165. The REAL Second Coming

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Well hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 165, the real second coming. Well hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast.

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This is a show that chooses boldness in an age of cowardice, clarity in a time of compromise, and truth in a world that is drowning in theological fluff.

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This is a show that is a little salty because the church has actually become diabetic on all of the beautiful and sweet truths of scripture, but they've been starved of the meat and the salt that's going to actually help her grow.

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And here's the point, this show is not about my opportunity to share what I think or to or to tickle the ears of people who want to have them tickled.

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No, this show is about explicating the word of God because his word is true.

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His word is true and let every man be a liar if they disagree with it. The God who made the universe, the one who knows everything in perfection, the one who sees everything clearly and never gets anything wrong has written a book.

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And that means that the only one who actually understands reality as it is has told us exactly what he wants us to know about how to navigate that reality.

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And as a pastor, it's my job not to come up with fresh ideas or novel concepts or clever opinions.

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It's my job to open up that book and to explain what it says and to call

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God's people to believe it and to obey it. No word or opinion that I could conjure up would ever match with the power of what

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God has already spoken in his word. So that's why this show is about opening up the Bible and explaining what the

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Bible says and to do that without apology, without compromise and without pulling any punches.

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Now, before we dive into today's episode, I just want to say thank you to every single one of you who watches this show, who shares these episodes and who spreads the word about what we're doing here online and everywhere else.

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A special thanks to you and a special thanks to all of those who have joined this show as members who make this show possible by financially contributing to what we're doing here.

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Thank you to you. Thank you to everyone who makes this show possible. And I'm especially grateful for the encouragement that I receive from your emails or from your messages or from comments that you've made on the

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YouTube channel. It's overwhelming at times just how much support that I'm receiving for this.

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And I'm thankful for that. Yesterday, I even spoke with a pastor in Michigan who's using our episode on how the book of Revelation proves post -millennialism to teach his church.

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And that was so incredibly encouraging to me. And honestly, that's just one of many conversations that I've had lately because people are hungry for the word of God.

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They're hungry to learn about eschatology and rightly so. Because your view of eschatology is going to shape your life.

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It's going to shape how you believe. It's going to shape how you live and you act in the world. If you believe that the world is just going to spiral into darkness until Jesus zaps us out of here, well, then you're going to have no real incentive to actually work for societal change.

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In fact, improving things here would actually make you feel like that you're delaying the rapture.

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Because if you're believing that Jesus returns when the world is at its worst, well, then you trying to improve it would delay the rapture.

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So you wouldn't want to do that. You want to take a hands -off approach and just let the world go to hell in a handbasket instead of actually getting involved.

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But that's not what the Bible says. And if you believe what the

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Bible says, if you believe that Jesus reigns now and that he is reigning over his bride, the church, and he's going to put all of his enemies under his feet and then he's going to continue to reign until the final enemy death is destroyed.

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Well, then your entire worldview shifts because you'll begin to build and you'll begin to labor and you'll begin to fight with joy because you'll know that your work and your labor is not in vain.

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1 Corinthians 15, 58. That's why I keep pressing into eschatology.

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This is not necessarily a show that is entirely dedicated to eschatology, but I've noticed that there's so much bad teaching and confusion and fear about this topic that the church has become paralyzed because of this topic.

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And it's been one of my goals to actually help Christians recover a biblical eschatology just so that they'll live with hope and so that they'll have joy and so that they'll have faith and so that they'll build in this society.

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We've retreated for far too long and that's why the culture around us has decayed and rotten. So we got to be a church that's once again ready to advance the kingdom of Jesus again.

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The Bible says that the gates of hell will fall down when we advance. Maybe the gates of hell haven't been falling down lately because we've stopped advancing to that end.

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We've got to recover a biblical eschatology and the way we've been doing that on this show is we went all the way through Matthew 21 through 24, which is one of the great eschatology passages in the

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Bible. And now we're on this series in the book of Revelation where we're reading through the book and we're discovering what it says.

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And when you get to the book of Revelation, you realize that you are at the mountaintop of biblical eschatology.

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You are, you're at the high watermark, the creme de la creme, the magnus opus of end times theology when you're in the book of Revelation.

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And today we're going to make the positive case for why the so -called second coming in Revelation 1 -7 has already happened.

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Now let me clarify, I don't mean the final bodily return of Jesus at the end of human history where he comes to receive his faithful bride.

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He puts all of his enemies under his feet. The final one, especially which is death and where he personally destroys death and he ushers in the eternal state.

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That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about today, the judgment coming of Jesus.

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I'm talking about how in AD 30, when he ascended to the throne of God and assumed control over this new covenant kingdom, that he came again 40 years later to bring covenantal vengeance upon his enemies, the ones who pierced him.

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And today we're going to see from Revelation 1 -7 -8 that this coming, this judgment coming already happened.

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It happened in the first century and it happened when Jesus came in judgment against the apostate Jews. Now, last week we exposed the landfill of end times failed speculations and prophecies that have been littered all throughout church history.

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That was a fun episode. I laughed a lot during that episode because a lot of failed in time predictions are just ridiculous.

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So go check that out. You can check it out on our channel. The week before that we showed why this coming could not be a future coming and it had to have happened in the first century.

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And today, as I said before, we're going to make the positive exegetical case from scripture that this judgment coming has already happened.

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So with that, let's open up our Bibles. Let's get started. And we're going to begin today in Revelation 1 -7 -8.

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And this is what the text says. Behold, he is coming with the clouds and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him and all of the tribes of earth will mourn over him.

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So it is to be. Amen. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the

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Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the

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Almighty. And with that, let us jump into part one, the true second coming.

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Now, the biggest mistake that people make when reading Revelation is thinking every time that Jesus comes in the

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Bible or every time that God comes in the Bible, that it must mean the end of the world.

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But that idea is actually blown up by Revelation 1 -7 and Matthew 24 as well, because this passage isn't about the end of human history coming when

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Jesus raises the dead and judges all people and brings about the eternal state. No, no, this coming is about something different.

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This, this is a covenantal judgment coming. This is a storm of divine justice that's aimed at a specific people at a specific point in history.

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And it's not in our future. It's in our past. It's the first century Jews. When John says, behold, he is coming with the clouds.

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He's not telling us to stare up at the sky. He's not telling us wait for a Jesus shaped cumulus cloud to appear upon the horizon.

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He's not telling us to look to see if we can see Jesus surfboarding down from heaven. He's telling us to draw our eyes to the prophetic scriptures and the

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Old Testament and see that this moment of reckoning has come. This language isn't about Jesus floating down from space with a parachute.

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This is a poetic, prophetic speech that is used all over the Old Testament. It's, it's

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Daniel's courtroom, thundering scene. It's Moses' theophanic storm. It's the Mount Sinai smoking and burning with the wrath of God.

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This is cloud judgment, not on Egypt and not on Babylon and not on Assyria, not on Tyre, but this time it's been leveled against Jerusalem by her own

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Messiah. Jesus, again, is not coming down in a heavenly escalator.

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He's riding the storm clouds and he is bringing those storm clouds against his apostate people.

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The target of his wrath is the harlot city of Jerusalem that had become like Babylon who had broke covenant with God.

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The time markers in revelation prove this because John doesn't start with, with some vague futuristic talk about, well, at some point in the end of the world, no, he says, these are the things which must take place soon.

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The time is near revelation one, three. These are, these are not throwaway phrases.

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They're neon flashing signs that are pointing to the eminency, the urgency and the first century immediacy of this prophecy.

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And they slam the door shut on any interpretation that kicks the fulfillment of the book of revelation down into the future at some point in the indeterminate future from us to say that revelation one seven is still waiting to happen is not just a bad interpretation.

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It's a cruel joke appointed at the first century church that endured the suffering that this book is talking about.

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That kind of interpretation tells the suffering first century saints to take comfort in a promise they would never see.

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They were being comforted for a promise. It would be 2000 years into the future, which makes no sense.

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Even John on the Isle of Patmos wasn't waiting for a distant apocalypse. He called himself a fellow partaker in the tribulation.

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That's revelation one nine. He says, said, Hey, you want to talk about the tribulation?

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I'm going through it. And yet so many today talk about the tribulation as if it's future.

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John saying, nope, I'm going through it in the first century, along with every other Christian in the first century, the tribulation was not a reality that was going to happen 2000 years in the future.

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It was pounding on their door. It was marching like a thousand orcs upon the horizon.

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And you could hear the rumble of their footprints. The coming of Christ wasn't a far off rescue plan that had no relevance to the first century audience.

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He was, he was proclaiming that he was coming against the apostate Jews. He was their judge.

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He was the church's Avenger. He was the King who is riding on the clouds of wrath. Jesus is not whispering about this judgment.

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He's, he's been saying it the whole time. He warned about it in the Olivet discourse. When he told his disciples that the temple was going to be torn down stone by stone,

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Matthew 24, two, where he said that every single judgment described in the Olivet discourse was going to have its terminus within a single generation,

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Matthew 24, 34, and that they, that generation, we're going to see the son of man coming on the clouds,

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Matthew 26, 64. That's the same coming that we're talking about in revelation one seven, but it's not about Jesus floating down to end the universe.

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It's a courtroom verdict that's crashing upon them like a tidal wave against their shores.

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The kind of cloud coming that we're talking about, isn't new. It's just straight out of the old

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Testament. And because there's so many people today who are unfamiliar with the old Testament, we think that coming with the clouds must be future because we have no old

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Testament context for it. And yet it's all over the old Testament. For instance, we're going to talk about this more in a second, but in Isaiah 19, one, it says that God comes on a swift cloud to judge

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Egypt. God doesn't show up in person to do that. He doesn't ride down like a celestial skateboard.

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He comes on a cloud. That's symbols of judgment. The cloud is a symbol of his power and of his presence.

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It's the same cloud that lit up the night to save Israel when they were running away from Pharaoh's armies.

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It's the same cloud that filled Solomon's temple with glory. It's the same cloud that was in Ezekiel's vision when judgment was near.

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It's the same cloud that shows up all over the old Testament that signifies God's judgment. Now, according to Ken Gentry, who's a great scholar,

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I would definitely recommend you read his books. Jesus's death on the cross marked the end of the old covenant and the destruction of the temple in 8070 was its final burial signified by this cloud coming.

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Gary DeMar, James Jordan, others have said the exact same things. David Chilson put it this way.

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The cloud brings both rescue for God's people and ruin for God's enemies.

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For those who love Christ, the cloud brings deliverance, but for those who reject him, it brings destruction.

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And that way, Revelation 1 -7 is not a teaser trailer of a upcoming movie that's going to happen 2000 years later.

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Revelation 1 -7 is the key to the entire book. It is the theme passage for the entire book. It is telling us what this book is about.

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When you look at a book of the Bible, you want to know what is the passage that tells us what the whole book is about.

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In the book of John, it's John 20 -31. These things have been written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and by believing in him, you'll have life in his name.

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That's what the book of John is all about. Well, John, true to form, gives Revelation 1 -7 as his theme verse, and it's those who pierced him will see him, they will mourn because of him, and it's not going to be a worldwide mourning.

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It's going to be a mourning in the land where the tribes of Israel dwell. This single verse is like a pair of glasses that when you put them on, you can understand the entire book, what it means, what it's talking about, what it's pointing at, and it's pointed directly like a shotgun at the first century apostate

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Jews. John is showing us that covenant judgment is coming through seals, through trumpets, through bowls.

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He's painting it with beasts and with harlots and with falling cities, and then he brings the entire book to a crescendo and a climax when

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Babylon, which is Jerusalem, is put down and a new bride, the new

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Jerusalem, comes up and out from heaven to earth now as God's people to serve the world with the gospel, which is the tree of life in Revelation 22.

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Every single symbol in the book flows from this passage. The king has ascended.

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His judgment coming was near in the first century. It's not far away. It's not near to us.

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It was soon going to happen after his resurrection and after his ascension, and he 40 years later came in judgment and he came against the apostate

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Jews, and he came against the very city that murdered him, and even the grammar in Revelation 1 -7 proves this.

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The Greek phrase, he is coming, is archetype.

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That's he is coming archetype, which is a present tense verb. Now think about it.

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John in his time in the first century is writing a present tense verb. If you know how language works, if John wanted to say something that was happening 2 ,000 years in the future, he would have used a future tense verb, but he's using a verb that's saying it's happening in the present.

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He's not saying that he's going to come someday or he will come one day. He's saying that he is coming now, present tense.

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The action in the first century was already in motion. The grammar proves this. It does not say that he came, that's past tense, and it does not say that he will come, that's future tense.

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It says that he has come, he is coming, that's present tense. Theologians, when they look at this word, they call this the prophetic present tense.

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It's language that's used not to predict a distant event way off in the future that you need binoculars to see.

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It's a word that shows imminent reality. It's like hearing the sirens of the police car before you see the car coming.

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You've heard it. You've heard the sign. It's coming. When you're driving, you hear those signs, you get over because you know that something is coming, some kind of judgment is coming, and the police car is coming to execute that judgment, and you get out of the way.

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That's sort of the point. John is writing about a judgment that's not penciled in on someone's future, far off calendar, but it's pounding the ground beneath the first century

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Christian's feet, and they are to move out of the way as God executes his judgment on his enemies.

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That's not all. John doesn't use the word here parousia, which is the typical word that you would use to refer to a royal arrival.

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He uses the word erkatai, because he's emphasizing not the arrival itself, but the pursuit.

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Think about it like this. If you've ever seen a dog chasing after a rabbit, and he's hunting down the rabbit, and he's sniffing out the rabbit, and he's running towards the rabbit, and eventually he grabs the rabbit and he wins.

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That's the idea of erkatai. It is a pursuit. It is the hound who is chasing after the rabbit.

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It is the Messiah who is chasing after the ones who murdered him and are murdering his people, and he will catch them, and he will bring them into judgment.

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Now, the Old Testament prophets use this kind of grammar in the exact same way. Take Isaiah 13 .6,

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for instance. Well, for the day of the Lord is near, but the

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Hebrew grammar reads like it's already happening, because when Yahweh rises up to judge, there's no such thing as delay.

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Micah 1 .3 does the same thing. The Lord is coming down to trample Samaria and Jerusalem.

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In Isaiah 26 .21, he is coming out of his place to punish the wicked.

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Psalm 96 .13 says, he is coming to judge the earth. Over and over again, the

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Septuagint uses this Greek word erkatai, and in Hebrew it's translated as bow, but it's always about covenantal judgment.

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It's almost always in the context of covenantal judgment. Acts 17 .31 declares that Jesus is the one who was appointed for this task, and the pattern is unmistakable.

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When God comes, nations fall, and the New Testament doesn't abandon that pattern.

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It intensifies it. In Matthew 26 .39, Jesus tells the religious leaders that their house, the temple, is about to be left desolate.

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Then he adds, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes, erkatai, in the name of the

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Lord. That's not Jesus saying that, well, if you finally will just say, blessed is he who comes, then you'll see me in some sort of spiritual way.

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Jesus is saying, because you're not going to say that, I am coming in the name of the Lord.

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I am the one who's coming in the name of the Lord. When you say, blessed is he who comes, he who comes is

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Jesus, and he's coming in the name of the Lord, and he's coming not peacefully. He's coming against them in judgment.

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Revelation follows the same thread in chapter two, and in chapter three, Jesus tells the churches,

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I am coming to you quickly, and the word there's erkatai. He's coming to rescue his people and destroy his enemies.

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He's coming for salvation, and he's coming for judgment. His coming is not a neutral affair.

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It will signal the positive salvation and the negative judgment. He's warning all of them about the immediate covenantal action that is coming from him in the first century.

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He's not talking about the end of the world. He's warning the first century people of the immediate judgment discipline that's coming if they don't repent.

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He's going to shut their doors. He's going to remove their lampstands. He's going to end their witness. These aren't threats of a far off future.

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They're personal. They're urgent. They're local. They're time bound. The risen king walks among his churches, and some of them are about to be snuffed out if they don't truly follow him.

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And then at the end of the book, Jesus repeats this three times.

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He says, behold, I'm coming quickly, which is erkatai. That's in Revelation 20. That doesn't mean he's coming slowly.

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That doesn't mean he's loitering until he eventually finds up the motivation to come.

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No, he's coming quickly. And here's the point. If Revelation 1 -7 is pointing to an event that is imminent in the first century,

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Revelation 22 is pointing to an event that is imminent in the first century, Revelation 2 and 3 are warning people about the imminent judgment.

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So make sure that they repent and they follow Christ. And if the entire book 4 through 20 is talking about the judgment that's being poured out on the ones who refuse to repent, then why do we misread this book so much as a future oracle when everything in it is pointing to its immediacy and its judgment on the first century

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Jews? And that leads us to part two, coming on the clouds.

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Revelation 1 -7 is not about the end of the physical universe. It's not about Jesus peeling back the sky and descending on a rocket or a divine parachute or any of those other end of history scenarios.

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This is not about the resurrection of the dead at the end of history. It's not about the great white throne of judgment. It's about covenantal wrath.

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It's about judgment. It's about Jerusalem and it has already happened.

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This statement may sound shocking to modern ears, dulled by generations of futurist assumptions, but it would not have been surprising at all to the first century.

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They would have understood what coming on the clouds meant because every

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Jew raised on the old testament knew the pattern. When Yahweh rides on the storm, somebody's getting got, or another way to say that would be somebody's getting destroyed.

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The Bible never uses coming on the clouds to describe

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God physically floating down through the atmosphere, like some kind of celestial elevator.

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That image is not a part of scripture, but what the Bible does say is when it describes

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God coming on the clouds, this is a kind of shorthand for judgment.

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It's not generic judgment, it's national judgment. And whenever you see Yahweh in the scripture riding on the clouds, you're not talking about a physical event where he physically comes, but you are talking about a nation that is physically destroyed.

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It's not poetry for the sake of poetry. It's not circumstantial, but it's a formula.

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It's a scriptural formula. It's a liturgy of judgment. It's a holy pattern that is so consistent that you can maybe even call it a kind of divine muscle memory.

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God never comes on the clouds in order to kumbaya or hug with his people.

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He comes to destroy his enemies. The clouds are his war chariot. The storm is his robe.

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When the heavens darken and the winds begin to swirl, he is coming to settle accounts with wicked kings and rebellious peoples.

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And he does it against multiple nations in the Old Testament. Again, we talked about this earlier.

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The illiteracy of the Bible is where we fall short on these things. If Revelation is the most

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Old Testament book in the New Testament, we ought to know our Old Testament before we start opining our opinions about it.

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Okay, well, with that, what is coming on the clouds actually look like in the Old Testament? Do we see it show up?

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Indeed, we do. Isaiah 19, 1. Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and is about to come to Egypt.

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This image is unmistakable. Yahweh does not come and visit Egypt, but he's clothed in the storm.

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He advances towards a nation that was ripe for destruction. And when this prophecy was fulfilled, no

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Egyptian looked up into the heavens and saw God parachuting down. But what they did see was the unstoppable advance of a serious armies in 761

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BC, sweeping down on them and annihilating them completely. When God came in the clouds in Isaiah 19,

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Assyria was coming on the ground in 761 BC. That's what the prophecy was about.

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It wasn't about meteorology. It was about divine vengeance executed in heaven and on earth.

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Yahweh rode the cloud in heaven. The Assyrians rode the war horse on earth and Egypt fell.

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That's what it means. Look at Jeremiah 4, 13. Behold, he goes up like clouds and his chariot is like a whirlwind.

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What is this talking about? Well, God is dawning the clouds in heaven. Well, what's happening on earth?

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Well, when you check out what's happening on earth, it's actually Babylon. It's Nebuchadnezzar's calvary that was storming towards the city of Jerusalem and being used by God as the instruments of his wrath.

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And what did they do when Babylon came? They completely decimated Judah. They destroyed

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Solomon's temple. They raised the city to the ground. They dragged its people into exile with chains and marched them over 700 miles to the city.

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Babylon was doing on earth what God was doing in heaven.

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God was coming in the clouds, signifying his judgment on Judah, and Babylon was his vehicle of judgment.

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It was the weapon in his hand, and Judah was the smoking crater that was left behind.

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Nahum 1, 3 gives another glimpse of this. The Lord has his way in the whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust beneath his feet.

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Again, this is not a physical coming. God didn't physically come to Egypt when he destroyed it.

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He didn't physically come to Judah when he destroyed it in 586 BC, and he's not physically coming here. This is

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God signaling in the heavens what he's about to do on the earth. And what is he about to do? He's going to destroy

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Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, a city that was so ripe for judgment, soaked in blood, arrogance, and pride.

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It was a town, a city that had once repented in the days of Jonah, but now had returned to her wickedness in even more wicked ways than before.

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And Nahum tells us that God was now going to break that city with a flood of his colossal wrath that had been stored up and now was going to be poured out upon them in indignation.

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And that is precisely what happened in the year 612 BC. A coalition of Babylonians and Medes and Persians destroyed

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Nineveh so thoroughly that it disappeared from history for centuries into the future.

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When God rode on the clouds, he destroyed Babylon, he destroyed

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Assyria, he destroyed Judah, he destroyed Egypt. All of these images are the same.

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You either have to take, and there's more, you either have to take that God visited the earth on the clouds multiple times,

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I think seven or more in the scriptures, or you have to take this as what it means.

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It's symbolic of his judgment. Joel chapter two paints a picture of the day of the

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Lord as a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

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Again, what is this for? Well, this one is not for Assyria, not for Babylon, not for Egypt, but this one's for Jerusalem.

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And this one in Joel two is an interesting one because it's not for 586 BC Jerusalem that was destroyed by the

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Babylonians. No, this is for first century Jerusalem. This is a prophecy that after Pentecost, after the spirit falls upon the people of God, that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed because they had forsaken their

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God and they had trampled upon their covenant and God was coming after them.

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So 300, 400 years before it happened, Joel prophesied that God will come on the cloud again and he will destroy

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Jerusalem again and he will destroy their temple again, but this time it will be final.

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Now that's what happened in in the first century. We'll cover that more in just a moment. Ezekiel 30 verse three calls the day of the

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Lord, a day of clouds. And he's aiming that prophecy right at Egypt and Egypt was destroyed.

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The sword will come upon Egypt. He says, those who support her will fall. So it's clear that God didn't visit

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Egypt on a cloud, but he did visit Egypt with armies that destroyed her.

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Seth and I one 15 says a day of wrath, a day of darkness, a day of gloom, a day of clouds and a thick darkness.

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This time it's a prophecy of Judah. Again, God's own covenant. People had turned their back on their sacred festivals.

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They had turned their, their festivals into lies. They had sacked, they, they had turned their sacrifices into a stench in the nostrils of God.

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Their worship had become idolatry. And so what happens? The clouds were rolling and billowing in heaven as Babylon was rolling over them on earth.

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Are you seeing the pattern yet? In every single one of these scenes, God is said to be coming with the clouds.

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And yet in every single one of them, God is not physically coming to the earth, but he is physically destroying a nation.

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He's destroying nations left and right in the old Testament using this cloud like metaphor.

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And the metaphor is never sterile. It's never neutral. It's never peaceful. The clouds don't signal comfort, hope, or inspiration.

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They signal that God has aimed his 30 ought six right at the forehead of the nation who's violated his commands.

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When God mounts upon the winds and advances, he does so to execute divine justice.

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The clouds are not symbolic of his transcendence. They are symbolic of his invasion.

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And if you think this pattern starts with the prophets, we'll think again, this pattern goes all the way back to the beginning of the

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Bible in Genesis three, eight, where it says that Adam and Eve, after they had sent after they had eaten the poison fruit, they heard the sound of the

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Lord God walking in the cool of the day. Now, at first glance, it kind of sounds like a serene moment.

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They ate the wrong fruit and God strolls in, in a twilight stroll, walking through paradise in the cool of the day.

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But that's not actually what that word means. The Hebrew word there is not cool of the day.

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It is literally ruach yom, which is the word for wind and the word for day.

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So it literally means the windy day. That's what it means. So I don't understand why the English translation translated as the cool of the day, that part of the day where a nice cool breeze was blowing.

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This is saying that God came after Adam and Eve like a hurricane on a windy day.

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He came after them like a whirlwind. He came after them like a storm cloud.

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And in this, God was coming after Adam and Eve because they had made themselves enemies of God.

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So he was coming after them in a storm cloud. Again, it's not casual language here.

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It's confrontational. When God comes as a whirlwind, he comes to destroy.

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And only by grace was Adam and Eve spared. When God came in a whirlwind to confront them in their covenant rebellion and covenant breaking sin, he came to destroy them.

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Yet in his grace, he spared them and he sacrificed an animal on their behalf and covered them in their nakedness.

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But don't make any mistake here. The wind, the storm is God's fury.

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The same is true in the book of Exodus when God would later descend down on Mount Sinai in a cloud.

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He's descending like a cloud in order to show the people that he is holy and they better not cross him.

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And they got the message. They laid down with their faces pressed against the earth and they begged God not to deal with them and to only deal with Moses.

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The same is true in the book of Job where Job trembles over the tempest. The Lord wasn't out for a walk.

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He was coming in judgment. This is the same storm that shows up in Genesis 6 through 9 where the floodwaters falling upon the earth from storm clouds above.

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They fell when God loosed the foundations of the deep and he opened up the floodgates of heaven and the clouds amassed overhead signifying not just a shift in weather but that divine wrath was coming.

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The flood was not just an ecological disaster. It was a theophany.

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It was a storm theophany. It was Yahweh visiting the earth in watery judgment purging the world that had become hopelessly corrupt in its sin.

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The clouds came and the world was drowned. Fast forward to the

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Exodus. God saves his people. How does he save his people? He saves his people with a storm cloud that was so fierce in fact that it parted the

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Red Sea in two and welcomed them into newfound freedom as it drowned the armies of Pharaoh in the sea.

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And then how does he lead them after that? He doesn't lead them silently. He doesn't lead them invisibly. He leads them in a pillar of a cloud by day and fire by night.

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Exodus 13 21. What does that mean? Well the cloud is not a GPS tracker because it's very clear that they went a very indirect route to the promised land.

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What was it? It was Yahweh riding on the clouds and leading his people in a kind of way to show everyone in the land of Canaan that Yahweh was coming on his war chariot.

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As Israel marched towards Canaan the cloud was a kind of declaration and a banner saying

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Yahweh is coming. And how did the nations respond? Well they didn't mock.

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They didn't scoff. They didn't ignore it. They trembled. Rahab tells us what the spies in Jer - or what the city of Jericho was thinking in Joshua 2 9 through 11.

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I know that the Lord has given you the land. All the inhabitants of the land have melted before you for we have heard how the

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Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you. That's cloud language. She's saying we know that the

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Lord God rides the clouds and we're terrified about it. She's saying that that they were afraid of this

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God because he's the one who rides the skies and conquers kings. And this must have been particularly terrifying for the

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Canaanites because their chief God Baal or maybe you've heard him called Baal was the

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Canaanite God for storm cloud riding. He was the storm God.

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He was the God who rode on the clouds. So they believed that that he's the one who brought thunder and rain and lightning and the way that they would that get his storm clouds to come is they would participate in sexual debauchery in order to motivate the rain.

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Now they saw no Baal but they did see the true cloud rider.

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The one who really rides upon the clouds the one who was coming after them for their counterfeit worship and for their demonic disgusting practices and their society was going to collapse under the weight of the true rider of the clouds.

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He was coming not to water their fields but to drown their armies in his fury not to bless their land but to break it.

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The cloud had moved before Israel wasn't just a weather phenomenon it was a war chariot with war horses dressed for battle and the

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Canaanites knew it. They knew exactly what it meant when God comes on the clouds unlike us today when we see this and we think ah that must be the future.

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It's not. When God rides on the cloud he's coming into battle against a nation that he's that he's imminently going to destroy.

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He doesn't come on the clouds and wait 2 ,000 years. He comes on the clouds now to destroy people now who have broken the covenant now.

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The Canaanites heard the stories they saw the smoke and when God came to meet them they were incensed they were terrified they were broken because they realized that God was going to dethrone every imposter who dared to claim anything other than allegiance to him and this is the unbroken testimony from all of scripture from Eden to Egypt from the antediluvian world to Canaan from Judah to Nineveh from Babylon to first century

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Jerusalem every time the clouds appear judgment follows. It's not it's not happenstance it is a divine strategy the clouds are the backdrop for God's holy war that he is executing upon covenant breaking people.

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The sky goes dark not because the sun forgets how to shine but because God is going to rise and act in judgment when

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God rides the clouds he's not coming to suggest he's coming to slay and this was not only true in the old testament it's true of Jesus as well.

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Jesus uses this storm language in the new testament where he describes how he's going to come against Judah the one who kills him he says you will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven.

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We think about this that Jesus is standing there in front of Caiaphas and Caiaphas is questioning him and mocking him and and we and and Caiaphas asked him this question are you the son of man or not tell me answer me and Jesus says you will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven.

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We we don't understand what that means we don't understand how how base that was when

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Jesus said that Caiaphas this fake pretending high priest asked Jesus to answer him and Jesus says you will see me coming in judgment and you will see me annihilate you

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Matthew 26 64 that's what Jesus was saying he's saying that you are under the death sentence

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Caiaphas the city of Jerusalem is under the doom of God I am coming he does the same thing in Matthew 24 he declared that wars and famines and persecutions and and all of that is going to happen before the destruction of the temple is going to take place because it was going to happen in this generation then he told his disciples not to go chasing false reports and don't go out into the desert and don't go to the inner rooms looking for me you're going to know when

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I'm coming you're going to recognize when it happens because I'm going to come in the clouds he was not telling his disciples to be for 40 years looking and waiting to see him coming physically on the clouds he's using old testament language to say you'll know that I've come when

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Jerusalem is destroyed you'll know that I've come when that city is leveled and raised and dead in its own ashes that's when you'll know that I've come that's what it means that I'm coming on the clouds and that takes us to our next section which is part three all those who pierced him will see him revelation 1 7 is not a gentle observation it's a summons it names the guilty it locates the crime it promises the consequence behold he is coming with the clouds and every eye will see him even those who pierced him that final phrase should not be looked at as incidental it is the point the piercing is the wound that bleeds into the rest of the book the judgment isn't generic on some kind of people who sort of pierced him no this is personal and the verdict lands squarely on a particular people ones who in fact really did pierce him and it lands squarely on the generation that drove their own messiah to a roman cross it's the ones who precisely the bible says pierced him it can't mean the 21st century americans or people of the world it can't even mean the roman soldiers who actually did the piercing because they didn't know what they were doing they didn't know who he was and even if it was their hands that struck the nails and the spear that pierced his side they were only following orders legally morally biblically the guilt does not rest primarily on the hammer wielders but on those who actually planned and perpetrated the execution those who called for it those who conspired and manipulated and demanded that the king would be killed and that was not caesar and that was not pilot and that was not the romans that was jerusalem the jewish leadership orchestrated the murder it's what the new testament tells us the priests and the scribes they incited the crowds they they met together in a secret council in order to secure his death penalty and then with full awareness of what they were doing the elders staged the trial they the sanhedrin secured the death penalty and then with full awareness and a kind of terrifying resolve the people flung the city into madness which propelled pilot to do it and then they said to pilot his blood be on us and our children matthew 27 25 they asked for god to curse them curse them and their children which is a generation they asked god to curse them for 40 years and they were they didn't merely permit his death to happen they summoned it they executed it and they accepted the consequences for it to grasp the gravity of this is to consider maybe a legal analogy imagine a woman who hires a hitman to kill her husband she's not the one who pulls the trigger she doesn't climb through the window and and suffocate him with a pillow or whatever was the murder weapon but she did plan the murder she did pay for the murder and she sent the murderer to do the murder and in the court's eyes who's the one who's more guilty the one who fired the gun or the one who paid for it in our justice system the law often comes down harder on the instigator than on the instrument the hitman may be charged with murder but the one who conceived it ordered it and paid for it is usually punished even more severely than the hitman himself because her mind is the one who willed it her hands were the one who arranged it and her heart is the one who desired it and so it is with the jews if you remember the jews were the chosen people of god they were god's bride and when the son comes to his bride not only does his bride reject him but she hires the romans to kill him she hired a hitman that's what the jews did that's what the new testament is saying the jews hired a hitman to kill their god and is it any wonder that god himself judged them so severely because the crime itself was so severe the jewish leaders weren't confused on what they were doing they were not passive on what they were doing they weren't trying to stop a crime they weren't trying to they weren't trying to preserve something good or true or beautiful no they were planning a murder john 11 53 says it plainly from that day on they planned together to kill him and when pilot hesitated they threatened him they stirred up the crowds in order to show pilot you just watch if you don't murder him for us we're going to throw the city into chaos and if we throw the city into chaos caesar's going to hear about it and you're going to be executed so pilot what's your play we're going to have this jesus murdered whether you like it or not and if we don't then you're going to be killed that's what they were saying to pilot and then when pilot offered them a kind of uh a kind of uh middle point where he said here what about barabbas i'm gonna i'm gonna put up for you a revolutionary a guy who actually should be murdered and well you still want to kill jesus then and they said yes they said give us barabbas give us the insurrectionists give us the murderer because we want jesus killed and when pilot washed his hands right in front of them and he said that that his hands were clean but their hands were going to be stained with blood they did not back down they continued on in their course it may his blood be on us and our children but you know in the midst of this jesus tells pilot a comforting truth pilot doesn't want to kill jesus pilot feels like the jews are forcing him which they were but he wants to let jesus go now we don't know his motivation maybe he wanted to let jesus go to to tick the jews off we don't know maybe he really saw something in jesus that jesus wasn't guilty that's what it seems like in the text but jesus tells him this he says you would have no authority over me unless it had been given you from above for this reason he who delivered me to you has the greater sin john 1911 the greater sin jesus is not saying it's equal he's not saying that the romans are 50 to blame and the jews are 50 to blame no he's saying that the majority of the blame goes on the jews the roman governor was under pressure and he gave the order but it was the jewish leaders who forced him they were the ones who plotted they were the ones who purchased they were the ones who pursued the murder of the messiah and this is the consistent testimony of scripture peter preaching in jerusalem at pentecost doesn't say that the romans killed jesus he doesn't say that it was actually the romans who whipped jesus it was the romans who pierced jesus it was the romans who beat jesus it was the romans who crucified jesus and yet peter says that it was the jews this is what he says this jesus who you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put him to death acts 2 23 peter's talking to the jews he's saying that rome might have been the weapon but you are the one who was wielding it and peter continues you jewish people you disowned the holy and righteous one and you put to death the prince of life acts 3 14 through 15 he doesn't mean that in general humanity in a kind of sinful sense where everyone has fallen short of the glory of god has somehow put jesus to death no he's standing in jerusalem looking at the eye looking into the eyes of the jews and he's saying you put him to death and you are guilty he's saying you're the ones who called for jesus's crucifixion you're the ones who executed jesus's crucifixion and you use the romans to do it stephen who was a deacon in the early church says the same thing in act chapter seven he echoes the same theme he says which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute they killed those who had previously announced the coming of the righteous one whose betrayers and murderers you have now become acts 752 he's not saying that it's the romans who killed the prophets it's the gentiles who killed the prophets he's saying no your fathers jews your jewish fathers killed the prophets that god sent to you and now you've become twice the son of hell by killing god's one and only son that's what he's saying and what did they do they killed him for it they murdered him for saying it paul in first thessalonians 2 15 writes this the jews killed the lord jesus and the prophets and drove us out and they are not pleasing to god but they are hostile to all men and he doesn't stop there he says wrath has come upon them to the utmost so when we get to revelation and we see wrath boiling up to the utmost in revelation four and five and six and seven through the bulls and through the and through the trumpets and through the seals and we see judgment being poured out and we see and we see uh all of this destruction and devastation that's kind of wrath being poured out to the utmost that's what paul's saying that they killed the lord of life they killed god incarnate and in flesh and after he resurrected he brought them under judgment for their crimes and they are experiencing wrath to the utmost and that was not just a fringe opinion by paul as we've said stephen says it peter says it but it was the whole apostolic consensus in the first century it was the verdict that heaven had declared by the holy spirit over the jews it was affirmed by the apostles it was ratified in the fire and in revelation 1 7 you've got the opening salvo that that it is started it is coming when revelation was written it was maybe two or three years before the great judgment comes so revelation is the inauguration of the judgment it is jesus is coming and he who is he coming against those who pierced him he's not being poetic he's being precise he's quoting zechariah 12 10 which is a prophecy that was aimed right at the heart of jerusalem and he's saying they will look on me whom they have pierced and they will mourn and the they is not ambiguous there it's not the it's it's not the 21st century people it's the house of david it's the inhabitants of the city of jerusalem it's the tribes of the covenant land this is not a kind of sweeping reference to all sinners and all ages are gonna have a kind of kumbaya moment where they come to god and and they confess that we're the ones who pierced you we're the guilty ones no he's addressing the specific guilty generation the one who had the promises the one who saw god in the flesh the one who killed the prophets the one who had the messiah right there and they handed him over to die and not just any death but a pierced death they pierced him the hebrew word in zechariah is dakar which means to thrust through with a fatal intent it means to stab someone in order to kill them the pierced one is not merely wounded in the prophecy of zechariah he's killed he's slain and even more astonishing still is the one speaking in that passage is yahweh himself they will look on me whom they have pierced god is saying you jews are going to look on me who you pierced zechariah is prophesying that god in the flesh will be pierced by the jews stabbed in the back by the people who should have loved him and accepted him and welcomed him the same god who dwelled in the holy of holies was now walking in the flesh among them and instead of worshiping him they killed him they pierced their god through and through they murdered the very one who made them they turned the covenant blade inward and they cut the hand that had rescued them from egypt and they cut the hand that had fed them in the wilderness and they cut the hand that had planted them in the land of promise and the prophecy doesn't just end in silence it ends in sight this is what zechariah says they will look they the ones who pierced him will look and there will be a day when they who pierced him when there i see how they scorned him and how they wounded him and in their humility they will suffer by the sovereign vengeance of god and that day came in ad 70 when titus's armies broke through the city walls of jerusalem the city of the great king and he turned that city into a campfire and a furnace of divine wrath the temple the glory of the old covenant world crumbled under the roman siege the priesthood abrogated the very system that rejected its fulfillment was obliterated the people who cried his blood be on us and our children watched the blood pour out of the streets of jerusalem not for atonement but his judgment and jesus who had warned them all these things will come upon this generation he came he came upon that generation and he pierced them through because they pierced him and what those people saw what they saw was not an accident of history it was not happenstance it wasn't roman imperialism or roman uh roman addiction to conquest no every stone that fell in that city was a sermon that jesus had already preached in matthew 24 every flame that climbed up the walls of the temple was a psalm of retribution on the lips of christ 40 years before every starving child in that city was a witness to the fury of the lamb the covenant that they shattered came back down on top of their heads like the flood waters that collapsed upon the armies of egypt this was not lost on the early church they saw it eusebius who was an early church historian he declared that jerusalem's destruction was divine justice for their impiety against the christ of god justin martyr tertullian origin many many other apostolic fathers agreed with this that revelation 1 7 is not a riddle awaiting fulfillment it's a revelation that's already been unsealed in the first century proving that the lamb who was slain slayed the jews that's what revelation 1 7 is saying and that takes us to part 4 all the tribes in the land will mourn revelation 1 7 ends with a bang and it says all the tribes of the land are going to mourn over him and this is not metaphorical it's it's not emotional regret it's not a kind of repentant posture of the jews it is covenantal agony it's the shriek and the wail of a nation watching her world collapse in judgment these are not the sobs of soft -hearted seekers these are the howls of men and women who are crushed under the weight of divine wrath and every syllable in that sentence bleeds with first century relevance let's begin with the word itself that that kicks this off and that is the the word for world which is gay or gaia it's gamma nu in greek many english bibles render this world as earth which makes you think about the entire planet all seven continents but that's just not what it means that's not what the word in the bible gay that's not what it means it doesn't mean planet it means land it means the earth beneath your feet not the earth as in a spinning globe it means land and not just any land but the covenant land the land of israel the promised land the land where god's people are supposed to live the land where god planted a vineyard and expected fruit to grow from it isaiah 5 1 through 7 and matthew 22 and when the prophet spoke of this land's destruction they used the word gay look at the septuagint over and over gay refers to a particular piece of covenantal soil genesis 12 1 this is the promise go forth from your country to a land gay that i will show you exodus 3 8 i have come down to deliver them and bring them up from that land to a land or to a good and spacious land gay a land flowing with milk and honey deuteronomy 28 21 it's particularly important because this is covenantal cursing language that moses is giving to them from god god says this the lord will make the pestilence cling to you until he has consumed you from the land gaze where you are entering to possess it this means that that god is saying this land that i have given you gay is going to be taken from you if you don't obey the covenants i am going to strike you down with pestilence until you are consumed and removed from the land and here's the point god could have done this multiple times in the old testament to the people of israel and he was gracious and he was gracious and he was gracious in the exile he does this temporarily he removes them from the land and and fills them with all sorts of pestilence and removes them and brings them to babylon and that's where we get daniel and daniel praying for the people and the people returning under the edict of cyrus and rebuilding the walls under under nehemiah and rebuilding a a second temple under ezra and and then you have guys like malachi who are prophesying to this group of people who are now the remnant who's remained and and yet after 400 years in between malachi and matthew the problems that were inherent in them the covenant breaking tendencies that defined them had not gone away and now god is coming in ad 70 to remove them from the land once and for all but my point here is that the word land here is not earth it's gaze and here's and here's the interesting feature this is the same word john uses in revelation 1 7 that moses uses in deuteronomy 28 now those are not the only examples hosea 1 2 says the land gay commits flagrant harlotry forsaking the lord zechariah 12 12 the land gate will mourn every family by itself these are not accidents this is the prophetic pattern the land gay is israel's land the tribes are israel's tribes the mourning is israel's judgment revelation 1 7 is echoing zechariah 12 with chilling exactness both in vocabulary and in vision zechariah says that they will mourn they will look on me whom they've pierced and they will mourn for him and the land will mourn each tribe by itself zechariah 12 10 and 12 12 in greek the word gay and fulai which is the word for tribe is exact is an exact match in zechariah 12 and revelation 1 7 which tells us that john is quoting zechariah and it tells us that zechariah is talking about judah how do we know that because he says later he names the tribes david levi and shimei he sets the scene in jerusalem david and levi and simi are royal officers so you have you have the scene set in jerusalem he locates the grief within the covenant borders of the city the mourning is not planetary it's tribal it's local it's covenantal and john adopts the exact same phraseology using both fulai and gaze when he says fulai taste gaze that's a quote from zechariah which tells us that john is quoting him and he's saying that the coming judgment on the land is not a judgment on the world it's a judgment on the jews in other words revelation 1 7 is not broadening zechariah's prophecy out to the whole world it's narrowing in on the jews and it's saying it is being fulfilled and that's being proclaimed in revelation 1 7 that the hundreds year old prophecy of zechariah is now coming in revelation 1 revelation being written in 65 66 ad something around in there john's saying there's a couple years left guys before zechariah's prophecy comes true and john incorporates it into the very theme of the book of revelation consider the other word the word for tribes which is fulai that's not a random ethnic term that talks about all people and their tribes and nations when when it says the gospel is going to go forth to every tribe tongue and nation that that's not that's not what this word is doing here overwhelmingly the word tribes refers not to all people at all times and all languages in all places it's talking about a specific group of people in a specific time in a specific location it means the 12 tribes of israel this is not the modern day united nations this is not the modern day australians or the americans or whoever else the south americans this is covenant people this is this is judah and how do we know that well look a couple examples of this matthew 19 28 this is the word you will sit on 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes fulais of israel acts 26 7 our 12 tribes earnestly serving god night and day revelation 7 4 144 000 sealed from every tribe fulais of the sons of israel unless a broader context is demanding that the word fulai means something other than the 12 tribes of israel you should assume that it's the 12 tribes of israel and revelation 1 7 there's not any context that should lead you to the alternative in fact the context actually confirms that it must be the jews because it's the tribes who pierced them not every people and every time pierced jesus but the jews the jews did this is not an expansion to nations tongues and peoples and tribes that's not what this is happening here the phrase that that john is talking about is not global he's talking covenantal he's narrowing the crosshairs on the jews so that all the tribes of the land are going to come under the death sentence and that is judah and they don't mourn symbolically they mourn actually the greek word here for mourning is which means more than crying about something it means to beat your breast in agony it means to wail aloud it means to to collapse in public shame and lament this is not private remorse this is someone at a funeral who falls on their face in weeping agony over the loss of something this is the same word that's used in luke 23 27 when the women of jerusalem beat their breast on account of jesus it's the word that's used in revelation 18 9 when kings are weeping over the fall of the city it's visceral it's physical it's explosive it's not quiet it is howling and here's probably the most important part this mourning is not repentance this is not a sorrow that leads to repentance this is a recognition of their doom this is the weeping and the gnashing of teeth that characterizes people in hell this is the kind of wailing and weeping that the jews are doing when their covenant god comes and pours out covenant curse upon them when deuteronomy 28 is exacted when leviticus 26 is poured out this is what is happening to him that the one they crucified has come back from the dead and now he's come back to strike them down their weeping is not the sorrow of salvation their weeping is agony and judgment wailing and weeping and and shrieking cries because their temple is burning their covenant is collapsing their precious levitical priesthood is gone their their feasts are over every aspect of what it meant to be a jew is gone their genealogies were burned in the fires there is no old testament jews after 80 70 when they said his blood be on us and our children they were enacting a curse that had now come home to roost they did mourn not because they loved him but because they pierced him and because in piercing him they lost everything that's why jesus says in luke 21 23 there will be great distress upon the land epi taste gaze and wrath to this people same word matthew 24 30 then all the tribes of the land i fool i taste gaze will mourn and they will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven oh they will see and as we've already said the clouds of heaven are the storm theophanic clouds of judgment and wrath so the tribes of that land saw and they wept and they mourned because of it zephaniah 1 14 through 15 the great day of the lord is near a day of wrath a day of clouds and a thick darkness a day of distress and anguish the land mourned with agonizing with agonizing sadness when the judgment fell upon them and in 80 70 it fell on them good and hard famine spread like fire cannibalism was creeping into their homes blood was running through the temple like the second passover but this time there was no angel of death to pass over them there was no protection there was no lamb that was gonna take the punishment for them there was no threshold that was gonna be marked by protective blood there was only wrath only ruin only agony josephus tells us that so many men were crucified outside the city walls that the romans actually ran out of wood i want to i want to tell you this in the first century the mount of olives was filled with trees olive trees that's why it was called the mount of olives but the romans started cutting down tree by tree by tree why well first they were building their roman siege ramps they were building their catapults they were building their their siege works and all of that but they also use these trees to make crosses and they hung so many bodies on so many crosses that they ran out of wood that's why when you go to the mount of olives today none of the old trees are there because the romans wiped them out in crucifying so many bodies bodies were stacked like cords of firewood ready to be set on fire smoke was rising from the city like like a chimney on a desecrated altar the streets were rivers of blood and the alleys were filled with the stench of rotting corpses priests were fighting each other and killing each other in the holy of holies starving women were roasting their own children and eating their own children jerusalem the city that was once called holy had now become a tomb and through the choking ash of the collapsing kingdom of the old covenant they were mourning they weren't mourning for repentance they were they weren't mourning in a way that leads to life but they were mourning an abject freakish misery and horror the mourning of judgment the mourning of covenant breaking and as the flames devoured their city the sword swallowed that people whole and the prophecy of john stood vindicated word for word tear for tear all the tribes of the jews were mourning exactly as john said and that wasn't theoretical it was a sentence sealed in the blood of the lamb that they pierced and because they pierced him they unleashed the fire of judgment upon them and revelation 1 7 is not talking about a future judgment that's coming on a future people it's talking about the judgment that came upon that people because of their sin of piercing him and that leads us to part 5 the divine guarantee now we're gonna this is a quick section at the end verse 8 really i think is the signature at the end of it this is what verse 8 says i am the alpha and the omega says the lord god who is and who was and who is to come the almighty revelation 1 8 revelation 1 7 ends with storm clouds and piercing and judgment and mourning a judgment that had been that had been defined for them 1500 years earlier was now coming true because of their covenant breaking their covenant idolatry and revelation 1 7 ends with their freakish agony but revelation 1 8 ends with the signature of god it says i am the one who is and the one who was and the one who is to come i am that word in greek is ego and me in hebrew you may have heard this word yahweh yahweh is the covenantal name that god gave to moses at the burning bush i am that i am tell them i am has sent you tell them i am is gonna lift them up out of their squalor and bring them into the land of promise tell them that i am is their covenant god who brought them up out of the land of egypt who parted the red sea for them who fed them by manna and and led them by cloud by day and fire by night tell them it's i am and here you have ego and me which is the greek version of yahweh in hebrew i am has returned not to bring them up out of the land of egypt and out of the land of slavery but to drown them like the egyptians in the flood of his own wrath because they had become worse than the egyptians they had become more disgusting than the egyptians they had become more idolatrous than the egyptians so now god comes to deliver his people who are not the jews anymore the biological jews he comes to deliver his church and he delivers his church from judah just like he delivered the old people from egypt and he drowned judah like he drowned the egyptians and he brought his people up and out of the land and into a land of promise and now it's not just a land it's not just a country it's the whole world every time god comes on the clouds he destroys one people and he rescues another here we have god coming in the clouds against judah but saving the church and rescuing them from their slavery and healing them through his cross and bringing them into a world that now belongs to him that he has given to them and at the end of that statement he signs it with his covenant name i am that i am i am the one who is i am the one who was and i am the one who is to come the almighty

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Yahweh signed this judgment with his own hand and in his own name which guarantees that it's true and we're going to get into this in the conclusion a little bit but i just want to say before we get there stop reading revelation like it's going to happen in our future because Yahweh signed it with his own hand that it already happened in the past the ones who abandoned covenant were destroyed the ones who didn't deserve it the church were purchased by his own blood and brought into covenant now as new creations and now we live by the spirit in service to the king to the glory of god alone