11. Things that must soon take place (Rev. 1:1-3)

[Music] well thank you all for minding your way here great to have you here revelation I quit already whose idea was this seemed like a good idea at the time you know one of those things well you recognize that artwork we actually did a series in this room five years ago and I called it the apocalypse in space and time some of you were here and you may recall that I was cut off right at the end of it I had it was a survey of all the various ways at least major ways that the book of Revelation has been construed down through history and my hope at the time was to come back and do three or four weeks of you know what I think of the book just you know for fun and the church changed the schedule and I lost those three or four weeks and so I've had this bee in my bonnet ever since a little frustrated that I wanted to come back and as long as we have more leisure I'm going to take a little more time so we're going to spend I don't know how long this won't go on for years and years but it's going to go on long enough that we can at least try to digest this book and so you know fools rush in I feel maybe a little foolish to take on this book but nevertheless I think that by the time we're done we all will appreciate the great contribution that it can make in our lives so I'm calling this the apocalypse in space and time part 2 but if you weren't here for the original series that's just fine because we're gonna start verse 1 chapter 1 of Revelation and get going from there those other lectures if you're interested or online so you can hunt them down if you want that background but it's not essential to what we're going to be doing here this morning we're going to be covering just three verses first three verses of chapter one we will hopefully cover a little more than that week by week but this morning I want to do a little bit of introductory work as well and so I'm going to be somewhat modest in my ambitions for the material that we cover so we're looking at Revelation chapter one beginning at verse one the Word of God the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must take place right away he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John who swears to everything he saw to the Word of God the testimony of Jesus Christ blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it because the time is right away and there we are let's have a word of Prayer and we'll take a look at this our Father we're grateful for this remarkable conclusion to your great body of literature that we call the Holy Scriptures and we pray as we enter into this holy ground that you through your spirit would open our eyes and give us ears to hear we grope in the darkness without that and so we plead with you to give us your spirit and we pray that our thoughts would at every juncture at every turn be more emphatically turned to Christ in whose name we pray amen well I have one simple objective in this course and I can put it in one short proposition I want revelation to become a part of your Bible I know some of you think well I last time I checked it was there you know it was part of my Bible but I think you know what I mean the book of Revelation is for some people about the only book in the Bible they ever think about and they're constantly looking at it and triangulating what's going on in the world visa vie what they find in the book of Revelation and you a couple of texts in Daniel maybe two or three thrown in from Ezekiel and that basically is where they spend all their time I have gotten emails occasionally from people who are convinced that Barack Obama is there in Revelation somewhere and then it's would you believe it Donald Trump shows up usually not as a good guy in Revelation other people see geopolitical conflicts going on they see the rise of radical Islam they see this they see that and you know it leaves some of the rest of us feeling he not so sure about that and then you sit down to read revelation and it doesn't help much because you've got such images so colorful sometimes over-the-top and you think why I've just almost resent that that book is there I remember David Peterson in sermon once just as the Gulf War was beginning and some kind of wild-eyed person he said this in a sermon so I'm just kind of reporting what he said came into the church he'd never met the man before in his life came up to the pastor is that pastor is this the end of the world David Peterson how should I know I'm a presbyterian I think that's the way some of us feel about it you know I know it beats me maybe but you know we we've kind of operated a lesser level and so my hope is to make revelation part of your Bible and I hope that by the time we're done this may seem a little presumptuous but I'm going to say it anyway and then you can hold me to it I hope that by the time we're done you'll feel perfectly comfortable with revelation feel quite confident as to what it says and what it means and how you can legitimately apply it in your life that's my ambition so whether we make it or not you'll have to be the judge but at least that's what I'm hoping to accomplish to do that there's a certain few rules of engagement that I'd like to spell out and so we're doing this as a preliminary hermeneutics is that branch of biblical studies that has to do with how to interpret the Bible and I'm going to reduce what sometimes our multiple courses in hermeneutics down to three simple rules three simple rules that apply to this book but not just to revelation these are rules that would apply to any book in the Bible it applies to Genesis it applies to Jude it applies to Matthew it applies to Malachi all the books in the Bible are to be read really subject to these rules and for that matter any legitimate piece of human literature should be read pursuant to these rules because these are not distinct rules for Revelation these are simply common-sense rules of making sense out of any piece of written communication the reason I mentioning them here however is because people do have a tendency maybe you've noticed to abandon rules when they start reading revelation and so we need to remind ourselves of how these rules apply here as they would anywhere else so the first rule has a fancy name but a simple idea the historical grammatical method it simply means that as much as possible we read the book trying to get inside the mind of the person who originally wrote it and we believe the best way to do that is by asking what's the most likely sense that the original audience would have read it that my friends is an objective standard we can actually ask that question and come up with reasonably good answers to the question how is it most likely that the people that originally read this book would have understood the things that are being communicated that's an objective standard and it really prevents us from winding up in a sea of rather arbitrary rules that bring in all kinds of agendas that aren't necessarily dictated by the book at all but just seemed like a good idea at the time I want to stick pretty close to that question what was probably going on in the mind of the original hearers and at least by that means I think we can hang on to a somewhat objective standard at least in the first instance to gauge any given text the second rule also has a fancy name but a simple idea it's called the antelope iya feed ace this means simply the analogy of faith and you've heard it more popularly the Bible is its own best interpreter you ever heard that expression the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible commentaries are great we should read them I read a lot of them as I'm doing preparation but I always find the most helpful comment on the Bible is what I find the Bible says about itself elsewhere you know and that's what this suit rule stands for the reason it's called Ana logia fides is because an analogy is a comparison and so this warrants us comparing one text of Scripture with another so that reading various texts together that all treat the same topic we can be guided to a better understanding of the topic and view the fides part stands for faith but it also means confidence and it suggests the idea that we can confidently compare one part of the Bible with another because we believe the Bible speaks with integrity it's not speaking to us on a self-contradictory nonsensical impenetrable fashion it's not speaking to us as the natives used to say with a forked tongue if we read a topic in the Bible we can assume that it's giving us a consistent message and so we're warranted in making these kinds of comparisons the book of Revelation is especially susceptible to this rule because there are literally I tell you hundreds hundreds of allusions and references in Revelation to other texts in the Bible there are virtually every verse is reflecting in some sense or other other texts in the Bible and if we ignore the rest of the Bible then we put ourselves into a very awkward position trying to make sense out of what the author is saying here many of you know the name Eugene Peterson famous for his message paraphrase of the Bible wonderful reading he wrote a bunch of other books of course one of which was a short commentary on Revelation entitled reversed Thunder it's a great little read and I welcome you to read along as we're going through we won't agree at every point but I think you'll find he's a breath of fresh air when it comes to his treatment of revelation Eugene Peterson says early in his book quote the revelation has 404 verses in those 404 verses there are 518 references to earlier scriptures if we're not familiar with the preceding writings quite obviously we're not going to understand the revelation st. John has his favorite books of the scripture Ezekiel Daniel Zephaniah Zechariah's I as a ax Exodus but there's probably not a single canonical Old Testament book to which he doesn't make at least some allusion so that should give us a little bit of a hint that is we're reading revelation we should be doing our homework and asking where else is this image this idea this theme shown up showing up in the Bible Peterson says a little later everything and the revelation can be found in the previous sixty five books of the Bible that is really interestingly there's nothing much new in revelation it is not giving us a whole body of all kinds of new information that we couldn't otherwise have figured out from the rest of the Bible rather it is giving us kind of a great culminating exclamation point for all of those themes at the end of the Bible and if we think about it that way again it helps us make sense out of some of what's going on there Peterson says much mischief has been done by reading the revelation in isolation from its canonical context north of Frey another commentator says quote the more one studies revelation the more convinced one fields that it was deliberately composed as a coda or a finale to the Kanon it's my favorite picture my favorite image of Revelation is as I said earlier just a great exclamation point the Bible is filled with all kinds of wonderful themes and we can richly enjoy them and in a sense just in a blizzard a compacted snowball as you will of all of those things being brought together in one dramatic conclusion revelation delivers it to us in this really colorful and wonderful and powerful way one other detail here that's worth noting revelation should be read in a way in which we use this this is a corollary to my rule right here in which clear texts guide us to understanding obscure texts the whole Bible has clear texts and obscure texts it's a mistake to run to an obscure text hard to understand and use it to overrule what the Bible otherwise says fairly clearly you know when you read revelation you'll find some obscure texts but you'll also find that often right in the middle of an obscure text is a perfectly clear lucid statement that nobody could be confused about as if it's a little light shining in the midst of the obscurity to say okay by the way here's what we're talking about friends so that we can make sense out of those pictures and images which might otherwise be a little bit more too difficult to comprehend alright third rule finally interpretation precedes application every legitimate human communication has one fundamental meaning it may be complex it may be multi-layered but nevertheless to interpret a document is to find out what is its basic meaning and then once we've done that with the text in the Bible we are warranted in asking ok how does it apply to me when people skip the first step they create a world of hurt in their Bible study we need to first of all do our homework it's a little bit of homework sometimes it takes a little effort but if we go to the effort to say what did this text really mean or what was the point of this text then we're free to legitimately apply it to our lives there's an old joke it's been around for a hundred years I remember hearing it as a kid so I assume you've all heard it so I'm not telling you this as new information but I'll remind you of it guy decides to study the Bible get his verse for the day he opens the book randomly drops his verse or drops his finger to a verse in the Bible looks at it this is the verse for the day what does it say Judas went and hanged himself guy thinks I don't think so that can't be right so he flips his Bible open to another verse puts his finger on and says go thou and do likewise now that's what happens when you skip the first step both of those verses are in the Bible and both of them have a meaning that can be helpful to us but if we strip them away from their fundamental intended meaning we can get into some trouble now that's a simple example but I think you can imagine there are many many more much more complex examples that have gotten people into some problems so those are my three rules and armed with those now I'd like to dive in and take a look at the first three verses of Revelation which says the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John if we are going to credibly ask the question how did the original audience hear the words of this book I'm afraid we have to do a little Greek sorry it's not going to be tough for technical but that's it that was the language it was written in and that was the language in which it was originally heard and sometimes it gives us immense help to just appreciate the language that was used well the first word in Greek of this book is a poke oopss which is the word apocalypse we borrow it by transliteration it's composed of two words aapko which is a preposition means from and collip sis is a word that goes back to a Greek word for a veil and so the simple sense of it is to veil from or to unveil and thus it means a revealing so that's the simple sense of the word that's all it boils down to it has a slightly dramatic flavor to it but beyond that that's its meaning the first thing to notice about the word is this it means a revealing hmm it is not a word that stands for making things mysterious obscure impenetrable unfathomable enigmatic difficult impossible it's exactly the opposite the first word of this book presupposes that this is going to be making something knowable the revelation and so we should read the book expecting to understand it not expecting to be mystified by it again Robert mounts some of you know that name of course previous president of Whitworth University wonderful Presbyterian pastor and a very competent Bible scholar also wrote a commentary on revelation that I also heartily recommend to you this one was entitled what are we waiting for and mounts who had a very dry sense of humor brought that out a lot throughout his book but he said this is Robert mounts now when John wrote the book of Revelation and sent it to the seven churches of Asia he fully intended that they would not only read it but that they would understand it as well can you believe it the author expected the people who first heard that with a public reading of it not after hours and hours years and years of careful study of every little nuance just the public reading of it would be perfectly clear to them that they would get it right off the bat I'm afraid we've made something that was actually intended to be pretty straightforward and simple something so obscure that we're terrified of it so I want to hopefully get us past that to an appreciation of it in the first instance it's apocalypsis Jesu Christo revelation of Jesus Christ that is the fundamental title of the book it's the central content of the book it's the fundamental purpose of the book and we must never wander too far away from that tract as we're working our way through the book when commentators said Christianity is a revelational religion and at the heart of the revelation is Christ in a death in the desert Robert Browning the author makes John responsible for these words quote I say the acknowledgement of God in Christ accepted by thy reason solves for the all questions in the earth and out of it and has so far advanced need to be wise if you're a Christian person here and ice assume and hope all of you are true believers in Christ then you know that's true you know that the fundamental heart of reality is Christ and you know that the heart of the message of the Bible is Christ Luther said we should find Christ on every page of the Bible Old and New Testaments and if you look hard enough you'll see them everywhere that this is what it's all about and we live and die on that great belief we die on that hill friends that the truth of all reality is Christ and insofar is that's the case we should expect that revelation would be there for all about Jesus now that phrase revelation of Jesus Christ has two slightly different nuances in the way it can be understood it can be the revelation of Christ as in Christ being revealed or it can mean the revelation made by Christ concerning things that are important to communicate and people get into little squabbles about that but the fact is both those roads read to lead to the same conclusion whether Christ is the one being revealed or the one doing revealing either way Christ is the one who is finally the subject of this whole discussion again Eugene Peterson says Jesus Christ is both the content of the revelation and the agent of the revelation Jesus Christ is the way in which God reveals himself to us Jesus Christ is also God Himself being revealed and so as we read revelation let's never wander too far from that mooring it'll give us help again and again this is a revelation that God gave to Christ for us it is for us which is to say it is for our benefit it was first and foremost for the benefit of the people who originally received it it was going to give them practical help in the immediate circumstances of their life but it was certainly intended for all God's people at all time including us 2,000 years later who are going back and taking a look at it we here in this opening statement about things that must soon take place first word to notice is the word must the Greek phrase day Dei day it is necessary that these things take place the reason that was important to communicate was because at the moment of the first reading of this book tumultuous times were coming up set was in the pipeline there was going to be an unsettling series of events that would befall these people and it would have been easy for them to suspect that God had just checked out that nobody was at the helm that things were spinning out of control and thus these people needed an assurance in advance that even though it was going to be a time of upset and upheaval God is still the one who is orchestrating all of this and that indeed these things must take place jesus said in the Olivet discourse referring to the same events when you hear of wars and rumors of wars don't be troubled these things must happen but the end is not yet now the other little detail in this is the Greek phrase in say intok say you know the word tachycardia means a rapid heartbeat and that's where it comes from this Greek word talks say to be rapid idiomatically it means something that must happen right away right now soon it doesn't have to do with something that might take place 5 years 10 years 20 years 100 years a thousand years down the road it's something that has within it the notion of that which has an immediacy to it taking place that phrase is only used 8 times in all the New Testament twice in Revelation once at the end and then virtually verbatim repeat oh I'm sorry once at the beginning and repeated verbatim at the end as if to say the bracket around this whole book is that these things are going to happen in Tok say they must happen right away it's used 6 other times in the rest of the New Testament it always always always means right away now the reason I'm emphasizing that is because this is the first point where people choke on revelation who want to make it about something 2,000 years down the road they got a problem right off the bat because the first verse of the Bible says or the first verse of this book says it's going to happen right away there's a lot of ingenuity that's gone into trying to explain you know some way around that one of them is to say well it doesn't really mean right away it means rapidly so these things are going to happen two or three thousand years from now but when they happen it'll be passed you see well aside from the fact that the New Testament never uses it that way the phrase doesn't mean that the phrase means something that's just about to occur you see other places in the New Testament where it's used are always given to that sense so I'm just giving you a case in point just to illustrate it this is from Acts chapter 22 verse 17 Paul is standing up before the crowd to Jerusalem giving a testimonial and he says this at verse 17 quote now it happened when I returned to Jerusalem it was praying in the temple that I was in a trance and I saw Jesus to me make haste get out of jerusalem intox a for they will not receive your testimony concerning me Paul did not take that to mean okay Paul hang around for 10 years but when you leave leave on a dead run I wasn't the meaning nobody would take it that way because that's not what the term meant the terror meant these things are gonna happen in the very very near future and any attempt to avoid that is in my humble opinion an act of dishonesty now I realize I'm painting with a real broad brush at that point and so I'm saying this with all due humility I hope but the words are the words and the sense of the words is really not negotiable so at least on the face of it the reason the way the original hurt here's would have taken this is John is describing for us things that are going to happen in the very near future and it's good for us to know about them because it will give us some help in the process of experiencing these things right away of course would be calibrated from the time of the writing of the book Eugene Peterson warns against those who try to give us fanciful speculative understandings of the book based on events that might take place way out in the future and he says quote the Bible warns against neurotic interest in the future and escapist fantasy into the future it forbids trafficking with persons who make predictions it's a good warning because a lot of the treatment of Revelation is trafficking with making predictions generally they don't come true but it just opens the door to more trafficking in more predictions again and again this does of course leave one unanswered question it's measured from the time of the writing of the book but when exactly was that there are two theories in town one it was written under the reign of Domitian in about the Year 95 ad during a short but fairly intense persecution by that Emperor the other is the earlier date that it was early in the persecution that was launched under Nero I yours truly was once an advocate of the later view this was years ago 30 years ago I just took it for granted because that's what people tended to say then I heard a series of lectures by Earl Palmer internationally famous pastor of course of University Presbyterian Church we have some former members right with us this morning welcome to being here and he gave a series of lectures on Revelation and I listened to this was way back thirty years ago and he rattled my cage believe me he made a case that I had to take seriously and I went back and did a little more homework and had become convinced from that time to this that the earlier date is the correct one however I'm not going to deal with that right at the moment next week I want to look at that a little bit more closely can't cover it all this morning so just hold off on that we'll talk about those two dates and what the arguments are at least to some degree that militate for one as opposed to the other so by passing that for the moment he made it no now this is important we translate this made it known but sometimes it's rendered signified and that's a better English word the root of the English word signify is sign and that's exactly the Greek word here as same an N is a verb form of the Hebrew word as say moon and that word means a sign and it means a sign pretty much the way we use the word a sign is something that points to a reality other than itself it's a pointer to something else but it is not the something else to which it points if you're driving to Spokane coming down the freeway on i-90 you know that about 30 miles out there's a sign and it says Spokane 30 miles you don't confuse the sign with Spokane you don't stop right there you know it's a sign now the sign is connected to a reality but it is not the reality and that's what John says right off the bat the first verse of this book says he is as it were giving us kinds of these things that are about to take place gr Beasley Murray another good commentator on Revelation says the Prophet wishes to make clear that he does not provide photographs of heaven revelation is not photographs it is signs number reading how Lindsey back in the day and at one point he said chapter nine has in it a discussion of locusts scary creatures and he postulated that those locusts must apparently be Cobra helicopters that were being used in Vietnam and John just didn't know what to call them so we called them locusts you see wait a minute you know it these are signs they're pointing to something other than themselves GK Chesterton made a great comment those st. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators you know they take the cake and we just need to be careful to read the book of Revelation as fundamentally a bunch of signs that are pointing to important realities and yet are not the realities themselves Peterson says the inability or refusal to deal with John the poet is responsible for most of the miss reading misinterpretation and misuse of the book another commentator TF Glosson says quote prophecy is usually given in straightforward terms but the apocalypses frequently adopted what we may call cartoon language there were other apocalypses around revelation is in the Canon others weren't he says we are accustomed to newspaper cartoons in which Russia is represented by a bear England by a lion China by a dragon this will help us understand the language of these books I want to be reverent and saying this but I think it'll help us get the idea in some ways revelation is giving us cartoon imagery you know you flip open the op-ed section of the New York times and you see a political cartoon you don't think that's a photograph you know better those caricatures are intended to make some kind of comment on something that's going on in the world and you immediately get it and in some ways revelation is giving us these caricatures of real events important events but almost in a kind of language that spoofs them a little bit and if we realize that's what's going on those first hearers would have gotten that they would have seen that that's what's going on and we tend to get kind of twisted up in every little horn and every little this on that you know and and wait a minute there's something else happening here and that will help us as we go through it the signs peterson says engage all the senses these are rich wonderful delicious signs in revelation he exercises peterson says all five senses plus the mind and emotions prodding the imagination to experience afresh personally and wholly what is in danger of being only acknowledged intellectually and so let's understand that as we go along we're going to be encountering signs he sent this angel to be the mechanism by which these this information would be disclosed the way it stated here is is unusual and and important you know in the old testament angels are often vehicles of Revelation angels show up and they deliver information to people and give them various instructions and so on in the Old Testament there's one particular angel that kind of stands out from the rest and you know this it's called the angel of Yahweh the angel of the Lord it's been commonly understood I believe correctly that the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament when this being shows up is actually what's called in theology a pre-incarnate christophany that is Christ himself showing up in the drama of the Old Testament but before the Incarnation he shows up in the form own angel and the descriptions of this one really stand in a class by themselves because in some ways you already detect that there's the flavor of deity about this one the angel of the Lord the way it stated here suggests that the angel that's under discussion he made it known by sending to Angela out to the angel of him the angel of God and at least it invites us to identify this one as the same one in a sense making his culminating appearance at the end of the Bible kind of wrapping up his job as the angel of the Lord because the one the angel of the Lord is revealing is no one other than the Christ who in the Old Testament was that christophany you see what I'm saying in a sense now the angel of the Lord brings this message which is a true revelation of Christ himself so at least that's a I think a plausible way of viewing that John says he testified to the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus even to all that he saw the word here M arte rusyn the root of it is marked her mark ter we think of a martyr someone who dies in a cause of some sort but the original word was a witness and especially men a witness who swears to something in court sworn testimony that's the way it would have been heard John is swearing to the truth of what he is reporting at this point it's a term that's a favorite of John's both in Revelation he uses it here and at the end but also in his gospel I assume John the Apostle is the author I mean to talk about authorship a little next week as well and so we find a word here that in fact is a word he likes to use and is using elsewhere he says to add kind of fuel to this it's the testimony this is the word martyr Eon noun form of the same word of Jesus the sworn testimony of Jesus so in a sense John is attaching extraordinary weight to what he's saying he's saying I'm swearing to what Jesus has sworn to namely the Word of God the very testimony of Christ so he was this is something that's kind of rare really especially in the New Testament for a book on its own terms to make that kind of claim you see this sort of extraordinary claim right off the write off out of the shoes to being nothing less than the testimony of God himself the Word of God you see and so we take it as at least a book that claims extraordinary authority among us and that again is a good reason that we shouldn't just be you know ignoring it we should be paying attention to it all right finally wrapping up blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy blessed are those who hear and keep what is written in it for the time is near well this is the first of seven so-called Beatitudes in Revelation will notice them as we go along and I'll remind you of them as we go along Revelation is obviously organized around sets of seven seven seals seven trumpets seven vials you know others are a little bit less visible but are still there some are really hidden there are multiple examples of sevens of things showing up there are seven of these Beatitudes it's no accident of course and each one of them paints a picture for us of the people that are being blessed by virtue of reading this book so I want to note them as we go along that I just mentioned it to you in passing now when John says blessed is the one who reads the sense of the text is blessed is one who stands up and reads publicly John anticipated this book would be read in a public assembly start-to-finish some of you know I memorized the book of Revelation years ago when I was a nutcase you know and so I worked it through I can recite it to you right now start to finish it takes about an hour and five minutes so you could read it out loud to yourself and it'll take you about that long and it's worth doing it's worth doing because there's a power to the book when you hear it spoken that is kind of lost on us when we simply read it I'm telling you there's a power to speaking it and so I suggest that you do it not necessarily are memorized but at least at least go through it and read it aloud it was intended because it was going to be read aloud to be published immediately this book was not to be kept secret Daniel 500 years earlier had been given a prophecy and he was told to seal up the vision because it refers to many days in the future to wit 500 years revelation specifically and repeatedly says do not seal up the words of this prophecy because the time is now not five hundred years from now let alone two thousand years from now the time is now so publish it read it get it out there get it on the street God's people need to hear this and they need to consume this information right away and of course with few public copies no Gutenberg presses you know the best way to do that was to read it aloud in public assembly John calls it the words of this prophecy a technical phrase suggesting that John wants us to view this right off the bat as nothing less than canonical Scripture he puts it on a par you might say with prophetic material of the Old Testament that phrase would certainly suggest that he says blessed are those who hear it and keep it which of course applies in the first instance to the original hearers of it but absolutely applies to us as well one commentator said this applies to us but especially to the first worshipers because for them the time was near the warning is repeated at the end the same language at the end of the book the ancient world would soon be in an uproar as kingdoms shook and crumbled and Christians needed revelation as a stable guide the end of the old order was approaching the passing away of the governing world revolving around a central sanctuary in Jerusalem God had established a new nation you were here when we did mark a couple of years ago you recall we made quite a deal out of that Jesus says the kingdom is taken from you and given to a nation worthy of it judgment language a new priesthood Peter says we are all a royal priesthood Luther bout a you know beat the drum for the priesthood of all believers that's us we are the priests in God's kingdom a new humanity Christ established a new creation and if any man is in Christ he is a new creation in Christ a new sanctuary the Temple in Jerusalem was dismantled destroyed irrevocably permanently and the New Testament repeatedly says you're the temple you're the temple God and God is now working in this new holy place namely his people God's house was nearing completion and the old provisional dwelling was scaffolding was about to be torn away those are the great events that we're going to shape the world the whole Roman world not just Israel and it's for that that the book of Revelation is preparing these folks and then we hear because the time is near the phrases whole Kairos and goofs Kairos is the word for time but we don't have a good English counterpart to it there are two words in Greek Chronos which means time is in the tick tick tick of a clock Kairos means a moment pregnant with significance so called chaotic moment you'll hear theologians use that term he's saying the Kairos this moment of rich significance that's going to change the whole course of history is unfolding now in just the next few years and gee and and he's saying the time is Angus it is at hand this word is an adverb it can either mean near in space as in standing right next to you or near in time as in something that's about to happen fair's lexicon of Greek words defines this word concerning things imminent and soon to come to pass that's the meaning of the word that's certainly the way the original hearers would have taken it and I believe it's the way we should take it and by so doing we have a good firm foundation upon which we can ask okay how does this particular statement this text this verse apply to me that by the way INGOs is used 14 times in the New Testament twice in Revelation once at the beginning once at the end 12 other times invariably when it refers to time it refers to something just about to happen there is no warrant whatsoever textually to say it means something different when John uses it in Revelation so it's just about to happen and that's the way we're going to interpret the book and try to understand it and I think if you'll be patient even if this comes as kind of a surprise to you this particular approach now you're good presbyterian so I don't think this is too surprising to you but you know nevertheless I think as we work through the meaning of the book will become very very clear and obvious and very useful to us for that reason all right Sunday School lesson I say we interpret then apply so hopefully we've done a little bit of interpretation now a little application God has planned that certain things must take place in our lives which may at the time seem unpleasant or painful but are intended for our would I'm not sure I can believe that Terry you know talking about having to switch up my Medicare coverage I'm not so sure I'm happy about this you know I wrote this before I knew when I was gonna have to change my Medicare go long sorry God has planned that certain things must take place friends and sometimes they are not pleasant but we have great comfort in knowing that even when God ordains things in our lives that are not pleasant it is still something that must take place and we know that God causes all things to take place what for our good and so even the upsets financially health-wise family wise we know these things must take place because God is intending them for our good the book of Revelation with all the Bible is the sworn testimony of God through Christ to you and you may rely on it as an unchanging foundation for faith I hope I don't need to beat this drum too long or too loud revelation reminds us of it dramatically but it's true of the whole Bible it's for you don't leave it to the scholars don't leave it to the experts I've said some times of the Constitution of the United States don't leave it in the hands of moments or lawyers it's your document you know same thing even more so with the Bible you read it it's your book and God intends to communicate to you his truth but as you do so be a good student do it legitimately ask yourself first and foremost hmm I wonder what this text really meant in the first place and then you'll be on safe ground to say okay now how can I apply it in my own life and finally although revelation describes events in the past the truths of those events are timeless and there's a rich blessing for all who hear it afresh and take to heart its message I've had conversations occasionally with folks and I've said well you know I think revelation fundamentally is describing events that took place in the first century that's what I think and they look at me like I'm nuts well then the books irrelevant what does it have to do with us there's no reason to read it if it had to do with the first century then you know the book has no bearing on my life whatsoever you've just taken away this book that would otherwise be so meaningful to me because you think it applies to the first say yeah I did it you know that also applies to Matthew doesn't it oh yeah I'm mark too and we'll do gospel put the book of Acts and that's basically about stuff in the first century oh yeah and the letters of Paul those were all written to churches that were wrestling with stuff in the first thing yeah yeah in fact the Old Testament is really written in the context of things happening well you know if we start reasoning that way how foolish is that to think that because God is describing things in the first century we cannot they're thereby find rich significance in our own lives because even though the events themselves took place then the principles the things Christian people learned and applied and did are timeless and we can gain great help from examining and learning and being encouraged by this instruction yeah I need to let you go at this point let's let's have a word of Prayer and we'll be dismissed our Father were deeply grateful for the word that you've given us a light to our path a lamp giving us understanding we thank you that this book revelation is similarly given to us to be a light to be a guide to be a source of encouragement we do pray father that you would guide us in our studies in our conversations that we wouldn't do injustice to this book but that we would hear it reverently thoughtfully and be encouraged by it and for all of that we know we need your spirit and so we appeal to you to give us your spirit to that end to give you thanks for all of this [Music] you

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 17,952

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: Revelation, Apocalypse, Bruce Gore, The Book of Revelation

Id: xbESweN-xjE

Length: 49min 51sec (2991 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019