Revelation 19:1-5 Hallelu-JAH!

You're listening to the podcast of the Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches through his series, Thy Kingdom Come, taking us through the book of Revelation. Let's listen in.

Good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And a special welcome to those of you that maybe you're here for the first time. I'm glad that you've taken the time out together with God's people here this morning.

And I hope that we hear from God through his word. We get a chance to worship him in song this morning. And I'm going to confess I'm a bit biased, but I'm really glad you chose to come to Recast Church this morning to worship together with us.

So glad that you're here. Let me just kind of clarify our mission statement, why we exist. What is the purpose of Recast Church? Recast Church officially exists, here's the quote, from our Constitution, to glorify God through worshiping him and seeking both local and global worshipers for the name of Jesus Christ.

That's our mission statement. It's meant to be simple. It's meant to be short. It's meant to be memorable. If you don't get all of that that I just said, it's just simply this, we want to worship God and we want to find more to worship him with us.

So that's our goal as a church. And I think that point and that purpose lines up fairly well with what humanity was created for, right? Like if you were to ask yourself, why do we exist? Why does the human race exist on this planet?

Why did he create us? And the answer to that is to worship God. What is the highest thing that you or I can do with our lives? And I would suggest to you it is worship God. And think about it this way.

Why does every people group that has ever existed on the planet worship something? And it's because we are created to be worshiping creatures, right? It's part and parcel of what it means to be a human that we would give our worship to something.

But I would suggest to you that the word worship has been refined down so much within the church and maybe within our culture, but even particularly within the evangelical church, that we have a misunderstanding about what it means to worship.

God did not create Adam and Eve, give them each a harp to ride on their own personal cloud and command them to float around singing, shine Jesus, shine for eternity, right? Is that what he did? Of course not.

He didn't create humanity that way. And we often think of worship and praise in terms of just singing, and we're missing something when that's the way that we approach it. God created Adam and Eve, put them in relationship together with each other, and it was called marriage and it is a method, a means of worshiping God.

He put them in relationship to the animals and they were called to tend them and it was called worship to God and he put them in relationship to the earth and told them to subdue it and to cultivate it as a means of worship to God.

And they were told to be fruitful and multiply as a means of worship to God. Throughout scripture, we find that humanity was created by God to worship him in a way that's unique amongst all of the other created things.

Other created things do indeed worship him, but not in the same way angels worship him, but not in the same way that humans worship him. We were created to worship him with creativity, with emotion, with relationships towards others, with cultivation, with sports, with art, with culture, with technology, with delight, and with wonder.

We are not like the animals and we are not just like the angels. Humanity has a unique role in the created order and we're going to see that in our text this morning. And everything about us, when we're functioning correctly as God originally designed us, when it's functioning well, it amounts to our ultimate flourishing and God's ultimate glory.

Now, we recognize that things get in the way of that, right? Have you identified that? Like humidity? Does humidity sometimes get in the way of your worship of God? I'm feeling a little bit this morning.

You're feeling it too. Again, just like I say every service, I usually say it at the start of my sermon, I'll probably repeat myself again, but if at any time you need to get up and stretch out or just kind of get cooled off, take advantage of that.

Get more coffee juice or donuts or anything like that. But I recognize that it is very, very humid in here. But where is the world going? Like when you think about that, we're studying the book of Revelation, we're nearing the end of the book of Revelation, we've been going through it chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and where is everything heading in the world?

And I'm going to slow down in my exposition here, in my taking chunks of Scripture during these final four chapters of the book of Revelation. We're going to slow things down and take smaller chunks because at the end of the book of Revelation, things get a little staccato.

They're intentionally written that way, where the visions that John receives are shorter and briefer and they increase in their power and their fervor in the sense of introducing us to the destiny of mankind.

Now we often think of this when we think of Revelation, like how many of you would identify that when you think of the book of Revelation, you think of the phrase, God wins. Like is that part and parcel of it?

And that's the end of the book. But we also have seen all of these judgments that have been going on and all of that that has been going on through the bulk of the book. But now that we get to the last four chapters, we get to that final explanation of God winning.

We get a chance to look at the destination of those who have put their faith in Christ and it's glorious and amazing to consider over these next four chapters. And our destination will be a place of praise.

It will be a place of worship of our great God. And as much as I think in terms of awe of our salvation, how much are you in awe of your salvation now? Are you pretty amazed that God would send his son to die for you?

Is that a pretty amazing truth? But imagine how much more awe and wonder you're going to have when it all goes down and you're with him for eternity. It's going to be an amazing time, right? Anybody looking forward to that?

We won't wrestle with this kind of humidity. We won't wrestle with discomfort. We won't wrestle with chairs that are not the most comfortable on the planet. You know, I mean, we will be in a place with no more pain, no more difficulty, no more problems.

It's going to be a glorious time when the king breaks into history one final time and ushers in his glorious eternal kingdom. That's going to be a great day. But our text this morning sets the stage for the final victory of the lamb and his eternal kingdom.

And the contrast we see really in this text is a contrast between two songs. Last week, do you remember we saw a song, those of you that were here, we saw a funeral dirge for the world system, for the corrupt ways of this human system in opposition to God fading and falling away?

It was called Babylon in the text and it was a funeral dirge, all of chapter 18 last week. And that is meant to contrast the praise and the celebration that is going on in heaven in our text here this week.

Praise for the Almighty. And that contrast couldn't be more clear between the funeral dirge of last week and the praise celebration that's going on here. So turn in your Bibles if you're not already there, Revelation 19, one through five.

If you need a Bible, I don't want to embarrass you, but just raise your hand if you don't have a means to navigate to God's word. Mark is back here and he's got a load of Bibles and he just wants to pass them out.

So if you don't have a Bible with you, just raise your hand and he'll bring one to you so that you can follow along. And I read out of the English standard version. It just happens to be my favorite, but you can obviously follow along in whatever translation you prefer.

Revelation 19, just the short text, one through five. And I say this every week. I don't want to be a broken record, but it's just very powerful to me as it hits me when I get to study this each week, that this is God's word.

This is what he desires to say and to communicate to Recast Church, to us this morning. So let's listen in. Revelation 19, one through five, the words of God. After this, I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven crying out, hallelujah, salvation and glory and power belong to our God.

For his judgments are true and just. For he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality and has avenged on her the blood of his servants. Once more they cried out, hallelujah.

The smoke from her goes up forever and ever. And the 24 elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who was seated on a throne saying, amen, hallelujah. And from the throne came a voice saying, praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, great and small.

Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, I rejoice in that we get an opportunity to turn from looking at the destruction of the things that have gone on in your judgment from these past several chapters, chapter after chapter reiterating the sinfulness of our hearts, the brokenness of this world, the brokenness of our own lives in contrast to what they were designed to be.

And now we get an opportunity to see what the worship looks like around your throne. And Father, what we get an opportunity to reflect is your redeemed people, this worship and this praise. And Father, now we're gonna do that in song, we're gonna sing some songs.

But Father, I pray this would be so much more than an exercise of singing songs with our vocal cords. But it would be an exercise of our hearts exalting and rejoicing because you are so awesome and glorious in your salvation, in your power, in your glory.

If we could just behold you for a moment, we would be on our faces before you. So Father, give us a glimpse of you this morning as we get an opportunity to praise you, as we hear from your word, as we dig in and we see what it means to praise our great God.

Please receive this praise as our offering to you this morning. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, a big thanks to the band for leading us in worship this morning. Again, worship in song, as we kind of talked about in the introduction.

Singing is one of those components that God has given us to worship him, but I'm just grateful for those who are more talented in that area than I am. So, and I think probably all of you are too, at least you would be if I led you in worship.

So keep your Bibles open to Revelation chapter 19, one through five. And as we're gonna walk through this, you know, kind of thought by thought and see what this has to say. And then remember, if at any time you need to get up and stretch out, if you need more coffee or juice or donuts, you're not gonna distract me if you need to get up in the back and stretch out.

Restrooms are out the hallway. Women's on the downstairs, men's upstairs, so use the restrooms on this end. Last week we saw that chapter 18, as I mentioned in my introduction, was basically one long funeral dirge for the destruction and death of Babylon.

And Babylon is used as a symbol in the New Testament for humanity united against the Creator. Think if you were in Sunday school, if you were raised in church, then you kind of maybe have that story of the Tower of Babel in mind.

When you hear the name Babylon, all of humanity, God says, disperse. And so they stay united, they build a city, they build a tower, and they try to make a great name for themselves. So that's kind of what we have when we think of Babylon.

And there was a funeral, a sorrow amongst the people of the world over the loss of that unity against God sometime in the end. But after all of that, John is given another vision, and you can't quite call it a vision because it says he heard something.

So although he's kind of experiencing this spiritually, we might call it a vision in air quotes, what it really boils down to is an audible thing that he's experiencing. It's a noise, it's a sound. And once again, it is a sound of voices shouting and singing from heaven.

We've seen that a few times in the book of Revelation. And in verse one, we see that there is a great multitude in heaven singing. In chapter seven of verse nine, verse nine of chapter seven, rather, clear back several weeks ago, a couple months ago when we were there, we were introduced first to this great multitude.

We saw them there standing around the throne room of God, and there's little question that these are people who have died with faith in Christ. They are either the church who has been raptured combined or people who are then combined believers who have died all the way back to Old Testament times.

And notice where they are. Do you see that in the text? Where are they in this text? They're in heaven. They're in proximity to the Almighty. They're in heaven. They will not always be in heaven. And in just a couple of paragraphs later here in chapter 19, we're going to actually see them shifting from heaven to earth.

They're going to come back with their king at his triumphal revelation when the king, the rightful king, climbs on that white horse and rides it to victory, and the people of heaven are there with him as he rides in with victory.

But for a time, it seems like maybe a long time. I mean, if you think about Old Testament saints, is there a passing of time in heaven? And some of us might kind of wonder, you know, is there a, do they experience time like we experience?

And how many of you, just being honest, I mean, I don't want to rub a raw nerve this morning, but you have somebody that you're looking forward to seeing there? Does anybody here have somebody who's gone on before you and you're kind of wondering what is it like for them right now?

Have you ever wondered what can they see down here? What do they observe about what's going on here and what are they privy to? I don't really know. There's indication in the book of Revelation from a previous chapter that we already went over that they do experience some level of time.

They experience, and there's actually a time designator in one of the things that they say there, like, how long, oh Lord, until you set this straight, until you fix it, until you send your son to make it all right and bring justice to the earth.

And so there's some indication that there is indeed some time there. But they are there and they are singing. There's a party, there's a celebration that is going on there in that place. And that is a contrast to, again, that dirge that we saw last week, that funeral dirge of where people are mourning over the loss of their wealth and the loss of their comforts.

And that's meant to contrast the gaining of and the blessing of heaven. And the very first cry that comes from their voices needs some attention from us this morning. It is the shout of one word, hallelujah.

Now how many of you have heard that word before? Raise your hand if you've heard it before, maybe sung it before even. You've sang that word. I think there's maybe a couple songs that we sing here at Recast from time to time that have that word in it.

And so if you've sung that word before or you've used that word before, then you know some Hebrew because that's a Hebrew word. And so you're multilingual, you might not even have known it, you're probably not quite fluent yet in Hebrew, but you at least have that one word down or will by the end of this message.

Because hallelujah simply means it is a command to praise. So that part of the word, hallelujah, is a command to praise. It doesn't tell you just that word, hallelujah, it doesn't tell you what to praise.

You've got to have the yah on there. And hallelujah is a word often used in the Psalms and the simple translation of the word is praise Yahweh. Praise Yahweh. Yah is the shortened form of the name of God.

And it forms an imperative or a command, if you will. And in one sense, I would call it maybe the purest, most simple, maybe even most foundational or fundamental of all commands. Why should you have no other gods before him?

Because you must praise God. Why shouldn't you lie, murder, commit adultery, steal, take his name in vain? Because you should hallelujah. Yah. You should not hallelujah yourself. You should not hallelujah others.

You should not hallelujah images made of stone or icons or pictures of Jesus or crucifixes. You should not hallelujah dead saints. You should not hallelujah money. You should not hallelujah your home, your bank account, your athletic prowess, your acting skills, your teaching skills, your leadership skills, or whatever you might credit to yourself as skills.

You should not praise any of that. There is only one that you should hallelujah, and his name is Yah. There's only one. You will hallelujah something. Every human hallelujahs something. Every one of us sitting in this room is in a regular and routine state of giving our praise away, whether you know it or not.

Whether intentionally focused on God or intentionally focused on other things, you are always giving your praise away to something. If you kept track during a day, just took a sample day of this past week, and you were to take your time and break it down and then categorize at different times your thoughts and what you're doing and what you're thinking through and what you're processing and the mental conversation you're having in your mind, and you converted that into a pie chart of the time spent praising things, how much of that pie chart would belong to Yahweh?

How much of that pie chart would belong to God? Now, hold on a second. I'm not talking about singing all day. I'm not talking about cataloging how much time you spend singing. How many of you know that that might be pretty slim to none?

The amount of time that you spend singing. Maybe some of you commute and sing a little bit. Maybe there's a little shower time there or whatever. I don't know how much you sing each day, and if that was the standard, if that was the measure, I think we'd all be like, oh, this is not good.

But everything that you do, everything that you say, every way you interact with others is a means to praise. It is a method of worship. There's another pastor, and I borrowed this illustration a couple times.

His name is Matt Chandler. I don't know if any of you have ever heard of him. He's a pastor of the Village Church in Texas. I would commend him to you as far as if you run, if you got to commute and you like to listen to good messages, I would encourage you to listen to Matt Chandler.

Look it up, the Village Church, and he does a great job. But he's always had this illustration that really has just stuck with me. Maybe it's because I like a good steak. I don't know. He just kind of illustrates things with food, and I'm like, man, this guy speaks my love language here.

So here's an illustration of the way that you can convert things or the way that we ought to convert things into praise to God. A lot of people could maybe feel guilty eating a really good filet mignon.

I don't know. You shouldn't. Eating a good filet mignon, awesome, especially you get some blue cheese crumbles on that thing and it's just cooked medium, medium tops, and a nice and juicy steak. The thing is, you recognize that maybe there's an enticement there to enjoying good food that could lead you away from God.

How many of you identify that? You could get over the top with that, right? You could get carried away. Or filet mignon, you can talk in terms of a good craft beer or an amazing tiramisu. I don't know what your dessert is.

That's mine. I'm really into, I really like that. But you get into this and you can eat this or consume this, and where does the praise rest in that meal? Where does the delight go? It is completely appropriate for you to enjoy your food.

God created and designed it that way. But do you go, thank you God for filet mignon. Thank you for making it so awesome and so tasty and so great. And it reflects back to him. You see, the praise shouldn't rest on the food.

The praise shouldn't rest on the chef who cooked it. But the praise should rest on the Lord who created it and designed it and made it for our delight and our enjoyment. Are you getting that? And so, it's not that you have to sing about your food in order to praise God.

You know, sing the glories of your food to God, I mean, that's not what praise is. A lifestyle of reflecting the delights, the joys, the pains, the difficulties, all of life reflected back on God with a thanks.

You have created this moment. You've created this very moment as a moment to bring before your throne is worship. That might change some spats in our marriages, right? That might change the way that we interact over that class schedule we just got that we're not super excited about.

I don't know, maybe someone in the room is struggling with that, I don't know. But it's all different kinds of things that kind of going, huh, I mean, this is a time to hallelujah. This is a moment designed to praise Him.

And He has shown us His love by giving us each moment. You see, the ancient Jews refused to pronounce His name. I don't know if you realize that, maybe you've heard that before. They refused to pronounce the name that I'm choosing to pronounce Yahweh.

They never included vowels in His name because they never intended it to be vocalized. And so because they never intended it to be vocalized, you're going to hear a couple of different ways it's said, and maybe this will clear up a little bit of confusion for some of you.

You ever wondered about the difference between Jehovah and Yahweh? You heard those two names before? They're the same thing. They're just a different vocalization, a different pronunciation of the same four Hebrew consonants, Y-H-W-H.

And then you're going, well, wait, there was a J in one, there's a Y in the other. How does all this get? Well, the Y is sometimes pronounced J, the W is sometimes pronounced V. So you get Jehovah, Yahweh.

But aside from the technical explanation, I want to be clear that this name that we are being told to praise, this one that we are being told to praise, His name, Yahweh, that is His personal name that He revealed to Moses in the burning bush.

Moses said, who should I say, who should I tell Pharaoh has sent me to set my people go? And God said, tell him the I Am has sent you. A conjugation of the word, the name Yahweh. The generic word for God, by the way, there is a generic word in the Hebrew language which is used for God occasionally, and it is El or Elohim.

But Elohim revealed to His people a more personal name. He is the I Am that I Am, Yahweh. That He shared His name with His people shows His passion to reach out to humanity with His relationship. He is not a distant God.

He is not a technical God. He is not some life force or some impersonal power at work in the universe. He is personal, and He chose to enter into relationship with humanity in part by sharing His personal name with us, His personal glorious name with us.

The name Yahweh, by the way, contains a flavor of His self-existence and His self-sufficiency. He doesn't depend on anything to exist, He doesn't need oxygen to breathe, He doesn't need food to eat, and He's completely self-sufficient.

He does not obtain His power from anywhere else. And it most directly translates His name to He is. God is the one, think about it, a little bit mind-blowing, He's the one who is. He is the given in the universe.

He always is, He always has been, and He always will be. He is the constant while all else is created. He is the stability in an unstable, broken cosmos. He's the stability. And we need to know Him in order to hallelujah Him, in order to praise Him.

We must get to know Him in order to identify who He is and praise Him rightly. And so we look again at verse one because the verse, in this verse we have some things that heaven wants to tell us about God that is intended to move us or fuel our praise of God.

So we can praise Him accurately. He is to be praised because according to heaven He possesses three things. They from their vantage point have the opportunity to communicate to you and I who don't have the vantage point of heaven yet, to tell us some things that He has.

They're there observing the Almighty and they're going to communicate back through time to us here where we sit some things that they believe will be beneficial to our praise now of this great God. And they say, hey, by the way, all you people here in Matawan, all you people at Recast, let me tell you something.

God has three things well in hand. They're well within His control. He possesses these three things. And you and I need to be reminded that God possesses salvation. Salvation belongs to our God. Glory belongs to our God.

Power belongs to our God. And the people in heaven are speaking to us through the pages of Revelation telling us that. As a matter of fact, I believe that there's quite possibly a little bit of a mind bending back to the future kind of thing where you are there communicating back to yourself right here where you sit.

One of your voices, our voices may very well be mingled among these who are speaking these words that John is recording. A little bit like we're talking to ourselves here. Future you has come back to present you and is telling you some things that future you has found out about God and has clarified, has seen with your eyes these things.

And in the end, people from every tribe, tongue, people, race, and nationality will be gathered around his throne and praise God for a time when there will be no more racism. It's gone. It's done. And standing around his throne, they will celebrate that salvation, glory, and power are his.

How does that contrast with the world system that we live in today? Think about those three things. Salvation, glory, and power are his. Is that what the world's going to tell you? Where does salvation, glory, and power rest in the world's eyes?

In this human system's eyes? Our world seems to be pretty sure that we've got salvation figured out. We know where it belongs. It belongs to mankind, right? We've got to take care of it ourselves. If anything's going to get done, it's going to get done by us.

We will have to science our way to a better tomorrow. Did anybody see, oh goody, we found another inhabitable planet. Did anybody see that in the news this week? Oh, big news, right? There's a planet out there some bazillion light years away that is the closest star to us that we could maybe someday conceive of maybe getting to so that when this place is gone, we can what?

Save ourselves, right? Isn't that what it's about? Isn't that what Pandora was for Avatar? It's the salvation of mankind to get out there and get away from the, you know, and it's all this, you know, and we live in a society that's really popular.

It's really popular to talk about dystopia, right? The bad future, all the books and all the movies and all the teen fiction and all of that stuff is focused on some future catastrophic thing that's going to come down the pipeline and actually, well, maybe our culture's tying into something that really is going to happen in light of the things that we've actually seen from scripture.

But are we going to save ourselves from that? No, as a matter of fact, we need to throw ourselves on a savior for that. We're not going to science our way to a better future. We think that we're going to engineer culture to such a degree that we will no longer be in conflict.

Oh, how many of you recognize that conflict is part and parcel of your life? How many of you have been living with your spouse for a little while? How many of you think that maybe it would be just seem to make sense that after time you would be living with more peace with your spouse by now?

Like, almost like, I'd have it resolved, I'd have it fixed, and that's with the spirit of God alive in you, right? It's a wrestling match with our flesh day in and day out. How are we going to solve that problem?

How are we going to fix ourselves? We have this idea, this notion that we're going to forge a brave new world without war, famine, disease, and who knows, maybe we'll just figure out how to deal with death itself and we'll get rid of the death gene and then we'll just live forever and we'll be awesome and we'll save ourselves.

No, salvation belongs to our God, the text says. Do you see it there? Do you see it in writing? Salvation belongs to our God and heaven wants you to know that now, wants you to live in that now. Why does salvation belong to God and not to us?

It's because we've misdiagnosed our problem that we think we can save ourselves. We have kid-gloved and put aside how broken we really are. We minimize our failures, right? Man, we've got a mess. We need to be saved from ourselves, not saved by ourselves, right?

Be saved from ourselves. We need to be saved from our own corruption. We need to be saved from our own self-destructive natures. We need to be saved from the sin that we brought into the world through rebellion against God and He has provided salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ.

And so therefore, through Christ, all the storehouses of salvation are stored up with God in heaven. Nobody else has it in stock. Nobody else ever had salvation in stock. If you want salvation, the only place you can go to is the Almighty.

He possesses it all. And He is so good and kind to give that salvation to anybody who runs to Him and asks for it through His Son, Jesus. Secondly, that's all salvation belongs to Him, but secondly, all glory belongs to Him.

No other glory, no other accolades, no other praises ultimately really stick to anybody except God. Sure, we might try to steal that glory from time to time, but how many of you know when we try to dress up in the glory that belongs to God, it looks ugly?

You ever seen that before? It looks pompous and arrogant and it's kind of like putting on, kind of like a police officer's son putting on his dad's uniform and it just doesn't quite fit. And that's the way that praise, when we try to take God's praise on ourselves, it just does not work.

Think about the gold medals given out in the Olympics. Any of you watch any Olympics? You watch some of the gold medals? Did any of you watch any of the gold medal ceremonies? Couple people? There's one on the screen right there.

Gold medals given out in the Olympics, I can tell you that one thing is true about all of those gold medals that were given, the real glory for their feats of strength, their feats of endurance, their poise, their proprioception, you can look it up, and mad basketball skills, all of that belongs to the one who created them.

Well, how so, you say? They worked hard. Sure, they worked hard. With the muscles God's loaned them, they metabolized the energy from the food that God has provided. They burned energy using the oxygen that he gave them with each and every breath.

And with each gold medal, I believe that God sat in heaven and delighted in himself for his awesome creation. I believe he sat in heaven and he watched that whole thing unfold and he was like, wow, wow, I made this.

And it's not that God is arrogant. It's that he really is all that. Who's God going to worship except himself? He's like, I did awesome, look at this. Look at this whole display out here. This is fabulous.

And I did that. God wasn't in heaven watching, saying, you're saying, Bolt, man, how did he get so fast? How did he do that? I mean, I just gave him some muscles and he did all that with that? It's all God.

I'm beginning to end. And so, how much better, how awesome, how glorious, when a few of the athletes get it and they hallelujah, when they praise Yahweh, the self-existent one, the one who doesn't need anything and is the provider of all things, and they praise his name.

That is a glorious, beautiful thing. And they praise him for what he has given to them. And I hope so often, you watch those, you watch those, and any of you see those interviews afterwards where the person praises God, and what's her name, Simone, Beisel?

You know, and I mean, she's teary-eyed and she's praising God, and I just think it's a beautiful thing, and I just hope it's genuine. Anybody a little bit cynical? Anybody struggle a little bit? I hope that that's real.

I hope that's legitimate. I hope it's not saying what you think you're supposed to say, but I hope that they're authentic and they're genuine in recognition that everything that they have comes from God.

And lastly, we are commanded to hallelujah because all power belongs to him. All authority, all strength, all clout, all talents, all forces of influence flow from him. I want to be clear, there are not two sources of power in the universe.