Revelation: Part 61

When anyone anywhere responds to this knowledge by having a desire to know this God, God will move heaven and earth to get the message to him.

Let’s look at Revelation 22. Now, remember, this is after the last judgment. This is after this present heaven and earth has been destroyed by fire, and this is at the time that the new Jerusalem, which is what we think of as heaven, it’s called new Jerusalem by God, and a new heaven and a new earth has been created. So this is what this chapter covers in some of its final details.

It says, and he showed me a river of water of life, clear as a crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It’s very difficult here. The Greek is difficult. If you have my book, there’s a new world coming, you see that there’s a translation in there.

I don’t know whether I ever told you about this, but back when I wrote this — and I believe it’s 1974 when I first wrote this, it’s been updated a bit — but when I was writing this book, I was going to use the new American standard Bible as the text. And so I had a deadline, and, I mean, I was working night and day to get to that deadline. Finally, I got a manuscript ready to go, and I had 24 hours before the absolute deadline was there this had to be in to the publisher. When my publisher called and he said, guess what?

And I knew that was going to be ominous. He said, the new American standard Bible says that they want a 20% royalty for using their text. Well, probably no one on this planet sold more copies of the new American standard Bible than I have. And I couldn’t believe they’d do that.

But, hey, as an author, I don’t get 20%. And so we couldn’t do it. And so he said, well, what are we going to do? Use the King James?

And I said, no, that would defeat what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to communicate with young people. And I don’t mean, you know, the King James is majestic, it’s beautiful. It’s accurately translated in 17th century english.

The only problem is, this is the 20th and 21st century. And so you have to have a translation that communicates with the english of this day. So I sat down and I prayed and I said, well, I only know one thing to do. I’ll have to translate the book.

So in 24 hours, I translated the book of Revelation from Greek to english. And so what you see in here is what I did. I couldn’t just take it from some other version. I had to translate.

But that was a wonderful experience because, you know, it forced me to come to grips with a lot of issues. And so this is one of the issues here where it talks about the main street and the river. It’s hard to get a mental image of this because in the new American, or I should say the new international version, it says, then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the great street of the city. And on each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations.

And let me correct one translation there right away. The word used here isn’t healing. It’s health. These people don’t need to be healed.

They’re in eternal bodies. And the word means the health of the nations. There is this great main street that leads right to the throne of God and the Lamb Jesus Christ in the center of the new Jerusalem. And down the middle of the street is this great river that flows.

And on both sides, it says, is the tree of life. Well, if it’s on both sides, it shouldn’t be in the singular. And it is on both sides. So apparently, it’s lined with trees, the trees of life, as they come down both sides of the river in the center of a great street which has, you know, wayfair on both sides.

So the center is the river. Next to the center on both sides are the trees of life. And then in this tree-lined river on the outside is the way that you can go back and forth to the throne of God. You got the picture?

Now, that’s your travel guide when you get there.

But can you imagine? I mean, a lot of these things are so out there, it’s hard to picture yourself there. But we’re going to be there. We’re really going to be there.

God’s not kidding us. And it says that the tree of life bears twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And in the Greek it says twelve different kinds of fruit. Every month.

And so this is something very important, you know? And as I wrote about it in my book, there’s a new world coming, which is a commentary on the book of Revelation, in many ways, you could condense the history of the world into the tale of three trees. In the Garden of Eden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stood in the center of the garden. And man and woman could have chosen to eat of anything.

As a matter of fact, there was one tree that was the tree of life, another tree that was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right in the center. And I can tell you, I guess a little saying that I heard could kind of explain this. After the fall, Adam was going by the entrance to the Garden of Eden — of course, they couldn’t get in because the angels were barring it — and Adam walked by there with cain and abel and he said, boys, you see that? That’s where your ma ate us out of a house and home.

But what happened there changed the destiny of the world. Now, Eve was not held culpable legally by God for the fall. And the reason is because God didn’t speak directly to her in giving the command not to eat of that and giving the reasons that the day they ate of that they would die. So she didn’t hear that from God.

She heard it from her husband, Adam, who heard it directly. And so God puts the culpability for the fall on the man. The woman was deceived, it says. And that was a legal loophole that God would use because the woman, since she was not legally culpable for the fall, could be the one who would bear the Messiah who would die for the sins of the world.

But if the Savior of the world had a human father, he would have been directly culpable through his relation to Adam for the sin. But, you know, there are so many things that the Bible links together. But when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was because they believed the lie of Satan who told them that God did not want them to eat of that tree because he didn’t want them to be like him. And so they had to believe a lie about God in order to disobey God and eat of the tree.

They had to believe that God’s character wasn’t right. So instead of eating of the tree of life, they could have eaten of the tree of life and lived forever. You know that? But they chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Literally, the tree that gives the knowledge of good and evil. And so there you have two trees right there. The tree of life which could have given them eternal life and the tree that caused them to fall and all of us with them. And then there’s another tree.

And I’m going to read about that one. Well, before I do, I’m going to read something that is a very strange verse. It’s from Genesis 3:22, and this is after God has dealt with Adam and with Eve after they disobeyed him. You see, it wasn’t the eating of the fruit itself that was a sin.

It was the choice to reject God and reject a relationship with him by doing exactly what he told them not to do. So God dealt with that. And then there was something he had to deal with. Genesis 3:22 says, then the Lord God said, “behold, the man has become like one of us.”

Notice the plural there. Like one of us. God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. “Knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat it, and live forever.”

And there is a kind of a, in the Hebrew, you can express this very well. You can express emotion in Hebrew better than any language. And it’s like God gasped at what a horrible thing that would be. You see a dash after it because it’s something that when God said it, it was just so horrible, even God stopped for a moment.

And that’s why he banned them from going back in there so they could not eat of the tree of life. Now, why did he do that? Why would that have been so terrible? Well, because man could have eaten of the tree of life and lived forever in a fallen state.

And nothing could be more horrible than that. Because in order for us to be freed of the nature of sin that replaced the spiritual nature we were originally created with, man has to die. When we die, we cannot be delivered from the sin nature with which all of us are born until we die physically or until God supernaturally transforms us in the Rapture. And so if man were to have eaten of that and lived forever as a fallen creature, it would have been a devastating thing.

So death is a horrible thing. We all face it. You’re not going to see any committees formed to ban death. No parades.

Let’s ban death. Well, most people know that’s — even the liberals know that’s a folly. But it would just be a terrible thing. Not only would it be terrible for the person who lived in that state but it would also be terrible for a world that had people that were preserved in a fallen state for thousands and thousands of years.

You know, it’s one thing I’ve noticed and that is if a person’s rejected God and they have kind of, you know, just kind of hardened themselves against God, as they get older, they don’t get better. They get worse. Well, think of them getting worse for about 10,000 years. Oh, the violence we would have seen.

Well, interesting, isn’t it? But then look at Galatians 3. Here the apostle Paul talks from Galatians 3:12-13. He says, however, the law is not of faith; on the contrary, “he who practices them shall live by them.”

He’s quoting from the Old Testament. He shows that, hey, if you’re going to come to God by keeping the law, then the word you’re going to practice them and says he’s going to live by them. Well, there’s only one problem with that, and this is something the Israelites haven’t learned as a race yet. The law has been a snare to them and, of course, most of the human race, too.

But they failed to see that God gave the law not as a way of salvation but as a witness to how good they would have to be if they were going to earn their own salvation. And that’s why when Jesus was preaching, he had come to bring in the kingdom and he was trying to get them to repent and to believe, he preached the Sermon on the Mount because, you see, all of these religious leaders that were standing out there contesting with him were saying, you say you’ve come to save us from our sin. We’re Jews. We live by the law.

We don’t need a Savior. And that’s why Jesus started quoting the elders. He said, you’ve heard it said by the elders that you shall not commit adultery. But I say if you look after a woman with lust in your heart, you’ve committed adultery already.

He wasn’t giving a new law. He was explaining what the old law meant. In God’s eyes, keeping the law means in your thoughts and heart as well as in your actions. And James really puts the coup de grace on it when he shows that, hey, God doesn’t grade your law-keeping on the curve.

Or he says, whosoever keeps the whole law yet offends in one point is guilty of all of it. So that’s why he’s showing the law will never save anybody here. And here was the man who was the greatest teacher of the law in Israel in his day before he became a christian. So he says in verse 13, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us — for it is written, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”

So there’s the tree of the cross. And it’s the story of three trees today. The only way we can get back to the tree of life is to believe in the tree on which God made his son a curse in our place. He took the curse of the law, which we can never keep, and paid in our place the penalty for it.

Then so the tree is interesting that if we start out with the tree of life and we end with the tree of life. Now, in verse 3, he says, no longer will there be any curse — he’s talking about the city — that the leaves of the tree, the river of life, the main street that leads directly to the throne of God that we can travel anytime we want to, he says, there will no longer be a curse. Now, you see, when man gave — when he rejected a relationship with God and he gave into the lie of Satan, then he became the property of Satan. And only Jesus could deliver us from that.

But not only that, the whole earth and the heavens around us became the property of Satan. And the earth fell under a curse because of what man had done in his fall. And, you know, I’ll just put it personally, I’ve been to many places on earth and I thought, man, this is beautiful. And there are places on earth that are beautiful.

But just think if it’s beautiful under the curse, what’s it going to be without a curse? And that’s what he’s saying. When he says there will no longer be a curse, he’s talking here about the new heaven and new earth. It won’t be under a curse.

And everything will be perfect. And we will see dimensions of beauty that it never entered into our minds such things could exist, even as Paul strives to describe to us what we’re headed for, he says that no man has seen or heard, neither has it entered into the heart of men the things that God has prepared for those who love him. And it’s far beyond anything that we could even dream up. And I just think, oh, man, a place where there’s no curse.

There’s no curse on the environment, there’s no curse on my body, there’s no curse on the animals — and there will be animals there — there’s no curse on the earth itself. It’s just going to be perfect. And then he says, the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him; and they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. You know, even as Moses said when he was on mount Sinai, he knew that he wanted to see God, but God said, if you saw my face, you would die.

So God put him in a crevice of a rock and covered him with his hand when he passed by, and he could see the afterglow as he passed by but he couldn’t see the glory of God. But we are going to see his face. You may say, that’s a big deal. Hey, that is a big deal.

Because you just look at the handiwork of God, the intricacies, the little details of beauty that God just in his fingerwork creates. And you think of what he must be. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine what it would be like to look in the face of God. But we’re going to.

That’s where we’re headed. And it says, they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night; they will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light; and they will reign forever and ever. Now, several times in the Scripture, it talks about the believer being a king and a priest.

And it talks about the fact that we’re going to reign with Christ forever and ever. Well, think about that for a minute. Who are we going to reign over? But more intricate than that, a king is only a king if he rules over some intelligent beings.

And here’s the real hooker. A priest is a person that intercedes before God on behalf of a needy person. Okay. We’re in the — I call it the new j — we’re in the new j.

It’s perfect. We’re in a, you know, everyone that we know on this earth, they’re either in the lake of fire or they’re there as glorified people forever. So who are we going to intercede for? Not the angels.

Their destiny is already set. Well, I can explain how we can be kings because 1 Corinthians 6:3 says, do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more, matters of this life? We are going to judge angels.

Well, I can understand that to some degree. But angels don’t need priests. You know, God tells us that the things that are revealed are for us and our children, but the things not revealed are the Lord’s. God hasn’t revealed everything to us.

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 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.