* Revelation: The Book of Revelation vents God’s final warning toward those who will not follow Him. Often clouded in mystery, this book has eluded the understanding of millions, and has been used as a pretext for many false prophets. Bob Enyart presents this conclusion of Scripture in light of the Bible’s overview. This clear method of study helps to cut through much of the confusion regarding Revelation.
For over a quarter century Bob Enyart has studied God’s Word praying for the wisdom to share the truth of Scripture with a lost and dying world. Now you can benefit from this
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday, we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview.
But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
So there’s time, there’s now and then, in heaven. If there was no time in heaven, there could never be anything new ever in heaven, if there was no time. And believe me, when you get to heaven, there will be something new there.
Something quite unlike anything that had ever been there before, when any of us get there. So of course, heaven is constantly changing, just with the never-ending stream of souls who arrive there, who have put their faith in God.
Verse 10, okay, there’s a song being sung to God, and God is told, and you have made us kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth. Kings and priests. This shows the Jewish character of the book.
The people of God in the Book of Revelation are the 12 tribes of Israel, and their covenant is the new covenant based on circumcision, the covenant of circumcision and the law. That’s the group to whom this book is written, the people of God. We’ll see that in a bit when 12,000 are sealed from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Way back in Exodus chapter 19, you shall be to me a kingdom of priests. And that’s what we have here. Christ has made us kings and priests to our God.
As one of the 12 apostles wrote to the believing Jews of the dispersion, 1 Peter 2.9, he wrote, You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a royal, a kingly priesthood. Now, why are there 24 thrones and 24 elders when the number 12 signifies Israel? Well, King David divided the priesthood into 24 divisions.
Not the entire priesthood, not all of the Levites, but of the Levites, Aaron was a Levite. Remember Moses’ brother, Miriam’s brother, Aaron. And Aaron was the high priest.
And he had four kids. Two of them were killed because they were evil right off the bat. And the other two ended up with many thousands of descendants.
And at the time of David, which was centuries later, about five centuries later, David divided the descendants of Aaron into 24 divisions. The 24 courses, the 24 divisions of the priesthood. And each one, he went into the descendants of Aaron, and he found a strong man, a father of 24 different families that Aaron’s sons had split into.
And he made each one a leader of a certain group of the descendants of the high priest. And they were as a group then responsible for serving the Lord at the temple. And they would take turns.
They’d go for one week from the Sabbath to the Sabbath, and then the next group and the next group. When they went through all 24, they’d start over, and they’d do that each year. And the eighth group, the group that would go in the eighth week of the year was of the division of Abijah.
And Abijah, that is whom Zacharias and Elizabeth were descendants of. He was in the order of Abijah, and that’s who John the Baptist was of that order. So David, he took the priest, specifically the high priest descendants, and divided them into 24 divisions.
And so it’s possible that these 24 thrones with 24 elders, of course, Israel’s 12, double that as 24, in heaven and on earth, it could be that they are emblematic symbols of the priestly kingdom of Israel. And in that way, in that respect, symbols of the whole group of redeemed Israel. Perhaps these are not always 24 particular individuals.
It could be that from time to time, those saved among Israel get to go to the throne room of God and sit on that throne and from Sabbath to Sabbath worship the Lord. We don’t know. But if so, then that would work following the model of the priesthood that was implemented by David through the Old Testament.
And we shall reign on the earth. And that is what they are looking forward to. God promised Israel an earthly kingdom.
And Jesus Christ came in encouraging them that the meek shall inherit heaven. Is that what he said? No, he said the meek shall inherit the earth.
Christians, rightly today, have a focus that we are citizens of heaven and we plan to live forever in heaven. But God creates a new heaven and a new earth. And the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven onto the new earth and becomes the center, the capital, if you will, of the kingdom on earth, of God’s kingdom on earth.
And that’s for Israel. And that’s where the twelve tribes will live. And that’s where the twelve gates to the new Jerusalem, the city, and the names of the twelve apostles, and the twelve thrones that Jesus spoke of, that the twelve apostles will sit on those thrones, judging the tribes of Israel.
So that is all going to happen. And that’s what these elders are looking forward to, reigning on the earth, not in heaven. Which is another of so many indications that this is a Jewish book for believing Israel in the circumcision, not for the body of Christ.
Verse 11, Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands. There are many angels up in heaven that are willing to worship God and serve him and at his command could fly down to the earth. And one angel back in the Old Testament destroyed the Assyrian army.
How many soldiers did he kill in one night? I think it was a hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrians. You know, it’s interesting looking in the history of the world.
I didn’t put this in my notes. I’m trying to recall who wrote this brief history of the world. It’s in two massive volumes that I have at the office.
Maybe I’ll recall who wrote it, but he’s not a believer. He’s not a Christian. He doesn’t like the Bible, but he mentions in there when you go back and read about the Assyrian empire, he says, and the Syrian army at one point, at the right point in the Bible’s history, was on its way to Egypt in a plague destroyed the Assyrian army.
And I think that was pretty coincidental. HG. Wells.
Thank you very much. That’s right. So God has a lot of angels, and those angels represent a tremendous amount of power.
How many angels are there? And if a third of the angels fell, how many angels would that mean? How many demons are there?
Well, we don’t know how many angels there are. If this estimation here is anywhere near literal, within any kind of ballpark, that would mean there were 153 million angels originally created. Now, I don’t think this is really a literal statement.
I think it’s a figure of speech, but it might put us in a ballpark. There might be many more, but 10,000 times 10,000 would be 100 million, and thousands of thousands would be at least a couple million. So that would be 102 million, and if there were originally a third that fell, that would be 153 million, with 51 million demons.
Now we have no idea, of course, if that’s the case. Maybe there’s twice as many fallen angels, 100 million, or three times as many, 150 million, or four times, or five times, maybe a quarter of a billion. You know, if there were a quarter of a billion fallen angels, that would be one for every 24 people in the world.
So you couldn’t have your own demon, but you might have your block demon, who would try to tempt everyone on the block, depending on who’s home at any given moment. But it’s interesting, if the number is closer to 50 million, then we’d have one demon for every 120 people in the world today. But of those, say whatever the number is, 50 million demons, many of them have been locked up in Tartarus, some undoubtedly for going after strange flesh when they produced the Nephilim, the giants of old, by going into the daughters of men.
Remember when Jesus in Matthew chapter 8 confronted these demons and they cried out and said, What have we to do with you, Jesus, you son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? And they didn’t want anything to do with Jesus.
And they didn’t want to be like their fellow demons who had been locked in chains and bound up. They wanted to stay free and clear. So of the original number, how many were locked up?
We don’t know. We are speaking of the same angels that jude wrote of in verse 6 of his book, the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, that God has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day. In Noah’s day, there could have been a billion people on the earth, and it seems that the problem of angels going after women was widespread, being a major reason why God destroyed all of mankind.
So if half of the demons were locked up, we may not have as many demons as Christians generally think. And the only reason I’ve spent this few minutes on this topic is because there are some groups of Christians that are almost obsessed with demonology and demons and deliverance from demons. And whenever there’s a problem, well, you have to get delivered from a demon.
If you have a problem with eating or with finances or with pornography, it’s a demon. And they will go through an exorcism of sorts and you’re delivered and you no longer have that problem. That’s wonderful, except that it doesn’t work.
And nowhere in the Bible does it say, well, if you’re struggling with some lust of the flesh, get a demon kicked out of you and then you’ll be okay. It just doesn’t say that. And in the whole Bible, if we looked at the passages that refer to demons, it’s just the tiny sliver of the whole book.
A very minimal focus. Now, our battle is in the spiritual realm. And that’s true if any one particular person is up against Satan himself or any of his hierarchy or even some of his flunky demons.
If you find yourself in a battle with a demon and there’s a demon putting thoughts in your mind and tempting you and you have this real concrete temptation and you’re getting these thoughts obsessively to give into it, you might be in a battle with a demon. On the other hand, you might just be in a battle with your heart and your flesh, which is deceitful above all else. And you might be in a battle with your boss or your friend or your relative.
The point is, whoever you’re in the battle with, it’s a spiritual battle and it’s fought in the spiritual realm because our Christian life is a spiritual entity. We live our lives in our heart, in our mind. That’s where the battles are all fought.
So let’s go on to verse 12. These angels were saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. How could God possibly receive power?
I think we talked about this when we were in chapter four. How could God receive power or honor or strength? Isn’t he the source of all power and all strength and all honor?
Yes, but he has delegated power and authority to us, to all the angelic realm. So if an angel honors God, if the four living creatures, all the hosts of the angels that worship God, when we worship God and we give him power, we’re giving him power over our own wills. Because we couldn’t give him something unless we had it.
And the determinist Christians, the Calvinists who think God is in control of every atom, every molecule, every thought, everything, then he could never receive power or authority because he has it all. And you can’t receive it if you already have it. But if you’ve delegated power over wills so that we have a free will, and we give power and glory and honor to God, we’re giving back to him the power he gave us over our wills because we submit our will to him.
We say, Lord, we want to obey you.
Verse 13, And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever. And it’s a strange reference to the creatures that are in the sea saying this. We’ve done a study when we were in the Book of Jonah, we went through quite a few verses in the Bible about the sea and the strange things that are said about the sea in the Bible and how it seems to be a place where demons get together.
It seems to be a place that receives the dead and the sea will give up the dead that is within it. So that down in the deep where hades is, somewhere down beneath the sea perhaps. And we know that in the new heaven and the new earth, when God creates the new earth, he says there will be no more sea.
So the sea is gone and surfing too. Forget that except for the internet. But hopefully that will be gone too.
So could it be that God’s angels have freedom to travel through his created order and they could be on the planets, in the stars, on the earth, in the sea, on the land, in the air? I think so. And they don’t have to breathe oxygen like we do.
And so wherever they are, as if on cue, they shout out their blessings to God.
And when we bless God, we honor him. God commands us to honor our parents because we should. And it teaches us to honor God.
When we honor our parents. So parents should be honorable. It’s hard for kids to honor their parents when they’re not honorable.
My kids, to the extent that they have suffered because of sin in my life, that makes me, in their eyes, less honorable. And they have suffered because of things I’ve done wrong to hurt our family and others. And so, in their life, if they come to a time when they decide to fully give themselves over to honor God as they grow and mature, if they do that, they’ve done that in part because I’ve taught and encouraged them to, and in part, in spite of what they’ve seen from me.
So because many of us in this room still have kids, and if not kids, grandkids, we have an opportunity to live honorably from this moment forward, and that our children and those around us would learn about God, not in spite of what we are doing, but because of what we are doing. Verse 14, Then the four living creatures said, Amen. And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped him who lives forever and ever.
And now we enter chapter six.
During this chapter, I’m going to take a diversion and look at the overview of the plagues and the torments that God will unleash on the world, just so we can get a bit of a view of what’s coming, and try to figure out the order of the Book of Revelation. Is it all chronological? Is it all mixed up?
So we’ll talk about that in the next few verses. Now I saw when the lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come and see. And that word come in the Greek is ercomai.
We’ll talk about that later. And I looked and behold a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him.
And he went out conquering and to conquer. Now we begin to see God’s wrath unfold from this point. This is where the first seal is opened.
The first seal is opened and a white horse as a result of this goes out to conquer. And from here to the end of the tripulation, we see the intensifying wrath and vengeance of God. Now let’s consider briefly for a moment, an outline of the 21 judgments in the Book of Revelation.
There’s 21 when you add up the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls. Now there’s something, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but they are the first four seals. So there’s really 21.
There are the seven thunders, but we won’t mention them because John begins to write what they said and God said, don’t write it down. So we won’t even mention those guys. But the Apocalypse reveals these three consecutive series, each containing seven events.
Seals, trumpets, and bowls. Now many commentators on this book end up with a convoluted view of the book. And they say it’s not in chronological order.
And you take whatever part you think comes next and you put it however you want to put it. And I think that’s a mess. I think you take things in the Bible as chronological unless the Bible says it’s not.
So in the scheme of his book, John presents these events, at least he intimates that he’s doing that, in order. First you get the seals and you get the first scroll before the second, before the third, and so on before the seventh. Then the trumpets, then the bowls.
As we’ve seen in the first two verses of Revelation 6, Christ opens the first seal and in the next verse, verse three, he opens the second seal and so on through the first six. And then he gets to the seventh seal. And when he opens that, I’ll read, I’ll skip ahead just for the sake of the overview, Revelation 8.1, when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
And I saw the seven angels who stand before God and to them were given seven trumpets. And so the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound and the first angel sounded. That’s all in Revelation chapter eight.
So the seventh seal is actually marking the first trumpet blast. So the seven seals lead right into the seven trumpets seamlessly. The seventh seal is the seventh trumpet blast.
As Christ is unraveling the scroll and opening the seals, and he opens the seventh seal, and it says, And there were seven trumpets. That was what was inside the seventh seal. It reminds me of when we went with Tim Gaylord, my friend, his kids, and my two boys, Josiah and Nathaniel, we went whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, and we were coming up to the seven steps, and they named the rapids.
And the rapids are pretty horrendous. They can be in the right time of the year. And you’re in these huge boats with paddles, and you’re semi-strapped in, in case of capsizes, you could get out.
And we go through this rapid, and the guide was flung from, she was on the opposite end of the raft that I was on, maybe 10 feet long, and she was flung through the air, and she hit into me and a guy next to me. That was pretty severe. One guy almost went over the raft, and we pulled him in.
She was on the other side, and it was finally to get to calm water, and we said, man, we’re glad those, did I tell you what they were called? The seven steps. And I said, I’m glad we’re through the seven steps, and she said, that was step one.
Like, oh no, where can we get out?
Well, that’s what this was like. There were the seven seals, and the seven seal opens the seven trumpets. Therefore, all seven seals precede the trumpets.
It’s chronological. And after the sixth trumpet sounds, after the sixth trumpet sounds, then we have, with the seventh trumpet, we’re in the midpoint of the tribulation. We’re in the middle of the week.
And we’ll talk about that for a little bit right now. The middle of the week is four chapters, ten through thirteen. And in those chapters, how do we know they’re the middle of the week?
Well, Daniel and Jesus, they both said things that look forward to the middle of the week of the tribulation, the middle of the seven years. But those chapters repeatedly warn about what’s to come. And they basically say, brace yourself, because the next forty-two months are going to be tough.
And the upcoming three-and-a-half years, or the one thousand two hundred and sixty days that are coming, are going to be really bad. So in those four chapters, we read of warnings like that repeatedly. So we could tell we’re in the middle of the week.
Recall that Daniel, in chapter 9, verse 27, specifically called attention to the middle of the week, period when the Antichrist would do something just abominable. And Jesus, too, referenced this midweek period in Matthew 24 and indicated it as the time that Israel would flee to the mountains. So that fleeing to the mountains that Jesus referred to is not coincidentally the same time that Revelation indicates Israel will flee into the wilderness in Revelation 12, verse 6.
It all comes together as a reasonably cohesive story of the outline of the last seven years of man’s rebellion against God just before Christ returns. So the Bible, especially in Revelation, emphasizes this middle of the week as a terrible time of great consequence. These middle of the week chapters, these four, 10, 11, 12, and 13, they might be where some commentators get confused and think the whole book is not in chronological order because the stories in that middle section have one place there’s a bit of a flashback, another place there’s a flash forward, but it’s a natural way of telling a story.
For example, in Revelation chapter 11, it’s in the middle of the week that we find out that there are two prophets. God sends down two prophets to judge and condemn the earth for 42 months. They’re here for 42 months and they have the power to kill those who attack them.
But it says, but at the end of their ministry, they are killed and they lie in the streets of Jerusalem for three days, their bodies unburied, and then they are resurrected. So there you are, oh no, oh my, what are we to do?
We’re at the end of the Tribulation.
But big deal. It’s just a little flash forward. It’s the normal way historians always write.
You’re telling the history of the world and you introduce a minor character, and you, in a paragraph, say, what’s going to happen to him in the rest of his life, and where he’s going to die? And then the very next story, you’re back at the same year, the same moment in time, you introduce that person. So it doesn’t mean that the Book of Revelation is not in chronological order.
And as an example of a flashback, we find the woman in Revelation 12 who is Israel. We can tell she’s Israel because of comparison with Jacob and his 12 sons back in Genesis chapter 37. And there, there’s depicted this brief flashback when the nation gives birth to the Messiah.
And so that’s a little bit of a flashback. And then a flash forward to the middle of the Tribulation where Satan is going to attack that woman Israel, but she will flee into the wilderness and be protected by God. And that’s about it.
Other than that, the Book of Revelation is chronological. And there’s no reason to take all the judgments and rearrange them.Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday, we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview.
But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
So there’s time, there’s now and then, in heaven. If there was no time in heaven, there could never be anything new ever in heaven, if there was no time. And believe me, when you get to heaven, there will be something new there.
Something quite unlike anything that had ever been there before, when any of us get there. So of course, heaven is constantly changing, just with the never-ending stream of souls who arrive there, who have put their faith in God.
Verse 10, okay, there’s a song being sung to God, and God is told, and you have made us kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth. Kings and priests. This shows the Jewish character of the book.
The people of God in the Book of Revelation are the 12 tribes of Israel, and their covenant is the new covenant based on circumcision, the covenant of circumcision and the law. That’s the group to whom this book is written, the people of God. We’ll see that in a bit when 12,000 are sealed from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Way back in Exodus chapter 19, you shall be to me a kingdom of priests. And that’s what we have here. Christ has made us kings and priests to our God.
As one of the 12 apostles wrote to the believing Jews of the dispersion, 1 Peter 2.9, he wrote, You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a royal, a kingly priesthood. Now, why are there 24 thrones and 24 elders when the number 12 signifies Israel? Well, King David divided the priesthood into 24 divisions.
Not the entire priesthood, not all of the Levites, but of the Levites, Aaron was a Levite. Remember Moses’ brother, Miriam’s brother, Aaron. And Aaron was the high priest.
And he had four kids. Two of them were killed because they were evil right off the bat. And the other two ended up with many thousands of descendants.
And at the time of David, which was centuries later, about five centuries later, David divided the descendants of Aaron into 24 divisions. The 24 courses, the 24 divisions of the priesthood. And each one, he went into the descendants of Aaron, and he found a strong man, a father of 24 different families that Aaron’s sons had split into.
And he made each one a leader of a certain group of the descendants of the high priest. And they were as a group then responsible for serving the Lord at the temple. And they would take turns.
They’d go for one week from the Sabbath to the Sabbath, and then the next group and the next group. When they went through all 24, they’d start over, and they’d do that each year. And the eighth group, the group that would go in the eighth week of the year was of the division of Abijah.
And Abijah, that is whom Zacharias and Elizabeth were descendants of. He was in the order of Abijah, and that’s who John the Baptist was of that order. So David, he took the priest, specifically the high priest descendants, and divided them into 24 divisions.
And so it’s possible that these 24 thrones with 24 elders, of course, Israel’s 12, double that as 24, in heaven and on earth, it could be that they are emblematic symbols of the priestly kingdom of Israel. And in that way, in that respect, symbols of the whole group of redeemed Israel. Perhaps these are not always 24 particular individuals.
It could be that from time to time, those saved among Israel get to go to the throne room of God and sit on that throne and from Sabbath to Sabbath worship the Lord. We don’t know. But if so, then that would work following the model of the priesthood that was implemented by David through the Old Testament.
And we shall reign on the earth. And that is what they are looking forward to. God promised Israel an earthly kingdom.
And Jesus Christ came in encouraging them that the meek shall inherit heaven. Is that what he said? No, he said the meek shall inherit the earth.
Christians, rightly today, have a focus that we are citizens of heaven and we plan to live forever in heaven. But God creates a new heaven and a new earth. And the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven onto the new earth and becomes the center, the capital, if you will, of the kingdom on earth, of God’s kingdom on earth.
And that’s for Israel. And that’s where the twelve tribes will live. And that’s where the twelve gates to the new Jerusalem, the city, and the names of the twelve apostles, and the twelve thrones that Jesus spoke of, that the twelve apostles will sit on those thrones, judging the tribes of Israel.
So that is all going to happen. And that’s what these elders are looking forward to, reigning on the earth, not in heaven. Which is another of so many indications that this is a Jewish book for believing Israel in the circumcision, not for the body of Christ.
Verse 11, Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands. There are many angels up in heaven that are willing to worship God and serve him and at his command could fly down to the earth. And one angel back in the Old Testament destroyed the Assyrian army.
How many soldiers did he kill in one night? I think it was a hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrians. You know, it’s interesting looking in the history of the world.
I didn’t put this in my notes. I’m trying to recall who wrote this brief history of the world. It’s in two massive volumes that I have at the office.
Maybe I’ll recall who wrote it, but he’s not a believer. He’s not a Christian. He doesn’t like the Bible, but he mentions in there when you go back and read about the Assyrian empire, he says, and the Syrian army at one point, at the right point in the Bible’s history, was on its way to Egypt in a plague destroyed the Assyrian army.
And I think that was pretty coincidental. HG. Wells.
Thank you very much. That’s right. So God has a lot of angels, and those angels represent a tremendous amount of power.
How many angels are there? And if a third of the angels fell, how many angels would that mean? How many demons are there?
Well, we don’t know how many angels there are. If this estimation here is anywhere near literal, within any kind of ballpark, that would mean there were 153 million angels originally created. Now, I don’t think this is really a literal statement.
I think it’s a figure of speech, but it might put us in a ballpark. There might be many more, but 10,000 times 10,000 would be 100 million, and thousands of thousands would be at least a couple million. So that would be 102 million, and if there were originally a third that fell, that would be 153 million, with 51 million demons.
Now we have no idea, of course, if that’s the case. Maybe there’s twice as many fallen angels, 100 million, or three times as many, 150 million, or four times, or five times, maybe a quarter of a billion. You know, if there were a quarter of a billion fallen angels, that would be one for every 24 people in the world.
So you couldn’t have your own demon, but you might have your block demon, who would try to tempt everyone on the block, depending on who’s home at any given moment. But it’s interesting, if the number is closer to 50 million, then we’d have one demon for every 120 people in the world today. But of those, say whatever the number is, 50 million demons, many of them have been locked up in Tartarus, some undoubtedly for going after strange flesh when they produced the Nephilim, the giants of old, by going into the daughters of men.
Remember when Jesus in Matthew chapter 8 confronted these demons and they cried out and said, What have we to do with you, Jesus, you son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? And they didn’t want anything to do with Jesus.
And they didn’t want to be like their fellow demons who had been locked in chains and bound up. They wanted to stay free and clear. So of the original number, how many were locked up?
We don’t know. We are speaking of the same angels that jude wrote of in verse 6 of his book, the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, that God has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day. In Noah’s day, there could have been a billion people on the earth, and it seems that the problem of angels going after women was widespread, being a major reason why God destroyed all of mankind.
So if half of the demons were locked up, we may not have as many demons as Christians generally think. And the only reason I’ve spent this few minutes on this topic is because there are some groups of Christians that are almost obsessed with demonology and demons and deliverance from demons. And whenever there’s a problem, well, you have to get delivered from a demon.
If you have a problem with eating or with finances or with pornography, it’s a demon. And they will go through an exorcism of sorts and you’re delivered and you no longer have that problem. That’s wonderful, except that it doesn’t work.
And nowhere in the Bible does it say, well, if you’re struggling with some lust of the flesh, get a demon kicked out of you and then you’ll be okay. It just doesn’t say that. And in the whole Bible, if we looked at the passages that refer to demons, it’s just the tiny sliver of the whole book.
A very minimal focus. Now, our battle is in the spiritual realm. And that’s true if any one particular person is up against Satan himself or any of his hierarchy or even some of his flunky demons.
If you find yourself in a battle with a demon and there’s a demon putting thoughts in your mind and tempting you and you have this real concrete temptation and you’re getting these thoughts obsessively to give into it, you might be in a battle with a demon. On the other hand, you might just be in a battle with your heart and your flesh, which is deceitful above all else. And you might be in a battle with your boss or your friend or your relative.
The point is, whoever you’re in the battle with, it’s a spiritual battle and it’s fought in the spiritual realm because our Christian life is a spiritual entity. We live our lives in our heart, in our mind. That’s where the battles are all fought.
So let’s go on to verse 12. These angels were saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. How could God possibly receive power?
I think we talked about this when we were in chapter four. How could God receive power or honor or strength? Isn’t he the source of all power and all strength and all honor?
Yes, but he has delegated power and authority to us, to all the angelic realm. So if an angel honors God, if the four living creatures, all the hosts of the angels that worship God, when we worship God and we give him power, we’re giving him power over our own wills. Because we couldn’t give him something unless we had it.
And the determinist Christians, the Calvinists who think God is in control of every atom, every molecule, every thought, everything, then he could never receive power or authority because he has it all. And you can’t receive it if you already have it. But if you’ve delegated power over wills so that we have a free will, and we give power and glory and honor to God, we’re giving back to him the power he gave us over our wills because we submit our will to him.
We say, Lord, we want to obey you.
Verse 13, And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever. And it’s a strange reference to the creatures that are in the sea saying this. We’ve done a study when we were in the Book of Jonah, we went through quite a few verses in the Bible about the sea and the strange things that are said about the sea in the Bible and how it seems to be a place where demons get together.
It seems to be a place that receives the dead and the sea will give up the dead that is within it. So that down in the deep where hades is, somewhere down beneath the sea perhaps. And we know that in the new heaven and the new earth, when God creates the new earth, he says there will be no more sea.
So the sea is gone and surfing too. Forget that except for the internet. But hopefully that will be gone too.
So could it be that God’s angels have freedom to travel through his created order and they could be on the planets, in the stars, on the earth, in the sea, on the land, in the air? I think so. And they don’t have to breathe oxygen like we do.
And so wherever they are, as if on cue, they shout out their blessings to God.
And when we bless God, we honor him. God commands us to honor our parents because we should. And it teaches us to honor God.
When we honor our parents. So parents should be honorable. It’s hard for kids to honor their parents when they’re not honorable.
My kids, to the extent that they have suffered because of sin in my life, that makes me, in their eyes, less honorable. And they have suffered because of things I’ve done wrong to hurt our family and others. And so, in their life, if they come to a time when they decide to fully give themselves over to honor God as they grow and mature, if they do that, they’ve done that in part because I’ve taught and encouraged them to, and in part, in spite of what they’ve seen from me.
So because many of us in this room still have kids, and if not kids, grandkids, we have an opportunity to live honorably from this moment forward, and that our children and those around us would learn about God, not in spite of what we are doing, but because of what we are doing. Verse 14, Then the four living creatures said, Amen. And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped him who lives forever and ever.
And now we enter chapter six.
During this chapter, I’m going to take a diversion and look at the overview of the plagues and the torments that God will unleash on the world, just so we can get a bit of a view of what’s coming, and try to figure out the order of the Book of Revelation. Is it all chronological? Is it all mixed up?
So we’ll talk about that in the next few verses. Now I saw when the lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come and see. And that word come in the Greek is ercomai.
We’ll talk about that later. And I looked and behold a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him.
And he went out conquering and to conquer. Now we begin to see God’s wrath unfold from this point. This is where the first seal is opened.
The first seal is opened and a white horse as a result of this goes out to conquer. And from here to the end of the tripulation, we see the intensifying wrath and vengeance of God. Now let’s consider briefly for a moment, an outline of the 21 judgments in the Book of Revelation.
There’s 21 when you add up the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls. Now there’s something, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but they are the first four seals. So there’s really 21.
There are the seven thunders, but we won’t mention them because John begins to write what they said and God said, don’t write it down. So we won’t even mention those guys. But the Apocalypse reveals these three consecutive series, each containing seven events.
Seals, trumpets, and bowls. Now many commentators on this book end up with a convoluted view of the book. And they say it’s not in chronological order.
And you take whatever part you think comes next and you put it however you want to put it. And I think that’s a mess. I think you take things in the Bible as chronological unless the Bible says it’s not.
So in the scheme of his book, John presents these events, at least he intimates that he’s doing that, in order. First you get the seals and you get the first scroll before the second, before the third, and so on before the seventh. Then the trumpets, then the bowls.
As we’ve seen in the first two verses of Revelation 6, Christ opens the first seal and in the next verse, verse three, he opens the second seal and so on through the first six. And then he gets to the seventh seal. And when he opens that, I’ll read, I’ll skip ahead just for the sake of the overview, Revelation 8.1, when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
And I saw the seven angels who stand before God and to them were given seven trumpets. And so the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound and the first angel sounded. That’s all in Revelation chapter eight.
So the seventh seal is actually marking the first trumpet blast. So the seven seals lead right into the seven trumpets seamlessly. The seventh seal is the seventh trumpet blast.
As Christ is unraveling the scroll and opening the seals, and he opens the seventh seal, and it says, And there were seven trumpets. That was what was inside the seventh seal. It reminds me of when we went with Tim Gaylord, my friend, his kids, and my two boys, Josiah and Nathaniel, we went whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, and we were coming up to the seven steps, and they named the rapids.
And the rapids are pretty horrendous. They can be in the right time of the year. And you’re in these huge boats with paddles, and you’re semi-strapped in, in case of capsizes, you could get out.
And we go through this rapid, and the guide was flung from, she was on the opposite end of the raft that I was on, maybe 10 feet long, and she was flung through the air, and she hit into me and a guy next to me. That was pretty severe. One guy almost went over the raft, and we pulled him in.
She was on the other side, and it was finally to get to calm water, and we said, man, we’re glad those, did I tell you what they were called? The seven steps. And I said, I’m glad we’re through the seven steps, and she said, that was step one.
Like, oh no, where can we get out?
Well, that’s what this was like. There were the seven seals, and the seven seal opens the seven trumpets. Therefore, all seven seals precede the trumpets.
It’s chronological. And after the sixth trumpet sounds, after the sixth trumpet sounds, then we have, with the seventh trumpet, we’re in the midpoint of the tribulation. We’re in the middle of the week.
And we’ll talk about that for a little bit right now. The middle of the week is four chapters, ten through thirteen. And in those chapters, how do we know they’re the middle of the week?
Well, Daniel and Jesus, they both said things that look forward to the middle of the week of the tribulation, the middle of the seven years. But those chapters repeatedly warn about what’s to come. And they basically say, brace yourself, because the next forty-two months are going to be tough.
And the upcoming three-and-a-half years, or the one thousand two hundred and sixty days that are coming, are going to be really bad. So in those four chapters, we read of warnings like that repeatedly. So we could tell we’re in the middle of the week.
Recall that Daniel, in chapter 9, verse 27, specifically called attention to the middle of the week, period when the Antichrist would do something just abominable. And Jesus, too, referenced this midweek period in Matthew 24 and indicated it as the time that Israel would flee to the mountains. So that fleeing to the mountains that Jesus referred to is not coincidentally the same time that Revelation indicates Israel will flee into the wilderness in Revelation 12, verse 6.
It all comes together as a reasonably cohesive story of the outline of the last seven years of man’s rebellion against God just before Christ returns. So the Bible, especially in Revelation, emphasizes this middle of the week as a terrible time of great consequence. These middle of the week chapters, these four, 10, 11, 12, and 13, they might be where some commentators get confused and think the whole book is not in chronological order because the stories in that middle section have one place there’s a bit of a flashback, another place there’s a flash forward, but it’s a natural way of telling a story.
For example, in Revelation chapter 11, it’s in the middle of the week that we find out that there are two prophets. God sends down two prophets to judge and condemn the earth for 42 months. They’re here for 42 months and they have the power to kill those who attack them.
But it says, but at the end of their ministry, they are killed and they lie in the streets of Jerusalem for three days, their bodies unburied, and then they are resurrected. So there you are, oh no, oh my, what are we to do?
We’re at the end of the Tribulation.
But big deal. It’s just a little flash forward. It’s the normal way historians always write.
You’re telling the history of the world and you introduce a minor character, and you, in a paragraph, say, what’s going to happen to him in the rest of his life, and where he’s going to die? And then the very next story, you’re back at the same year, the same moment in time, you introduce that person. So it doesn’t mean that the Book of Revelation is not in chronological order.
And as an example of a flashback, we find the woman in Revelation 12 who is Israel. We can tell she’s Israel because of comparison with Jacob and his 12 sons back in Genesis chapter 37. And there, there’s depicted this brief flashback when the nation gives birth to the Messiah.
And so that’s a little bit of a flashback. And then a flash forward to the middle of the Tribulation where Satan is going to attack that woman Israel, but she will flee into the wilderness and be protected by God. And that’s about it.
Other than that, the Book of Revelation is chronological. And there’s no reason to take all the judgments and rearrange them.Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday, we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview.
But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
So there’s time, there’s now and then, in heaven. If there was no time in heaven, there could never be anything new ever in heaven, if there was no time. And believe me, when you get to heaven, there will be something new there.
Something quite unlike anything that had ever been there before, when any of us get there. So of course, heaven is constantly changing, just with the never-ending stream of souls who arrive there, who have put their faith in God.
Verse 10, okay, there’s a song being sung to God, and God is told, and you have made us kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth. Kings and priests. This shows the Jewish character of the book.
The people of God in the Book of Revelation are the 12 tribes of Israel, and their covenant is the new covenant based on circumcision, the covenant of circumcision and the law. That’s the group to whom this book is written, the people of God. We’ll see that in a bit when 12,000 are sealed from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Way back in Exodus chapter 19, you shall be to me a kingdom of priests. And that’s what we have here. Christ has made us kings and priests to our God.
As one of the 12 apostles wrote to the believing Jews of the dispersion, 1 Peter 2.9, he wrote, You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a royal, a kingly priesthood. Now, why are there 24 thrones and 24 elders when the number 12 signifies Israel? Well, King David divided the priesthood into 24 divisions.
Not the entire priesthood, not all of the Levites, but of the Levites, Aaron was a Levite. Remember Moses’ brother, Miriam’s brother, Aaron. And Aaron was the high priest.
And he had four kids. Two of them were killed because they were evil right off the bat. And the other two ended up with many thousands of descendants.
And at the time of David, which was centuries later, about five centuries later, David divided the descendants of Aaron into 24 divisions. The 24 courses, the 24 divisions of the priesthood. And each one, he went into the descendants of Aaron, and he found a strong man, a father of 24 different families that Aaron’s sons had split into.
And he made each one a leader of a certain group of the descendants of the high priest. And they were as a group then responsible for serving the Lord at the temple. And they would take turns.
They’d go for one week from the Sabbath to the Sabbath, and then the next group and the next group. When they went through all 24, they’d start over, and they’d do that each year. And the eighth group, the group that would go in the eighth week of the year was of the division of Abijah.
And Abijah, that is whom Zacharias and Elizabeth were descendants of. He was in the order of Abijah, and that’s who John the Baptist was of that order. So David, he took the priest, specifically the high priest descendants, and divided them into 24 divisions.
And so it’s possible that these 24 thrones with 24 elders, of course, Israel’s 12, double that as 24, in heaven and on earth, it could be that they are emblematic symbols of the priestly kingdom of Israel. And in that way, in that respect, symbols of the whole group of redeemed Israel. Perhaps these are not always 24 particular individuals.
It could be that from time to time, those saved among Israel get to go to the throne room of God and sit on that throne and from Sabbath to Sabbath worship the Lord. We don’t know. But if so, then that would work following the model of the priesthood that was implemented by David through the Old Testament.
And we shall reign on the earth. And that is what they are looking forward to. God promised Israel an earthly kingdom.
And Jesus Christ came in encouraging them that the meek shall inherit heaven. Is that what he said? No, he said the meek shall inherit the earth.
Christians, rightly today, have a focus that we are citizens of heaven and we plan to live forever in heaven. But God creates a new heaven and a new earth. And the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven onto the new earth and becomes the center, the capital, if you will, of the kingdom on earth, of God’s kingdom on earth.
And that’s for Israel. And that’s where the twelve tribes will live. And that’s where the twelve gates to the new Jerusalem, the city, and the names of the twelve apostles, and the twelve thrones that Jesus spoke of, that the twelve apostles will sit on those thrones, judging the tribes of Israel.
So that is all going to happen. And that’s what these elders are looking forward to, reigning on the earth, not in heaven. Which is another of so many indications that this is a Jewish book for believing Israel in the circumcision, not for the body of Christ.
Verse 11, Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands. There are many angels up in heaven that are willing to worship God and serve him and at his command could fly down to the earth. And one angel back in the Old Testament destroyed the Assyrian army.
How many soldiers did he kill in one night? I think it was a hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrians. You know, it’s interesting looking in the history of the world.
I didn’t put this in my notes. I’m trying to recall who wrote this brief history of the world. It’s in two massive volumes that I have at the office.
Maybe I’ll recall who wrote it, but he’s not a believer. He’s not a Christian. He doesn’t like the Bible, but he mentions in there when you go back and read about the Assyrian empire, he says, and the Syrian army at one point, at the right point in the Bible’s history, was on its way to Egypt in a plague destroyed the Assyrian army.
And I think that was pretty coincidental. HG. Wells.
Thank you very much. That’s right. So God has a lot of angels, and those angels represent a tremendous amount of power.
How many angels are there? And if a third of the angels fell, how many angels would that mean? How many demons are there?
Well, we don’t know how many angels there are. If this estimation here is anywhere near literal, within any kind of ballpark, that would mean there were 153 million angels originally created. Now, I don’t think this is really a literal statement.
I think it’s a figure of speech, but it might put us in a ballpark. There might be many more, but 10,000 times 10,000 would be 100 million, and thousands of thousands would be at least a couple million. So that would be 102 million, and if there were originally a third that fell, that would be 153 million, with 51 million demons.
Now we have no idea, of course, if that’s the case. Maybe there’s twice as many fallen angels, 100 million, or three times as many, 150 million, or four times, or five times, maybe a quarter of a billion. You know, if there were a quarter of a billion fallen angels, that would be one for every 24 people in the world.
So you couldn’t have your own demon, but you might have your block demon, who would try to tempt everyone on the block, depending on who’s home at any given moment. But it’s interesting, if the number is closer to 50 million, then we’d have one demon for every 120 people in the world today. But of those, say whatever the number is, 50 million demons, many of them have been locked up in Tartarus, some undoubtedly for going after strange flesh when they produced the Nephilim, the giants of old, by going into the daughters of men.
Remember when Jesus in Matthew chapter 8 confronted these demons and they cried out and said, What have we to do with you, Jesus, you son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? And they didn’t want anything to do with Jesus.
And they didn’t want to be like their fellow demons who had been locked in chains and bound up. They wanted to stay free and clear. So of the original number, how many were locked up?
We don’t know. We are speaking of the same angels that jude wrote of in verse 6 of his book, the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, that God has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day. In Noah’s day, there could have been a billion people on the earth, and it seems that the problem of angels going after women was widespread, being a major reason why God destroyed all of mankind.
So if half of the demons were locked up, we may not have as many demons as Christians generally think. And the only reason I’ve spent this few minutes on this topic is because there are some groups of Christians that are almost obsessed with demonology and demons and deliverance from demons. And whenever there’s a problem, well, you have to get delivered from a demon.
If you have a problem with eating or with finances or with pornography, it’s a demon. And they will go through an exorcism of sorts and you’re delivered and you no longer have that problem. That’s wonderful, except that it doesn’t work.
And nowhere in the Bible does it say, well, if you’re struggling with some lust of the flesh, get a demon kicked out of you and then you’ll be okay. It just doesn’t say that. And in the whole Bible, if we looked at the passages that refer to demons, it’s just the tiny sliver of the whole book.
A very minimal focus. Now, our battle is in the spiritual realm. And that’s true if any one particular person is up against Satan himself or any of his hierarchy or even some of his flunky demons.
If you find yourself in a battle with a demon and there’s a demon putting thoughts in your mind and tempting you and you have this real concrete temptation and you’re getting these thoughts obsessively to give into it, you might be in a battle with a demon. On the other hand, you might just be in a battle with your heart and your flesh, which is deceitful above all else. And you might be in a battle with your boss or your friend or your relative.
The point is, whoever you’re in the battle with, it’s a spiritual battle and it’s fought in the spiritual realm because our Christian life is a spiritual entity. We live our lives in our heart, in our mind. That’s where the battles are all fought.
So let’s go on to verse 12. These angels were saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. How could God possibly receive power?
I think we talked about this when we were in chapter four. How could God receive power or honor or strength? Isn’t he the source of all power and all strength and all honor?
Yes, but he has delegated power and authority to us, to all the angelic realm. So if an angel honors God, if the four living creatures, all the hosts of the angels that worship God, when we worship God and we give him power, we’re giving him power over our own wills. Because we couldn’t give him something unless we had it.
And the determinist Christians, the Calvinists who think God is in control of every atom, every molecule, every thought, everything, then he could never receive power or authority because he has it all. And you can’t receive it if you already have it. But if you’ve delegated power over wills so that we have a free will, and we give power and glory and honor to God, we’re giving back to him the power he gave us over our wills because we submit our will to him.
We say, Lord, we want to obey you.
Verse 13, And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever. And it’s a strange reference to the creatures that are in the sea saying this. We’ve done a study when we were in the Book of Jonah, we went through quite a few verses in the Bible about the sea and the strange things that are said about the sea in the Bible and how it seems to be a place where demons get together.
It seems to be a place that receives the dead and the sea will give up the dead that is within it. So that down in the deep where hades is, somewhere down beneath the sea perhaps. And we know that in the new heaven and the new earth, when God creates the new earth, he says there will be no more sea.
So the sea is gone and surfing too. Forget that except for the internet. But hopefully that will be gone too.
So could it be that God’s angels have freedom to travel through his created order and they could be on the planets, in the stars, on the earth, in the sea, on the land, in the air? I think so. And they don’t have to breathe oxygen like we do.
And so wherever they are, as if on cue, they shout out their blessings to God.
And when we bless God, we honor him. God commands us to honor our parents because we should. And it teaches us to honor God.
When we honor our parents. So parents should be honorable. It’s hard for kids to honor their parents when they’re not honorable.
My kids, to the extent that they have suffered because of sin in my life, that makes me, in their eyes, less honorable. And they have suffered because of things I’ve done wrong to hurt our family and others. And so, in their life, if they come to a time when they decide to fully give themselves over to honor God as they grow and mature, if they do that, they’ve done that in part because I’ve taught and encouraged them to, and in part, in spite of what they’ve seen from me.
So because many of us in this room still have kids, and if not kids, grandkids, we have an opportunity to live honorably from this moment forward, and that our children and those around us would learn about God, not in spite of what we are doing, but because of what we are doing. Verse 14, Then the four living creatures said, Amen. And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped him who lives forever and ever.
And now we enter chapter six.
During this chapter, I’m going to take a diversion and look at the overview of the plagues and the torments that God will unleash on the world, just so we can get a bit of a view of what’s coming, and try to figure out the order of the Book of Revelation. Is it all chronological? Is it all mixed up?
So we’ll talk about that in the next few verses. Now I saw when the lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come and see. And that word come in the Greek is ercomai.
We’ll talk about that later. And I looked and behold a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him.
And he went out conquering and to conquer. Now we begin to see God’s wrath unfold from this point. This is where the first seal is opened.
The first seal is opened and a white horse as a result of this goes out to conquer. And from here to the end of the tripulation, we see the intensifying wrath and vengeance of God. Now let’s consider briefly for a moment, an outline of the 21 judgments in the Book of Revelation.
There’s 21 when you add up the seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven bowls. Now there’s something, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but they are the first four seals. So there’s really 21.
There are the seven thunders, but we won’t mention them because John begins to write what they said and God said, don’t write it down. So we won’t even mention those guys. But the Apocalypse reveals these three consecutive series, each containing seven events.
Seals, trumpets, and bowls. Now many commentators on this book end up with a convoluted view of the book. And they say it’s not in chronological order.
And you take whatever part you think comes next and you put it however you want to put it. And I think that’s a mess. I think you take things in the Bible as chronological unless the Bible says it’s not.
So in the scheme of his book, John presents these events, at least he intimates that he’s doing that, in order. First you get the seals and you get the first scroll before the second, before the third, and so on before the seventh. Then the trumpets, then the bowls.
As we’ve seen in the first two verses of Revelation 6, Christ opens the first seal and in the next verse, verse three, he opens the second seal and so on through the first six. And then he gets to the seventh seal. And when he opens that, I’ll read, I’ll skip ahead just for the sake of the overview, Revelation 8.1, when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
And I saw the seven angels who stand before God and to them were given seven trumpets. And so the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound and the first angel sounded. That’s all in Revelation chapter eight.
So the seventh seal is actually marking the first trumpet blast. So the seven seals lead right into the seven trumpets seamlessly. The seventh seal is the seventh trumpet blast.
As Christ is unraveling the scroll and opening the seals, and he opens the seventh seal, and it says, And there were seven trumpets. That was what was inside the seventh seal. It reminds me of when we went with Tim Gaylord, my friend, his kids, and my two boys, Josiah and Nathaniel, we went whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, and we were coming up to the seven steps, and they named the rapids.
And the rapids are pretty horrendous. They can be in the right time of the year. And you’re in these huge boats with paddles, and you’re semi-strapped in, in case of capsizes, you could get out.
And we go through this rapid, and the guide was flung from, she was on the opposite end of the raft that I was on, maybe 10 feet long, and she was flung through the air, and she hit into me and a guy next to me. That was pretty severe. One guy almost went over the raft, and we pulled him in.
She was on the other side, and it was finally to get to calm water, and we said, man, we’re glad those, did I tell you what they were called? The seven steps. And I said, I’m glad we’re through the seven steps, and she said, that was step one.
Like, oh no, where can we get out?
Well, that’s what this was like. There were the seven seals, and the seven seal opens the seven trumpets. Therefore, all seven seals precede the trumpets.
It’s chronological. And after the sixth trumpet sounds, after the sixth trumpet sounds, then we have, with the seventh trumpet, we’re in the midpoint of the tribulation. We’re in the middle of the week.
And we’ll talk about that for a little bit right now. The middle of the week is four chapters, ten through thirteen. And in those chapters, how do we know they’re the middle of the week?
Well, Daniel and Jesus, they both said things that look forward to the middle of the week of the tribulation, the middle of the seven years. But those chapters repeatedly warn about what’s to come. And they basically say, brace yourself, because the next forty-two months are going to be tough.
And the upcoming three-and-a-half years, or the one thousand two hundred and sixty days that are coming, are going to be really bad. So in those four chapters, we read of warnings like that repeatedly. So we could tell we’re in the middle of the week.
Recall that Daniel, in chapter 9, verse 27, specifically called attention to the middle of the week, period when the Antichrist would do something just abominable. And Jesus, too, referenced this midweek period in Matthew 24 and indicated it as the time that Israel would flee to the mountains. So that fleeing to the mountains that Jesus referred to is not coincidentally the same time that Revelation indicates Israel will flee into the wilderness in Revelation 12, verse 6.
It all comes together as a reasonably cohesive story of the outline of the last seven years of man’s rebellion against God just before Christ returns. So the Bible, especially in Revelation, emphasizes this middle of the week as a terrible time of great consequence. These middle of the week chapters, these four, 10, 11, 12, and 13, they might be where some commentators get confused and think the whole book is not in chronological order because the stories in that middle section have one place there’s a bit of a flashback, another place there’s a flash forward, but it’s a natural way of telling a story.
For example, in Revelation chapter 11, it’s in the middle of the week that we find out that there are two prophets. God sends down two prophets to judge and condemn the earth for 42 months. They’re here for 42 months and they have the power to kill those who attack them.
But it says, but at the end of their ministry, they are killed and they lie in the streets of Jerusalem for three days, their bodies unburied, and then they are resurrected. So there you are, oh no, oh my, what are we to do?
We’re at the end of the Tribulation.
But big deal. It’s just a little flash forward. It’s the normal way historians always write.
You’re telling the history of the world and you introduce a minor character, and you, in a paragraph, say, what’s going to happen to him in the rest of his life, and where he’s going to die? And then the very next story, you’re back at the same year, the same moment in time, you introduce that person. So it doesn’t mean that the Book of Revelation is not in chronological order.
And as an example of a flashback, we find the woman in Revelation 12 who is Israel. We can tell she’s Israel because of comparison with Jacob and his 12 sons back in Genesis chapter 37. And there, there’s depicted this brief flashback when the nation gives birth to the Messiah.
And so that’s a little bit of a flashback. And then a flash forward to the middle of the Tribulation where Satan is going to attack that woman Israel, but she will flee into the wilderness and be protected by God. And that’s about it.
Other than that, the Book of Revelation is chronological. And there’s no reason to take all the judgments and rearrange them.
