4. The Historicist Approach to Revelation

well last week we looked at a Gustin of hippo and I just mentioned to you the view that he put in place continued through the time of Thomas Aquinas the next great really great thinker in the history of the church but by the time of Thomas Aquinas who lives in the 13th century AD there is something changing something is happening in the church which is beginning to affect how people perceive it especially the upper leadership of the church is losing its moral focus and to some degree therefore its moral capital this really began in the 1100s when urban the second the Pope authorized the First Crusade it was in 1095 you recall and the Crusade traveled off in 1099 just at the turn of that century it had actually begun some years earlier under Pippin the short the father of Charlie Maine the Pope who had just been rescued by Pippin from the lawn guards was given a kind of protected buffer state it came to be called the papal States and Pippin the short in a sense made the Pope a king now at the time it seemed like an astute thing to do but it did begin a sort of development in the history of the church that had a certain trajectory by which the Pope would less and less have moral authority and more and more have political authority because now the Pope is another king and eventually he has an army and eventually he goes to battle and fights wars and aligns with some Kings and takes hostile positions towards others and so you have a mixture of a political authority and a religious authority and of course it didn't take long it took a couple of hundred years I'll say that and that fast but by the time we get down to the era we're looking at now the pulpit actually occasionally with a straight face claimed to not only be a king but the king the King of Kings on earth which did tend to rile up other political people in the world a little bit you see because he could play the trump card I'm the Pope and that makes me a special kind of King so by the time we get to the beginning of the Crusades we're hearing that kind of rhetoric out of the Pope and people are starting to wonder mmm what is this exactly you see so even now it's happening by the time we get to the 1200s the Pope in the midst of the Crusades had become vastly more wealthy the Crusades were a great money-making operation especially for Italy and drove the beginnings of the Renaissance this flow of revenue into Italy especially in Europe in general and the Pope was right at the middle of it enjoying the wealth and the revenue that we're coming then things got even worse during what's called the Avignon papacy you know church history you know that in the 1300s for about 70 years the Pope was actually not in Rome but in France in a little region called Avignon this was sometimes called the Babylonian captivity of the papacy because for 70 years there's the Pope well that happens to be the time in which the king of France is carrying on a protracted conflict with the King of England known as the Hundred Years War and during the Hundred Years War the Pope is in the back pocket of the French King and begins to be viewed by people generally especially the English as a French Lackey and so now the Pope rather than having this great moral prestige is just becoming a pawn of the politics of Europe and that didn't do much for the respect that was flowing to the Pope and then to make matters even worse by the time we get to the late 1300s and 1400s and the end of the Hundred Years War you recall Joan of Arc was a player at that moment but as the hundred year war comes to a conclusion a pope moves back to rome and another guy stays in Avignon and claims to be the true Pope and now you've got two popes both claiming to be the true Pope both treating each other to Anathem as both calling each other the Antichrist and both declaring that the other one is you know some great wicked schemer well Roman Catholic people good-hearted folks in the world we're going what is up with this and then just about the time we get to the 1400s a third Pope comes along and now you've got three popes all calling each other names well you can imagine that the high prestige the Pope had enjoyed back hundreds of years earlier was now virtually destroyed and people who were noticing that we're also noticing that the Pope with this increasing political power was using it in an increasingly violent and bullying way so the dissidents of any kind in the church could be burned at the stake could be executed and the most horrific ways could be subjected to in quizzes inquisitorial techniques that were ghastly and horrible and now the church is not looking like the church much at all and it just creates a malaise a lack of confidence across Europe with respect this is as you probably are well aware the force that really drove the Reformation had it not been for this dissolution within the upper leadership of the church it's very likely the Reformation would look very different you see but this is what generates that hostility toward the church all right that's what's going on over a few hundred years well this gave rise interestingly to a new idea about the book of Revelation because much of what was happening in the church appeared to resemble some of these colorful descriptions that we find in Revelation and the interpretive scheme that was brought to the book came to be called the historicist view it seems to have originated with a guy whose name was yo Hakeem of your day yo Keem was a man of tremendous influence in his day he was a faithful son of the church he went to the Holy Land in one of the Crusades the one organized actually by bernard of clairvaux the second crusade which was less of a military expedition and more of a pilgrimage it had a kind of military feel to it but nevertheless it was under Bernards influence more of a kind of holy pilgrimage to the holy lands after the evidence successes of the First Crusade and while yo Hakeem was there in the Holy Land he had a bit of an epiphany his epiphany was that all of human history is divided up into three great chapters the chapter of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit the chapter of the father began in creation and continued to the time of Christ the chapter of the son began with the time of Christ and continued generally to the era in which yo Keem himself was living and the chapter of the Holy Spirit would be inaugurated sometime soon visa vie the life of your king himself he predicted in fact that this new age of the Holy Spirit would start in the year 1260 this would be after he himself was dead but that was what he was predicting this had a huge impact he was a highly respected guy well you know whether you've heard of him or not at the time everybody was familiar with him Richard the Lionheart who was the leader of the Third Crusade actually sat down and had lengthy conversations with yo Keem because Richard wondered whether he himself might be the catalyst by which this new era of the Holy Spirit would come into play and that maybe the Third Crusade would be the very event that would trigger it you see that's the kind of influence that yo Keem had well this particular approach to history gave rise to a different view of the book of Revelation and he in fact developers to some degree himself he claimed that when you read the book of Revelation and you come across a reference to 1260 days or three and a half years or 42 months you'll find all of those references in Revelation that the days are to be construed as years and this came to be called the de year theory so it makes the entire predictive nature of Revelation extend well into the future over what amounts to maybe hundreds of years and eventually thousands of years he believed that revelation was therefore describing events of Western history beginning with the attire and continuing generally to the present for the life of yoki he saw revelation as pointing originally to pagan Rome but now sort of incorporating this unhappy condition of the church and that some of the more colorful images in Revelation had the church in mind he was pretty polite in the way he put this he is a Roman Catholic after all so it is somewhat tentative on his part but he is kind of floating that trial balloon a little bit the people that picked up his theory were the Franciscans you recall that Francis of Assisi wanted to start a new order of monks he went to the Pope the Pope said no and then the Pope was sort of coerced into it by a bad dream he had that night and so he came back and sort of grudgingly gave the sanction for this new order of monks the Franciscans but the Franciscans had always had a rather difficult tense relationship with the papacy they didn't look like normal monks normal monks you see go to the monastery the Franciscans went out of the monastery into the streets into the highways into the byways they took ministry out to the people bless their hearts they were a wonderful expression of the real spirit in my opinion of Christian ministry but the leadership of the church viewed them with a high degree of suspicion they were always a little bit outliers in that and so this view that had been developed by yo Keem became rather appealing to the Franciscans and they began to develop Francis himself by the way he's gone by now but the Franciscan Order at least some of them began to pick up this idea and from them it went to a guy named Nicholas of Lyra Nicholas of Lyra again was a remarkably influential Bible scholar during his era he is regarded by some as the most influential Bible exegete of that entire era he was born Jewish he converted to the Catholic faith as a young adult he entered the Franciscan Order in 1291 he became a doctor at Sorbonne and eventually became the head of all of the Franciscans in France in the year thirteen nineteen and he was deeply affected by this view that it originated with yo Keem he wrote a commentary on the whole Bible it was not published because they didn't have a Gutenberg press yet but a little church history trivia the first complete commentary on the Bible ever printed on a Gutenberg press was the one written by Nicholas of Lyra about a hundred years after he died so his work was quite important quite influential the style of the commentary was that each page of the Bible was an inset in a broader page of notes so if you can see that you see the little inset in the middle there is the Bible text all of the surrounding material is in fact his commentary on the content of the scripture one of the things that he did which was much to his credit and I'm going to try not to be overly technical but let me give you the idea he insisted that the right way to read the Bible is by giving it the plain sense interpretation that is what is the plain sense of the text a literal sense what's the plain meaning of the text this was quite revolutionary it may surprise you to hear but at the time at that time in church history the most widely accepted sort of hermeneutical strategy was called the quadriga in which every text of Scripture had four separate meanings literal and allegorical trop illogical anagogical all of these mean I mean can you imagine reading a verse of the Bible and thinking there's four separate meanings here and that became rather a disincentive for folks to try to read the Bible because hey who can figure that out you got to have all kinds of you know Aled sort of advanced degrees and training and so on Nicholas of Lyra to his credit said wait a minute the main meaning of the text is the plain sense of the text and in that sense he was saying something quite out of sync with what the upper echelon of biblical scholarship was arguing at the time Nicholas himself went out of his way to insist that he was not being a rebel because some of what he said could have been construed that way the plain sense of the text actually in many ways was part of what drove the Reformation eventually you see Martin Luther indebted to Nicholas Nicholas himself always insisted his loyalty he said for example quote I protest that I do not intend to assert or determine anything that has not been manifestly determined by sacred scripture or by the authority of the church wherefore I submit all I have said or shall say to the correction of Holy Mother Church and I've all learned admin's oh he's trying to be faithful to the church but still his approach to the Bible is the beginning of an entirely new understanding of how the Bible should be understood by Christian people his influence Widespread his reliance on scholarly sources Rebennack commentaries on the Old Testament Thomas Aquinas was a source of his made his commentary the most widely consulted manual of exegesis until the sixteenth century Martin Luther acknowledges his debt to Nikolas when he does lectures on the Old Testament I say all of this about Nikolas because here's the little strange detail even though he insisted on this plain sense approach to the Bible broadly somehow he drank some kool-aid somewhere when it came to Revelation he had picked up from his Franciscan influence going back to yo Hakeem this historicist approach and so even though everywhere else the role of plain sense applied here in revelation he sort of suspended those rules and in fact view in revelation as a prediction a continuous description in apocalyptic categories of the events of history he said it began with the Apostolic age would continue until the final consummation he said for example the seals that are broken by Christ I alluded to those in the recitation earlier the seven seals you know he said those seals described in Revelation six cover the period from the age of Domitian that emperor of the late first century in Revelation he saw in other parts of it the rise of the heresy known as Arianism he saw the spread of Islam he saw the reign of Charlemagne he saw the crusades and other events all of them in Revelation that's the car that's the heart of the historic seeing kind of the great play of events in Western history symbolized in the book of Revelation this became highly influential because York Nicholas was held in such high regard because his biblical scholarship was so good elsewhere it was not difficult to sort of embrace maybe slightly uncritically what he had done with revelation his Capitol credibility was so pronounced on other places than in a sense this approach to revelation sneaked in and it became the view of John Wickliffe it became the Juke view of Martin Luther it became the view of Isaac Newton and a bunch of other names that you would recognize it became the prevailing view during the Protestant Reformation just a couple of other folks that I'll just mention in passing you may recall Peter Waldo he's actually a contemporary of yo Keem the original guy he's sometimes called the first glimmer you know of the Reformation he criticized the church he also read the Bible and kind of adopted this plain sense approach and that led him to be highly critical of the church and in fact to go so far as and I believe he's the first guy in history to actually say this publicly that say that the Pope is the Antichrist of the New Testament that that's what the New Testament was predicting was the rise of this corrupted papacy of course Peter Waldo had some good practical reason for saying that because the church was doing everything it could to catch him and burn him at the stake and many of his followers were executed by papal authority in the ensuing generations but anyway he's probably the first maybe a guy you you're more familiar with is John Wickliffe John Wickliffe who was active in England during the Hundred Years War writes a stream of pamphlets and tracts and other publications essentially arguing the same proposition he's a couple of hundred years later and at least among the English it got a pretty ready acceptance here's the Pope who's supporting the French who's the who were the bad guys in the Hundred Years War they began to think yeah there's something to this Pope is the Antichrist business and so Wickliffe also was important in that connection Roman Catholic who took the same view was eerily mohs Savonarola you know his name he was important moral reformer in Florence during the high Renaissance he preached a series of highly influential sermons on Revelation taking a kind of historicist approach he actually said point-blank that the church was the harlot of the book of Revelation chapter 13 so on he also said that well I won't say this he came within a hair's breadth to my knowledge of saying that the Pope was the Antichrist so at the time when the papal Authority has really descended to maybe its most dramatic nadir in history you can almost imagine that people are reading the Bible and seeing there this corrupted institution reflected in the various descriptions that we find in Revelation and elsewhere well of course by the time we get to the Reformation this thing had picked up a life of its own there was a strong desire to see revelation as an anti Roman Catholic polemic in the New Testament we have three notorious characters one is known as the Beast that's revelation one is known as the man of sin that second Thessalonians chapter 2 Apostle Paul the third is the Antichrist Antichrist is never mentioned by that name in Revelation but John in 1st and 2nd John alludes to a character known as Antichrist there was a strong tendency to see all three of these as the same person and all of them pointing to the Pope the rise and fall of the Antichrist as described in the New Testament was then construed to be a description apocalyptically of the rise and fall of the papacy which was part of what was inspiring of course the Reformation efforts of Luther and others the images in Western revela in Western civilization the I'm sorry I should say the images in Revelation because they were the context for the Antichrist became descriptions of events in Western history that surrounded the papacy so again it seemed to fit the kind of impulse for interpretive imagination that was going on Martin Luther himself interestingly had a very tentative view of revelation in his preface to the book in his translation of the New Testament he writes this he says quote about this book revelation I leave everyone free to hold his own opinions I would not have anyone bound by my opinion or judgment I say what I feel I miss more than one thing in this book and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic so not only did Luther have questions about the book of James he had serious questions about the book of Revelation he especially disliked all of the images the colorful pictures and apocalyptic kind of descriptions that we find there he said this quote first and foremost the Apostles do not deal with visions but prophesy in clear and plain words as do Peter and Paul and Christ in the gospel for it befits the Apostolic office to speak clearly of Christ and his deeds without images and visions moreover there is no prophet in the Old Testament to say nothing of the new who deals so exclusively with visions and images for myself I think it approximates the fourth book of Ezra I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it as dross was a Jewish apocalyptic writing that was very popular in the first century came out of the Hellenistic era and it was given to a lot of fanciful descriptions Luther think it has more in common with as dross than the Bible he criticized the extravagant claims of the author of Revelation he said you know who's this guy saying if you subtract one word from this prophecy God's going to subtract to you all the blessings that are described herein and so on he just thinks it's too extravagant too over-the-top Luther however finally left it to individual judgment he said finally let everyone think of it as his own spirit Legion my spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book for this is reason enough not to think highly of it Christ is neither taught nor known in it I have to wonder did he ever read it but that's different I like Luther you know that don't you you he's one of my heroes so it pains me to have to give you this I'd like to spin it a little bit but no just the unvarnished facts here but to teach Christ Luther continues this is the thing which an apostle is bound above all else to do as Christ says in acts you shall be my witnesses therefore I stick to the books that present Christ to me most clearly and purely so Luther himself holds revelation in some degree of tension not really supporting it as you can tell very aggressively nevertheless and this is a little bit of a almost duplicity in Luther when it comes to the Pope he's perfectly prepared to see in Revelation and elsewhere allusions to the Pope and he did indeed in some ways apply descriptions and revelation to his own time this is not Luther now this is a church historian not sympathetic to Luther named Obon who wrote a history of the Reformation but I think his this quote is pretty telling I think it's accurate at least if not a little bit stylized but listen to it this is DeBaun fron Luther called Luther approved by the revelations of Daniel and Saint John by the epistles of st. Paul st. Peter and st. Jude that the reign of Antichrist predicted and described in the Bible was the papacy and all the people did say Amen a holy terror seized their souls it was Antichrist whom they beheld seated on the Pontifical throne this new idea which derived greater strength from the prophetic descriptions launched forth by Luther into the midst of his contemporaries inflicted the most serious blow on Rome this was quite a psychological notion to begin spreading this is the guy we read up in the Bible and people came to believe it and in some ways Luther and others were encouraging that it's no problem finding in Luther's writings stay he made many on many occasions statements like this one which is very early he says we here are of the conviction that the papacy is the seat of the true and real Antichrist he said that August 18 1520 in a writing called the prophetic faith of our fathers and as I say this became the dominant view during the Reformation this almost became one of the fundamental articles of faith during the Reformation and again if you've never heard this before it may be a little shocking to you to hear it I know some of you are already familiar with this some of you may not be but this is a very significant chapter of church history and it is an interesting asks I think an interesting illustration once again of what I'm calling the chameleon character of the book of Revelation that it does tend to shift its content based on the fundamental concerns of the time and it's that that I'm hoping eventually we can try to escape although I'm not going to try to give us an escape hatch yet John Calvin is the one notable exception in this whole description John Calvin never wrote a commentary on Revelation he wrote a commentary on most of the Bible fact he only didn't he only skipped about three books one of them was revelation some people thought the reason he didn't write a commentary on Revelation was because he doubted its canonicity I don't think so nothing he ever said raised the kind of red flags that you find in Luther I think he accepted as canonical he's reported to upset on one occasion the reason he didn't write a commentary on Revelation was because the ground was too holy to tread upon I don't know if that was just tongue-in-cheek or what but in any event he believed and the little scant evidence we have of John Calvin's view of Revelation he believed with Agustin the apocalyptic imagery applied to first century events it was written for that population at that time in history to describe what they were going through and so it doesn't seem there's no evidence that I'm aware of it all in Calvin that he saw in revelation some sort of historic approach but having said that he allowed the revelation include his includes principles of instruction for every age once we've properly interpreted were perfectly legitimate in applying the encouragement of the book to our own age when we are persecuted we can find comfort in it but maybe more importantly Calvin didn't shrink a bit from joining in the chorus during the Reformation declaring that the Pope was the Antichrist not based on Revelation however but based on Paul's descriptions in 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2 so Calvin for example says quote some persons think us too severe and censorious when we call the roman pontiff Antichrist but those who are of this opinion do not consider that they bring the same charge of presumption against Paul himself after whom we speak and whose language we adopt and that of course is not revelation that 2nd Thessalonians Calvin continues I shall briefly show that the words of Paul and 2nd Thessalonians 2 are not capable of any other interpretation than that which applies them to the papacy so again even though Calvin had a different view of Revelation he did not have a different view with respect to the papacy all right just a few others just for fun if this is fun John Knox I won't actually quote from him you know he's the founder of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland you can imagine this firebrand of a preacher had no problem attaching the idea of Antichrist to the papacy Thomas Cranmer who was the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry the eighth no problem assigning the status of Antichrist to the papacy it may surprise you to hear that Roger Williams usually credited as being the great man of religious toleration Rhode Island the place where there'd be religious freedom had no problem assigning the status of Antichrist to the Pope this is a quote from Roger Williams regarding the Pope as quote the pretended Vicar of Christ on earth who sits as God over the temple of God exalting himself not only above all that is called God but over the souls and consciences of all his vassals gay over the Spirit of Christ over the Holy Spirit yay and God Himself speaking against the God of heaven thinking to change times and laws but he is the son of perdition he says that in a commentary on 2nd Thessalonians 2 the prophetic faith quoted in a book called the prophetic faith of our Father Sir Roger Williams joined the chorus as well the Westminster Confession of faith 1647 Edition quote there is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof but is that Antichrist that man of sin and son of perdition that exalts himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God now you may be thinking wait a minute I read the Westminster Confession I don't remember that it's in the footnote because it was edited out later as later thinkers reflecting on this believe maybe too many folks were getting carried away on this point and at this point I'm simply reporting this to you because I want to impress you that it was at the time taken for granted you see that the Pope was indeed the Anti Christ of the Bible the Puritans who come after the Reformers had the very same view Cotton Mather you may know his name he was a highly influential Puritan in the colonial period John Wesley is not a Puritan exactly but he lived at that time he was the founder as you know of the Methodist Church John Wesley says this quote he referring to the Pope in an emphatic 'el sense the man of sin as he increases all manner of sin above measure and he is to properly styled the son of perdition as he's caused the death of numberless multitudes both of his opposers and followers it is he that exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped claiming the highest power the highest honor claiming the prerogatives which belong to God alone Jonathan Edwards shares the view he agreed with the general Puritan assessment of Rome he agreed with the assessment that the Pope was the Antichrist he said quote the beast is found speaking great things and blasphemies which Edwards applied to the Pope he says he era gates to himself the power and prerogatives of God and pretends the same power of the church as Christ has he believed were taught in his commentary on Revelation that the Roman Church was the great harlot he mocked the the purported miracles of the Pope I'm gonna move along a little bit because of time he affirmed however in history the ultimate victory of the true church and he worked out what's come to be called a sweeping post-millennial eschatology I'm not gonna treat that now but when we return two weeks from today next week is Easter by the way happy Palm Sunday praise God two weeks from now is Easter I want to do a little bit on Edwards view of that post-millennial idea all right LNG white eighteenth century I'm sorry 19th century 1800s adopts the historicist view she's the founder of the seventh-day adventists it continues to be the seventh-day adventists view of the book of Revelation to this day others many others during this era of the 1800s took the same view just by way of a sampling I'm just I'm just doing this so you get a feel for where this was now by the time we get to the 1800s one very influential Bible commentator named Edward Bishop Elliott wrote a highly influential treatment of revelation titled horray apocalyptic a he said the trumpets of Revelation cover from ad 395 to ad 1453 he said the first trumpet was the invasion by the Goths the second trumpet was the invasion undergone ezarik the third trumpet was a till of a hund the fourth trumpet was the collapse of Rome in 476 the fifth trumpet were the Muslim hordes as he called them the locusts that come out of the abyss in Revelation chapter 9 the sixth trumpet the four angels that are holding back the forces of destruction that the great river Euphrates referring to the rise of Turkish power in the Ottoman Empire you see this is the kind of thing that was just freewheeling and going on all the time in this particular interpretive scheme and just by the way some others that may be of interest many viewed monks and friars as the locusts of Revelation chapter 9 Muhammad was viewed as the fallen star of revelation 9 Elizabeth the first was construed by some to be the first bowl of revelation 16 Martin Luther was called by some the angel of the church at sardis Revelation chapter 3 Adolf Hitler in the 20th century in this scheme was called the Red Horse of Revelation chapter 6 what's the problem with this I'm going to give you three thoughts I haven't I've tried not to be too critical of the views as we've been you know covering them but here I can't resist it so I've got to say a couple of words just as we wrap this up aside aside from the problem that if the historicist view of Revelation is correct it would have made the book absolutely nonsensical and irrelevant and worthless to the original recipients of it aside from that problem I see some other little details that trouble me about the historic view first the book of Revelation if you read it would you all have seems to describe events taking place clustered in a relatively brief period of time and it does raise a question how this description that at least on the face of it seems to happen in a brief period of time all of the sudden stretches out over centuries and indeed millennia how does that happen well the theory that went clear back to yo Keem bless his heart has done service this was the view taken by lmg right of the seventh-day adventists and most his stories us to this day who were still out there by the way take this kind of Year Day Theory days in the book of Revelation are actually years and actually there's more horse power for this because it allows of course for this kind of protracted understanding of Roman Catholic history which by the way would be part of seventh-day adventists teaching to this day it also got additional juice from the Book of Daniel which talks about 2300 days and so now we've got 2,300 years to play with in this use so that's the first problem the first problem is that for no hermeneutical a legitimate reason that's at least obvious days are turned into years so that now that's not without precedent and in the Book of Daniel you have weeks of years so maybe there's some justification for it but that's one problem I'd say a more deep problem is that historic interpreters have been unable today to ever establish an objective criterion by which the book is to be understood so it basically requires that revelation be interpreted in light of external events so that external events are used to interpret the book rather than the other way around that's always a dangerous approach to hermeneutics it also I think you probably suspect closes the book of Revelation to any ordinary reader I mean you've got to be pretty up to speed on a lot of details in history if you're going to take this view it makes you dependent in a sense on purported Christian teachers who are going to put all of that together for you but the ordinary reader of Revelation would be more or less unable to make heads or tails of it one commentator John Hendrick DeVries said quote it turns exegesis into an artful play of ingenuity and I think there's some truth to that finally it creates a kind of agenda driven hermeneutics revelation becomes the vehicle by which it seems to me the biases of the interpreter simply get a kind of biblical legitimacy so i use revell to buttress what is actually my own private opinion on this or that topic now that happens all the time but it does seem this approach to revelation gives a certain freewheeling power to that that might not be quite so readily available elsewhere revelation becomes a kind of provincial book invariably the historicist approach sees revelation describing Western history we don't hear much about the east we don't hear much about the you know Africa we don't hear much around the rest of the world its Western history that becomes the centerpiece of descriptions from revelation the interpretive scheme has to be reworked every time a new generation comes along with new Western history to deal with we have to redo revelation all of these things to me suggest that the jury is out it has come in and found this view wanting so if you don't mind me saying I think that this view even though some of the people I respect the very most I mean I love Martin Luther you know I like John Calvin I like all these people and I'm believing Calvin now this was not his treatment of Revelation but even the rather vociferous and vitriolic statements about the Pope I think we're a little bit overstated in my opinion for whatever it's worth you may differ but nevertheless that's where it is I remind you too at the beginning we'll wrap up with this my Sunday School lesson of a scroll it was mysterious nobody could look inside it nobody could figure out some people think the scroll of revelation five and six is the book of Revelation maybe so I don't think so but one thing it stands whatever else it stands for it stands for this there is a fundamental explanation of things that is hidden from us without the help of the one who is worthy what history is about what it actually is disclosing what story it is telling has been the subject of countless comment by countless thinkers but there's only one my friends who is worthy there's only one who can break the seals open the scroll and tell us what it's about and at that true of human history it is also true of your history there is a sense in which in every one of our lives there is a scroll that is hidden sealed with seven seals what is my life about if you've been sleeping for the last 45 50 minutes wake up what is your life about what is the story what is in that scroll there's only one who is worthy to open the scroll and to make the sense of your life make sense to you and you're not that person you are not worthy only Christ can break the seals open the scroll and tell you this is what your life really means so now I know and here I'm preaching to the choir god bless you all but you know people who are twisting in the wind wondering what's my life about that scroll remains sealed there is one who is worthy to open that scroll and give light in a world where there's confusion and hopelessness and despair and suicide and horrific self-destruction of every every conceivable imaginable kind there's a scroll which can be opened to let us all with the humility of God's Spirit in us help in our own lives and in others help see that scroll opened

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 47,732

Rating: 4.7183099 out of 5

Keywords: Revelation, Apocalypse, Historicist, Nicholas, Lyra, Bruce, Gore, Luther, Ellen, White, Pope, Antichrist

Id: 9Mx6pHBAL4k

Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2015