Revelation: Part 1

All right. Verse 1. The revelation of Jesus Christ. Literally, the apokálypsis of Jesus Christ.

Apokálypsis would better be translated “the unveiling” of Jesus Christ. That is the theme of this book. It is an unveiling of who Jesus really is. As it says in, I believe it’s Revelation 19:10, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

And he is involved in prophecy. But this book unveils who he really is. And so the very first phrase gives us the theme. Now it says, the unveiling of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show to his bond-servants, the things which must shortly take place; and he sent and communicated it by his angel to his bond-servant John, who bore witness to the Word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, and to all that he saw.

Now, let me just capsulize the significance of that. First of all, this gives you the divine origin of the book. The purpose of the first two verses is to show more than any other book in the Bible clearly that this book came straight from God and its inspiration and source is revealed and claimed in a way no other book of the Bible has. Now, look at it.

First of all, the unveiling of Jesus Christ, that’s the theme. God gave to show. That’s the source and the purpose. God gave it directly, so that’s the source.

And its purpose is to show the things that are soon to take place. And it says that this revelation that came straight from God the father is sent through his angel — this is the divine messenger — that brought and revealed it. And then to his servant John, this names who is the recipient and the writer. So as no other book in the Bible, these matters are stated clearly.

Now, why would God do that? I think it’s because down through history, the book of Revelation’s been the most maligned book in the whole New Testament canon. There’s some even in early Church history who thought it shouldn’t even be part of the canon in Scripture. The reformers, like martin Luther and all of the great reformers that followed him, John Calvin and the people after that, they were at that time in history unveiling and recovering the truth of salvation by faith alone.

And so they focused mostly on the doctrines of salvation and the doctrines of the Church. But they ignored the book of Revelation, indeed they ignored prophecy. Well, that was proper because prophecy’s time wasn’t here. But then starting, there were some in the late 1600s who began to write about prophecy and take it literally.

The problem that we thought all down through most of Church history is those who dealt with prophecy at all, especially the book of Revelation, said that you can’t take this literally, it has no — it has only this big allegorical meaning, it has nothing to do with even the symbols and things, they have no literal touch with something future. But there were some who began to take up prophecy and take it literally. And I’ve got a couple of books in my library, I wouldn’t loan them to the archangel michael.

Because they are very old books and these men wrote about things such as Russia would one day become a great enemy of God and that they would lead a great attack against Israel and that Israel would have to be reborn for that to happen. Well, this man in 1690 said that. Now, prophecy really didn’t become a subject that was seriously sought until the beginning of the 19th century. In the 19th century, there were some who began to earnestly study it.

And a lot of these were people in scopment, and they began to systematize a literal study of prophecy. But when the 20th century rolled around, there began to be many who were studying prophecy. This is exactly what God predicted would happen through Daniel. Let’s look at Daniel, hold your place here, the book of Daniel 12.

Now, then it was revealed about the resurrection of his people, the coming of the Messiah, and so forth. And then in verse 4, he was overwhelmed. It says, “but as for you, Daniel, conceal these words and seal up the book until” — how many of you have heard me comment that how important the word “until” is? It’s one of the most important words in the Bible.

It keeps coming up in key passages. The book is to be, as he says, concealed. Conceal these words and seal up the book until the time of the end” -or it’s literally not the end of time, but time of the end — many will go back and forth, and knowledge will increase.” Okay.

So Daniel is told that all he had been shown, and this, I believe, has an application to all of prophecy, he was told that, look, the book of prophecy is going to be sealed or concealed until the time of the end. And this word that he says, that is translated, “conceal”, would better, the Hebrew word would better be translated “encrypted”. Encrypt these words until the time of the end. Verse 8.

Daniel said, as for me, I heard but I could not understand; so I said, “my Lord, what will be the outcome of these events?” And he said, “go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed” — encrypted -“and sealed up until the time of the end.” You see, a lot of people that, not a lot, but there’s certain theological types that use the theology wrongly and they say, you know, all of these people who have come on the scene talking about prophecy and all of that, they’re just flash in the pans trying to build sensationalism so they can draw big crowds and that prophecy is just not that important. They said, if it were, why didn’t martin Luther, why didn’t John Calvin, why didn’t all of these people take it literally, and so forth?

There are a lot of people who think that if martin Luther or John Calvin or some of those people didn’t understand prophecy, then nobody can. Well, it wasn’t the right time. It clearly says that it would be literally encrypted until the time of the end. I believe that prophecy really became on the fast track in the 20th century.

And it was just the right time because it was drawing near. When 1948 came and that state of Israel was reborn, there was a tremendous interest that started even above what had been developing. And yet there was still a general slumber out there in the Church. Now, I remember in the early ’60s when I was working on a college campus, I loved prophecy from the beginning, and it’s just something that God made me.

When I see something complex, my whole being wants to make it simple. And so I took the subjects of prophecy and prayed over it, and by the grace of God, was able to make it understandable to the average person on the street. Not just a religious person, but the average person on the street. That was a gift that God gave me.

And so when I saw — I was there when mario savio started the free speech movement at berkeley in 1964 and all of those things I was about, and at that time the christians couldn’t reach the rest of the students. They didn’t want to hear anything about the Bible. The one subject that they would listen to was prophecy. And so I used it to get their attention.

And a lot of times, I was in campus crusade for almost ten years, and I kept asking God, why have you got me here? I didn’t like being in campus crusade. I used to spend days, I would make appointment one person at a time, I would meet, ten, fifteen people for an hour at a time all day long and say, Lord, is this what you prepared me for? And I’d be meeting them and teaching them followup, and many times leading them to Christ and so forth.

And I just wonder, what are you doing with me? I thought I had more purpose than this. But what I didn’t know is that God was teaching me by force because whenever I spoke, it was usually to a 99% hostile audience. He was teaching me by force to communicate with people in non-churchy terms to learn to speak straight, untechnical, and unchurchy ways so that people would listen.

And that was what gave birth to the late great planet earth. And by the grace of God, the late great planet earth started a revolution of interest in prophecy. Now, thank God there are a lot of people who are good in the field and they’re out there now and I’m really grateful for it. But I remember before I wrote the late great planet earth, I would give a lecture and there would be people that would come up to me and they would say, is there a book we can follow up on this?

And I would say, sure. Get the things to come by dr. Dwight Pentecost. It’s about that thick.

It’s a great book, if you’re a theologian. They would come back and they’d say, I need an interpreter, I can’t understand this. And a lot of the books I would recommend, it would end up that way. So finally I wrote the late great planet earth, and that began an avalanche of interest.

And then other good authors began to write about prophecy so that by the end of the 20th century, they’ve developed a tremendous interest in prophecy. And that’s exactly what God wanted. Because now the book is open. And I think one of the — a man of great insight, one of my favorite people, dr.

C.I. Scofield, who did the Scofield Bible, this is what he wrote in 1903. “The book is so written” — he’s talking about the book of Revelation – “the book is so written that as the actual time of these events approach, the current events will unlock the meaning of the book.” He pointed out that the book of Revelation didn’t have too much meaning to people a few centuries ago, and that for this reason, very few people were willing to study its message.

“Revelation is written in such a way that its meaning becomes clear with the unfolding of current world events,” end quote. Isn’t that true? And when I wrote there’s a new world coming, which was my paragraph by paragraph analysis of the book of Revelation, as I have said here before, I really prayed that God would show me how to understand the many passages in the book of Revelation that had symbols that you just couldn’t — you couldn’t find the meaning of it somewhere else in the Bible. Now, most of them are explained somewhere else in the Bible, but there were some that were not explained anywhere.

And so I asked God to help me to understand what is the key to understanding it. And that’s when the Holy Spirit really spoke to me and he laid it out so that I said, why, of course. And here’s what he did. He caused me to see, now, let’s look at this.

In verse 2 again, it says, who bore witness -then this is talking about the apostle John -who bore witness to the Word of God, number one, to the testimony of Jesus Christ, number two, and to all that he saw. And that’s where the wheels started ticking. Because I looked up the word, this comes from the word idon in Greek. It’s a word that means this.

And I looked it up again today in the gingrich and danker, which is one of the most authoritative Greek lexicons, this is what it says

Don’t you get it? How could a first century man actually see these things that haven’t happened? With God, that’s no problem, because he created time. And he simply time traveled John up so that he could actually see these things.

Then he brought him back. And let’s read. I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like the sound of a trumpet -this was the voice of Jesus himself — saying, “write in a book what you see, and send it to the seven churches.” And we’ll go into that another time.

All right. He was commanded to write in a book or a scroll what he actually saw. And then that began to click. The Holy Spirit showed me how does a first century man write in a book about science and technology that were inconceivable to him at that time.

He was commanded to do the impossible apart from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He was brought up to see the kind of technology and science we have today, and then to explain it. How in the world can a first century man do that? He could only take phenomena with which he was familiar and say, it looked like it or it was approximated what he saw or what he heard or what he felt.

So he had to use things that were only known in that time to try to explain what he saw. Now, once you have that as the key, and I won’t go into all of that today, I’ve talked about it with some of you before, I won’t go into that today, but there will be places in the book of Revelation where we will bring this key back and say, now, what was he actually seeing, and how would a first century man see that, and what is he really trying to tell us? And using that as a key, we can come pretty close to understanding what he was saying if not actually knowing what he said. Okay.

The interesting thing is that in verse 19, once again he’s commanded, it says, “write therefore the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall take place after these things.” All right. Once again, he is told to write about the things that he sees. Eye witness.

And then the outline of the book has given. It says, “write therefore the things which you have seen, and the things which are — and “and” should be translated “even” here — “should even the things which shall take place — and the things will take place after these things.” After these things. All right.

Now, what he is seeking to show is first John’s going to write about the things that are. And you remember the chart I just went through, well, many of you weren’t here, I just did a study on God’s outline of history, God’s plan of the ages, and we are in the age of the Church right now. So in the first three chapters, John writes about things that are presently in the age we live in. The Church age.

But the big word is meta tauta, which is the Greek words for “after these things”. After these things. In other words, after what? After the present age has ended.

And so we have a two-fold thing here. He is told to, first of all, write about the things that he has seen again and that he is to write the book in an outline form of the things that are or the things that pertain to the Church age, and then the things that will happen after these things. Now, look with me. I went through and I counted how many times, by the way, that John used the word “I saw”.

Very important. He said, write the things which you see. Forty-six times all through the book of Revelation, John said, I saw. Now, no other book in the Bible has the author saying over and over again, I saw.

Why is he doing that? Because he is assuring us that he is only writing about the things of which he was an eye witness. Furthermore, there are seven key points in the book that you can trace by every time John used this formula, I looked and behold. That’s done seven times.

I looked and I behold. And behold. Thirty-one times, John says, I looked and I heard. So he uses the word he “heard” thirty-one times.

So he’s using two of the most reliable senses that we have; the sense of hearing, the sense of seeing. And he says, thirty-one times not only did he see something but he heard all of the things around about. See, in every way he can, he’s trying to show us I was there. I was there.

If you have the guts to be a real revolutionary, come forward right now and accept Jesus Christ as your real revolutionary, and he’ll make a revolutionary that will change lives.

As I prepared for this week’s program, I was again struck by the speed with which events are moving into the scenario that the prophets predicted for the end times. I believe we’re there. People on the street are talking about what all of these things mean. Folks that wouldn’t darken the door of a Church or pick up a Bible are now very curious.

This may be our greatest opportunity, maybe even our last opportunity, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ before we’re silenced by political correctness. The message that God has given me is more important now than it’s ever been for the Church and for the nation.