrymen were falling headlong into hell.

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Because of that, they were willing to be tortured. They were willing to be viciously martyred by the ones that they were praying that would get saved.

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And because they saw that God had abandoned the system of temples and abandoned the priesthood and abandoned the ceremonial law.

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And they saw that the Davidic throne that had been left empty since the Babylonian invasion of 586

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BC had now been inhabited by the true son of David, Jesus Christ who was now ruler over the kings of earth,

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Matthew 28, 18. Well, then that transformed everything. And that made dying for Jesus purposeful as they were trying to reach their brothers, their sisters, their fathers, their mothers, their neighbors, their cousins, and their countrymen.

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Now, I want you to think about this from their perspective for a moment. I want you to imagine that you were living in the city of Pergamum, which is one of the seven cities that John is writing this letter to.

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You're living in the city of Pergamum in the modern day country of Turkey around the year 66

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AD. You had been all your life a diaspora Jew, which meant that you were a

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Jew through and through. You were a real Jew, but you were living outside of the homeland of the Jews called Judah.

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You were a kind of Jew that went to Jerusalem every year for Passover and for the Yom Kippur and the other high holy day festivals.

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And yet at some point you, as you were going back and forth between the years 50 and 66, let's say it was around 65, 66, at some point as you're going to the city, you hear rumblings in the crowd among this new

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David, about this new Davidic king, about a man who offered himself up as a sacrifice.

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It would end all sacrifices. And before you knew heads or tails of it, before you even knew what it meant, the

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Holy Spirit of God leaped inside of your chest and regenerated your soul. And you found yourself crying out,

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Christ is Lord. Much to your amazement and astonishment, the

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Spirit of God was authoring the profession that Jesus is King. Now, very soon after that, because you're the head of your family at this point, your entire family now is bowing and echoing that confession.

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And very soon you realize that you're not very liked. You're not very loved. You're actually public enemy number one, because in Judah, if you say that Jesus is

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Lord, well, you are now, you've got a target on your back from all of the non -Elech

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Apostate Jews who were living in Jerusalem. And when you flee and when you go back home, you realize that all the people in the synagogue also now hate you because of Jesus.

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Before long, you find out that local groups of people who confess that Jesus is Lord have been meeting in the city.

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And you're like, okay, I need to meet with them. I need to get to know them. And they let you in. They examine you.

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They ask you, is Jesus Lord? You say yes. And then you start coming into this thing called the church, a very foreign institution to you since you grew up in the synagogue.

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Now, this would have been a home church. And by home church today, we think of people with candles from Yankee Candle and from everybody having their own coffee cup and with some guy with long hair or a man bun playing his acoustic guitar and singing

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Jesus loves me this I know or something like that. That's not what a home church was back then.

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Back then, a home church meant a dirt floor. It meant meeting under the threat of Roman persecution.

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It meant having communion elements like bread and wine that were smuggled in, hidden in your cloak so that no one would see them.

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It meant in the midst of all of these things that you would be meeting with people who were both

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Jew and Gentile for the first time in your life. You would have been meeting with Gentiles and they would have been confessing the same thing you're confessing that Jesus Christ is

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Lord, that he is the true fulfillment of the entire Mosaic Covenant. And you would have been astonished seeing this.

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You would have been meeting with male, female, slave, free, Jew, Gentile. The dividing wall had been broken down and you would be sitting flabbergasted in these underground gatherings watching what this

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King Jesus was doing. But regardless of who was coming after you and the persecution that you were facing, what you would have noticed is that the word of God, the

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Old Testament scriptures that you had your entire life was now coming alive inside of you in a way that you had never felt before.

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You were feeling like that you had met the author, the one who gave

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Moses the words, the prophet that Moses prophesied about, the one that David looked to.

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You met him and his name is Jesus. Now, not long after beginning this brand new journey with Christ and his underground persecuted people called the church,

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I want you to imagine that your pastor is publicly arrested and imprisoned because of his confession that Christ is

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Lord. A few weeks later, one of your children is discovered drawing in the dirt a picture of a fish,

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Ichthus, which is a symbol for Jesus in those days. They would draw the picture of the fish to identify themselves as a

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Christian. And your child was drawing it in the sand and they're noticed by a local Jew in the market and they're grabbed by their hair and they're pulled out of the city and they're stoned to death in public as you watch in horror.

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That night, you're almost inconsolable and your church gathers around you in secret to comfort you and to assure you that your fallen child is now with King Jesus in heaven.

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But in your heart, you're filled with grief. You feel like you're hemmed in on every side. You're clinging to your savior with every ounce of faith and energy that you've got left in your soul.

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But these times are hard. Before long, you're pronounced as human vermin.

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You're no longer able to buy food in the local marketplace. The synagogue has totally turned its back on you.

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The synagogue, which would have been your entire world at that time, it would have been your community, your people, your neighbors, it would have been your entire support system would have come crashing down amid the clash of these two kingdoms, the old covenant kingdom that the

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Jews were hanging onto to their death and this new covenant kingdom that was rising up out of the ashes of persecution and tribulation.

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It was in the midst of all of this mayhem that you heard that a letter had arrived at the church, a letter that was addressed to the church at Pergamum.

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And you go quickly to the elder and he confirms, yes, there's a letter. We're gonna read it tomorrow at the next

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Lord's Day. So come be there, be ready. We're gonna read the letter. And during that Lord's Day service, when you arrive, you realize that it's not a letter from Rome.

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It's not a letter from Jerusalem where they're sending an assassination death squad in order to kill you because you are forsaking the

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Mosaic covenant. No, you find out in that service that it was a letter from the island of Patmos, which was the prison colony of the

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Roman empire. It was a letter from the famed apostle named John, who was one of Jesus's closest, his beloved disciple.

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It was a man who actually helped plant the church in Pergamum that was meeting underground in the quiet concaves of night.

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It was a man, John, who personally discipled your pastor and your elders and a man who would visit your congregation from time to time to check up on you when he wasn't imprisoned or being exiled for his faith.

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And you knew that because this letter was from John, it carried apostolic authority.

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And you also knew that the message was gonna be very, very important for you and for this local church who's watching your family members being killed by Jewish persecutors.

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Now, you would have known this letter was important, but how important? You probably wouldn't have quite known yet.

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You wouldn't have known yet that the letter that was in your pastor's hand was going to become a book of the actual

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Bible. And it was gonna be of the same character and God -breathed quality as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

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Now, as you came into the clandestine church service that morning, and you would have done what you did every church service, you would have looked around and you would have made sure that there was no insurgents, no hostile

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Jewish actors, or no people in there who were trying to kill you or were trying to burrow inside of your church and infiltrate your meeting like rats burrowing through walls and plaster to make their way into the cupboards.

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And you would have surveyed the room carefully, making sure that there was nothing awry before you allowed yourself to both relax and sit down and get ready to receive from your pastor the letter that he's received from John.

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As you take your seat, your elder stands up, the one who's filling in for your local pastor because your local pastor is still in prison.

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And he stands up and he opens up the scroll that had been sent from the apostle John. And here are the words that you hear in that church service in 66

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AD. This is what it says. John, to the seven churches that are in Asia, grace to you and peace.

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From him who is and who was and who is to come. From the seven spirits who are before his throne and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

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Revelation one, four through five. Now, as you heard those words reverberating throughout that little hidden hall, the first and most obvious thing that you would have noticed is that John is not giving you a generic greeting to check up on you and your toil.

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He had a much bigger purpose. In fact, he had a Trinitarian purpose. He had a doxological aim.

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He had an eschatological telos in view that he wanted everyone in that room at that church at Pergamum.

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And you found out later that also all the churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia and Thyatira and Laodicea and Ephesus, all of them, that there is one truth now that he wants everyone in Asia Minor to know.

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And that is Christ is king. And he is not just a local king. He is king of kings and king over all the kings that are on the earth.

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And that reality would become increasingly more apparent as the letter was continued to be read.

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Because they would have read the entire book of Revelation right there in that church service. Then after the reading of that book, the pastor would have stood up and he would have given some words.

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But the point right there in the first chapter is brothers and sisters, don't fear, don't worry.

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I know what you're going through. John even says that I'm your fellow co -laborer and sufferer in the tribulation.

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So he gets it, he understands. But he's telling that church, all seven of them, don't fear because Christ is king.

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Now this truth is gonna become more readily apparent to us as we continue throughout the book. But for a moment, I want us to stop right here on this greeting.

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Revelation 1, four through six. This is the greeting from John to these seven churches. And I want us to dissect all of the words, all of the phrases in this most important and very essential theological greeting that John gives.

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And I want us to understand every little tidbit of meaning that we can squeeze out of this book.

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And to do that, we're gonna have to go to part two. A Royal Slave, John as Human Author.

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Now, John not only introduces us to himself, but he introduces us to the triune God. And he points us to the new ruler over all the earth, which would have been a supreme comfort to those beleaguered saints who were suffering in Pergamum and in Ephesus and Philadelphia and Thyatira and Smyrna and Laodicea and Sardis.

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John begins this comforting letter by letting them know who he is and also by saying who he knows them to be.

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He's telling us who he is and who he's writing to. That's why he says, John, to the seven churches that are in Asia.

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John's letting them know that these words are coming through a man that they knew, a man who knew persecution and who was walking through those kinds of trials intimately that he was the one who was sending it to them.

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John was not hiding in some kind of state -sponsored pulpit or in some kind of state -sponsored church.

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He was exiled. He was banished to the salt -bitten island of Patmos, not because he was a revolutionary and not because he was trying to start some elaborate religious coup, but because he refused to be silent about the kingship of Jesus Christ.

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That single three -worded sentence, Christ is king, is what was turning the world upside down.

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That phrase, Christ is king, is what was getting pastors arrested, families beaten, and one of the founding apostles exiled, boiled in oil and mangled up in his skin and his flesh because he refused to stop saying that Christ is

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Lord, that Christ is king, that Jesus is the ruler over all the kings of the earth.

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John was being punished. He was banished. He was exiled. And oddly enough, this would have been a great comfort to the saints who were reading this letter, not because they wanted

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John to suffer, but because they knew that John could identify with them in their struggle.

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They knew he'd been there. They knew he felt it. They knew he was struggling with the exact same thing.

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And when John, when he put his pen to parchment, he wasn't writing to a metaphorical audience at some point in the modern future.

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He wasn't writing to us. He was writing to real flesh and blood churches and pastors, men and women that he had personally hugged, men and women that he had stayed up to the midnight hour with waning lamp oil to pray with, congregations that he had eaten meals with, faces that he knew and that he loved.

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He was writing to men and women and children who had been baptized by him and by others in the local church.

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He was writing to people who are now getting arrested, who are now being beaten, who are now being tortured for their faith in Jesus Christ.

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He was writing to elders who he knew personally who were leading the Lord's day worship service underground under the threat of Roman death, where Romans could have broken in at any minute and bust down their doors and arrested them for being disturbers of the peace.

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Because why? They wouldn't admit that Christ is Lord. Or Caesar is Lord because they only could admit that Christ is

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Lord. He was writing to deacons who were having to hide food and take it to starving saints who no longer could buy or sell in the marketplace because they declared that Christ is

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King. He was writing to children who were being taught to whisper in hushed tones the name of Jesus late at night, just in case that prying

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Jewish ears or roving Roman guards would hear them, would break down their doors and would come in and murder them.

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This was real. The blood was real. The danger was real. And John's words are not esoteric meanderings to the 21st century

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Christians who barely suffer. Like our idea of suffering is what?

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That the left doesn't like us. That the lime -haired lesbian screams in the street that she should be able to kill her baby without importunity.

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Like that's who we suffer from? These Christians in the first century were being hunted down and murdered.

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This was a Holocaust before the word even was invented. So clearly,

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John's not talking to 21st century America. He says in the first chapter that he's talking to the seven churches of Asia Minor.

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He's talking to real people who are really suffering. And this is why David Chilton reminds us that this modern obsession with reducing the letter of revelation into some vague prescription or forecast for the church that exists right before the rapture, the end of the world, is not just bad hermeneutics.

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It's actually interpretive travesty, especially when you consider the facts that are so plainly revealed in the letter.

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John says that he wrote to seven churches that existed in Asia Minor in the first century. He also said in the very first verse of the book that he's writing about things which must soon take place,

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Revelation 1 .1. How much clearer could he be? He tells his original audience that the time is near,

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Revelation 1 .3, which means that he's writing to real churches in Asia Minor about things that are gonna happen really quickly and soon to them, not to us.

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Not to something that's gonna be delayed or put on the shelf for 2 ,000 years. These things were imminent, they were urgent, and they were fulfilled in that generation.

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And it's true in the first six verses of the book. Again, how much more clear could

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John be? And if that's true, and it is, it is, it's right there, verse one, verse three, verse six, it's true, then we must abandon every single theology that treats the church like a footnote in history or an asterisk or a institution that is destined to fail.

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As John MacArthur said, we lose down here. No, sir, we don't. The church does not lose because what happened in Revelation was inaugurated 2 ,000 years ago.

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The enemies that were crushing the church did not crush her, she did not lose, she won, she triumphed,

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AD 70 destroyed the apostate Jews who were murdering Christians. The church then marched on to overthrow the

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Roman world, and now the church has filled the world in every latitude and longitude with her people.

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We don't lose. We keep spreading and spreading and spreading the victory of Christ. From the beginning of the book to the end of the book, that's the message.

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Because if Jesus really truly did what he said he did and he ascended to the throne of God in the first century,

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Revelation 1 .5, and he sat down upon the throne to rule over all the kingdoms of the earth, which is what

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Revelation 1 .5 says, then the church is not a institution that is in decline.

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We're an institution that is now bringing his dominion. If he's king over the earth now, then he will continue to bring his dominion until his spirit is poured out on all flesh.

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Not just Pentecost where it was 3 ,000 people, but now the kingdom is a kingdom that cannot be stopped, it cannot be shaken, it cannot be thwarted, and his spirit will inhabit every thing that inhabits the earth.

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His spirit will be poured out on all human flesh until the glory of God covers the earth as the waters covers the sea.

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That's a kingdom that is expanding like leaven in a lump, Matthew 13 .33.

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It is a kingdom that's crashing into the nations like a stone that crashes into the foot of the statue in Daniel 2 .35.

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And it is a kingdom that will never be destroyed, Daniel 7 .14, and never be shaken,

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Hebrews 12. And because of that, this tells us that the church does not end in a kind of Laodicean apathy.

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There's a lot of people in the church who look at the seven churches of Revelation, which we'll get to in chapter two and chapter three, they look at that as a map of world history.

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Schofield himself, the dispensational guy who invented that stupid system, he sort of saw the world and saw history like this, that history was played out in different epochs and eras.

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And the final era was this Laodicean, lukewarm spat out of Jesus's mouth kind of era that is the church in defeat and in retreat.

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And that's just not true. That's just not true if Jesus is king. If Jesus is king, he brings victory because there's nothing that thwarts

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Jesus. The death, I mean, death couldn't hold him. The grave couldn't hold him.

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And now he's spreading his life to people all over the world and we think somehow that his kingdom is gonna somehow die?

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That it's gonna, that his world conquering resurrection over death is just how somehow gonna stop and end?

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Isaiah tells us of the increase of his government, there shall be no end,

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Isaiah 9 -7. There shall be no end. The government he started when he rose from the grave and became king over all the earth and ascended into heaven to sit down on the throne of God, that government will not stop increasing until it has nowhere left to increase.

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That's why Paul says he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet, 1

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Corinthians 15 -25. That's not a complicated sentence. He must reign until, that's a time period.

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What's that time period? Until every single enemy has been put under his feet. That means that he's gonna reign until nothing opposes him on earth as it is in heaven.

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And that's why Revelation declares that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our

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Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever,

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Revelation 11 -15. It could not be more clear. Second, this teaches us that the world is not beyond saving.

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We like to think about the world as, ah, you know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And why even bother?

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Why even get involved? Why even preach the gospel to these dirty pagans? Because they're just gonna continue going from bad to worse.

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This book does not give us that option, brothers and sisters. This book is not about a post -Christian world that ends in failure.

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This book is talking about a pre -Christian world that's white for harvest, John 4 -35.

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It's a world that's waiting for every single one of its nations to be discipled,

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Matthew 28, 18 -20. And it's a new Jerusalem whose light is gonna actually cause all of the nations on earth to walk by it and all of the kings of earth are gonna bring their glory to it,

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Revelation 21 -24. And it even says in Habakkuk 2 -14 is a great summary that the earth is gonna be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters covers the sea.

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How's that gonna happen? The whole world's gonna be made Christian. All his enemies are gonna be put down.

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The increase of his government is going to expand until it knows no end. And then

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Jesus is gonna return to receive a world that's filled with his people.

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If you get Revelation wrong and you live like it's some fantasy novel or some apocalyptic novel that's talking about the end of the world like the book of Eli or like the

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Hunger Games or one of that, then what you're gonna do is you're gonna look for the antichrist around every corner.

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You're gonna think that this book is about you escaping from the world instead of you working in the world. And you're gonna live like a coward and a loser who is clinging to your evacuation plan instead of your marching orders.

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But if you see that this book is about conquest, it's about victory, it's about the lamb who reigns and the saints who overcome by the power of the lamb and the ones who hang on until the end and they are the ones who were saved and the ones who come into the new

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Jerusalem and the ones who feast from the tree of life and the ones who are now the bride of Christ who is the new

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Jerusalem on earth, who feeds the nations. If you believe that and you see that and you understand who the church is in light of who our king is, then you're going to have courage pulsing through your veins.

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You're gonna have scripture coming out of your mouth and you're gonna have victory and conquest and work and effort and joy within your grasp.

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Listen, we cannot forget that this book and this encouragement that was given by John was not given by some voiceless, faceless scribe who was writing down some

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Nostradamus in time scenario. We have to remember that this was John.

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This was a man of skin and bone, a disciple of Jesus who once leaned in on his chest, a shepherd who had been appointed the bishop of these seven churches, a man who had been persecuted, a man who wept with widows, a man who buried martyrs, a man with bloodshot eyes and trembling lips stayed up late at night praying for these people.

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This was not the voice of a distant speculative theologian on Ayahuasca seeing some fantastic visionary schema.

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No, this was a faithful brother, a faithful pastor who bore the scars of the tribulation and the ink stained calluses of obedience to Jesus.

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And he was writing to men and women that he knows, men and women that he loves, men and women that he has comforted.

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This was not an aloof message with heat. This was not distant without hope. This was not despair without some sort of victory.

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No, this was written by a weathered hand of a tired saint who had poured everything out serving

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Jesus for these local seven churches. And he reminds us and he reminds them that God has chosen to save a particular people through their sufferings and bring them under the rule of his great

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King Jesus. That's what the book of Revelation is all about, saving the world and a world filled with rebels and making them into citizens of the greatest

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King, the King of all Kings, the King Jesus Christ. That is what our

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Royal Slave John was writing, why he was writing and to whom he was writing.

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And that leads us to part three, A Royal Sender, Triune God as Heavenly Author.

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Now as the underground church gathered for worship and huddled in the shadows in the silence, there would have been a noticeable hush that descended upon everyone as the scroll from Patmos was unrolled and open.

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And while it bore the familiar pin of the Apostle John, and it would have included his cadence and his voice and his style and his heart in every way, everyone in that room would have known that the true author, the ultimate author was not

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John, but it was the divine. This letter by its own admission didn't come merely from the mouth of man.

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It was penned by John, yes and amen, but it was breathed out by God himself, the

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Triune God. This message was crafted in heaven. It was wrapped and cloaked in Trinitarian grace.

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It was sealed with hypostatic beauty and it was delivered, hand delivered to a particular people on earth through the

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Spirit's inspiration, flowing into the minds and out of the ink pen of the

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Apostle John. It bore the imprint of the Father's sovereign love.

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It bore the fullness of the Spirit's presence and it bore the regal authority of the

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Son and his dominion, even while being etched on the page by a human man. And everyone in the room would have heard that this letter signaled that God himself had sent a message to these beleaguered souls and they knew that every single point, every fiber of focus from this letter did not originate in the imagination of John, but actually in the mind of Almighty God.

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Now, for a moment, I want us to look at each member of the Triune Godhead as John records it in this greeting.

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And I wanna see how they are introduced to these seven suffering churches, which will be instructive for us as we continue.

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And we'll begin with the Father. Revelation 1 .4 begins this way, grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.

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This isn't ornamental language, it's covenantal. When John introduces the

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Father as him who is and who was and who is to come, he's talking about God in his timeless past, present and future covenant reality.

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He's not innovating, he's invoking here. The phrase actually is a deliberate echo of Exodus 3 .14

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where God reveals to Moses his very covenant name, I am that I am.

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And while English translations don't really render this exactly, many Hebrew scholars have said that I am that I am.

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This name of God actually communicates a kind of I am who

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I am, I am who I was and I am who I will be. That is that God is not bound by time, but he is immutable, unchangeable and infinite beyond it and above it and over it.

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He simply is. He is the self existent, uncreated, eternal one. He's the one with aseity, impassibility and perfect eternality.

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And when John opens up this letter with that name, with the name above all names, the one who is, the one who was and the one who is to come, he is anchoring the message of revelation in the immovable mind of Almighty God, the same

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God who gave his name to Moses at Mount Sinai and the same God who has been the

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God of this people all along. But this is more than just a theological callback, it's a covenant announcement.

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Just like at the burning bush, think about this, the burning bush, when God gave his name, that marked a new era in covenant history.

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When the Exodus begins, when the people of Israel were brought up out of the land of Egypt and they're delivered from Pharaoh and his minions and they're brought to the land of promise, when

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God gives his name, a new chapter begins in the Bible. Slavery is over and the people are gonna be set free.

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So now here in revelation, when God gives his name, the one who is, the one who was and the one who is to come, a new chapter of redemption is beginning.

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The old Mosaic chapter is coming to a close and a new kind of slavery is going to be ended.

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A new kind of Egypt is gonna be put away. A new covenant is going to be enacted because God is giving his name.

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In the same way that when God gave his name to Moses, a new chapter was beginning for the people of God, now the ultimate chapter of the people of God being delivered from their slavery to sin is now coming because in revelation, kind of like the fiery bush in the

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Old Testament, now in revelation, the I am is once again giving his name.

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He's gonna be the one who is acting in history again. He's gonna be the one who's bringing down the temple.

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He's the one who's ending the old covenant order. He is closing out all the types and the shadows of the

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Mosaic world and he is putting down this kingdom that's persecuting his people, that's acting the

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Jews who are acting more like Egypt than like Aaron. And he is raising up a true and a better Israel, a better kingdom, a true and a better people who are gonna displace the pagans of this world, who are going to, like the

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Israelites should have done, cast out the Canaanites from this world, conquest this world for the glory of the risen

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Christ. And they're gonna be a kingdom that cannot and never will be shaken because God has given his name.

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So when the first century saints heard this greeting from the one who is and from the one who was and from the one who is to come, they would have heard not a generic reference to God, not some kind of creative way to say

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God's name because revelation is so creative. No, they would have heard the covenant name,

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Yahweh. I am that I am. They would have heard the burning bush name. They would have heard the name that was connected to the booming voice that shook the mountain called

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Sinai. And they would have heard that I am is speaking again.

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I am is naming himself again. I am is beginning a new covenant again.

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I am is with us. I am is the one who will never forsake us. And I am is the one who is here to protect us through this moment of persecution in route to our deliverance.

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They needed to hear the I am. And as they sat there and listened to this book being read in their very presence, they understood that God was with them just like he was with the people of Israel of old.

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And he was going to deliver them from their persecutors. He was going to deliver them from their slavery and their chains and their oppression and their victimhood.

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And he was going to bring them out of their persecution and into a land of freedom where they were going to displace the pagans and fill not one country, but fill the entire world with the glory of God.

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They needed to know that this I am was going to overthrow a priesthood that had turned to pure venom, that he was going to knock down the temple that was sitting like a rotten corpse, that he was going to overthrow the

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Jewish apostates who were descending into a kind of violence that made them look like the

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Egyptians, but worse. And they needed to know that Yahweh God had not abdicated or abandoned them.

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He was not pacing nervously in heaven watching CNN on live stream with a stress ball, squeezing and saying, oh my goodness,

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I wonder how this is going to turn out. I hope it's going to happen in my favor. No, he was by this very greeting promising that he is going to overthrow the tyrants that were persecuting his people.

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He was going to deliver them through a new exodus. And he was going to bring them to a land of promise by dismantling the old covenant order, putting down all of the enemies of God, breaking their chains of oppression, delivering them to the good land of promise so that they could stay in the land and live under the rule of their perfect and righteous king.

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God was telling them that he was with them in their fire and in their trial and in the sword and in the spear that was piercing them.

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And because now the eternal, unchanging, all seeing God was with them, they had no room for fear.

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And this would have been a tremendous encouragement for them. But it doesn't end with God the father.

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That would be encouraging enough if God the father shows up in the greeting, but God the Holy Spirit also is including in this greeting in the most glorious and beautiful way.

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And it's here that the book continues. And from the seven spirits who are before his throne.

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This is John's way of referencing the Holy Spirit. This is not a reference to seven distinct ghostly beings, but this is apocalyptic shorthand for the

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Holy Spirit of God and the Holy Spirit in his covenant fullness, his perfection and his beauty, as many faithful scholars affirm.

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The number seven throughout the scripture signifies completion and perfection and covenantal harmony.

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So this particular image of the spirit in his sevenfold form is referenced actually in the book of Zechariah chapter four, where the seven arms of the menorah burn continuously before the presence of God, symbolizing his omniscient gaze and his ever active spirit who goes out into all the earth.

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In the revelation, that same spirit, that same fire, that same glory is now radiating before the throne of God, just like the golden lampstands once did in front of the veil in the tabernacle before, radiating with power, flooding the holy place with his light and his mediating and immediate presence in front of almighty

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God. This is the spirit that Isaiah saw in his sevenfold beauty in Isaiah 11 too.

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This is the spirit who hovered over creation's waters in the seven day creation in Genesis one.

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And now in John's vision, this same spirit in his sevenfold form is no longer confined to sacred architecture, but he's presiding in heaven's temple and he's filling the earth with his fire and orchestrating the transformation of the world through his own people, the church.

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Now, to grasp how shocking this is, you would have needed to hear this like a first century listener.

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You got to remember that the temple was not like church that we have today. Under the old covenant, only the priests were allowed to go into the temple and they were allowed to see the sevenfold or the seven armed menorah that was standing in the holy place.

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Only the priests could do that. Only the priests and only during their sacred ministrations could they experience the presence of the spirit of God in the sanctuary of God.

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Everyone else, everyone else in the country was standing on the outside of the temple, offering sacrifices from a distant, viewing it from the courtyard, unable to draw near, unable to enter in, unfit to experience the

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Holy Spirit's presence. In those days, the spirit was mediated, restricted and reserved only for a special class of people who were the priest.

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But now in revelation, everything has changed.

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Not only is the I am that I am speaking his name again and promising new covenant, new freedom and new freedom from their chains.

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No, that's not it. I mean, that's not all. Because of Christ's finished work on the cross, the veil that existed in the temple was torn in two.

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The spirit of God that for millennia was relocated to the back room of the temple is now gone and is now out and is now in the world.

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The boundary that divided the common man from the holiness of God has been abolished.

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The temple curtain that was once thick enough to stop an arrow in and of itself was now split in two like parchment at the death of Christ.

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And through the torn flesh of Jesus, the spirit tore the curtain in two and his power was unleashed upon the world.

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Not to float aimlessly about like Casper the friendly ghost, but to take up residence within the gathered church of God.

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What I'm saying is, is that the church is now the fulfillment of the tabernacle.

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The church is now the temple of God. The church, the people gathered together is now the temple of the living

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God. That's what's being communicated here. Those huddled, hidden believers who were hiding in Ephesus and Smyrna and Pergamum were not merely victims in history, but they were the sanctuary of almighty

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God. The spirit of God is promising to be with them. The spirit of God that used to dwell inside of a temple in his sevenfold form is now with the church.

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They're not just exiles. They are the temple. They're not waiting to draw near.

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The Holy Spirit's already drawn in. And the sevenfold spirit of God was no longer limited to a dusty old building in Jerusalem that Jesus promised in a generation was gonna be torn apart brick by brick.

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The Holy Spirit of God was now walking among the lampstands, Revelation 120, which means that he's actively dwelling in the churches of Ephesus, Philadelphia, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Laodicea, all of them.

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This is the first time in history that non -Levites, non -priests, common men and common women and common children, ordinary people, some former

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Greek pagans and some scattered Jews, this is the first time in history that a gathered people are experiencing the presence of God.

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Every other time, a gathered people gathered outside the temple and waited for the priest to come out to tell them that the spirit was there.

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Now the gathered people who are on the outside are now on the inside with God because the temple veil was torn.

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Jesus brought the spirit to his people and now the gathered people, the church, are the temple of God.

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We don't need a temple in Jerusalem anymore because the church is the temple of God. We don't need a biological genetic

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Judaism anymore because now the church is the Israel of God. Do you get what I'm saying? Every Old Testament reality is being put down in the first century because something greater is rising up out of it.

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The temple was a type and shadow of Jesus, the true temple, and the church who is his bride. The sacrificial system was a type and a shadow of Jesus, the true and perfect sacrifice.

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Every single bit of that old covenant was a type and shadow of something greater that was coming and now, instead of the spirit being held inside of a building, which is the

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Old Testament, now the spirit is alive in the church. The church is now the temple of the living

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God. And just in case you missed the implications of what this means here, 2 ,000 years ago,

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God made the local church his temple on earth, which means that every time the church gathers, the temple of God is on earth, which means that every local church that gathers all over the world is not gathering in weakness or obscurity, but you are basically the fulfillment of the

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Solomonic Temple wherever you are located, whether it's Chelmsford, Massachusetts, or Timbuktu.

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And this is why the New Testament is better. This is why the new covenant is more glorious and more expansive than the

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Solomonic Temple. The Solomonic Temple was one temple in one city and it could not be replicated.

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And yet, every single believer is a temple of the living God. When we gather together, we are gathering in the presence of God, with the spirit of God, in the name of the son of God.

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We are templing all over the earth. The old covenant had one temple.

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Think about 2 .5 billion temples of the living God on earth today as we gather together as a church on Sunday morning to extol the majesty and the glory of God and the sanctuary of God.

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Now, this great I Am is announcing that he's going to free his people permanently and forever.

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And he is going to indwell them with his sevenfold spirit who once radiated the temple, but has now made his church the temple of the living

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God. And he will continue growing his church until what? Until the entire world is filled with the glory of God.

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What Revelation is saying through even the words in the way that it describes the father and in the way that it describes the spirit, it is saying that the old covenant age is over.

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The new covenant world is rising and a new sanctuary has been established.

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The old sanctuary in Jerusalem will be torn down within five years of John's writing this book because a new people had been consecrated and a new people were gonna be living in the power of the spirit of God from that point forward.

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They were being handed this declaration that God is with you. You are the people of God.

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The oil is not run dry. The flame is not going out. The fire still falls on God's people.

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And guess what? It even says in verse six that you've been made a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

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Why is that important? Because in the old covenant, only a select few people called priests got to be in the presence of God.

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Now, everyone is a priest. It's not a small 1 % club that's the priest.

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All Christians everywhere are priests and we all get to be in the presence of the

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Holy Spirit of God in his seven fold perfections. That's what this greeting is saying about the spirit.

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Now we need to talk about the son. The Trinitarian greeting, father, son and spirit ends where it must end and that is with Christ.

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The center of human history and the king of heaven. And yet John doesn't merely just close out this greeting by naming the son, he unveils him in the full splendor of his three fold mediatorial office of prophet, priest and king, which

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I think is beautiful. The greeting introduces us to the triune Godhead. It introduces us to the father in three, the

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God who is, the God who was and who is to come. So in three time signatures, it introduces us to the

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Holy Spirit in seven, in his seven fold form and introduces us to Jesus in his three fold mediatorial office.

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I just, I find the way that this described, that this is described so beautiful.

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And it's a kind of crescendo here as the glory of the son is shining in all of his full and radiant supremacy in his three fold office of prophet, priest and king.

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As Ken Gentry rightly observes, this three fold title is not only a doctrinal formula, but it's a declaration of Christ's enthronement over all of history and over all covenant and over all of creation.

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And it says it like this, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of earth, revelation one, five.

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The first way that it describes Jesus is as the faithful witness. And this isn't language of kind of passive observation, but this is talking about Jesus as the witness, the

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Martus in Greek. He's the one who is faithful in his testimony, even unto death.

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Jesus is the one who is the true and faithful witness, which makes him the true prophet, the final and faithful mouthpiece of God.

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He doesn't blink before Pilate. He doesn't cower before Caiaphas. He bore witness to the truth like the

01:01:02

Old Testament prophets from old. And he is like them, the one who is killed for his testimony, where his witness actually is proved true through the terror and agony of the cross.

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And you know, unlike the false prophets of Israel who sometimes lied for gain,

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Jesus told the truth until it killed him. He's the true prophet. He's the true and faithful witness.

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He's also the firstborn of the dead. This isn't poetic language.

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This is talking about royal resurrection language. It means that Jesus is the first man to rise from the grave, never to die again, which makes him the only faithful, true high priest.

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He's the one who entered into the sanctuary of heaven, not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with his own blood,

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Hebrews 9, 12. He's the one who tore down the old covenant system by offering himself up once and for all as a faithful sacrifice.

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He's the one who rose as the beginning of a brand new humanity, a new creation, the first fruit of that new people.

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And he's the one who rose as the forerunner. And it's gonna eventually offer us the same bodily resurrection that he now has stepped into, because he represents us, because he is our true high priest.

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He's the faithful witness as the true prophet. He's the firstborn of the dead as the true high priest. And he's also the true king, because John tells us that he is the ruler of the kings of the earth.

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He's not the ruler someday. He's not the ruler eventually. He's the prophet, he's the priest, and he is the king, and that is true now.

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David Chilton reminds us that this is not about a possibility at some point in the future.

01:02:46

This is not about Jesus being coronated at the end of time. This is Jesus Christ being enthroned now, 2 ,000 years ago, already ruling 2 ,000 years ago, already sovereign over every

01:02:58

Caesar and every Sanhedrin and over every synagogue and over everyone who rejected him. He's not awaiting permission from Jerusalem or from Washington or from the

01:03:08

Kremlin or from anywhere else. He is the king of kings. He is the Lord of lords. He is the one who is reigning now.

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He is the one who began that work of subduing the nations and putting them underneath his feet 2 ,000 years ago when he rose from the dead.

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This is not just a garnish. This is the centerpiece. This is the ribeye steak that's sitting on the plate.

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The threefold office of Christ is not a summary of his work alone. It's the divine announcement that the new

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Moses had come, the final Aaron had entered the temple, and the true and greater David was now sitting enthroned in his heavenly throne room.

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He's the prophet. He's the priest. He's the king. And this greeting is not just filler.

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It is not just adjectives strewn together to make it interesting. It is fire. This is your savior.

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This is your champion. This is your Lord. This is your king. And that brings us to the final point that I wanna talk about.

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And what does this kingship mean? And we're gonna talk about that through part four, the royal point of the greeting,

01:04:13

Jesus is king. Now, as we come to a close in our final part, we need to fix our eyes on the final phrase of this glorious greeting that begins the book of Revelation, that Jesus Christ is the ruler of the kings of the earth,

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Revelation 1 .5. Again, this is not poetry. This is not eschatological wallpaper in a

01:04:38

Victorian veneer. This is not future possibility. It is present first century coronation language that Jesus was already reigning back then.

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And to say that, to say this, for John to say, hey,

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I'm writing this letter to you seven churches that Jesus is the king over all the rulers of the earth.

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To say that back then would have been treason because Rome demanded that you said that Caesar is

01:05:12

Lord. Apostate Judaism demanded that you say that we follow

01:05:19

Moses, don't follow that Nazarene. The synagogue demanded you to be silent.

01:05:25

The marketplace demanded you to compromise. But John in his chains on the isle of Paphos Patmos with unveiled thunder says,

01:05:36

Jesus reigns. Jesus is king and not just any king.

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He's the king that rules over every king, past, present and future from that moment forward.

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But the question is, how did he become king? He wasn't crowned by Rome.

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He didn't have a coronation celebration in Jerusalem. He didn't ride on a donkey into the city where they put a crown on his head.

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Oh, they did put a crown on his head, but it was a crown of thorns. And they elevated him not to a throne, but a wooden cross.

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See, Jesus's coronation came in a different way. It came in two covenantal phases. First, his coronation came in his resurrection.

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Jesus triumphed over sin, death and the devil. And he emerged from the grave, not just as savior, but as the last

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Adam who's reclaiming Adam's forfeited throne, Romans 5, 17, 1

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Corinthians 15, 45. By rising from the dead, he was declared the son of God with power,

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Romans 1, 4. And he took his seat at the right hand of the majesty of God, Hebrews 1, 3.

01:06:52

And he fulfilled the enthronement promises of Psalm 2 and of Daniel 7.

01:06:58

And this is the foundation of his kingship, which is described in Revelation 1, verses 5 through 6, that he was enthroned as king over all the earth.

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He is now the firstborn from the dead. He is now the ruler of the kings of the earth.

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And he is now the one who has loosed us from our sins by his own blood and made us into a kingdom of priest.

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He made us into a kingdom because he's a king. And that kingship began in 30

01:07:39

AD, when he rose from the grave. That's the first phase of his kingship.

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When he rose, he became king. He rose and ascended to heaven and he sat on the throne and he became king.

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But his kingship also, the first act of his kingship was actually judgment.

01:08:00

Jesus resurrected from the dead, ascended to heaven, and his first act of divine monarchy, who's gonna rule over the earth, was to go to war, was to declare war on the rebels who just killed him and on the rebels who were killing his own people.

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Revelation 12 tells us about this. He tells us that Jesus defeated Satan on the cross.

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And when Jesus ascended to heaven, he pulled and yanked Satan up to heaven with him because on the cross, he crushed the serpent's head.

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And then Jesus in heaven, before he sits down on his throne to rule, he goes to war with Satan, who

01:08:43

Revelation 12 tells us after he's defeated in heaven, he's thrown back down to earth.

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And it says that he only has a little time left. So when

01:08:55

Jesus ascended, according to Revelation 12, he and the angels of God went to war against Satan and his minions, and they defeated them in heaven.

01:09:06

So in 30 AD, when Jesus rose from the dead, he ascended to heaven and went to war.

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He kicked Satan out of heaven once and for all. This is what Revelation 12 says. You can read it, read the whole chapter because it's all about this.

01:09:23

And then when Satan was cast out of heaven, he was thrown back down to earth. And it says, woe to you, earth, because the dragon, the slanderer of your soul has been thrown down and he has only a little time left.

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Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that Satan has 2 ,000 years left to roam and prowl the earth?

01:09:48

Or does it mean that he has a little time left, that he was cast down, that he was enraged, and that he actually tried to stop the plan of God, but failed?

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You see, Jesus says that he is the one who possessed Israel and became their kind of demonic father in John 8, 44.

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He's the one who marshaled their hatred against the lamb and caused them to turn against Jesus and sacrifice him.

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And when he's cast back down to earth, he comes back down, not to remain passive, but to stir up the nation,

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Psalm 2, 1 -2, and to stir up Israel against God into a kind of demonic fury.

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And God, Jesus, from his throne in heaven, assembles the

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Roman armies around the city of Jerusalem, and he brings down the wrath of God on them and on that city.

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And in that day, and at that time, he crushes Satan underneath his feet permanently and fully, just like he promised in Romans 16, 20, where the

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Roman church was promised that soon you will crush Satan under your feet.

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So here's what I want you to understand, and we'll get to this in more detail when we get to Revelation 12. Jesus crushed

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Satan's head at the cross. He yanked him up to heaven and he defeated him in heaven.

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He cast him down to earth for a little time. And for 40 years,

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Satan influenced Judah. Satan led Judah to rebel, to kill

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Christians, to murder believers, to do all manner of evil until 70

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AD came. And God's promise in Romans 16, 20, that soon

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Satan would be crushed under the feet of the church came true. And Jesus, through his bride, the church, crushed the head of the serpent, ended the old covenant, and opened up an era of his unrivaled reign on earth from now and forevermore.

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There is no more opposition to Jesus. That's what he's saying. What was the only opposition to Jesus in the year 8030?

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The temple. The temple was saying, no, we're the only way to know God. And Jesus says, no,

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I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. So that rival needed to be torn down. What about the sacrificial system?

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The sacrificial system was saying, no, no, no, no, no. This is how you're right with God.

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This is how your sin is atoned for. This is how you're forgiven. Jesus says, no, I'm the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.

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Not that. What about the priesthood? They say, no, no, no, no, no. You have to come to us in order to be interceded.

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Jesus says, no, I'm the true high priest. I'm the one who intercedes for you at the throne of the father.

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Every single element of that old covenant order had to be put down in order for Jesus to reign in his unrivaled supremacy forever.

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And he's been reigning that way for 2000 years, since 80, 70, not quite 2000 years, 1950 years.

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And that announcement began in Revelation one, four through six.

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It didn't come as a soft little lullaby of a Galilean rabbi. It came as a royal pronouncement to these seven churches that the

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I am, the one who is, the one who was, the one who is to come, the sevenfold spirit of God and the true son, the one who is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth, the prophet, priest and king.

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He now has supremacy. He now is bringing his great power to the earth.

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And that reign began 2000 years ago and it has continued down to our day,

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Revelation 11, 17. And let's just try to understand for a moment what that reign means.

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He reigns. He reigns over what? Well, he reigns over the Caesars.

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He reigns over their armies. He reigns over Herod's schemes. He reigns over the Sanhedrin's betrayals.

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He reigns over the temple's collapse in 80, 70. He reigns over Rome's rise and over Jerusalem's fall.

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He reigns over every nation. He reigns over every system. He reigns over every demon. He reigns over every throne.

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This is the point of the greeting that the father is on the throne. The spirit is ablaze in the church of God and the son is standing in unrivaled glory, not waiting to be enthroned, but ruling now.

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His dominion's not hypothetical. It's cosmic, it's personal, it's covenantal, it's total.

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John is giving us Jesus in his threefold office. And if he's a prophet now, and if he's a priest now, then he's the king now.

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As Ken Gentry said, this is the mediatorial office of Jesus Christ in all of its glory.

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Prophet, priest, and king. And this progression is not incidental.

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It's the same structure that's revealed in the tabernacle. The father dwelt in the holy of holies. The spirit dwelt in the holy place.

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And the son, represented by the priest, ministered to the people in the outer court.

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Here you have in Revelation 1, four through six, father, son, and holy spirit representing the totality of the temple of God.

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No longer a building, but a people. A people who are in union with the father by virtue of the spirit on the basis of the son who now rules and reigns forever as the faithful witness,

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Jesus is the final prophet. He's not just offering us a message, but he is the message.

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He's not just a passive observer. He is the legal prosecutor of heaven who speaks judgment over his enemies and blessings on his friends.

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He's the one who declared the temple's doom, Matthew 24, as a true and faithful prophet. He's the one who confronted the

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Sanhedrin with their murder of the Messiah, Matthew 26, 64. And he's the one who stood before Pilate, not as a victim, but as a witness, and as a verdict, and as a true prophet condemning the wicked that he saw in front of him.

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As R .J. Rushdune put it, Jesus is not only witness against those who were at war with God, but he also executes them as God.

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As the firstborn witness from the dead, Jesus is the great high priest. His resurrection is not just a moment of indication, it's the public declaration.

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He's the firstborn of a new creation. He's the great Passover lamb who's moosed us from our sins by his blood.

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Revelation 1, 5, declares him as the true high priest.

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As Hebrews teaches, he's the one who entered into heaven's sanctuary once and for all,

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Hebrews 9, 12, interceding for us by the power of his indestructible life, Hebrews 7, 25, so that he would not just cleanse the temple, but he would become the temple, and he would not just offer a sacrifice, he's the living sacrifice, the sacrifice once and for all for the forgiveness of sins, because the blood of bulls and goats was not enough.

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And now, Revelation 1, verse 5, tells us that he is ruler of kings.

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He is ruler of all the kings on earth. He doesn't need your permission slip.

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He's not waiting for Antichrist to show up, or for Israel or Netanyahu to welcome him back in.

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He's not pacing nervously in heaven, hoping that the world gets better. He's reigning, not symbolically, not spiritually, sovereignly, legally, eternally, forensically, physically.

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His rule is not metaphorical, it's judicial, and it's immediate, and it breaks through every sphere and every structure and every square inch of reality.

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As Kuyper said, there's not one square inch in all of the cosmos for which the

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Lord, who is Lord of all, does not point at it and say, mine, he reigns.

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He reigns over the civil magistrates, for by him, the kings and the rulers of the earth decree their justice,

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Proverbs 8, 15. He rules over every governor, over every senator, over every judge who sits and serves at his good pleasure, and he removes them like dust whenever he wills,

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Daniel 2, 21, Romans 13, 1. He reigns over every military power on earth, for Yahweh is a warrior and a rider on his white horse, and he shatters the nations with his rod of iron,

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Exodus 15, 3, Revelation 19, 15. He reigns over judges and over lawmakers, because God is the one who stands in the divine assembly, and he's the one who has prepared his throne for judgment,

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Psalm 82, 1, Psalm 9, 7. He's the one who reigns over the bankers and the merchants and the

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CEOs, because all of the silver on earth is his, all of the gold on earth is his, all of the digital assets on earth are his, even the stock market and the global economies are his,

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Haggai 2, 8, Colossians 1, 17. He reigns over the academia, over the media, over the cultural elites.

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He rules over all the kings of the earth who try to take their stand, but he who sits in the heaven laughs, he's the one who holds them in derision,

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Psalm 2, 2 -4, and he's the one who reigns over every studio, over every newsroom, over every campus, over every script, over every syllable, over every stage,

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Psalm 24, 1. He's the one who reigns over the family, for Christ is the head of every man and every woman and every child.

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He's the one who reigns over those who obey him and call him Lord, Ephesians 5, 22 -23, and Ephesians 6, 1.

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He's the one who reigns over the church, for he's the chief shepherd in the head of the body, and he's the one who is first among all and the one who is head over all,

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Colossians 1, 18, 1 Peter 5, 2. He's the one who reigns over the angels. He's the one who reigns over the demons.

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He's the one who reigns over every spiritual principality in heaven and on earth, because he's the one who has triumphed over them.

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He stripped the demons of their weapons and of their powers, and he's paraded them in defeat, Ephesians 1, 21, and Colossians 2, 15.

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He's the one who reigns over Satan himself, crushing him under the boot of his majesty, because the

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God of this world has now been put down, cast out, and his power has been shattered under the reign of this ruling

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King Jesus, John 12, 31, Romans 16, 20, Revelation 12. He's the one who reigns over death.

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He's the one who reigns over Hades. He's the one who conquered the grave. He's the one who holds the keys to life and death, and he's the one who reigns over even the last enemy, which is death, who he will come back personally, and he will defeat himself, 1

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Corinthians 15, 25 through 26, and he's the one who reigns over you.

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Your body is not your own, for you are a temple of the living God. Your will is not your own.

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You were bought with a price. You are not the captain of your own vessel. You are not anything other than a slave that is owned by a faithful master whose name is

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Jesus. Christ rules over you. He's the one who every knee will bow to, every tongue will confess to, and he's the one that everyone will say,

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Jesus Christ is Lord, whether it's the Roman centurion or whether it's the atheist who, in his disgust and hatred for his own life, in his agony, cries out,

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Christ is Lord before he is thrown into the lake of fire. Christ is the one who rules over everything.

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You cannot imagine a world that is not under the command and the rulership and the governorship of Jesus.

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He's the one who commands your allegiance, who commands your destiny, the one who governs your steps, the one who ordains your days, the one who demands your worship, 1

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Corinthians 6, 19 through 20, 2 Corinthians 5, 9. He's the one in whom we live and whom we move and whom we have our being.

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There is no neutral ground when it comes to the kingship of Jesus Christ.

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There is no rival throne. Every crown, every authority, every power, every rule, every authority belongs to him,

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Matthew 28, 18. Every domain on earth is his inheritance, Psalm 2.

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Every breath that we take is on loan from the ruler of the kings of earth.

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As Vati Bacchum says, you go to sleep by the grace of God and you wake up by the grace of God because every stolen breath that you took from Jesus while you slept should have been credited to your account.

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This, brothers and sisters, this picture of Jesus in Revelation 1, 1, the firstborn of the dead, the faithful witness and the ruler of the kings of the earth, this is not your quiet time,

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Jesus. This is not your 1980s flannel graph, Jesus. This isn't your water -cooler, wimpy

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Jesus with his fluffy, shampooed hair with the lamb slung over his shoulder and his

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Pantene Pro -V follicles blowing in the Galilean breeze. This is the

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Jesus of Revelation, the one with eyes like fire and feet like burnished bronze and a sword flashing out of his mouth and a robe that is soaked in the blood of his enemies because he crushed them underneath his feet.

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This is not the Jesus that stares at you with an effeminate gaze.

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This is the king of glory, mounted, crowned, enthroned, advancing, and you will either bow to him or be crushed by him.

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That is this king. And all of history agrees with this.

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If you don't believe me, ask the first century Jews or ask what's left of the

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Roman Empire if you can peel them off the heel of his sandal. This passage is the comprehensive dominion of Jesus Christ and it is a dominion that provoked the wrath of the nations.

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Revelation 1 .5 is not just pleasantries and not just greeting language.

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It is a death sentence. It is the opening salvo of Jesus's royal war.

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And as Chilton rightly observes, the phrase the kings of the earth refers primarily to the apostate rulers of the first century

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Israel that Jesus was about to crush, the ones who said we have no king but Caesar, John 19 .15,

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the ones who led the nation into judgment, the ones who followed Satan instead of Abraham or God or Moses or Jesus, the ones who were the religious aristocracy in Jerusalem who killed

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God's one and only son, who Jesus even said that the kingdom is gonna be taken away from you and given to a people that bear its fruit.

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And now Jesus is ruling over them, Jesus is judging them, and Jesus is tearing them down one covenantal stone at a time until there is nothing left, until they weep and gnash their teeth, until Babylon the harlot burns,

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Revelation 18 .9, which is Jerusalem of old. This is why they cry out for the rocks to fall on top of their heads,

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Revelation 6 .15 through 17, because they had put themselves in the place of opposing the king of kings.

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And that is why they make war against the lamb, Revelation 19 .19, and this is why they lose, because they set themselves up against the king of all kings and the

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Lord of all lords, and they lose. The church doesn't lose down here, the

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Jews lost down here, because they turned against the one and only

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Christ. He's the king, he's the king of history, he's the king of judgment, he's the king of the past, he's the king of the present, he's the king of the future, he's the king who's not in retreat in the 21st century, he's the king who's still on the march, he's the king who's still redeeming slaves, he's the king who's still enthroned in his glory, he's the king who's still making orphans into priests, he's the king who's still giving his people a kingdom,

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Revelation 1 .6, he's the king who's giving us a visible hope, 1

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Peter 2 .9. A visible reign, as Chilton notes, the kingdom has begun.

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Christians are now ruling with Christ, Ephesians 1 .20 -22,

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Colossians 1 .13, and our dominion will increase all across the earth,

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Revelation 5 .9 -10, and so the entire earth is filled with his glory, Habakkuk 2 .14.

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That is the king that we've seen today. Not a wimp, not a wuss, but a conquering

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Lord who will put every enemy under his feet and will raise up his church to fill the earth.

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And that leads us to our conclusion. Conclusion.

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So what is the only proper response to this king? This king of kings, this

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Lord of lords, what's the only proper response? Worship. Not emotionalism, not sentimental spirituality, not skinny jeans so tight that it reduces your sperm count, but a throne -thrilled, gospel -fueled, crown -kissing doxology that starts in the depths of your bones and ends and echoes all across the sanctuary and up and reverberating to the heavens.

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To him, this is the way that the passage that we read today ends in Revelation 1 .6,

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in light of his kingship, in light of his kingdom, in light of his rule, in light of his universal, unparalleled authority, to him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever, amen.

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It's not much more we could say than that. He's the one who reigns.

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He's the one who'll have all glory and all power and all dominion and all authority and all rule and all everything.

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All glory belongs to Jesus because he alone is worthy. All dominion belongs to Jesus because he alone is king, forever and ever, because there is no rival, not the

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Democratic Party, not George Soros, not the Trilateral Council, not the new

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Pope, not anyone. There is no rival. There is no possibility of anyone unseating him because no one can.

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He is the king over all the rulers on earth. Let that sink in, brothers and sisters.

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He's the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth, and he is now 2 ,000 years into his reign.

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His crown is not failing. It is sitting on loft, his glorious head.

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His throne is not empty. It's being occupied by his resurrected body. And his kingdom is not postponed.

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It is in the present. It is progressing. It is prevailing.

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And the reason why the early church risked everything for this king, and that's why they were willing to die for this king, and that's why we ought to be willing to live for this king.

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They believed that they were serving a reigning king. And if it was true in the first century, it is even more true today, which means that we must not cower before the world.

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we must confront it. We cannot retreat from culture, we've got to rebuild it.

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We can't bow down to the idols of this age, we've got to break them in Jesus's name. We don't pine away waiting for a rapture to teleport us out of here and leave the world in shambles.

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We don't wait for Jesus to rescue us out of here like a bunch of cowards in a foxhole who are too afraid to fight, no.

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We take up the sword of the spirit, we take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and we live like Jesus reigns because he is.

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Because he reigns, I can face tomorrow. And because he lives, all my fear is gone.

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Revelation 1 .6 tells us plainly that he's made us now, because of his resurrection, to be a kingdom and a kingdom of priests.

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You and I are not serfs who are scavenging in the margins of some far -off kingdom, and we are not slaves to the new world order, no.

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We are his people. So live like it, live like it in your home, live like it in your masculinity, live like it in your femininity, live like it as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult.

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Live like it in your job, live like it in your home, live like it in your town, in your neighborhood, and in your church, and in your world.

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Live like Jesus reigns, walk with the confidence that he is king, build institutions that magnify his name, and watch him crush his enemies underneath his feet, one salvation at a time.

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Until next time, live in light of his kingship, love him richly, and I pray that God richly blesses you this week until we meet again.