Bible In A Year - Revelation (part 2)

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Bible In A Year - Revelation (part 3)

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We will continue this morning, because we have a lot of ground to cover, with our study of Revelation.
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We are looking principally this morning at the judgments that are going to be poured out.
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And we're not going exactly in the order in which the chapters appear in the book, because there are some parathetical chapters, and we will be addressing those a little bit further down the road.
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This morning we want to talk about the judgments that are going to take place.
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And these are described by John, as he is writing.
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Now, to recap a little bit, John has been, he is exiled, he is on the
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Isle of Patmos, he's a very old man, he's well into his nineties, he's probably the last surviving apostle of the original twelve apostles.
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He's the last one. And he has been having visions of heaven, and visions which lay out for him what will happen to wrap up the entire, all of human history.
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How's it all going to come out? He's writing the last chapter of the book, so that we can all go to the end and see how it all comes out in the end, how
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Jesus will triumph, and how sin will be defeated, and how all that seems to be totally in chaos will actually be, all will be set right.
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And he has been told to write all of these things. And he was told to write, first of all, the things which he's seen, the past.
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And he records for us a vision of the risen Christ, risen in glory, and moving among his churches, and ministering to them.
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And as we pointed out last week, John is uniquely qualified to do this, because he was one of the three that saw the risen
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Christ on earth, that saw the glorified Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration.
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And then he is also told to write the things which are, and we have letters to seven churches in Asia Minor, real churches, each of which was not only a real church.
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It is also a type of a church age, and it is a type of Christian, if you look at those seven churches that he writes to.
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But the majority of the book, by far the most of the book, is devoted to the things which shall be hereafter, the things which are going to happen in the future, things which have not happened yet but will happen in the future, at the end of the age, which will conclude the age of the
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Gentiles. It will also continue God's working with Israel, his people, his earthly people,
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Israel, and how all of this is going to come out. And what's going to happen? First of all, starting in chapter four, chapters one, two, and three, we find the church, the body of Christ, present on earth.
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Chapter four, we see the church in heaven. The church has been raptured, to use the term.
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It means to be caught up or caught away. So the church is gone.
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And all of us here today, we are members. We are unique people. We are members of the church, the body of Christ.
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All believers throughout all history are not members of the church. The church had a specific start at the day of Pentecost, and the church will have a specific end, which will happen with the rapture of the church.
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And the rapture of the church will herald, very shortly thereafter, the start of a seven -year period, which is referred to as the tribulation.
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And you'll also hear references to the great tribulation, and that refers to the last three and a half years of the seven -year tribulation period.
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And that's what we're looking at. During the tribulation period, it will be a time in which evil will be allowed to run its course.
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It'll run completely out, and it will accumulate in a great battle to be fought at Armageddon, where Jesus Christ himself will come back to defeat the forces of evil.
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And this is the time leading up to that. And as we start going through this, it will be a time of increasing trouble, increasing misery on earth.
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All sorts of disasters, man -made and natural, will be occurring. And they will come with greater and greater frequency, and with shorter and shorter periods between the various disasters and judgments that are meted out upon the earth.
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And it's going to be like a drumbeat, going faster and faster and faster and faster until we get to this great final battle.
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And today, we're going to look at the judgments. We have a lot of ground to cover, and we're skimming here because the problem with the book of Revelation is we could teach for years, literally, on the book of Revelation.
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But the outline of the judgments, the judgments are referred to, there are three groups of seven judgments.
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The first group are referred to as the seal judgment, because in chapter 5, we saw a scene in heaven in which the
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Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, comes and presents himself to the
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Father on the throne and receives from the Father's hand a scroll, which is the title deed to the earth.
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Because what's going to happen here, we're looking at the period of time in which Jesus Christ is going to take back what is rightfully
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His. This scroll is sealed with seven seals, and as each one of the seals is broken, and the imagery was very common to the people of that day, because that's what you did.
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You made a scroll, you rolled it up, and then you sealed the edge. And the number of seals on the edge signified what this scroll dealt with.
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And a seven -sealed scroll was a will or a testament or a document of that type.
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And so, as the seals break, as the seals are broken, various judgments are poured out on the earth.
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And then, following the seven seal judgments, there are seven trumpet judgments. And following the seven trumpet judgments, there are seven bowl judgments.
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And by the time we get to the end of the seven bowl judgments, you get an idea of just how bad it's going to be.
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To summarize, the seven seals are false peace, war, famine and natural disasters, death, prayers for vengeance, a fear, a universal fear of wrath to come, and then the seven trumpet judgments are all incorporated in the seventh seal.
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When the seventh seal is broken, that just starts seven more judgments. And the trumpets are directed, they destroy the ecosystem of the earth.
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I mean, environmentalists are worried about that now. They haven't seen anything. Because we're going to have all sorts of hail, and fire, and things falling out of the sky, and the bottomless pit will be opened, and the demonic activity will increase radically.
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And then we finally get to the seventh trumpet judgment, and there are seven bowl judgments that come in that.
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And by bowls, these bowls, they're actually, as MacArthur puts it, they're actually, the
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Greek means that they're shallow saucers, so that everything dumps all at once.
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It's not a gradual pouring out, it's a dumping out that takes place, where you have all kinds of physical torment against men, and everything wraps up finally with this great final battle.
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And so we're going to try to get through all of that this morning, if we're going to make that, because what's going to happen?
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Well, one of the things that's going to happen at the start of the tribulation period is that we are going to see a true world government, true world economic system.
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Now, speaking broadly, there's only one thing that will make groups of people that basically do not like each other, and have never liked each other, and in fact, have hated each other all their existence, to get together and come together, and that is that they've been scared to death.
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So something has happened which has caused universal terror upon earth, and one such event that could possibly be happening is the sudden disappearance of a substantial portion of the world's population.
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We don't know, when the rapture takes place and the church is snatched out, we don't know how many people that's going to be.
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But even if we get very, very conservative and say it's 10 % of the population of the earth, that's a lot of people to suddenly disappear.
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And if you take the position that God in his will extend saving grace to infants and small children as well, they're gone too.
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And so all of a sudden, some great event has happened on the earth, that much is clear.
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Because whenever the rapture occurs, it's going to be rush hour somewhere. And it's going to be absolute total chaos when it happens.
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So whatever has happened, somebody is going to arise, and we'll talk about...
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I don't want to get too far off down the rabbit trail here because we're going to be talking about the Antichrist and so forth and so on at a later lesson.
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But this individual arises that says, in effect,
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I know what happened, and I can keep it from happening. Everybody follow me.
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And everybody throughout the entire world suddenly takes off and follows this individual.
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So we have a coming together. And the events are going to go from bad to worse.
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But at the beginning, there's actually a false peace. Things are going to progress.
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We're going to have war crimes, economic upheavals, natural disasters, and the final battle, just as the
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Old Testament prophets have been predicting, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Joel.
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This is referred to, for example, as the time of Jacob's trouble in Jeremiah.
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And so we're going to see this judgment poured out on earth. And so what's going to happen?
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Now, how many of you have ever heard the expression, the four horsemen of the apocalypse? That was not referring to a bunch of football players.
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Okay? The four horsemen of the apocalypse, this is where that expression comes from.
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In the visions that John sees, he uses the imagery of horses and riders as representative of forces.
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These are not individuals. These are forces that are happening upon earth. And the first one, starting in chapter 6, verses 1 and 2, you see a white horse.
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A white horse. And the rider on this horse wears a Stephanos.
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He's got a crown on. But this is the crown that is won as a prize, not a crown that is won as the result of conquest.
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And he carries a bow, but no arrows. And so this period of time starts off with a false peace.
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There are considerable parallels, by the way, here to the start of World War II. And one of the things that matched the start of World War II is after war was declared and Poland had fallen, basically we went into what was called the phony war, where everybody's mobilized and everybody's up on the front lines, but nobody's doing any fighting.
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Well, you sort of have a situation like that now because there's a world peace and a false sense of security.
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And we've all come together and everybody likes everybody else. And the world longs for this.
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Human beings long for peace and stability. And generally speaking, they're willing to make almost any deal they can possibly make to get those things.
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All you have to do is promise somebody that, you know, the good times will roll and I'll take care of you and I'll protect you and human beings will give up all sorts of their personal individual freedom and follow someone like that.
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And that's what's happened here, except it's happened on a worldwide scale. He is also, whoever this individual is, he has deceived even
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Israel because Israel makes a treaty with him, which is going to last for seven years.
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Now the treaty is going to be broken halfway through, but that's what he's doing. And there's going to be a new temple. And the temple sacrifices are going to be restored.
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And everything's going to be hunky -dory, except it's not going to last very long because the second horseman, the one on the red horse, that's war.
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And this writer is granted power to take peace away. So the peace is going to be very short -lived.
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This is early in the first half of the tribulation period that has happened. And he has a great sword.
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He has a great sword so that he can go out and make war. Now consider this.
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At the time John was writing, and up until very recently, war was a fairly restricted activity.
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Up until the 19th century, war was primarily something that armies went out and did. It didn't affect the civilian population all that much because a bunch of guys would go out, and they'd meet on a battlefield, and they'd hack at each other with swords for a while.
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And then when that was over, they all went home. In fact, they would go home to plant crops. They would go home to make more soldiers so that the battle could go on for 100 years or so.
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And they would go back out in the spring and fight some more. And that's how war went on.
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Up until about the time of the American Civil War, towards the end of the
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American Civil War, you began to see warfare carried to the civilian population on purpose.
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That's what Sherman did when he marched through the South. And then on in through World War I and World War II, where all of a sudden there was this distinction between the combatants and the noncombatants was blurred.
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And now what you have today, mankind possesses the ability to kill on an unprecedented scale.
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When John first wrote about killing one -third of the population of the earth, that would have taken divine intervention to do that.
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We can do that quite well ourselves now. We have the ability to do that. We can conduct warfare 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in any kind of weather, day and night, winter and summer.
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It doesn't matter. The battlefield has become increasingly lethal.
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And that's what we face as we get into this. There will be a Western Confederacy formed, which is the revived
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Roman Empire. Go back to the Book of Daniel if you want to learn more about that. Wars will continue with increasing frequency and increasing severity until Jesus returns.
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And for the final battle, that will take care of everything. And it's going to be very bad, but it's going to get much worse.
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Matthew 24, chapter 24, verse 8, talks about this, and it describes this as this is just the birth pangs.
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This is just the beginning of how bad it's going to get as we go into this period.
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To use the vernacular, you ain't seen nothing yet, as bad as it's gotten. And so it keeps going.
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Violence is going to become commonplace. Even today, even today among the common population, violence is really something we hear about.
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It doesn't happen to us very often. That's why when it does happen, we're so upset by it because, you know, we hear about it, we read about it in the news and so forth and so on, but it doesn't really happen to us and the people we know all that much, does it?
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Violence is going to become commonplace during this period of time. It's not going to be something that just happens to them.
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It will happen to us or to the people alive at that time.
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Church is gone. It will be happening routinely to the people that are alive on earth at that time, and it's not going to be limited.
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And then we get to the third rider, the one on the black horse, and this represents famine, which represents overall natural disasters of all kinds.
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Imagine, if you will, a Katrina -type disaster happening regularly, several of them a year, not one every few decades, things of that sort.
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The rider on the black horse has scales. He's carrying scales in his hand, which are symbolic of measuring and weighing.
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You know, we use that use of our legal figures have always got scales, you know, weighed into balances, and this evokes an idea of rationing, and it talks about how it's a full day's wage for one meal.
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A denarius is, at the time John's writing, a denarius is a standard wage for a laborer, a day laborer.
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You've got a denarius a day, and it says, okay, we're going to need a denarius for a quart of wheat, so you can just barely feed yourself for everything you make because a quart of wheat is right at the sustenance level for one person, for a healthy adult, that will keep you sustained.
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Or you can get three quarts of barley, which is more quantity, but the nutritional value is about the same.
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Three quarts of barley have about the same nutritional value as one quart of wheat. So what it's saying is that it's going to take everything you can possibly do just to keep body and soul together.
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And what about your family? If you're a working man and you have a family and you're making just enough to keep you alive, what are you going to do for your wife and your children, and how is that going to work?
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So it's starvation wages, and food has become a luxury. Food has become a luxury.
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There are places on earth today where food is a luxury, but we don't live in one of them.
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We don't live in one of them. We have so much in this country that only a minuscule fraction of 1 % are actually at the starvation level in this country.
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But this is going to be a worldwide situation that we come into. The ingredients necessary for cooking, the oil and wine that it refers to, those are things that are used for cooking.
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And these will become precious commodities that have to be guarded and very carefully watched as the situation gets worse and worse.
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And water becomes a scarce commodity. And it's interesting that there are certain strategic thinkers around today that predict that in the future, wars are going to be fought not over the oil supplies but over the water supplies.
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That water will become the commodity that you fight for. And then we come to the fourth rider, seal number four.
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The fourth seal is broken, the pale horse. And this man has the authority to destroy one -fourth of the world's population.
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Now, people have been dying up to now, but up to now it's just been collateral damage.
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This rider is sent out specifically to kill people.
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One -quarter of the earth's population will be destroyed by all methods, whether by war, whether by disease, natural causes of all kinds, beasts, rats, for example.
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The bubonic plague which destroyed roughly a third of the population of Europe, it was spread by rats, by fleas, carried by rats.
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The pale horse, it evokes sort of a gray -green color, kind of a decomposing type color, very sickly looking.
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And 25 % of the earth's population dies from all causes. I did look up the
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Black Death. It was 14th century in Europe. And there were 25 to 50 million deaths in Europe during that period of time.
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There were roughly 75 million deaths on earth worldwide during that period of time.
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And this was also roughly a 25 % reduction in the population of the earth.
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But, of course, it'll be many, many more people because the earth is much, much more densely populated now than it was then.
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Now, seal number five. Seal number five has a little bit of a change to it because seal number five concerns prayers for vengeance from martyred saints who are described as being under the altar.
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And it brings up a point. God is, says MacArthur, God is he who has revealed himself to be not what people imagine him to be.
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And the God that is revealed with seal number five doesn't meet up with the popular vision of God as a kindly old grandfather who, you know, smiles and is indulgent toward his grandkids, does it?
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The God of seal number five is a God of vengeance because we'd say, well, we're
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Christians, we're not supposed to take vengeance. Very true. Why are we not supposed to take vengeance?
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Because God will take vengeance. Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the
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Lord. And so there's a time coming when he's going to set everything right.
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There's a time coming when he's going to set everything right. This also marks the midpoint of the tribulation. The first four seals have all occurred in the first half of the tribulation.
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Seal number five is the hinge point where you go from the first half to the last half.
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If you want to see some of this, you can look at Deuteronomy 32 -35, Romans 12 -19,
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Hebrews 10 -30, or any of the imprecatory psalms. The imprecatory psalms give people trouble when they read them because it shows
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David calling down the wrath of God, actually, upon his enemies.
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And this doesn't really fit in the way we like to think that the Bible should fit. But as is pointed out so often is that we have to take the
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Bible with what it says, not what we would like it to say or what we think it ought to say, but what it says.
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And we have to preach the whole gospel. We have to preach the entire Bible. There's all kinds of prophetic references.
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You've heard the expression, well, God hates sin and loves the sinner. No, God hates sinners, too.
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Look at Psalm 5. Look at Psalm 5. And there are all kinds of prophetic references all through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Nahum, all of the minor prophets talking about the day of vengeance where God's glory will be put on display and the ungodly will be destroyed.
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And so the force behind all this right now is the prayers of the saints. There is widespread persecution of believers.
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And again, the church has been raptured, but there are believers on earth during the tribulation period.
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We'll get into that, too, where we talk about the 144 ,000 evangelists and so forth and so on and the two witnesses and all the rest of it.
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There are believers on earth, and they are having a very, very hard time, much harder than any believers have had up to now.
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And I'm including those who were alive during the first century A .D. when the church was in its infancy.
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There's going to be a worldwide scope to the persecution. And the
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Bible describes it as a time of sifting where true believers are separated from just the hangers -on and the followers.
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But the gospel is going to be preached, and people will be saved during the tribulation.
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Excuse me. Number six, and we're going very fast here because I'm going to try to get through all of this this morning.
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Number six is fear, fear of the wrath to come. By this time, the population of the earth has figured out that something is happening on an unprecedented scale.
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This is not just bad luck or whatever else you want to call it.
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That there's intelligence behind this that somebody really has it in for them, and times are getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
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The day of the Lord has started. That's a phrase that you see all through the
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Old Testament. Nineteen times in the Old Testament, four times in the New Testament, you see that expression, the day of the
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Lord. And this is a time of unprecedented wrath where God is specifically intervening in human history to judge, to judge.
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The exact time of this is not disclosed, but we're not to practice date setting or anything like that.
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But Matthew chapter 24 gives warning. It says, if you're alive at the time that this starts.
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Get out of town. And get out of town right now. If you're out in the field plowing, don't go back home.
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To get anything, you leave town now. And if you're up on the roof, it means you're up doing something, whatever it said, you leave now.
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Don't go back to the house to get your coat or anything like that. And woe to you, ladies, if you have small children or if you're pregnant at this time, because it's going to be a very, very hard time.
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It warrants direct divine intervention is happening, and there's an increase in natural disasters that are very frightening.
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There are great earthquakes, it refers to. And there have been earthquakes from the very beginning of this, but all of a sudden they're increasing in severity.
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The sun, it says the sun is blackened. Well, all of these earthquakes, earthquakes trigger volcanoes, volcanoes put dust and ash in the air.
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And this causes the sun to appear darker than normal. And this is not unprecedented, this has happened before, where great volcanic eruptions have taken place.
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And it's recorded, just recorded in secular history, that periods of extremely cold weather caused by the fact that the sun was shielded, and all of this kind of thing.
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It refers to the moon becoming red. Well, again, dust and ash in the air, that's the effect of it.
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It makes the moon appear red when that happens. And it refers to stars falling, meteor showers, this kind of thing is going on.
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And I note for myself here that all of the things that have been described so far, natural forces can cause these things to happen.
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But it does not have to be natural forces. It could be direct divine intervention.
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It could be direct miraculous divine activity that's causing all of these things to happen.
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Or God could be using natural forces, all of these things that are happening. And what happens is fear, a worldwide panic, if you will.
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Because it specifies who's afraid. Well, it talks about kings, great men, commanders, the rich, the strong, slaves, and free men.
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That's the entire span of human activity. From the elite, from those at the very top, all the way down to the ones on the bottom, from the kings to the slaves.
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Everyone is afraid. None can escape. None are exempt.
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So what is their reaction? This is chapter 6, verses 15 and 17. Their reaction is to repent and beg
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God for forgiveness, right? Wrong. The reaction is to hide.
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Even though it's beginning to dawn on them that there is a God who, after all, is there.
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And he's bringing these disasters upon us. Their reaction is not to repent, not to beg him for mercy.
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It is to hide, to go get in the caves. Now, just as a side note, you know, if we're having earthquakes and volcanoes are going off, and things are falling out of the sky, a cave is kind of a dumb place to be, isn't it?
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You know, if we're having an earthquake, we probably want to get outdoors so that nothing's going to fall on us.
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That's what they tell you to do in California. You know, if an earthquake comes and you can get outside, do it. No, but men, it's irrational.
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But that's what we want to do. We want to go hide. And so we head for the caves. We head for the caves.
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And yet we are told to fear him who sits on the throne. It finally dawns on them that God is there after all.
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And that he is behind all of these cosmic disasters. And they're told to fear him that sits on the throne.
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Fear the wrath of the Lamb that the final day of judgment has arrived. It's judgment day.
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And then the seventh seal is opened. Interestingly enough, when the seventh seal is opened, the result, there's silence in heaven.
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You get the impression that up to now, heaven's been a pretty noisy place. Lots of folks singing.
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Lots of folks praising. Lots of folks extolling the Father. You know, praising
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God, falling down and worshiping. It seems like every time you turn around, the 24 elders are down on their faces, you know, praising
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God. And the angels are constantly chanting. And the seraphim are saying, holy, holy, holy.
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And all of this is going on. But all of a sudden, it's silent in heaven. It's silent in heaven.
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And we sort of get the idea that when the seventh seal breaks, those that are in heaven get a preview of coming attractions.
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And it's so awesome that they fall quiet. They get quiet. They're stunned into silence.
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There's a sense of suspense. And so the seventh seal incorporates within it all seven of the trumpet judgments.
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And the seven trumpet judgments, the first four of them destroy the earth's ecology.
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I mean, people are worried about the environment now. They haven't seen anything. The fifth and sixth trumpet judgments concern the destruction of humanity as if there hasn't been enough of that already.
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It's going to get worse. That's the theme as you progress through all of these. However bad it is, it's getting worse.
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It's going to get worse. And so when the first trumpet sounds, a third of all of the trees, a third of all of the trees are destroyed.
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All of the green grass is destroyed. And that grass doesn't mean just the stuff on the lawn.
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It means everything that's green, you know, food, crops, all of that. If it's green at the time that this judgment's poured out, it's destroyed.
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And what's the effect of this? Well, there's massive famine, of course, from food shortages.
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Livestock is destroyed because there's nothing for them to eat. Human beings are going to die.
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But again, this is still collateral damage at this point. And then number two, the second trumpet sounds and a great mountain is described as falling from the sky into the sea.
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Now, those of you that watch the History Channel or the
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Discovery Channel know that in recent times, there have been a couple of TV shows, pretty interesting ones, on the possibility of the
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Earth being hit by a great asteroid. And some astronomers hold the view that this is inevitable.
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It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. Well, whether or not that's what's referred to here, it does illustrate the disastrous effects that the striking of the
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Earth by a large body from space would have. The effects range everywhere from global cooling, forget global warming, global cooling, all kinds of effects upon our food supplies and what have you, to completely wiping out all life on Earth, depending upon how big the asteroid was.
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There is evidence, whether you want to look at this, accept it or not, there is some evidence that the
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Earth has been struck by asteroids before, in previous eras.
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We can argue about that, how likely that is. But anyway, it's certainly a possibility.
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But whatever happens, this thing hits and huge effects, pollution on a massive scale.
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One third of all of the sea creatures die. There would be enormous tsunami waves that would result from something like this.
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The amount of energy that would be released by a major asteroid strike would be many, many times the force of all of the thermonuclear explosions that have taken place on Earth throughout all of history.
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And then number three is another object that falls from the sky, only this one is over land.
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It breaks up in the atmosphere apparently and has widespread effects on the fresh water supply. Now, again, we do have at least one indication of what happens when something like this happens.
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Something blew up in the upper atmosphere over Siberia back in the early 1900s and caused widespread destruction.
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The only reason it didn't destroy any human beings is that it happened to happen out in one of the most isolated areas on Earth.
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But you can go there today and see the effects of what this thing had. They think it was a good -sized meteor that exploded in the upper atmosphere.
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And it had a lot of the same effects that you had when you have a nuclear explosion.
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So you have widespread effects on the fresh water supply. We're back to water again. What water there is becomes toxic.
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It's described as wormwood is the name that John gives to it. There is specific mention of human deaths in connection with the third trumpet.
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But it's still just a side effect. Wait until trumpet number six.
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And finally, the focus of judgment is in the heavens. That's number four and the effects that it has on the sun and the moon and the stars as they are viewed from Earth.
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Various signs in the heavens. That's one of the connections of judgment that you see a lot in the
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Old Testament in connection with the day of the Lord. You look at Isaiah chapter 13, Ezekiel chapter 32,
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Joel chapter 2, and Amos 8. You'll see that also all through the minor prophets.
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And then there is an announcement of even greater judgment to come. Woe is pronounced on those who dwell on the earth.
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That's a technical expression meaning the sinners who have rejected the gospel. And now we come to trumpet number five.
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Trumpet number five, the bottomless pit is opened. Right now on Earth, even though there is demonic activity on Earth, it is restrained.
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Two things are at work. First of all, believers are present on the earth. The Holy Spirit is at work.
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And number two, certain of the demonic hordes are simply not permitted to come to Earth.
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They are restricted because even Satan and the demons are subject to God.
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And what God instructs and demands that they do, they must do. Well, those restraints are going to be removed.
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You've heard the expression hell on Earth. Well, it's really going to happen. It's really going to happen.
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And so the demonic hordes are going to be unleashed. They are described like a cloud of locusts.
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And if you've read your history at all, and have read descriptions of what some of the great locust invasions, literal locust invasions have done, when they have occurred, how this cloud of locusts can appear.
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And, you know, locusts are not very big. They're little guys. But there's just so many of them, and they can appear and sweep across an area and leave nothing alive.
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Everything living is gone. It's incredible. We've seen pictures of this.
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Well, this is what this has described. It's like locusts. And John describes some of these, what these locusts are like.
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But even they have restrictions at this time. First of all, they can't hurt grass and the green things and the trees.
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And I say, wait a minute, didn't we destroy the grass and the trees and the green things back a bit?
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We did. But the thing about grass and trees is that they do grow back. And a period of time have gone by.
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And so they're restricted. They can't hurt that. They are specifically restricted to harming men, mankind, and only sinful mankind.
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They cannot hurt the tribulation saints. They are excluded. They are sealed of God.
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And they cannot kill. They can only torment. Although the torment is described as being like a scorpion sting, and death would probably be preferable to whatever this is like.
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And they do have a king over them who is none other than Satan himself. He's given two names,
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Abaddon or Apollyon, depending on whether you're talking in Hebrew or Greek. Both words mean destroyer.
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That's who that is. And then trumpet number six sounds and four major demons are released that have been bound up to now.
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They're bound angels referred to in chapter 9. And we know that these are demonic creatures because holy angels are never described as being bound.
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And the focus, of course, is the Middle East. Everything is focused in the Middle East. And death has returned.
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Now, people have been dying right along with all of this. But up to now, it's been collateral damage.
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What we have here is purposeful setting out to kill men.
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And one -third of the remaining population of the earth is going to be killed under the sixth trumpet judgment.
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And that means that one -half of the earth's population has been reduced because we killed a quarter of it at the fourth seal.
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And now we're killing a third of the three -quarters that are left. So that's trumpet number six.
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And that's half, and that doesn't count anybody that was, again, killed as collateral damage to all of these things that have been going on.
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It's getting worse and worse and worse. And society by now is completely disrupted.
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But their reaction, again, is defiance, not repentance.
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Chapter 9, verses 20 and 21. And so what's being happened? They said, oh,
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I know what we're going to do. Let's get an army together. Really smart stuff here.
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So an army is assembled. And this army is 200 million people.
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200 million men. And John, again, using imagery because he's describing the indescribable as far as he's concerned.
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But this is a mechanized army. That's what he's describing. He describes it in the terms, the only terms he's got, in terms of horses and breastplates and armor and so forth.
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But this is a 200 million man mechanized army. Big army, right?
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And then the angelic announcement comes that there's going to be no further delay.
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Trumpet number seven announces start of Christ's reign. There's worship in heaven and the final judgments are going to begin on earth.
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And this is when we get to the seven bowls. And we have to move fast.
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The seven bowls, like I said, the word is actually for a shallow saucer, which means whatever's contained in that saucer can be dumped out just dump.
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And it's gone. And the idea is that it's coming very fast, one right after the other.
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There's no time to catch your breath in between. It's like this great crescendo is building.
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And so the first thing that happens, number one, is we get head sores. And this is not a little sore or something, a little zip that you can put some makeup on.
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These are sores that are open and ulcerous and really, really nasty, that kind of thing.
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Number two, the oceans coagulate. And the ocean, the health of the world depends upon the health of the ocean.
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We know this. That's well established. The oceans are vital to life. And yet, imagine the red tide covering all of the oceans.
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Everything remaining in the seas have now died. Number three, it's the same thing, except it's poured out now upon the freshwater on the land forces, rivers and streams, the freshwater supply.
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Freshwater is now critically short. And then when we get to bowl number four, now we really have global warming, real global warming, because apparently the solar constant is going to change.
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Now, we've already established, science has established already that the solar constant really isn't. It varies a little bit.
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But the solar constant is basically the heat output of the sun. Well, that's going to suddenly spike.
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And this is real global warming on a true global scale.
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The sun is going to basically lose control and suddenly heat up on a great deal.
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And then darkness comes, which is kind of the cumulative effect of all previous judgments.
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The final result is untold misery. And yet men still refuse to repent.
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Men have become hard and implacable. And then number six, bowl number six, the
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Euphrates River dries up. Now, I've seen the Euphrates River. It's impressive, to say the least.
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The Euphrates River has figured in biblical history. You see it appearing all the time.
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The two great rivers of the Middle East, of Iraq, the Tigris and the
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Euphrates. And with the Euphrates gone, this huge water barrier between the
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Holy Land and this 200 million man army is gone.
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Because you can build a bridge across a river. But building a bridge, bridges to get 200 million people across, that's a lot of bridges you need for that.
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But if the river's gone, then you just, you know, forward and everybody moves. So now the way is open for this 200 million man army.
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And they're headed where? They're headed to the Valley of Megiddo. Because the final battle is going to take place there.
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They're going to do battle with God himself. And finally, we hit bowl number seven where we have the final outpouring of wrath.
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There's all kinds of atmospheric effects that take place. There is a final great earthquake.
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And if this one is described as a great earthquake, it must be a doozy. Because we've been having earthquakes of greater and greater severity ever since the start of the
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Tribulation period. But we gather from this one that this earthquake is actually on a global scale and it's actually rearranging the face of the earth.
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You know, the geological features are suddenly starting to get changed. And major changes are taking place around the
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Middle East and around Jerusalem. This earthquake is going to actually flatten cities.
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And the final declaration comes that it's done. It's done.
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The great battle is going to take place. And evil is going to be defeated.
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Jesus Christ is going to return. And we are going to return with him.
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And as I've commented before, you know, if you read in Revelation 19, this is a preview of coming attractions because we did make it through to the end of all of the troubles.
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If you read Revelation chapter 19, you see that Jesus returns at the head of this great army.
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But the only one that's got a weapon is Jesus. Everybody else is along to watch and to praise him because he is coming and he says he slays with the words of his mouth.
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The imagery is a great sword proceeding from his mouth as he comes and does battle with his enemies.
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Now, these are scenes of unprecedented destruction.
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And this is the result of where evil goes. This is the result of where evil goes.
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And no matter how bad it gets, men refuse to repent, which underlines again that apart from God working a miracle of grace in our lives, we don't repent.
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We are rebellious. We are sinners. And we act according to our nature if God doesn't work a work of grace in our life.
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Here are these people. You know, you think if anything is going to make people cry uncle, it's going to be what's going to happen and the plagues and judgments that are described in Revelation.
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But what happens? No, no. They're still shaking their fist. They're just barely alive, but they're still shaking their fist at God when all of that happens.
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And so it serves to illustrate again how merciful
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God is to us, that he has worked a work of grace in our lives, that he has called us to himself, and he sent his son to die for us.
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Anyway, next week we will be talking about the status of believers during the tribulation and the 144 ,000 evangelists and the two witnesses and all of those things.
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But that's enough for today. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, truly,
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Lord, we are amazed as we read of what you will do upon earth, that things are not going to be left as they are, that things will be set right, that evil will be judged and evil will be put down.
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And Lord, we marvel also at the stubbornness of men.
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When faced with all kinds of disaster poured out upon them, they still defy you and they refuse to repent.
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And so, Lord, help us to take the proper lessons from this.
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Help us to take encouragement, actually, from this, that no matter how bad it seems and how chaotic things seem to be, you still have everything in hand.
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No matter how the chaos seems to be, you have everything in hand.
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You are in control of everything and that things will be set right. And may we praise you and thank you for your ruling in our lives that you have called us to yourself.
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We pray this morning also, Father, for Pastor Dave as he opens the word to us.