Revelation: Part 37

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 them.

Okay, we have come to Revelation 13 and this pulls together all of the predictions about this important figure. Now you remember I’ve taught you that there are certain chapters in the book of Revelation which carry chronologically the action of a seven-year period that immediately precedes the return of Christ called the Tribulation. The first half is the Tribulation. The second half is called the Great Tribulation.

And interspersed between these chronological chapters are a number of chapters that give a vignette about the most important movements, the most important personalities that will dominate those seven years. If you’ll look with me for a moment, Revelation 13, now I’m reading from the new American standard Bible. And he stood on the sand of the seashore. And I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names.

And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as if it had been slain, and his fatal wound was healed. And the whole earth was amazed and followed after the beast.

And they worshiped the dragon. Most of the symbols used in the book of Revelation are explained either in the book of Revelation or some other place in the Bible. All right, now, so what we have here what’s coming? And I believe it’s in this generation what’s coming is a world of Satan worshipers.

Now you don’t want to be here, do you, during that period. Thank God you will not be. But I feel great compassion and sorrow for those who live in this time and haven’t come to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior. Because they will be here.

Because I believe this is the time, this person that we’re studying tonight, is alive right now. He is somewhere in Europe. I don’t believe anyone knows who he is. I don’t think we will know.

I think that Christ will come for the believers before he’s ever unveiled. In fact, 2 Thessalonians 2 says that as we’ll see tonight. But there is a person, actually two persons, being groomed that we’re gonna take a look at tonight that are now alive. And they’re being groomed for their faithful role in history, which will be a monumental role by Satan himself.

Now I’m gonna stop right here and I’m going to tell you to make a note. Make a note to read Daniel 7 in connection with understanding what this means that the beast is like a leopard, a bear, and a lion. The leopard you will see there is a symbol of the second great world empire that Daniel talks about. I’m sorry the third.

It’s the third world empire that Daniel talks about. The bear is the symbol of the second great world empire. The leopard was Greece. The bear was medea-Persia.

So this form of world government that the Antichrist will take over will have all of the characteristics of these past empires. And I think you’ll see that as we go on. And he had a mouth like the mouth of a lion. The lion was the symbol of the first great world empire the Bible covers, which was Babylon.

All right. And it says he has this deadly head wound, a fatal head wound, and that this person is raised from the dead. That is exactly what this is saying is going to happen. And because of this, the whole earth is going to marvel in wonder.

Now God’s, you know, all of the restraints are going to be taken off of the most powerful of all created beings during this period. And he apparently will be allowed to use that power. Even to raise a person from the dead and that person is Satan. He is the most powerful of any created being that God ever created.

The Bible tells us that. Now, I’m gonna skip from here to verse 11. And I saw another beast. Another means in Greek, another of the same kind.

I saw another beast coming up out of the earth. Tes ges, in the Greek. And he had two horns like a Lamb and he spoke as a dragon. All right, now note, the first one comes out of where?

The sea. The second one comes out of the land, not land without a definite article, which means he could have come out of any part of the earth. But when the definite article is used in the book of Revelation, it’s always referring to what land? Israel.

And that’s confirmed by a symbol. He has two horns like a Lamb. So what does that tell us? He impersonates the Lamb of God.

But he speaks with what? He speaks with Satan. Satan’s wisdom and power. So you see these symbols aren’t so bad, are they?

They’re not so hard to understand. It just takes someone to take these Scriptures at face value and be serious about them. You can find the answer to these things. All right, now, it says he exercises all of the authority of the first beast in his presence.

And he makes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast. Literally this should be it’s the same word as in verse 11, ges. It should be he makes the land and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose fatal wound was healed. So what does that tell us?

This person particularly comes to deceive who? Israel. The first one comes out of the sea. The second one comes out of the land.

This second one is called, in the book of Revelation, the false prophet. The false prophet. And we know that these two are not some symbolic sense of a kingdom or a nation or something like that. How do we know that?

Hold your place here and turn with me to chapter 19 in the book of Revelation verse 20. And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast, and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone. And the rest were killed with the sword, etcetera. All right, now you can’t throw a nation into the fire, can you?

You can only throw an individual. And so it says these two were judged in a way no other human being is judged. They were thrown directly into the lake of fire. And so God is going to deal with them but not before they have their day.

All right, now I’m going to read a number of Scriptures about the Antichrist and they are from many parts of the Bible. The first I’m going to read is in Daniel 7. Just please mark these Scriptures down because I would like for you to do some homework this week. Do yourself a favor and do what I give you, assign you.

Read carefully Daniel 7. And I’ll give you some more references in a minute, okay? But read all of these references that I give you tonight, and I think you’ll be amazed what the Holy Spirit will show you. You know, I was studying these things today.

What I did was I printed out the Scriptures from — the same Scriptures from the new American standard, from the new international version, from the New King James version, and I put them side by side and was reading them and comparing them. And how many times have I taught the book of Revelation. I can’t count it. And yet I learned a lot of new things today just by going through these things.

All right, I’m gonna read from the new American standard here. Daniel 7:1-3 first. In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel saw a dream. And I want you to note if you go through the book of Daniel, almost in every chapter he begins by dating it carefully.

Now the way historians dated things in ancient times, was by who was the ruler and what year of his reign was it. That’s something that can be checked. And so each one of these prophetic chapters that Daniel writes, he pens it down exactly when he got the revelation. And, you know, these skeptics that come along and there are many that claim to be christians.

And there are even more that claim to be great scholars come along and say, well, you can’t trust Daniel. It was written way after his time by somebody else that used his name and all of that. Well, then that’s amazing because the things he predicted were fulfilled to the letters. Whoever this group that did it afterwards must be remarkable.

Because the things that were fulfilled were long after even they could have written them. But Daniel was a careful historian as well as a prophet. And so he dates everything, every Scripture that is important. And he did something else that’s very unusual.

Daniel 2 through chapter 7 are the only chapters in the Old Testament that are not written in Hebrew. Did you know that? These chapters are written in chaldean, which was a Gentile language. And there was a very, very glaring reason for it.

Chapters 2 through 7 in Daniel talk about the times of the Gentiles from a Gentile point of view. So he used a Gentile language. All right, now let’s get on. You know, I get into details.

I’m really a classroom teacher. But you’ll pardon me for that, won’t you? I want you to have background though so that you can discern these things when you read them yourself. All right, now, it was at this time the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon.

Now Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel saw a dream and a vision in his mind as he lay on his bed; then he wrote the dream down and related the following summary of it. Daniel said, I was looking in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. Ah-ha, the sea.

From where does the Antichrist rise? The sea. All right, right away. See, Daniel in the book of Revelation fit together like hand in a glove.

Now it says the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. Now, in symbolic language, that beautifully describes something. It’s the four winds from heaven that stir up the great sea. And that shows us it’s the providence of God that controls this massive Gentiles.

And it’s the spirit of God that stirred up what he’s about to predict. All right, now we go on. It says and four great beasts were coming up from the sea, different from one another. And he shows that the four great beasts coming up from the sea would be different.

All right, now, I’m not gonna go into all of chapter 7 right now. But these four beasts it describes it and says they are four great kingdoms, four world empires as far as God was concerned, that would succeed one after the other, okay? But before we go on to verse 19, which gets to the point about the Antichrist, I want to just read Isaiah 57:20, which says this. But the wicked are like the tossing sea, for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up refuse and mud.

You see, that shows us that the symbol of using the sea is used by God to describe the Gentile nations and how they’re restless and they can never be at peace. And then Revelation 17:15 identifies what the waters are. It says and he said to me, the waters which you saw where the harlot sits, this is talking about the whore of Babylon, or scarlet o’harlot as I call her.

The waters which you saw where the harlot sits are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. So there you have it for sure, don’t you? So the water, the sea describes all of the different people of the earth. Particularly it means Gentiles.

All right, now in verse 19. Then I desired to know, he’s seen a whole prophetic thing. I’m skipping now. Daniel said I desired to know the exact meaning of the fourth beast, that would mean the fourth empire in the succession of empires.

Which was different from all the others, exceedingly dreadful, with its teeth of iron and its claw of bronze, which devoured and crushed and trampled down the remainder with its feet. Now the fourth beast as is identified, and I’d like to show you later, is the Roman Empire. They’re the ones that took over what was left of the Greek empire. And the Roman Empire was different.

It was never conquered, was it? It fell apart from inside. And do you know that that empire lasted almost a thousand years? And one of things that absolutely boggled my mind, the first time I went to Europe and went around, was that you could hardly go anywhere without seeing some amazing remains of what the Romans built.

I mean, it’s all over whether it was in portugal or Spain or France. Or in Greece, all over the Middle East, Turkey. You’d see part of the witness of how great Rome was. And it did trample and control people like no other empire ever did.

Okay, let’s look at the next verse. And verse 20, and the meaning of the ten horns that were on its head and the other horn which came up, before which three of them fell, namely, that horn which had eyes and mouth uttering great boasts and which was larger in appearance than its associates. Okay, now we know that the ten horns are part of the fourth beast. So let’s read on and let’s see what else we can learn.

Now the first prophecy that I know about in the Scripture about the Antichrist is right here. He is the little horn that comes up among the others, the ten horns. And he comes up after the ten horns are there. And when he comes up, he displants three of the ten.

Apparently they didn’t go along with him. So he just took them over. All right, now, it says and I kept looking, and that horn was waging war with the saints and overpowering them until the ancient of days came and judgment was passed in favor of the saints of the highest one, and the time arrived when the saints took possession of the kingdom. This is when Jesus will return and he himself will put down what this little horn sets up.

But the ten horns are ten nations that come up out of the remains of the fourth empire. Verse 23 of Daniel 7.

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.