Revelation: Part 3

All right, turn to Revelation 1. And the focus tonight is on the book’s true purpose. You know, a lot of people look at the book of Revelation as that strange, mystical book that’s somehow about prophecy and a lot of symbols and everything else. Well, you know, it contains all of those things.

But the first verse of this book tells us whatthe real purpose of the book is. And it says the revelation of Jesus Christ. The first clause, the revelation of Jesus Christ. And the word translated to revelation is from the Greek word, apocalypse, which means to unveil that which is not understood.

To unveil it. And so the real purpose of this book I want to focus on tonight, it is to unveil who Jesus really is. Now, you have to remember, of all the apostles, the apostle John was the closest to Jesus. During Jesus’ life, John was the youngest.

He was just a young teenager when Jesus called him. He had a fierce love for Jesus and Jesus just had a special love for him. And so God picked this apostle, who’s closest to him on a human level, to reveal and to unveil who he was walking with and talking with, and was so familiar with. And it is so awe-inspiring that John, once he sees who this person really is, it just almost knocked him down.

He said he felt as if he was dead. Now, look with me at verse 4, where we start to have explained to us who Jesus really is and why he is the focus of this book. It’s about prophecy, but this book says in chapter 19, verse 10, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Now, look with me, verse 4.

John to the seven churches that are in asia: grace to you and peace, from him who is, who was and who is to come; and from the seven spirits who are before his throne. And from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us, and released us from our sins by his own blood. Okay.

Why does it say that this book is addressed to the seven churches of asia? There were hundreds of churches in asia. There were thousands of churches in the world at that time that had been started. So, why does this book pick up the specific seven that it did and say this book is addressed to them, and then in chapters 2 and 3, it has a special message to each one of these specially picked seven churches.

I want you to think about why. Because there’s an enormous importance to why these seven were picked out. And I’ll give you a little clue. What’s this book about?

What is it? It’s prophecy. So there had to be some prophetically-related reason as to why those specific seven churches were picked out of all the rest of them. So you think about this this week, okay, and then we’ll talk about it next week.

All right. It says now, I want you to recognize something, that once again, this book, as no other book, is authenticated ina very special way. Because it shows that the source of the message in this book, the source of the prophecy, the source of the message and everything else, is from the triune God. It shows that each person in the Trinity had something to do with revealing and inspiring the wordsthat are in this book.

Now, that place is on a level beyond everything else. All right. Let’s see how that plays out. Verse 4.

Grace to you and peace, from him who is, who was and who is to come; and from the seven spirits who are before his throne. All right, first of all, let’s take the clause that deals with God the father. Because that is who is referred to here when it says, from him who is and was, and who is to come. Interesting way to describe God.

Especially if you read it in the original Greek. Because, first of all, it says, he who is. Is, is the translation of the word for being in Greek. And it’s in the present tense, which in Greek, they cared more about the kind of action, than the time of action.

Did you know that? In english grammar, we care more about the time that the verb is referring to. But in Greek, they cared more about what kind of action is being described. That’s why the germans called it aktionsart.

What kind of action? Well, put together the description, the grammatical description of the Greek present tense. It means continuous action in present time. So when you couple that with the word for being, it’s saying, from him who is continuous.

He is continuously present. He exists continuously in the present. Number one. And then it says, he who was.

Now, of course, in english, there’s just one verb we can say was with, you know. Not very good grammar, but you get the idea. But in Greek, they had several words for past action. This is the imperfect tense.

Imperfect tense, and it is the same verb. It’s the verb of being put into the imperfect tense. The imperfect tense in Greek means continuous action in past time. They have the aorist tense, which means something that happened at a point of time.

And certain contexts show that it’s happened once and for all, at a point. That’s the one that’s used about salvation, by the way. Isn’t that nice? Then they have the perfect tense, which means something that happened at a point of time in the past with the results that continue.

This is the imperfect tense. He who always was. And then it says, to him who is to come. And interestingly enough, this is a present participle of the verb for coming.

And when you use it in that sense it refers to the future. Now let me just take all this technical stuff and reduce it down, to what does this really mean. What would a Greek understand by this? It would say to a Greek mind simply this.

To God who always is, always was, and always will be. Got it? Now that’s a wonderful way to describe God the father, isn’t it? And then, so he is the first source of this book, then it says and to the seven spirits who are before his throne.

All right. One thing that you learn very quickly as you study the Bible, and that is, there are certain numbers that God attaches certain typical meanings to. Seven is used frequently. Six, we’re told what six means.

Six is the number of man. Man was created on the sixth day. But six is always used as the number of man. Three is the number of perfect harmony.

Two is often used as the number of division. One is used in a very special sense sometimes of perfect unity. Five is the number of grace. Eight, the number of resurrection.

Seven is the number of perfection and completeness. So when it says the seven spirits, it’s talking about the perfection of God the Holy Spirit, and the completeness, and it’s emphasizing as the seven spirits, he has omnipresence. And he is before God’s throne because this member of the Trinity, you know, they’re co-equal. Each personality within the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal.

But each personality in the Trinity has voluntarily chosen to do certain things. And the holy spiritis the implementer. And so when it says he is before God the father’s throne, and he is the seventh spirits, completeness, perfection and so forth, it is emphasizing that he is the one who carries out the will and the purpose of the throne of God. And it’s also bringing to our attention what Jesus said when his -in John 14 and in chapter 16 also, when Jesus said he had to go away and they were sad and he says if I didn’t go away, then I couldn’t send the comforter.

But when the comforter comes, he will guide you into all truth. And he also said when he comes, the things that I do shall you do also. You know what an awesome statement that is? Now, he wasn’t saying that we would do the same things numerically, but qualitatively, that we’d do the same sorts of things.

And the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer today since the day of Pentecost. The moment of salvation, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in you. And he has come in this age as no other age in Church history, or I should say in Bible history, he has come to implement God’s will. That’s why you give certain gifts to certain people.

All of us get at least one spiritual gift, which is a special God-given ability. And in my case, you know, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to tell something had hit me because I couldn’t teach Mary had a little Lamb before I became a christian. And I was so terrified to get in front of an audience, I would stammer and stutter. I think I’ve told this crowd once before that I took speech in my first year at the university of houston and I sort of hung around until the first timethey made me get up in front of the class, and I stammered and stuttered and said, oh, nuts, and walked out and never came back.

So the fact that I can get up here is a miracle. And the second fact, that I can teach anything that anybody can understand had to come as a supernatural spiritual gift. That’s what they are. They are gifts that add to you abilities to fit God’s plan for your life.

You want to know what God’s plan for your life is, the first thing you have to learn is what’s your gift. You know, one of the these days when I get brave enough, I’ll teach a series on spiritual gifts, but I know that dr. Mcgee is right. You know, you fill up the Church going through the book of Revelation and you empty it going through Romans.

So I know it’s a calculated risk to get into teaching on spiritual gifts. But it sure would help a lot. All right, now, so the Holy Spirit is certainly one of the sources of this prophecy. Because it’s the Holy Spirit that God says so guides the chosen men that he chose to write the Scriptures.

That without destroying their individuality, their personality, without destroying their background or whatever, the Holy Spirit so moved upon these men that were chosen, that they reduced to writing exactly in words what God wanted to say. Did you get that? Now that’s what I believe. If the words of the original are not inspired, I’m not talking about the english translation or whatever, I’m talking about the original.

If the words of the original are not all inspired, who’s gonna tell us which ones are not? And where do you get -you lose the authority. You know, when I went to seminary, I got a lot of things that I didn’t go to get. And I’m glad I got them, but I went to seminary to learn Greek and Hebrew.

Because I wanted to learn as much as I could about what the actual words the Holy Spirit breathed. That’s why it says in 2 Timothy 3:16, all Scripture is God-breathed. Theopneustos. God-breathed.

I wanted to look at the words that God, through the Holy Spirit, breathed through these men. And I not only specialized in that, but I specialized in manuscript evidence. So, you know, you hear all this malarkey about well, you know, there’s so many different, it was so long ago, so many different people copied it and there’s so many mistakes, and how could we have in the original what they had? You know, if you compare -what they do is, they compare manuscripts from all different geographical locations that have been discovered at different times.

They compare all of these together, and where they agree, they know they’ve got what the original was. And if we take all of the words in the whole New Testament, for instance, about which there is some, some doubt as to what the real original word was, it would amount to about half a page of words. And if we never knew exactly what those few were, we would know it wouldn’t damage any doctrine that we know. And that’s the kind of gift that God has given to us.

And we can thank the Holy Spirit, the seven spirits beforethe throne of God that has made all of that possible for us. All right, now let’s go on. Let’s meet another source. And from Jesus Christ, and we’re going to get a lot of titles for Jesus here that we need to pay attention to.

First of all, it says, he is the faithful witness. God the son is the third source of this book. He is the faithful witness. What does that mean?

Well, it means that over and over and over again Jesus said because he came -he stepped out of heaven, laid aside the independent use of his divine nature, took upon himself a true human nature, and voluntarily limited himself to live only by that human nature. And he -you say, well, how did he do all the miracles? By depending on the Holy Spirit who dwelled in his human nature. That’s why he said the one that believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to the father to send the Holy Spirit.

Now he said that because the same Holy Spirit that dwelt in him dwells in each one of us. And he didn’t mean to -when he said greater works than these shall you do, he didn’t mean we’d do greater works qualitatively, he said we’d do more because there would be more of us the Holy Spirit is dwelling in. More in number. But we’ll do the same kind of works.

If we just walk moment by moment in dependence upon him and keep our eyes focused on the Lord and say no to temptation and let the Holy Spirit push that temptation out. Now, as a faithful witness, Jesus kept saying, and I’m thrilled that it was the apostle John who wrote the Gospel of John after he wrote the book of Revelation that kept saying this. Over and over and over again, Jesus is recorded as saying in the Gospel of John the things that I do, I do not do of myself. But the father who dwells in me does the work.

See, the father dwelt in his human nature through the Holy Spirit. Can you imagine? You know, it’s one thing to suffer and to not be ableto make a choice to change it. It’s another thing to suffer and know that at any moment you willed it, you could stop it.

When Jesus hung on the cross, and everyone was flinging these horrible insults at him, ha, if you’re the Son of God, come down from the cross. Listen, while his human nature was nailed to that Roman cross, his deity was holding the universe together. In that one person was God and man without confusion of the two persons. Two persons in one -I should say two natures in one person, not two persons.

Two natures. The human nature and the divine nature. But they were not confused. They were not -they were notfused together.

Jesus could have willed it and the whole world would have fallen apart. And that’s why he is the faithful witness because here’s some statements that he made, in John 6:63, Jesus said, it is the spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. The very words he spoke, give life as faithful witness.

He faithfully witnessed everything God sent him to do. Secondly, in John 6:67 through 69, you know, Peter got the point there. It says, so Jesus said to the twelve, you do not want to go away also, do you? Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God. A faithful witness. He witnessed everything the father sent him to do. But also, more than that.

You know, one of his disciples said, and I believe it was Thomas, he said, Lord, show us the father. This is John 14, show us the father and it will be enough for us. And he said, have I been so long with you, and you have not known me? He who has seen me has seen the father.

Everything that Jesus is, everything he said, everything he did was not just photographed of the father, it was a moving picture of the father. He in his very person is the perfect revelation of the father. That’s why John called him in the beginning there always was the word and the word always was face-to-face with God, and the word always was God.

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.